LL Blog: Avatar Rendering Cost

Or do some selective rendering. Don't render the less important items...like skirts.

I'd say don't render the highest cost items, but then you may not be rendering half of their av or something, which seems most people would want to avoid.

If we let it decide 'hey this part when removed brings it under the limit' then we'll have it choosing different things all the time, so that would be odd too.

Least it would be in my opinion.

Yes, easily predicted by anyone that has even a basic understanding of human nature. Wait, that excludes the lindens and their hailelujah chorus here on the forums.

Me, am going to go for reverse psychology as a way if giving the lindens and the little ARC-enforcers here on the boards the bird, going to try to increase mine! (not hard, since without clothes I weigh in at 1018 - 1024, and coded orange for easy discrimination. Stll have to have my top hat, cane, cravat and watch chain on the suit to go!)

1000ish without clothes??

You've either got complex hair or else a very high-tech penis.








Did ya see the toruses on that guy??????
Wowsa!

*bites your head clean off*

What has SL come to.

I know, I know. It's just a suggestion though. From what Viktoria says re: the rendering bit being client side and not server side I don't think it's feasible anyway.

It's not a hopeless idea, Keira's riff on it that uses impostors over a user-set threshold might be workable. It would certainly be friendlier than muting or banning.

I don't think the availability of this ARC tool is going to be the cause of widespread harassment.

1) Busy-bodies and self-appointed "Second Life Police" are going to do what they do whether they have this ARC thing to whine about or not.

2) Is is useful for one avatar to compare herself against another avatar. The ARC score or the color codes really have little meaning unless put into context. That's the more important issue, if one is conscious about the lag they cause- that they cause more or less than the other people around them. Measuring up to an arbitrary number is fairly meaningless.

3) If one sees a nice-looking avatar with a low ARC score, that helps one figure out how to lower her own ARC score. If one sees someone with an awfully high ARC score, one can take it as a lesson on what not to do.

4) If merchants are to have any hope of using lag-free as a selling point for items, residents need to be able to see ARC scores of persons other than themselves.

5) I actually appreciated it when someone pointed out this ARC thing to me a few weeks ago. I didn't know about it. It helped me figure out a few laggy items I could ditch.

6) If it does create social pressure for avatars not to go overboard with the lag, so be it. Processing resources are limited for everyone. Some social pressures are positive (i.e., don't drink and drive, wash your hands after you use the restaurant restroom, use deodorant).

7) Some places may try to enforce ARC-limits. Just like some places ban text-chat spam and poofers. And then some places will welcome anyone with high ARC limits. The market will deal with it.

This ARC tool is about the first thing I've ever actually seen Linden Labs do to deal with the problem of runaway resource use on the grid. There are lots of reasons that Second Life continues to perform worse and worse, but the lack of any meaningful limit to the strain that user-created content places on SL resources is one big factor. It has to be brought under control if there's any hope of bringing stability to SL. This ARC tool is just one small step toward that, but it's a necessary step.

9) As people have already posted to this thread, once they are aware of the high lag that some of their items cause, it's not too hard to find low-lag alternatives that are just as good-looking, if not better, than the high-lag items.

10) If I really don't want to hear someone telling me about my ARC score, I can mute them, just like I have to do in every other case of someone who won't stop bothering me.

I'm around 3000 when naked, but no penis there. My head has a whopping 500, each hand and ear 300. If anyone wants to force me to be an avatar which is not the one recognized by my friends (for example a human) I don't want to visit those events.

*snickers!* Attachments.....Head, feet and tail attachments. 1018 - 1024, zoom level dependent.

By way of Illustration, http://www.flickr.com/photos/maklin/2446319138/

Wasn't a lag issue nearly 2 yrs back when I got the AV, and with faster PC's and video cards, don't think it is now. Unfortunately, LL set the color numbers artificially LOW and also stigmatized folks with the colors.

