Hairs... Would you compromise lag for a good hair?

[Willow Danube]

Hair has one of the highest prim counts on your avatar next to jewelries. On a decent hair design the prim counts could go over than 200 prims and you see this on hairs that has plenty of flexis and alpha layers. Any hair below 100 prims are usually updos, bobs or really short. They have minimal flexis and alpha layers.

Another type of lag inducing hairs are the ones with scripts, be it resizer, texture changer or temp rezzer. Some comes with at least a combination of either 2. I'm not a scripter but you can know if the scripts were poorly written just by noticing the 'scan' time. Some scripts just took a lot longer to execute than others.

Having said all this, I will admit that I am a guilty lag inducing hair user from day one. I can't help it when the hair looks good on me. I am however, willing to try being a good SL resident by learning more and be aware of the amount of scripts and prim counts that I wear everyday on my avatar and I will start this with my hair. Here's what I think a good hair would be.

1. No scripts
2. Modifiable - even down to colour picker and texture (I play with colours a lot. I don't mind going smurfy if it looks good)
3. Not more than 150 prim counts. I know it is hard to find a good long hair with less than 100 prim counts. I only use my highest hair counts in places where I know lag wouldn't be much of an issue like empty sandboxes or empty clubs or at my own place.
4. Quality textures
5. Reduced alpha layers (it makes modifying a lot easier)
6. Reduced flexis
7. Last but not least, well thought and nicely designed hair. No bald spot left uncovered.

This could be a little bit of a challenge since hairs are one of the most difficult objects to create. A good hair takes time and effort and hair creators should be given some credits for having the patience and vision to create one of the most meticulous but important attachments on an avatar.

Some might argue that prims, flexis and alphas has nothing to do with it. Some will adamantly swear by the scripts. Some will point to ARC. Some will disagree with ARC. What about you guys? How would you know if your hair will be the cause of a sim crash? What do you think a good hair should look or be?

[Suspiria Finucane]

My hair doesn't lag, so I guess the answer is yes.  :smileytongue:

[Penny Patton]

I won't buy any hair that isn't moddable. If any hair I bought did have scripts, the first thing I'd do would be to remove them entirely. Keep a copy in my inventory with the scripts intact if they're used for something like texture changes, but otherwise I've no need for scripted hair.

i just logged out for bed so I can't check to see how many prims my current hair is, but most hair I've owned has been well under 200 prims. Well made hair seems to be even lower in prim counts with the introduction of sculpts.Since I get all my hair at the same handful of shops I'd be surprised if my most recent hair is any different.

 Judicious use of flexi and alpha textures definitely helps. Would help even more if LL would just give us 1-bit alpha like content creators have been begging for since the dawn of the grid.

 

 Things like flexi and alphas don't really contribute much to lag anyways. Framerate, sure, but not lag. There's a difference between these two things and the fact that few people make the distinction makes it very hard to reduce either problem.

[Venus Petrov]

What I do before going somewhere I suspect might be laggy is to run a script count on me.  My aim is to have 100 or less...lately I have been between 30 - 80.  While I agree with you, I think it is the avatar as a whole that must be considered.  I appreciate when a content creator provides an option to delete scripts once you've finised resizing them.

I do occasionally wear hair that has scripts (generally, to change color of a hairband) but other items we wear can be worse violators. 

[Keli Kyrie]

We all had our best hair on at Hippistock and we didn't crash the sim. Are you sure hair has something to do with this? I would really hate to have to trade in my hair. :smileysurprised:

[Poenald Palen]

Everything ads to lag, but lag is also a personal experience based issue as your network, hardware and tolerance all add to your perception of the subtle lag. Um, I go totally low lag and try to keep as little as I can. My avatar looks horrible lol. But, it sits in a car and builds, so no need! I really want to get into making a head of hair for my av that is super low prim, but I use the old playdoh/plastercine avatars hair for now! I put a helmet on many times, so it is unseen and doesn't protrude from the helmet as prim hair does. But for internal beta test (usually a tall shape with many prims attached) testing, it is not so bad really with all the hair and scripted shades lol. But, I like the frames pers second I get from less junk. Plus, hair bits sticking out of helmets is just not worth the prims.

You know, the best solution I have seen must be those new hair tatto layers! They are not perfect, but then again, prim hair can look odd close up as well. I like the movement of flexi hair, but the mohawk I have is very low prim and sizing is not as much an issue. Some other hair takes to much time, so less time, less lag, less helmet interference makes avatar hair blob or tattoo apealing. The tatto HAS to be beetter looking than the blob of av hair lol. This post reminded me to check the hair tatto layer thingy out for a av photo I really should make. For guy avs and female avs with Halle Berry sort of looks in mind, the tatto layer thing makes some sense I guess. It has zero scripts and almost fits any avatar head (bar the really odd alien or monster stuff), right?

