What is the max Avatar Complexity you will Render?

[Argent Stonecutter]

You mean 256 + height * width? Giving a texture ARC that's the same as the memory it uses + a smidgen

 

[Chalice Yao]

You mean 256 + height * width? Giving a texture ARC that's the same as the memory it uses + a smidgen

Ah, yes. (width * height) / 1024 I should say. Essentially 4096 for a 1024x1024. Perhaps with a multiplier as I described in my longer ram vs. triangles post to Niran.

 

[NiranV Dean]

The problem I see with this, and it's a big one, is that once popular mesh bodies/heads/etc. are downloaded, their actual FPS impact often isn't anywhere near as bad as one might assume just from the total triangle count of the linkset. Most of those triangles are from the often hidden applier layers, and as far as I can tell, 100% transparent rigged meshes get culled from the renderer.

This typically adds up to hundreds of thousands of triangles that aren't being rendered at all, but still get penalized. Even doing just a quick test looking at rendered tris and measuring FPS, there's a clear, very noticable difference in performance with those layers disabled. Don't get me wrong, the whole so-called onion layered construction of these typically no mod meshes is stupid and irritates me to no end, they are the definition of excessive (especially Belleza), but penalizing culled faces doesn't seem to be ideal.

I highly disagree. Invisible or not, they should be penalized regardless. You can't just smack a million polygons on a mesh with the excuse "but its culled".

BTW: This is a major spoiler in case you didn't know and i'll be busting a lot of bubbles of a lot of people here now with what i'm going to say but invisible objects are not culled, they are fully rendered and in the pipeline they are treated as alpha objects making them far worse (due to alpha sorting) than normal solid visible objects. This is based on tests i made with someone who might ring a bell to some of you: Jasdac Stockholm (creator of TiS, BARE, Game of Thongs, Fright and a few other things), he once came to me bringing me the complains of his players that even though he uses super low poly meshes for his monsters (and i mean so low poly you can barely tell what it is, 1999 style) they still absolutely murder your framerate. We put down one of his monsters, it has several completely invisible states (you know how this works from all those animated animals people keep attaching to themselves) all of which in theory shouldn't be rendered right? WRONG. You are so WRONG. WRONGER THAN WRONG. The super low poly mesh monster dropped me from 113 FPS down to 16 FPS by having all states completely invisible. Then, to test our theory, we made all states visible and lo and behold i was back at 113 FPS. Made them invisible again and dropped back to 16 FPS once again. I'd say i was pretty shocked but i'm sure that everyone and i mean EVERYONE probably already assumed that this is the case. If you read my code snipped you can even see that i commented out the "invisible" multiplier because my Viewer uses both Marine's "don't render invisible things" hack as well as an extended "don't render invisible faces" hack for shadows, glow and several other things. And in case you don't believe me: See for yourself:

Both are with Marine's "don't render invisible things" fix, yet the Viewer still renders (and includes in post processing) them under certain conditions (like when it has glow set). Ohhh how LL blinded us all these years.

The only reason i don't use the invisible multiplier is because i already punish them by handling them as "alpha".

Oh, quite. An overhead makes sense, and I think 256 is a good value for it. It's just what it's being added to that's...just wrong :|
Something along the lines of 256 * (height * width * 4) would make some sense IMO.

Sounds fine to me having a baseline overhead, textures aren't free to allocate after all, no matter how small. Will be adding one to my calc, 256 is not much in comparison to 5120 but its mostly aimed at smaller textures anyway. This should both penalize using way too many small textures but at the same time penalize using too many big textures.

This would be the result currently:
S32 texture_cost = 256 + (S32)((ARC_TEXTURE_COST * (img->getFullHeight() * img->getFullWidth())) / 1024);

1024x1024
5376 = 256 + (5 * (1024 * 1024) / 1024)
512x512
1536 = 256 + (5 * (512 * 512) / 1024)
256x256
576 = 256 + (5 * (256 * 256) / 1024)
128x128 (At this point textures get penalized simply for existing more than anything else)
336 = 256 + (5 * (128* 128) / 1024)
64x64
276 = 256 + (5 * (64 * 64) / 1024)
32x32
261 = 256 + (5 * (32 * 32) / 1024)
16x16
257.25 = 256 + (5 * (16 * 16) / 1024)
8x8
256.3125 = 256 + (5 * (8 * 8) / 1024)

 

[Vaelissa Cortes]

BTW: This is a major spoiler in case you didn't know and i'll be busting a lot of bubbles of a lot of people here now with what i'm going to say but invisible objects are not culled, they are fully rendered and in the pipeline they are treated as alpha objects making them far worse (due to alpha sorting) than normal solid visible objects.

Yes, let me stop you right here. You are screeching about something entirely different that most people here should already know very well. For clarification, I am talking about worn rigged meshes specifically, those are what is treated differently.

Big edit:

I highly disagree. Invisible or not, they should be penalized regardless. You can't just smack a million polygons on a mesh with the excuse "but its culled".

