LL Blog: Avatar Rendering Cost

So someone inside your skirt can see out of course.

Quotes Kitty:
"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."

Yes, i understand.. but i think , even with avatars with a high script content, the ideal ARC would still be a usefull guide to know.. a judgement line... like a speed limit sign doesnt stop one exceeding it on the road,or stop one being held up sooner in the traffic jam ahead..or make ones car more efficient than one with twice the engine size, or stop one from crashing round the next bend into a stalled tractor..

Lindens based the numbers on real known factors affecting "lag", else the whole idea is mythical..some could argue that speed limit signs should change according to traffic quantity, time of day... many things.. but the numbers mean something, the ability of the driver and other road users to reach the destination.

and yes i realise the ability of ones PC is a contributing "lag" factor.I run SL on ultra graphics setting,and there are places where the frame rate drops considerably, wether its the ability of my PC or SL and the web connections ability to get the information to my PC fast enough, is a balance point i make a decision about, like a speed limit sign...

If i load my car to its limit, and try and exceed the speed limit on a busy winding road in a city centre, the chance i will have an accident and crash..taking others out with me, is greater..i make that decision.

fortunately the SL police dont fine me ..yet, for breaking the speed limit.. and i cant kill anyone.

Problem is the ARC tells you nothing whatever about the script content of any given AV in your visual range.

I could have a ARC of 600 but be wearing a hud radar, and hud based shields and hud based weapons system and be lagging the heck out of the sim and the ARC would simply tell you that I'm not visually causing you lag.

Unless people know the whole story, the ARC can be misleading and misunderstood. While I am standing there laging the sim to death, our host might eject someone with a 2500 ARC for causing all the lag.

Quotes Kathy:
"our host might eject someone with a 2500 ARC for causing all the lag."

yes, that is probably the bigger concern.. It says the ARC needs more info incorporated in its evaluation decision, do you ban the 4 wheel drive people carrier or the convertible two seat sports car? both may use the same resources at the same rate and present an identical risk.

Except that it is not the same resources and not an identical impact. My 1000 or so scripts are running on the server, dragging down the sim FPS and time dilation which makes everyone in the sim drag their feet through the quicksand. That 2500 ARC avatar is probably having only marginal impact on people with low enc PCs and then, only those in visual range.

Since the ARC is computed on the client, how can your client know to include MY scripts that are running on the server?

Very different resources and a much different impact.

ok.. so what is required? if the ARC right now is local, and is derived from the users PC, thats a start.. it is a common to all user resource,

what would one add to that ARC to compute a new one?

are we capable of deriving an ARC of our own based upon information from
A: our own PC and SL client
B: our landmarked sims

else.. do we ignore the ARC..? take nothing from it and suffer any consequence?

i would reiterate.."remove the undesirable confrontation and one has a better life in SL"

so.. i think this as suitable a space.. the forum, to see what is possible to create a better solution..

what would you ADD to the ARC ?

your pc`s capability? on what basis.. something standard would be required..
your SL frame rate ? on what basis.. naked?..where..what sim? again something standard

if there is a common starting point, the ARC would mean something.. its the information evaluated in that figure that is important..

does anyone have an idea of a framework list that can be evaluated? and how? post it here.


the speed limit doesnt mean the same to everyone.. but the risk is the same..

or else...what? lets all speed.. and continue crashing.. who cares?

i care.. i pay to use SL.. just like i pay fot the services that provide for me in RL... anything that makes my life easier, cheaper and stable.. is a good thing i think..

Why limit the system to just people, why not just have a slider that shows all textures over it's setting as grey? So you could say no to any texture over 512x512 or 1024x1024 or whatever.

Hmm yes by having green/yellow/red they have set illusionary limits for the masses, wonder what is past red, if you can work an ARC of 50k or something does it change to black?

"Excuse me miss, move and face the wall, take off that cap, and lift the back of your skirt, I got to do a tail/ears check on anyone wearing fluffy ball sneakers"

anybody that thinks LL cares what you think about the validity of this bogus metric is wasting their time. the metric is intended not to educate but to divide the community and deflect due attention away from the largest cause of lag to be introduced in the history of SL: windlight. Windlight is pastrami's baby and he will defend it strenuously since a new CEO is coming in. It will be the duty of residents to inform the new CEO what the reality of SL is since the Lindens are working on SL, not using it. imagine for a moment a new ceo comes in and asks why theres lag. do you think pastrami is going to stand up and say windlight because it requires a powerful computer running a late model GPU? no. he will not do that. windlight is great but it may be ahead of it's time. so what will a "technical person" do when confronted with the possibility of loss of stature and/or loss of job? deflect. blame it on end users. its what technical people that never learned how to be business communicators do.

fact is a modern computer doesn't have all these lag problems. LL would do better to desupport any video card over 2 years old and require a 64 bit OS with 4GB ram minimum.

that would take care of the lag wouldnt it?