[Dana Hickman]

There really is no arguing.. when hair is phantom and not physical, the sim itself has very little to do with what makes up a hair because nearly all sim-side havoc physics are not applied. It's in the viewer, and the rendering burden that's placed on ones video card that can create render lag, which is not the same as the sim lag that drags down a sim or makes it difficult to move. Even very old computers will have little trouble rendering tons of standard prims, it's when you add in things like havoc computations for flexi, transparencies, sculpties, severely tortured prims, excessive or inefficient building methods that pushing all that through ones video card can become a problem for some.

The biggest culprit relating to hair is scripts, and specifically super-bloated scripts or hair that has more than just a few (like the old-style resizers with a script in every prim). Nowdays things like color changing and resizing can be held in one root-prim script, so hairs with more than one or two scripts are going to be more inefficient, and some rediculously so. Any hair that comes with a chat listener or other active scripting IMO should always have the script removed, and hopefully the creator flogged repeatedly. One can get a rough idea of the burden a hair has by going to a lag-free sim and seeing how long it takes to rez after clicking 'wear'.. the longer it takes compared to other similar style hairs, the more inefficient or just plain old bloated it is.

[Knowl Paine]

It's her hair and I'm supposed to lag so she can look pretty?

 

Are you crazy!  Of course I will.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Dresden Ceriano]

The simple answer is no.  And that goes for shoes as well.

I will not use hair that is not modifiable, period.

I will not use shoes with scripts that can't be removed.

The other day I bought some hair from this one place and it was modifiable; so I thought, "great."  But, when I got home, I checked and there were a ton of scripts in it and they weren't resize scripts.  I looked and, low and behold, they were scripts that would derez the hair if it was rezzed in-world instead of just wearing it. Wtf?

I was pissed.  And, of course, there was no kill script.  So I ended up spending a good half hour deleting every single script in every single prim, cursing as I went.

You know how hard it is to grab tiny, little, flexi prims?

At least it was only about 65 prims total.  The whole time I was thinking about the horrible notecard I was going to send to the creator. But once I was done I felt better and decided I had spent too much time on it already so forget it.

I monitor my script usage religiously and try to lower it as much as I possibly can. It's amazing how much better Slife is since I started doing that. ARC... eh, whatever.

...Dres

[Bree Giffen]

I won't wear a hairstyle that causes my SL to become laggy or cause the viewer to slow down. I haven't really run into a bad hair like that in a while since you can usually get a demo and see any problems before you buy. I think I have had just a few hairstyles that had a huge amount of prims which caused a noticeable slowness. I don't wear those anymore.

I tend to mute people who have too many prims or cause lag in some way.

 

[Relm Foxdale]

Re-sizing scripts, for the most part, are evil, and I want nothing to do with them, even if they're deletable. My current hair is 92 prims. I get what I like. I don't think a few prims here and there matter, frankly.

[Willow Danube]

Hi guys,

Very informative feedback so far. I will get back to you once I'm back at home and not secretly using the work place's open port password to post this message.

Willow.

sent from NOT my Iphone.

[Jenni Darkwatch]

Usually I don't care much if anyones hair has 2 or 200 prims. There's always the option to turn down the number of simultaneous avis on screen, which will greatly improve frame rate. Scripts on the other hand... I passionately despise badly written, memory- or script cycle hogging scripts. I still see people lugging around 20MB worth of scripts or more - and these same people often complain bitterly that their TPs fail, sim crossings suck etc.pp.

[Sidnella Riler]

I kille scripts after resizing usually

[Willow Danube]

I'm learning as I am reading... I've got a message from someone inworld just now asking me what is ARC, prim counts, script counts and how to get these info. For the sake of everyone else who might be wondering what we are talking about, I'm going to explain that with a screen shot. Those who would like to ask more, please feel free to reply in this thread... as you can see there are plenty of knowledgable individuals here that knows all the technical side of your hair and you.

[Jenni Darkwatch]

I'd like to add that people who don't have Viewer 2 can also check script count, albeit not as detailed, via free scripts in-world. There are a number of free fullperm ones. Unlike the Viewer 2 script count these free scripts only give totals though.

