1.8.1(9) First Impressions

After reading this announcement from Karen, I decided to try the new client preview. Sorry to tell you this Karen, but this one needs a little more time on the drawing board. Here's what happened.

First, the supposed attachment culling that has raised so much contraversy appears to do nothing at all. I put on various avatars with attached prim counts ranging from 2 to several hundred, and then I zoomed the camera all the way in and out at 4 or 5 different detail settings. No attachments disappeard at all at any setting.

Second, there was a huge problem with how textures appeared to behave on objects. Some looked normal, but a great many had their apparent repeats per meter all screwed up. From what I could tell, the textures were repeating vertically at a very high amount, and repeating horizontally at an amount far less than one. The result was that each affected texture appeared as a bunch of wide stripes.

Examining the affected prims revealed the numbers were absolutely correct in the editor, yet the textures refused to bahave according to what the numbers mean. Furthermore, changing the numbers in the editor had no affect. The textures were stuck at the repeat rate they decided to show themselves at, and that was that.

Upon switching back to 1.8.1(6), everything looks normal again. Clearly there is a serious problem with the way 1.8.1(9) displays textures on prims. Please, Karen, make sure this is fixed before 1.8.2 goes live. This is huge.

About the first issue, with the LOD seemingly doing nothing, Brent had this to say:

"This change only affects avatars that are farther away. You won't be able to selectively choose not to rez avatar parts, nor specific avatars. For users with less-than-stellar computers or video cards this will be very helpful.

The Avatar LOD is based on your camera view and not on your avatar's location. Therefore if you zoom in on an avatar, their attachments will appear depending on the current setting, the distance from the camera to the avatar being viewed and the avatar's attachment sizes.

You can also set the Avatar LOD to the highest setting which will force all attachments to always render."

About the second issue, with the texture repeats:

I will look into that. As I mentioned, the 1.8.1.9 viewer contains only SOME of the fixes that will go out with 1.8.2. Therefore, it may be some code for other fixes was left out, or changed, in such a way as to make a bug seem to appear that in actuality does not.

That said, I will follow up with QA immediately to be sure we don't see the same thing in 1.8.2 that you have seen in 1.8.1.9. If we do, it will be fixed!

Oh, good. I thought my video card was screwing up for a minute with the texture thing.

Are we *absolutely sure* that culling is, in fact, in 1.8.1(9)? I really, really tried to notice it and I couldn't see it. I would think it would produce *some* noteable effect.

Related question, is your own avatar subject to culling?

That actually seems to be the point - preventing your system from taking up valuable cycles rendering things that cannot actually be seen anyway.

I guess my point, if even in extreme testing I can't observe the effect, whats the point of the slider?

Easy, its the drama slider!

Har.

But seriously, if it culls outside your view, I guess it does what it is intended to do, even if it isn't immediately apparent.

I noticed a local FPS gain with the new culling system, though not a 10 or 20 fps gain but a mear 1.5 - 3 FPS gain and slightly increased stability in the areas I tested it in. Last night my big test was visiting the club called The Ministry of Sound for one of their events. Staring directly at the crowd of like a dozen people (I know there was close to 20 people in that area but my camera isn't omnidirectional so I'm taking a guestimate of 12 people in my view) that had prim hair, shoes, bling, and all the other usual crap people wear to look good. My frame rate was a stable 4 FPS with ocasional spikes of 5.2 FPS wich lasted a good minute before dropping back down to 4 FPS. While in the Forest Sandbox I notice that when I zoomed out on me and 5 other furry avitars with WIP builds around us my framerate dipped for only a second before returning to the same framerate as it was in my normal field of view. Normally with all that I loose at least 2 - 4 FPS because of all the extra rendering that needs to be done. So for me the new LOD system is apperantly doing something. Like everyone else I have problems with the texture loading, but I'm assuming its because 1.8.1(9) doesn't have the new texture memory management that 1.8.2 has.

Note: forgot to mension I did the test with settings at max as well, I noticed all those frames I gained with the new system were completely lost by turning off the culling (moving the slider all the way right). For my system (and probly alot of other people as well) a stable 1.5 - 3 FPS gain is a big boost.

We're talking in circles.

Things that your Mark One Eyeball can't see that are still rendered by your graphics card seem to be the targets of culling. Since, even if you can't see them, they'd still be there.

I mean...

If the slider at anything above about 25% *still* renders so much I can't observe culling, what is the point of the majority of the slider? The details are too small to observe.

EXACTLY.

...

I think your missing my point slightly, although doing so in a rather emphatic fashion.

If the upper two third (or so) of the slider is meaningless, WHY HAVE IT? Why not (to ironicly borrow a term) cull it, so that the remaining levels of detail are more meaningfull?

The slider also has another function and thats the avatar build detail, the higher the slider the further away you'll be able to see the avatar at full detail (as in mesh detail) as you zoom out depending on the slider you'll be switched to a lower quality mesh, this hasnt changed for this version, but used in combination with the lod for attachments it works quite well. especially if your using a high draw distance and alot of av's in view

True, the only times you notice culling is if the slider is all the way to the left. Center you really can't tell except maybe for avitar fuzziness at a distance. All the way to the right I can see avatars in full detail whether they're in front of me or 15m away showing that culling is turned off. There's no noticable difference at 25 or 75% unless you watch your FPS.

Because if I understand correctly, you looking across half a sim at another AV previously meant that SL would spend time rendering and draw in all the details for their attachments you couldn't even see as more than a small dot on your screen, I think that's what Ali's trying to point out, and the purpose of this sliderbar...

If your saying, "Why did they make it a slider like this if 2/3rd of the slider doesn't produce any visible effect?" then that's an entirely different can of worms. See any one of the more recent threads as to why people wouldn't necessarily want it to be any more "powerful" than this...

I just tried it myself and found that in a club with about 20 avatars dancing and the avatar detail slider at 50% I couldn't see any difference. Set one click to the left though caused the people farthest from me to lose their prim attachments, usually hair, and it would hover near them as they danced. All the way to the left (0%) and I saw a lot of bald dancers and the two dragons there lost everything but heads and wings and these missing parts would hover strangely. Didn't seem to affect those not dancing. I did send in a bug report.

It cots down on what your video card has to render. LOD usually includes culling of non visable objects, ie if you are looking at a wall and there is some one on the other side your video card does not have ot render them. That aspect is also called HSR (hidden seurface removal) but most program impliment it via LOD.

...

Nevermind.

I don't need stuff like that explained to me, I've been working with this crap for years. It appears only one person so far has understood the question I was asking.

You may wish to take a look at Hiro's thread in General... It seems to cull his own attachments, from what I can tell. I didn't conduct enough testing on that to know for sure.

I never said I wasn't stupid. I think I see what you mean, now, though.

The experments so far suggest there is a difference even when it's not "visible", and the different levels are still different insofar as "wiggle room" is concerned. It just doesn't seem to make a lot of practical difference, given that Hiro, at least, had to make some unusual combinations of attachments to get wacky results.

So... if I understand what you were really saying, I think the answer is "it does make a difference, but not an observable one for many situations; the different values are there for when it DOES make a differerence."