I'll go ahead and reply to this too. I never said such meshes were okay (in fact, I said the opposite), but what I am saying is that jellydolls exist to remove things which hurt FPS from view, if it's not hurting FPS, then what is the point? To sit around proud that somebody is jellydolled because you made a thing that jellydolls people not impacting FPS? Okay I guess?

I do not have an ideal solution for excessive triangles yet either, we're still tackling that in my viewer (which has its own similar triangle limit), but I think a practical approach is best. Perhaps something like half penalty just for the extra downloaded data and having something badly made? I don't know. Second Life is in a bad state, but it's important to not push people away in an attempt to make it better.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

I got a question, Niran. The Bento version of the TWI fox has a way lower ARC than the previous version, but the mesh and textures seem identical. Are they giving Bento rigged avatars a lower ARC or is there some other reason?

 

[NiranV Dean]

Yes, let me stop you right here. You are screeching about something entirely different that most people here should already know very well. For clarification, I am talking about worn rigged meshes specifically, those are what is treated differently.

I'm screeching about the fact that no matter how you turn it around, leaving invisible faces and objects on unnecessarily and overusing them remains a bad thing. It's a bad practice and shouldn't be used. Besides that ARC doesn't just include direct FPS impact, it counts overall complexity of your avatar, that includes VRAM usage so i see no reason not to include it just because we're wearing it and it has no direct impact on your framerate anymore "for now". These kind of things, called "workarounds" quickly end up being shared among creators to game the system (again) like we've seen so many times with several systems in the past. I'm not going to give them another free pass.

I'll go ahead and reply to this too. I never said such meshes were okay (in fact, I said the opposite), but what I am saying is that jellydolls exist to remove things which hurt FPS from view, if it's not hurting FPS, then what is the point? To sit around proud that somebody is jellydolled because you made a thing that jellydolls people not impacting FPS? Okay I guess?

I do not have an ideal solution for excessive triangles yet either, we're still tackling that in my viewer (which has its own similar triangle limit), but I think a practical approach is best. Perhaps something like half penalty just for the extra downloaded data and having something badly made? I don't know. Second Life is in a bad state, but it's important to not push people away in an attempt to make it better.

You literally just gave another reason why invisible objects shouldn't be free. They are still downloaded and processed, they always impact you in some way or another and no, half ARC is not going to be effective, anything but full ARC cost is going to tell these people that hiding everything is not the solution. Take less ARC and people will make as many things as possible invisible to save on ARC, give them no ARC and the same will happen.

And yes, jellydolls were made to cut out avatars that take up too much resources and reduce them and i'd be lying if i said my ARC calc didn't do exactly that and yea i'm proud that it jellydolls people regardless of whether the triangles are invisible or not, it does its job, consistently and with no mercy, you either get rid of all unused/unnecessary stuff or you pay for it, no "but it's invisible its fine".

I have no more mercy with these kind of things.

Hell my own ARC made me remove all invisible extra body states of my avatars just so i stay as low as possible. This does not only save me some trouble such as extra textures and information it also lowers my internal avatars complexity on the server, less scripts, less stuff on me, smaller linksets and so on, it is a win in every situation.

I got a question, Niran. The Bento version of the TWI fox has a way lower ARC than the previous version, but the mesh and textures seem identical. Are they giving Bento rigged avatars a lower ARC or is there some other reason?

I'm not sure, i haven't seen any of them yet but i'd assume that the bento version got rid of all extra states for fingers and eyes/ears/snout/tail etc which would save an insane amount of triangles with more the higher the base triangle count of the avatar is. This is what bento was made for after all.

 

[Vaelissa Cortes]

I'm screeching about the fact that no matter how you turn it around, leaving invisible faces and objects on unnecessarily and overusing them remains a bad thing. It's a bad practice and shouldn't be used.

I was referring to you going on to me about being so "WRONG WRONGER THAN WRONG" since you apparently misunderstood what I was saying and went on about something I wasn't talking about. Nobody's argued that it isn't a bad practice, I am very much against it and probably one of the few people on the grid consistently getting on to creators about such practices (in a nice way), offering in-depth explinations and tutorials on how to improve their creation habits.

I'm not going to give them another free pass.

You literally just gave another reason why invisible objects shouldn't be free.

Yes, yes I did, that was the whole point of me mentioning at least giving them some kind of penalty in my second post, I thought that was obvious. It shouldn't be free really, but where as you are all or nothing, I am thinking about something revolving around how SL currently works and is being used in its current state right now. You know, something that is more immidiately approachable to the average person, which counts for everything. Again, I am very much against the practice of including a bunch of invisible layers just in case somebody might want to apply a texture to them. Nobody has said "but it's invisible its fine", I have been trying to fight this nonsense for years (and have gone on for pages on old SLU on exactly this problem). Either way, I am only offering things to consider. At the end of the day I am indifferent to whatever you do with your viewer, it is always good to bring more attention to the problem though.