Think the outfit in the picture was around 2.5K ish, adds a cane, top hat (with animated retractable light), glasses, ring, cravat and an invisible type-overrider. Without basically ceasing to be what I am and what others know me as, there is nowhere on ARC to go but up!

I'd just like to add one tiny, itsy, bitsy complaint about the ARC score itself...why is it in exactly the same location as the avatar name that hovers over our heads? It's really hard to see...

Let's just kill markets, clothes sales, hair sales and avatar attachment sales. I've already been harassed about the cost of my clothes and hair. I was told it was lagging others and inconsiderate to have on a high prim dress. Thank you Linden Lab for giving assholes another reason to accost others and prove what good people they are while those of us who shop and help keep the economy alive are now the bad guys.

1) Why give them another reason? It should have been see your own ARC only, not others.

2) Having not seen a case of avatar lag in literally a year, WHY would one really care what one's ARC is? What I do see is a TON of lag due to the asset server (no ports, no groups, no search) which happens eveywhere at the same time. This seems like merely another linden 'throw the blame on someone else' designed to turn player against player and away from the real culprit of late....LL.

3) Again, why would one care?

4) I'll patronize merchants with items that look good, ARC be damned. In fact, if I start catching grief from others, I will AVOID those merchants that add ARC ratings to their listings.

5) Hasn't done a thing for me. Saw this when it first came out and figured LL was going to use it as a distraction (see? Its not the asset server, its those two high-ARC folks over there, get them!).

6) Sorry, not being in high-school, I find using social pressure to manage people quite repugnant. Nothing more, in most cases than tribal thuggery....an excuse to gang up on others while claiming the moral high ground. Very conservative.

7) The mythical market....not even going to comment on this one....

The lindens aren't doing jack-sh*t, but blaming the players for server-side issues and their unwillingness to bugfix the client. I'm still getting the memory error on exit, 5 RC's out the door. Somehow, I bet long run that has more impact on the operation of the game and PC performance than a roomfull of high-ARC avatars. Looks like blaming the players and getting them to harass their fellow players over a bogus number is easier than optimizing code and eliminating memory leaks.

9) Why bother? I see no indication (other than a number that changes radically at times for the same outfits) that the outfit is causing lag? Where does lag start? Where green turns to yellow? Yellow to orange? Orange to red? Why won't a linden come forward and tell us EXACTLY where the point of impact is?

10) The only sensible point of the 10.

you're totally right Maklin. But as you know High School antics and social peer pressuring are the forte of assholes everywhere probably because they never matured past those years or reverted back to them after finding out the real world was a lot harder. Now they come to Second Life to avoid the Real World and as always it's creative and disabled people who get the brunt of these high school peer pressuring.

No, you're not the bad guys. I love your stuff! I love my high prim hair, and my flexi skirts, and my 3,000 ARCpoint handgun rig, and I'm not giving them up.

But having this data gives us some important information, and allows informed choice.
If I WANT (and I know the ARCpoint cost), I can put together a low lag outfit.

On the content creator side, you can test your items, and work to design lower lag outfits (alpha textures only where needed, for example). As a builder, I can look at my inworld objects and find ways to lower their rendering cost, too.

I don't want to see ARC wars or ARC banning...but when it comes down to it, reducing lag is everyone's business, from LL to your ISP to your graphic card maker...and including the content creators and users.

That would be a rather useless number though.

ARC only impacts a very small portion of what people mistakingly call "lag", namely a relative cost of someone when they're *actively* being rendered. It's a client-side rendering metric only, ARC has absolutely no impact on the sim, nor does it have any impact when you're not directly looking at someone.

If there is an - opaque- wall between me and another avie, it also doesn't matter if their ARC is 1 or 5,000,000; occlussion culling will make sure they're not rendered and their cost from my point of view is 0.

Unless you shove everyone on your sim into one spot so that everyone is always visible to everyone else all the time the total of everyone's ARC just isn't a usefull thing to know. You'd be better off making sure you have enough occluders so that there's always something in between people on opposite sides of the sim.

