how can i lower the impact of my avatar on sims?

[daddy56SP]

hello! greetings! my only goal on sl is to have stunning avis...i've been spending a good amount of lindens buying stuff...this weekend, for the first time i've been warned that my avatar was very : heavy"and could contribute for lag on some sims...i want to learn how to make copies and to delete scripts and, well not to cause troubles around...another doubt i have is how to delete scripts on an item that do not allow copies...

thank you so very much, in advance

[Syo Emerald]

A good avatar doesn't equals a ton of scripts running. From a distance its hard to tell what may cause you to be so "heavy", but here are some ideas (maybe you can list what you wore when this happened):

- old prim clothes and hair might include unfortunate amount of skins. I once heard of a hair that had resize scripts in each of its prims.

- huds

- wearing gentials....yes, if you do not need them right now, putting them back in your inventory is better than just turning them "invisible"

- multiple things that inlcude a lot of functions (I'm thinking of some demon tails right now, for example)

 

It also depends sort of what that person calls heavy or how they messured your heavyness.

[Marianne Little]

If you have Firestorm, you can rightclick your avatar and find out how heavy scripted you are. If not, there is lots of free gadgets that measure your scripts. Like this one: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Weight-Scale-Script-Counter/1835786

Weigh yourself and note down how many scripts you have, and the script memory usage. Then I suggest you first save what you wear now in an outfit. (In case you need to dress in a hurry) Then detach all. Eek! The horror! (Just kidding)

Then you can put on one attachment again, and "weigh in". You wil soon see where the problem is. Advice on taking off scripted genitalia is good. Many attachments also have a "Kill all scripts" function. Save a backup copy and kill the scripts in the one you wear. When you are done, weigh in your new and lighter avatar and save this outfit. Delete the heavy outfit folder.

It is smart to save an "shopping and event" avatar with very little scripts, maybe just 5. If you use RLV, some will never take a collar off... I think you should take it off whan you don't roleplay. Roleplay HUDS, hugging HUDs and dance HUDs are often really heavy.  If you go shopping, you don't need mesh eyes with colorchange and size change via scripts. Go back to as much basic as you can. System eyes and no mesh bodyparts, wear a mesh outfit that flatter you instead and who is unscripted.

[daddy56SP]

thank you for your answer...some of my avis show textures and downloaded 391260, already without the genitals///a friend mentioned something about making copies and than delete the scripts...my concern is about the "not copyable"items..lol..and i am banishing my demon tails, em particles emiter horns..with some sadness, though

[Marianne Little]

Eh, go full rigged out unless you are asked to change. Then wear a lighter outfit.

No copy things must be a pain. I try to avoid them. 

[daddy56SP]

oh! yes..iI have firestorm... just bought some eyes full of reflections and stuff..banishing them too, lol..i just noticed that fur coats also can contribute...aniway, this is a bit tricky but i'll try to make my levels lower before going into heavy populated sims

Thank you so very much for your kind answer

[Theresa Tennyson]

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daddy56SP wrote:

thank you for your answer...some of my avis show textures and downloaded 391260, already without the genitals///a friend mentioned something about making copies and than delete the scripts...my concern is about the "not copyable"items..lol..and i am banishing my demon tails, em particles emiter horns..with some sadness, though

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There are two completely separate things you should be looking at.

The "391260" number is your "avatar draw weight" which describes how much work a viewer has to do to draw your avatar. (Incidentally, that figure is horrendous; however, I've seen single human hairstyles that can cause numbers that high so don't feel TOO ashamed.) It's aggravated by having a lot of small, complicated sculpts and/or meshes and lots of large textures on those items. The only real solution to high draw weight is to find things give you the same look you want more efficiently. However, draw weight doesn't have a real effect on the region itself; only on the viewers of the people who are trying to look at your avatar.

The complaint that the sim squawked at you was probably about your "script count/weight" which is completely separate from your "draw weight." You can have high draw weight with low script count and vice versa. Also coolness and script counts aren't necessarily related either. Resizing scripts are the big culprits for script counts and usually can be reduced by deleting scripts. High script counts/loads can affect the running of a region; not as much as they used to and not as much as some region owners think, but they can.

