Avatar Rendering Cost (ARC)

Not sure if this belongs here but, I think I like this new feature in the RC 1.20.5. For those who are not familliar with this, it allows you to see the lag caused by each avatar in a numeric value.

What it will show, is like, the ladies with 350 prim hair is causing tons of lag, etc.

My question is, as a content creator, couldnt this be a useful tool for testing builds. If an av has a ARC of 500 and you attached a build to it, the sum of the ARC minus the 500 should give an indication of the impact your item has on the sim?

I make clocks and always worry about the lag of the textures and script. This should be a good way to tell if the impact is minimal, correct?

First off, to be clear, this number doesn't indicate the effect on the sim. It indicates how hard a person's video card has to work to render it. Scripts aren't factored into this number.

Yes, I think it's a useful tool to get an idea how well different techniques work when creating content. The thing to remember is that it's a comparative number. A score of 500 doesn't mean the same to everyone, based on their computer and graphic card specs. I can render a room full of 2000 score avatars fine. Some people would die on one 1000 score avatar. It's all relative.

(Omitted mention of "sim" because that's been disproven.)

In trying to think about what ways avatar rendering may be different from building rendering, it does occur to me that, due to culling efficiencies, wearing a multi-room building would tend to give you a much larger ARC reading than the building's actual impact. The reason behind this, if you haven't caught it already, is that large, simple walls around rooms tend to HELP rather than hinder framerates. With individual decorations like potted plants, however, it would indeed be helpful to, might I say, pick them up in your hands and 'weigh' them.

So consider the divide between what is sculpture and what is architecture. 'Carrying' furnishings into your house before plopping them down sounds sensible. 'Carrying' the whole house generally isn't . (Now if you lived in a literal glass house, I suppose it would be, but due to alpha-sorting glitchery I wouldn't recommend it.)