Could always just downgrade to limited graphics viewers like bots run

I'm sure the WindLight team dipped into their budget to give their new CEO a supercomputer as a welcome present .

It wasn't my intent to debate the usefulness of the ARC as a tool for me to see the impact I may be having on myself and others.

What I am getting at is that, since we can now see this ARC number displayed for everyone, some people will start to blame the moderately high ARC avatars for lag that they simply are not the cause of.

SL is already pretty good at not delivering textures

Quotes Kathy:
"What I am getting at is that, since we can now see this ARC number displayed for everyone, some people will start to blame the moderately high ARC avatars for lag that they simply are not the cause of."

i agree.. so lets get a figure on what causes lag and doesnt.. based on something really determinable.. figures anyone can calculate.. ive space on my web site and my quarter sim, i would be quite happy to display a lag list there for as long as i am on SL.

i would even suggest the lindens could put a lag sim together.. something thats already close to lagging.. on some determinable basis with a lag figure, or pehaps a set of columns displayed,before and after your entry.. then there would be a place anyone can go and see if they cause lag... on what basis..

The problem is that if you ask 20 random people what lag is, you'll get 20 different answers and 200 different suggestions of what to do about it, a lot of which doesn't really help.

One Linden was planning to put a project together on demonstrating the effects of lag, but when the average person there attributes lag to things that don't matter ("Lindens trees are very laggy because they bend in the wind, prims trees are low-lag", or things that don't make sense ("My avie is low-lag because it uses flexi in all the attachments instead of physical attachments that lag down your PC" you're not going to accomplish a whole lot.

What about adding the effect that your scripts are having on the sim to your ARC?

Yeah yeah I know it's all this mumbo-jumbo about server-side and client-side stuff (can you tell I know zero about computers?) but there's got to be a way to find out from the server how much your scripts cost to run, in the general scheme of things. Of course this WOULD be a considerable cost to both server and client, this script cost query, but if you only use it once or twice, and don't keep the damn ARC running 24/7 on your client, it shouldn't be too bad.

The sim already keeps track of how much time each script takes to execute (estate managers and sim owners can view the Top Scripts from the estate tools). Your total "sim shame" could just be the sum of all script time(s).

The only thing left to do then would be to assign a meaning to different numbers (low/medium/height). It also wouldn't have to update very frequently at all.

As a plus: script creators (that don't own a sim) have been asking for a way to measure "script lag" for ages.

Indeed we have!! /me points to her signature.

so.. is this a problem with no solution? a problem with a treatment?or cant we even say exactly what the problem is yet? is it really undefinable?

I'm not sure it is a problem without a solution. I just don't like the way the ARC was implemented.

I am all for LL providing us the tools, including the statistics bar and the ARC, so that we can quantify the impact we each make on ourselves and others.

But, when they make something, like the ARC, display for every AV on your screen and then give it this color coding that makes virtually any female avatar with decent hair and a nice dress look like she is killing your PC, well, it is not helpful and just creates an adversarial atmosphere across the entire grid.

Yes, give me the tools. Yes, tell me how to _properly_ interpret what the tools are telling me. Yes, encourage the use of the tools and promote them so that everyone knows about them.

But don't just stick a number over every avatar on the screen with some, seemingly arbitrary color coding and just tell people that anything that isn't green is BAD. All that does is create exactly the atmosphere that, as has been pointed out by a couple of folks above, where people start demanding that you strip your avatar to achieve some nonsensical "goal" that, in reality, probably isn't going to make a real significant difference except in the most extreme of conditions.

Did we decide the amount of prims you are wearing are a big ARC raiser- or the textures thereon...? Got a little lost in the tech stuff sorry.

I *think* it was decided that the textures (esp alpha) are more important in the long run because you can conceivably have 6 textures for every prim...

Prims don't count unless the size of them along any of the three axis is >1m (you round the size downward to the nearest whole number).

Default cube (0.5 for all three) - shame = 0 + 0 + 0 = 0

Prim (X = 1.99, Y = 0.75, Z = 5.4) - shame = 1 + 0 + 5 = 6

Prim type or twisting, cutting, tapering, etc all don't count towards ARC/shame.

Textures count (their size doesn't matter though) as the unique texture count across *all* attachments multiplied by 5: if you reuse the same texture on two attachments, it still counts as one texture. Note that sculptmaps count as a texture as well.

(Edited to add that if a texture has an alpha layer, it will "cost" an additional 4 for every single face it's applied to)

Well - I was asking because I made my first dress - it does carry multiple prims but it all uses the same texture. Thanks