[Ohjiro Watanabe]

If you go to About Land (AKA Parcel Details) and click on Script Info and then Avatar it will give you a list of things that you are wearing that have scripts in them.

Also see these two wiki pages:

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Calculating-land-impact/ta-p/974163

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Rendering_weight

 

 

[Perrie Juran]

 

You can get detailed info on your script usage by going to World>About Land>Script Info>My Avatar.

But you will also get many varied opinions about what is a reasonable amount.  It's not so much how many scripts you are wearing but what they are doing.  Many places will balk if you are wearing over 2,000 to 3000kb. 

Of note, your Render Weight does NOT include script count.  But things like particle emiters add a lot to your weight.

[daddy56SP]

thank you! that helped me a lot! You have been very kind!

[daddy56SP]

yes! you are totally right! the problem was "script count/weight" related...now I have to learn how to get rid of heavy scripts, without ruining items on my inventory...

thak you so very much!

my best regards!

[Pussycat Catnap]

---

Marianne Little wrote:

If you have Firestorm, you can rightclick your avatar and find out how heavy scripted you are. If not, there is...

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In the default viewer - you can do this same thing by opening"About Land" and looking at your scripts there.

Its in About Land because you are suppossed to be able to also do it for land you own, but this often fails to work... but the second tab for your own avatar always works. Not the best place to hide it... but there it is.

This was you can do it without using a HUD that itself adds to it.

 

 

Note also how the official data over-estimates as it rounds things up:

This is because it is reporting memory allocation, not usage. Allocation is still an issue - because memory allocated to you is not available to anyone else. The gadgets are using different formulas, but still mostly getting allocation.

 

Its good to remove items that:

1. Have too many scripts - especially with LSL (as opposed to Mono scripts), each of them also takes up a process on the server or something. But I'm a bit fuzzy on this point.
2. Have too much script "TIME" - you will need a gadet for this one.
3. Have too much script memory.
4. Are sculpties (they are polygon bloated).
5. Are mesh that use more polygons than they need to (they will cause mesh for yourself and others to fail to load, and cause graphics cards to heat up...).
6. Use the 'Torus' prim - the worst offender of them all, in the SL engine, this is handled very poorly and burns a lot of resources.

 

You can right click anything in inventory not currently worn, choose copy, then paste. I make subfolders called "descripted" and paste everything into there, then edit them and remove all the scripts.

Only buy items that are both copy/mod. Sometimes you cannot avoid this, but try to make it a habit.

If its no-copy... accept that editing it might break it... be extremely careful about buying no-copy unless its super-cheap.

 

If you have items that you really like but which are script heavy - check with the creator now and then for updates and if you are on good terms with them, talk them about maybe refactoring their scripts for a lighter load. In my screenshots note the 'Fate Eyes' - those are the old version. Refactored recently to use very low script memory and script time.

Since the OP noted tossing out a set of scripted eyes... look into the FATE ones, the new ones are under 64kb if I remember right.

 

[daddy56SP]

oh! you are the kindest! thank you soo much

now, i have a lot of "homework" to do...

i will read with attention all you wrote and follow your advices!

 

thanx again

my best wishes!

 

[Penny Patton]

Texture use is a huge performance killer that most people overlook. The fewer/smaller textures your avatar uses, the lighter your impact on performance.

 This impacts the sim as well as the framerates of everyone rendering you, because the sim needs to stream all those textures to everyone in rendering distance. It's probably the biggest bandwidth sink in SL.

 

 Of course, one avatar optimized for performance has a negligible impact if everyone else is loaded up with scripts and textures, but if everyone were more aware of what causes performance issues SL could run pretty amazingly well.

[Perrie Juran]

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Penny Patton wrote:

Texture use is a huge performance killer that most people overlook. The fewer/smaller textures your avatar uses, the lighter your impact on performance.

 This impacts the sim as well as the framerates of everyone rendering you, because the sim needs to stream all those textures to everyone in rendering distance. It's probably the biggest bandwidth sink in SL.

