LL Blog: Avatar Rendering Cost

Today i was asked to reduce my avatar content with an ARC of 681..

some limit.

the site in question will not see me again.. so i figure SL will have popular sims full of ruth`s soon..

ive some pride, and i will not be dictated to. i pay premium membership and for a quarter sim... its questionable wether i think doing anything cutting edge, in SL now, is worth the effort.. the leading edge is being erased.. you might have chocolate.. but you cannot eat it.

welcome to the bland new beginning...

And so, it begins.

I don't think anyone mentioned this about attaching things to the hud...

if you attach something to the hud and then drag it out of sight, you can get it back without having to detach and attach to a body part...

just edit something else on the hud, to get into the edit mode, then use the scroll wheel to shrink the viewable hud area and the item that has been moved outside of that area will appear.

nifty huh?

I won't ask where (though I'm curious), but I do wonder what they wanted your avatar reduced to?

For what it's worth, I had my avatar under 300 the other night at the hangout just by switching hair. Same "me." So it can be done without having to ruth yourself. But I'd be interested to see what ARC-limiting locations are asking for.

LOL 681 still in the green, it's nothing people loking like noobs can hit 1000 with just hair.
This clown was an idiot. Just tell him your ARC shows him at 1200, that will stuff him
This is a rare event, I only met one other person out of hundred or so that was using ARC

The solution is, you all need to join me and become dogs. It's a glorious thing to be a dog. My count is only 280. Of course, accessorizing my look brings me up a bit, but I still come out to far less than my human alt who is fond of prim skirts. I am amazed how much prim flexi skirts bring up the count. It's hard to keep her under 800, and impossible if she insists on wearing jewelry with it.

However, my froggie friend was only 261, even wearing a hat. You could be a frog too. I like frogs. Actually any critter will do. You humans are just too high maintenance and expensive to render at that!

*isn't fond of that idea at all!*

Kitty-cats are nice too. I can chase them around!

The bigger point is, though, it seems that a good number of animal avatars appear to have a lower ARC than many human or anthro-furry avatars. I'll have to do more investigating later. Perhaps it's because although we have a lot of attachments for our various body parts, there are fewer textures being rendered since animal bodies have a consistent texture on the attachments. You humans are very fond of things which have lots and lots of textures to render, which raises your score.

Alpha is probably the single most contributor considering it's so heavily used in SL.

Moderate use of an alpha texture on a high prim attachment will make ARC skyrocket and even high use of alpha on a low prim attachment will contribute a lot (my prim nails are only 6 prims on each hand for instance, but alpha on every face so: 12 prims * 6 faces * 4/alpha face = 288 just for alpha alone).

Animated textures on jewelry to create a subtle effect can be quite costly as well (I have a necklace where the chain is 100 prims worth of animated textures on all faces so: 100 prims * 6 faces * 4/animated texture face = 2400 ). The good news for those is that as long as it's mod you can get rid of the animated texture without much visual difference .

I met a newb tonight with an ARC of 1

My favorite, signature hairstyle is about 3,000. *sobs*

I was at a club the other night where the manager had an ARC of 17,000 and change...

I don't care what they say, I am NOT going back to those horrible, rigid, prim things that look more like comical crash helmets than hair.

My AV tends to run in the 1200 - 1800 range with occasional bumps well over 2000 if I dress up for a formal.

When I start finding low ARC stuff to wear that actually looks good, I will buy it. Until then, my look stays where it is.

I was at Sinewave last night and some girl was walking around over 10,000. It's funny how I get instantly irritated when I see that now.

I don't think people should start ARC banning until ARC gets into the latest client. Not everyone wants to run RC. I wonder if they'll enable a new land ban option for avatars with ARC over a certain amount. I know that would certainly improve performance at most events.

Agreed. And hosts/DJs should try to stay in the green zone if at all possible.

That being said, I absolutely HATE HATE Dazzle and shudder every time I open the RC.

Such a place will quickly find themselves a lot less popular.

As I've said before: My avvie is about 1500 and change. I suspect much is in my hair, with some in my glasses. There's likely a point or two for my shors and somewhat simplistic jewelry, too. All these things are a big part of me.

Even though my number is in that shade of orange, it's still on the low side -- ofer the last few, I've seen plenty of examples of numbers in the 3k-8k range. There's been plenty of examples here, too, of high ARC avvies.

As a result, I think I'm okay at my 1500k. Sure it could be lower -- but would it be me?

I have friends with older macs that still can't even run 1.19.1.4 let alone the RC clients. And, given the number of people using the Nicholaz client to avoid the windlight stuff at all there will be a fair number of folks out there with no idea what their ARC is.

I would hope that there is NEVER a land ban option based on ARC.

As above - ARC of 284
Without the animated sculptie snake - ARC of 178
Without the hair - ARC of 1

I tend to wear just jeans and top (and that hair). An ARC of 178 seems to my normal.

Wow...turned this on a few times now, and found out that Amethyst collars are about the worst around for 'avatar rendering cost'. With my old Ammy on, including their plugins, my rendering cost was about 4.2 thousand on average.

Now I've got one of Viara's Pet Collars, and everything else is the same, and down to 2100 or so, with about the same functionality, even some additions.

ARC is gonna be useful ^_^

I doubt there will be any land controls to ban via ARC. It does however make people conscious of how much they are contributing to slowness and that may be enough. I mean..have you ever been to things like the hair fair and skin fair? If people could see how badly they are causing the slowness that they themselves are complaining of I think they would start cleaning themselves up.

Well gang, I went ahead and created a JIRA for this. Please don't bite my head off. It's just a suggestion for added functionality that people may or may not decide to use.

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-7074

Am i missing something? maybe, but it would seem possible to have an average avatar rating on any sim.. ie x avatars = total ARC count, divided by X avatars gives an average..

That would be far more useful for any sim owner to evaluate over time what the ideal window average the sim can cope with, rather than everyone being conscious of what their count is.. the ideal count could be visible at the drop zone... for all to see.. or better still.. Lindens could make that figure, the ideal average.. available in the sim`s info on search.. like sales or people or anything..

OK.. if someone is hell bent on wearing a high count ARC avatar, then i can see that the sim owner or administrator could ask the offender to reduce count.. ( like happened to me, with only an ARC 0f 681.. .....) but if the ideal number, based on average, was available to see, one could make a decision before entering the sim...and not face criticism for no good reason..


If one removes an undesirable confrontation, one has a better time in SL.

The access controls are handled by the sim, but ARC is figured on the client. How do you envision this working, that the sim would need to constantly go though the motions of rendering so that it could monitor the ARC for each avatar, or would something else happen? Some of the things in ARC are details that the sim doesn't even know about.

On this note, I think rather than a sim-access option, maybe we should have a client-side rendering option for how high we're willing to let people we see go. If they go above..let's say 2000, then they render as a Ruth, or something similar.

Maybe instead of Ruthing them, have it like avatar impostors, just with ARC instead of distance.