How can I be an informed consumer?

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

Hi. In the JIRA entry on the mesh deformer, people have brought up the issue of builders creating needlessly high polygon count items. (Kind of like "this digital camera must be great, it has five petapixels!")

I don't want to reward that kind of behavior, and I don't want the overhead such items needlessly induce. (Here I wish to join the chorus of gratitude for Codewarrior Congrejo's excellent thread on topology.) So... as a consumer, how can I know before I buy which are the products whose makers have done their work and put polygons to their best and most efficient use? If an in-store model is wearing a garment, can I right click on it and find out polygon counts? Do I have to count on reviewers or the sellers?

[Codewarrior Congrejo]

Heya Melissa,

first of thanks for the comment on my topology thread, it is much appreciated : )

To answer your question:

you have several ways of finding out if a sold product is of 'heavy' density or of a reasonable amount. 

- If merchants offer demos of their products, get those. And rezz or wear them and switch on Wireframe-View in your viewer.
  CTRL + Shift + R this toggles between wireframe on/off (not CTRL+ALT+R, which is rebake). This will clearly show you
  the underlying structure of the mesh and make it visible if it is made of an hilarious amount of polygons.
- The same goes for inworld examples of their products. Just turn on wireframe.
- In the advanced menu (Ctrl+Alt+D on windows) you can also find performance tools, and info displays that can give
  you in addition nice output of numbers like FPS when looking at a certain object, their rendertime, texture and script
  impact and more.

- Especially : Develop >Show Info >Show Render Info (toggle) will give you even an oversight of the 'tris' (triangle)
  amount of an object and much more useful info.

- One other way is as you mentioned already, to have a look at customer reviews on products.

- The more obvious way: Some merchants are even overly proud of offering extremely high dense meshes, obviously being
  unaware of these rather being disadvantageous for any kind of engine similar to SL. And thus it can be easily detected by
  reading their item descriptions.

- Sometimes for the trained eyes at least it is also already easy to figure out items being highly over polygon'ed by looking
  at them, especially when you can't discover any slightest border / or edges and it's a very ´round and
  organic object. This often indicates that they have been made with lots and lots of polygons and thus looking this way.

- And of course the Landimpact (when rightclicking and getting info about an object) can also tell you about how good it
  is made. Let's give an easy example, if there is an item like a Television device which has a LI of about 30 or even
  more. That clearly is way overboard and indicates possibly in addition to too many polygons, it could have bad LOD
  levels, and a maybe even a high physical count. (those values are also an important part of good made products)

I hope this helped you a bit.

Cheers , code =)

[Tali Rosca]

I think it was a bit of a mistake not to impose some LI limits on worn items while the system was being redesigned anyway. I've seen wearable with literally more than 2000 LI.

[Codewarrior Congrejo]

omg..  (regarding the mentioned LI of some objects you have seen).

However the reason why 'worn' mesh is not counted against landimpact is because it has no 'land'-impact so to say.
Landimpact is made for determining how much weight a 'rezzed' object will have on the land (in that case the simulator / server side). As in how much item and storage space does it take, how much physics calculation will the server have to do and so on.

When something is worn its a matter of plain 'object or avatar rendering-cost', which is something the machine of the user has to handle. It is hard to put this into values or measures since someone with an older mashine might have a hard time rendering such a heavy object, whilst someone with 2 graphic cards of each let's say 1024 MB power might not really struggle at all, and it would first become noticeable when 20 or more of those worn polygon-beasts would appear on screen.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Avatar_Rendering_Cost

To see the ARC (avatar rendering cost):

1. Turn on your Advanced menu.
2. Enable Advanced > Rendering > Info Displays > Avatar Rendering Cost. Or in SLV 2.8/3.0 Advanced > Performance Tools > Show Avatar Rendering Cost

The OCR (object rendering cost) can be seen when you select an object - the value is displayed in the main tab of the Edit window.

Generally it's the same situation as we had before when attaching prims or sculpties. You could basically cluster your avatar with Linksets of  full 255 items (the linkset limit) made of 255 x 1024 vertices-sculpts and put those on every available attachment spot. That could give a pretty nasty rendercost as well. And mesh is actually supposed to bring us away from people trying to achieve certain looks this way and giving us the chance to make it finally with just one optimized model.

The only thing you can do to put an end to the visual pain / and the pain for your praphic card  - should you encounter a user wearing such a hilarious item, is to ensure you have avatar impostors on and simply mute this person. In that case it will be replaced by the grey avatar-imposter, and you don't need to render it anymore.

[LepreKhaun]

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Tali Rosca wrote:

I think it was a bit of a mistake not to impose some LI limits on worn items while the system was being redesigned anyway. I've seen wearable with literally more than 2000 LI.

---

I'll second that!

 

As an experiment, I ground-rezzed a recently purchased (male) hair piece (made 4 years ago) and examined it. It consisted of over 200 sculpties using three different sculpt maps. No Land Impact of course when being worn, but I can easily determine the impact this has on performance when teleporting or simply hanging around others having to render it. IMO a lot of the perceived lag we complain about is due to unrestricted attachment limits.

 

But, then again, what price fashion?