 

 Of course, one avatar optimized for performance has a negligible impact if everyone else is loaded up with scripts and textures, but if everyone were more aware of what causes performance issues SL could run pretty amazingly well.

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"....because the sim needs to stream all those textures to everyone in rendering distance...."

 

You do know about the Content Delivery Network?   That load has been removed from the SIMs.

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Tools-and-Technology/An-Update-on-the-CDN-Project/ba-p/2860114

ETA, that is not to say that overuse of large textures does not cause client side lag. 

[Penny Patton]

You're right, textures shouldn't affect the sim itself. I'd forgotten about that update. But yeah, still, the VRAM and bandwidth use do cause framerates to drop and contribute largely to latency issues.

Speaking of avatar impact on sims and performance, if content creators produced more efficient content it would be easy for everyone to keep their avatar render weight in the green. I've heard a lot of people complain that LL's render weight suggestions were unreasonable, that it was impossible to have a decent looking avatar without being in the red, but the problem is that LL never did anything to discourage badly optimized avatar attachments.

 There's also no way to see how poorly optimized avatar content is until you see it for yourself in-world and can check out how high a poly count it has, and how many textures are slapped onto it.  And even then you need to be familiar enough with SL to use debugging features hidden in the advanced and debug menus, which most users are never going to do.

 

Hopefully these are all things LL has become aware of in hindsight and plans to address in their new virtual world.

 

[Pussycat Catnap]

We need something like a prim allowance for worn goods - but I have no idea how you could ever make that fair...

 

[SaraCarena]

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Penny Patton wrote:

 

 

Hopefully these are all things LL has become aware of in hindsight and plans to address in their new virtual world.

 

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LL is going someway towards that in viewer develpment atm. An auto render feature based on ARC/ARW plus the option to know who is or isn`t fully rendering you was discussed at a recent TPV meeting.

between 20.00 mins and 40.00 mins

The debugs for auto render are already there in most viewers and exposed in the ui in Black Dragon viewer, the option to know isn`t.

 

RenderAutoMuteByteLimit Maximum bytes of attachments before an avatar is rendered as a simple impostor (0 for no limit)

RenderAutoMuteFunctions Developing feature to render some avatars using simple impostors or colored silhouettes. (Set to 7 for all functionality)

RenderAutoMuteLogging Show extra information in viewer logs about avatar rendering costs

RenderAutoMuteRenderWeightLimit Maximum render weight before an avatar is rendered as a simple impostor (0 to not use this limit)

RenderAutoMuteSurfaceAreaLimit Maximum surface area of attachments before an avatar is rendered as a simple impostor (0 to not use this limit)

While it`s not a massive step it might make more users aware of the impact of high avatar render weights in busy places.

 

There`s also recent news of how vram is being wasted by profile pics in the group chat, local chat and friendlist chui,

http://blog.nalates.net/2015/01/24/texture-thrashing-2015-04/#more-13923

Hopefully that gets fixed asap.

[Penny Patton]

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

We need something like a prim allowance for worn goods - but I have no idea how you could ever make that fair...

 

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LL missed several unique opportunities to do it in a fair way already.

Whenever LL introduces a new feature, they have the opportunity to add something like this in. When LL introduced mesh attachments, they could have introduced a resource cap for avatars that kicks in when you wear a mesh attachment.

When fitted mesh was added, also a perfect opportunity. 

They could have squeezed it in when materials were added. Want to wear materials on your avatar? Welcome to the world of Draw Weight Points!

 

 If LL adds any new avatar features people will want to use, they can add this in. They could even tell content creators now what the limits would be and an estimated time when those resource caps will kick in, giving content creators time to future proof new content.

@SaraCarena

That's neat. I'd like to see that go somewhere. If LL introduced that feature and really pushed it, again, letting content creators know where the default limits are set ahead of time, it would start encouraging people to create better optimized content. Speaking of which, I'm about to make a new thread about Avatar Rendering cost, copying an article I just posted to my blog.