 

[NiranV Dean]

I was referring to you going on to me about being so "WRONG WRONGER THAN WRONG" since you apparently misunderstood what I was saying and went on about something I wasn't talking about. Nobody's argued that it isn't a bad practice, I am very much against it and probably one of the few people on the grid consistently getting on to creators about such practices (in a nice way), offering in-depth explinations and tutorials on how to improve their creation habits.

Yes, yes I did, that was the whole point of me mentioning at least giving them some kind of penalty in my second post, I thought that was obvious. It shouldn't be free really, but where as you are all or nothing, I am thinking about something revolving around how SL currently works and is being used in its current state right now. You know, something that is more immidiately approachable to the average person, which counts for everything. Again, I am very much against the practice of including a bunch of invisible layers just in case somebody might want to apply a texture to them. Nobody has said "but it's invisible its fine", I have been trying to fight this nonsense for years (and have gone on for pages on old SLU on exactly this problem). Either way, I am only offering things to consider. At the end of the day I am indifferent to whatever you do with your viewer, it is always good to bring more attention to the problem though.

I see, i think you're misunderstanding this "WRONG WRONGER THAN WRONG", it was neither aimed at you directly nor was it meant as what you thought it was whatever you think it was. You have to imagine this as an announcer with a very silly voice coming out of nowhere smacking this fat stamp of disapproval across the screen thing. Generally you have to take what i say with a grain of salt. Here, a grain of salt:

I'm hardly ever truly serious, when i am, you'll see what is essentially a nuclear fallout going off in the background, it's pretty obvious. Anyone who was with me on that one TPV after-meeting about the Poser knows what i'm talking about when i say you'll immediately notice when i get serious.

 

[Fauve Aeon]

So, armed with a script reader and my ‘what is she wearing’ HUD, I went walking to an event to learn more about thingsby inspecting people during a live show. Pretty interesting! We can have up to 100 heavy people on the estate here with very little lag.
My own mesh body hud was briefly on while I adjusted my sit. I need to stick this AO into the Firestorm AO tab. Also, dumb but cute ascii is still a thing? And no, it was not me.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Animation scripts are not inherently bad. The script cost of a well designed AO HUD (like the low-lag variants of the Franimation script) is negligible.

 

[Fauve Aeon]

"but its culled".

I was wearing a full alpha today and shone a projector on myself, the avatar shadow is still there. Ruth is always with us...

 

[NiranV Dean]

I was wearing a full alpha today and shone a projector on myself, the avatar shadow is still there. Ruth is always with us...

Alpha Masks are a whole different thing again.

Oz once asked me what the difference between toggling body parts off and masks is. He was shocked when i told him that toggling off eliminates the shadows completely while using masks keeps shadows active as if the body was never hidden. This might be fixed in BD though with the inclusion of the Alpha Masking fix that also makes rigged alpha masked surfaces cast proper shadows now.

 

[Vaelissa Cortes]

I was wearing a full alpha today and shone a projector on myself, the avatar shadow is still there. Ruth is always with us...

If you're using Firestorm or another viewer with the option for simplified shadows, it is worth checking to see if you're using that option. Simplified casts avatar shadows from the system avatar's shape instead of whatever rigged mesh you have worn. In this case, avatar alpha doesn't matter. If shadows are set to Optimized or Complex, shadows from alphaed out system avatar parts will properly go away and be cast based on your rigged mesh attachment visibility.

 

[Fauve Aeon]

If you're using Firestorm or another viewer with the option for simplified shadows, it is worth checking to see if you're using that option. Simplified casts avatar shadows from the system avatar's shape instead of whatever rigged mesh you have worn. In this case, avatar alpha doesn't matter. If shadows are set to Optimized or Complex, shadows from alphaed out system avatar parts will properly go away and be cast based on your rigged mesh attachment visibility.

I will check but yep, I bet that’s why I noticed it. We use that setting for “The Nut” ballet since we are in system bodies in the roles.

 

[Andi]

I'm on ultra with no shadows and 64m draw. (32m draw on mainland)

 

[aliensalmon]

I use the Firestorm viewer, and it's set to what is recommended for my laptop: 250,000.

 

[Da5id Weatherwax]

Depends what I'm doing, to be honest.

If I'm performing: After checking that my stage rigs lighting cues all work, I crank all the graphics down to minimum and jellydoll almost everyone. My priorities are feeding a high quality stream with no clipping and what I "need to see" in-world is restricted to local chat, the separate chat window where my stage rig is sending me status messages about cues/anims and a severely shrunken inventory window for the occasions I need to switch out different guitars and other props. - The visuals there are for the audience, not for me.

If I'm attending a performance: However high I need to set it to render the performers is the minimum. If I can get an acceptable framerate and admire the rest of the eye-candy present then the settings go higher.

If I'm working a security or management shift at the club, I set no limit. I need to be able to see everyone in all their "glory" - there aint much of a dress code but there are some things we don't allow. Anyone who's a lagmonster I always check them out before derendering them.

 

[Risotto]

I don't see enough of a performance gain to make it worth seeing jelly blobs, in my experience.

I try to keep my personal avatars under 100k unless it cannot be helped