[Maitimo]

My favourite hair is long, flexi and 185 prims, but it is fully modify and has no scripts. I did a script count on myself and I have 5 scripts for a total of 192kb.  The only lag I'm causing is framerate on my own client.

[Marcus Hancroft]

There is an excellent blog written by Ana Lutetia that explains what lag is nowadays, what it isn't, and what can be done about it.  You can read it all HERE.  A few bullet points from that blog that are very important:

 

• Hair doesn't cause lag
• Lots of prims on a sim DOES cause lag because of the textures the server needs to send to your computer
• High ARC does NOT cause sim lag
• A lot of avatars on a sim WILL cause everybody to lag

These are but a few of the facts of lag now and I suggest you read fully the blog post.  It's an eye opener!

[Finora Kuncoro]

Thanks Marcus.  The article was a rather long read for a non computer person like myself, but I got the general gist:

 

My hair does not cause much lag at all

 

Yay take that "ARC Nazis"

[Marcus Hancroft]

 

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Finora Kuncoro wrote:

Thanks Marcus.  The article was a rather long read for a non computer person like myself, but I got the general gist:

 

My hair does not cause much lag at all

 

Yay take that "ARC Nazis" 

(my emphasis)

---

 

/me laughs

That's what I say, Miss Finora!

[Jenni Darkwatch]

The guide is a great starting point, but there's an inaccuracy as near as i can tell:

Lots of prims on a sim DO NOT contribute to lag if they're phantom. Textures get transferred from the asset servers, but that _should_ not lag the server, especially not with HTTP texture transfers.

[Suspiria Finucane]

 

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Keli Kyrie wrote:

We all had our best hair on at Hippistock and we didn't crash the sim. Are you sure hair has something to do with this? I would really hate to have to trade in my hair. :smileysurprised:

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Excellent analogy! :smileyhappy:

 

[Suspiria Finucane]

 

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Marcus Hancroft wrote:

There is an excellent blog written by Ana Lutetia that explains what lag is nowadays, what it isn't, and what can be done about it.  You can read it all

HERE

.  A few bullet points from that blog that are very important:

 

• Hair doesn't cause lag
• Lots of prims on a sim DOES cause lag because of the textures the server needs to send to your computer
• High ARC does NOT cause sim lag
• A lot of avatars on a sim WILL cause everybody to lag

These are but a few of the facts of lag now and I suggest you read fully the blog post.  It's an eye opener!

---

 

QFT

Thank you for that. :smileywink:

[Willow Danube]

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Keli Kyrie wrote:

We all had our best hair on at Hippistock and we didn't crash the sim. Are you sure hair has something to do with this? I would really hate to have to trade in my hair. :smileysurprised:

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Apparently, after reading Marcus's link the answer was NO. Prims MAY have something to do with it but only if it is solid. Scripts will not lag you either except when you are in the presence of multiple avatars that are constantly moving or there before you and are sending in request/queries on the server for them to 'download'.

 

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Gwyneth Llewelyn wrote:

One is where you are absolutely right: if everybody in a large audience is

forced

to be sitting down, using a single-frame pose that cannot be overriden (i.e. it was uploaded at Priority 4), and everybody who stands up is kicked out of the sim, then yes, everybody’s

SL client

will lag far less — the impact on sim lag will be not noticeable, since it still tracks down that avatars are in a “sitting” position and which animation is being used; but all SL client applications will naturally just download

one

animation, with just

one

frame (since it’s a static pose), and that will mean far less client-side lag. So, yes, you’re right — forcing everybody to use the same static pose will indeed reduce client-side sim lag, and that will be quite noticeable.

Forcing people to remove AOs will make little impact

if they’re allowed to roam the sim

. As an avatar moves, it will trigger requests for animations — no matter if they’re overriden or not (the difference is that each animation is an extra download; animations, however, are usually small in size, and while they download, SL clients will display the default Linden anims anyway: which will continue to create client-size lag, no matter if they’re default anims or overriden ones). So the issue is not about AOs or not: the issue is to force everybody to be sitting down, not move, and use an animation that cannot be overriden. This is the only thing that actually will help reducing client-side lag.

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So in keeping with the subject of hair... No you don't have to trade your hair just yet. :smileywink:

 

 

[Conifer Dada]

I did my own hair styles, mainly because I wanted them to be consistent with each other.  I was at a club the other day and my avatar rendering cost was only 830, complete with my ponytail swishing about.  My loose hair style does have more prims, but only about 40, I guess.  At another club there was an avatar with an ARC of over 30,000 but their hair didn't look any more real than mine!