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ARC might be useful, but this thread shows it's already being used to quantify things it doesn't even indicate. An avie can have an ARC 1 but have enough scripts attached to their HUD to lag the sim and he/she will be left alone while the clueless host focuses on the person with a 1,000 ARC with no scripts attached because they think it's a measure of overall lag rather than a tiny portion of what makes up FPS.

Well now wait a minute? I've noticed that the nekos almost always have a higher ARC than a lot of people; I assumed it was because of the scripted objects they were wearing. For example, I saw at Sinewave the other night a neko wearing basic shoes, no prim clothing, some fairly basic hair, and her scripted tail and ears; she had a score over 5000.

I think we need a Jira to make it possible to ban Nekos with the land functions.

ARC (aka shame) doesn't take scripts into account ever though, you'd need to introduce a new "sim shame" metric to account for that.

Without knowing which attachments they're using it's a wild guess though.

For instance: if her tail swished because it's made up of 4 "hidden" tail states then that's 24/prim due to alpha (assuming 6 faces at 4/alpha face). If each tail "state" consists of 10 prims, that would add 960 just for the hidden prims (24 * 10 * 4) for instance.

You have to be careful with hair as well, prim-based hair (unless the texture it uses is heavily alpha based) doesn't really add all that much, but "flat textured curl hair" hair adds an immense amount. At 120 prims the "flat hair" adds 2880 for alpha alone which it definitely deserves because it's a real "laghog" .

If a creator isn't careful and uses a 32-bit 100% opaque texture instead of the 24-bit it should be that's going to be a *very* "costly" mistake as well since whether you use the alpha layer or not, it's going to count as alpha.

(I do have a bias towards attributing high scores primarily on alpha because that's where most of my personal ARC comes from since I don't really ever wear something that emits particules, has animated textures, etc)

Right I forgot about all the alpha tail prims. Doh. Yeah I know about alpha hair. Hers was just plain plain hair. So do ears n stuff count for alpha textures as well?

I'm just curious. In no way do I advocate banning nekos (dude, they're cute!!)

Yes. The ARC tool is helpful. But it's only a small help on a big problem. It would be much more helpful if more tools like it were developed to measure other sources of well, and there was a way of comparing the different sources of lag.

If the ARC tool represents the end of Linden Labs's responsibility for lag (it's your fault, not ours, ARC proves it, we have other projects on which we want to work), then it's rather meaningless.

Depends on the ears I guess .

For your own attachments, it's best if you try and keep how ARC is calculated in mind (and per face costs will add more than per prim costs for instance) and you'll generally be able to spot why any given attachment you have might be ARC heavier than it has any right to be .

Examples I've had would be prim skirts where 5 faces of each prim were "full alpha" and the outward facing face had a fully opaque texture (applying the outside texture to all sides of each prim made the skirt usuable again without really changing how it looked). Even if the outside facing texture is alpha, you can lower ARC somewhatby retexturing the faces that are hidden inside your body from alpha->opaque.
Or the prim necklace where each face of every prim that made up the chain had an animated texture on it (getting rid of the texture animation reduced it ARC from 2400ish to virtually nothing).

People who rely on selectively hiding/unhiding an attachment *looks at guys for no reason whatsoever * would get an instant benefit from simply detaching it when not used. And of course the trick of attaching scripted gadgets to the HUD instead of your avie .

(And just for the record, I'm not a neko... I just meow, purr and do silly kitty things although I do have the attention span of a kit... oooooo... yarn!! *pounces and rolls around with it, batting at the ball*... uhm... what was I saying? )

My main avie now dislikes you.

How bizarre. Why would anyone make a skirt like this?

I've been wondering about that for over a year! .

The only reason I can think of is that they want to give the skirt a flat look because they don't like having it look like a bunch of obviously cut and hollowed cylinders? Still doesn't really explain why so many create a skirt that's invisible from the inside though .