Jelly Dolls - Six Months Later

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

8 hours ago, Lexbot Sinister said:

Well, the problem is that most of the mesh clothing makers have discovered a very handy workaround for rigged clothes, giving themselves superlow ARC they don't deserve.

Which is why I advocate looking at the geometry itself via wireframe or edit and zooming in and out to see how LoD changes are handled.

[Pussycat Catnap]

I work very hard to keep my draw weight low. I've also made several guides on this topic.

In a number of places I frequent, there are a select number of visitors that actively argue AGAINST lowering draw weight. Not just for their own avatars, but they will jump in and tell others to disable the feature and to ignore any advice on draw weight because of things like:

'my SL, my freedom' or 'I have a good computer' or 'only scripts cause lag' or 'it just tracks textures and flexi which don't make lag', or 'I don't like mesh', 'flexi hair/dresses look better', 'my computer it old, 'I have too much lag so I can't do new things', or 'it's too complicated', or 'SL is laggy not matter what', or other reasons that baffle me in their logic (or lack thereof)...

Yes... I actually have people say they won't try to fix their lag because they have lag... Usually not directly... more along the lines of "I won't take off the emergency brake because I'm going too slow" - as in complete failure to understand what they are saying and refusal to learn.

That said... by setting my Firestorm to limit me to 80,000 seen, I can see about 1/3 to 1/2 of the people around me... (yeah, that bad)... But I have just gotten used to not seeing the other people because even though I have a $3500 laptop and get 120mb/down... if I can squeeze out 1 more FPS, I will do it...

As for why I work to keep my own draw weight and my own scripts down...

 

Well, I happen to feel I should not be the cause of anyone else suffering lag. I feel that's just being nice to other people. I do wish others would consider logic like that... don't just think of yourself - think of the lag other people around you have to suffer, and work to make their experience better.

Oh on shopping and avoiding those people that use the LOD tricks to lower their scores on these things... I keep my SL LOD at 2.75 all the time... if I can't see your stuff as a result... I buy the other merchant's stuff. I don't care if I have a suped up machine... I'd rather squeeze out every bit of optimization I can as well as not lag any of my neighbors.

 

Edited April 3, 2017 by Pussycat Catnap

[Pussycat Catnap]

19 hours ago, Marianne Little said:

But can anyone tell me why a pair of eyes should have a display value of 20 488??

Bad laying of transparency maps, and too complex of a mesh in there.

Are these by any chance eyes that have multiple layers in them for a pupil, iris, cones, cornea, reflection, roswell aliens, and stuff?

That is likely to brand I used to use...

To me complex eyes make a lot of sense for why they have a high cost. All those multiple layers and each using an alpha blend transparency, and likely a very high LOD so that each individual eye-cone on the back of the eye still renders 1000m away...

I actually use prim eyes now. Not mesh, but prim. Two spheres on top of each other with one bumping out slightly holding the pupil. Forget who I got them from - but they looked great and were super low ARC. They were like... 15L in the 'discount section' of a merchant that is not on the 'cool' list anymore... but used to be years ago...

 

[Nikolai Warden]

4 hours ago, Klytyna said:

The idea that HUDs add to renderweight, really bothers me, I've heard quite a number of people mention this, and I can understand why but...

It simply is not so, items attached to HUD locations are NOT rendered inworld for others to see, so they do NOT add to your RCI, unfortunately some idiot involved with the developement of auto-blob chose to add an annoying message warning you that your HUD uses textures, so tech illiterate people assume they add to RCI, however, in my prefered viewer at least, if you open the appearance panel and switch to the 'current outfit' tab it lists the RCI  for every item you are wearing, HUDs are always ZERO.

 

You see, I had always assumed that HUDs do not contribute to render weight, but then that message kept popping up regarding all the textures in my HUD contributing to lag. As my render weight is usually low enough and I do not wear the HUD all the time, I was never curious enough to look into the matter.

[Theresa Tennyson]

10 minutes ago, Nikolai Warden said:

You see, I had always assumed that HUDs do not contribute to render weight, but then that message kept popping up regarding all the textures in my HUD contributing to lag. As my render weight is usually low enough and I do not wear the HUD all the time, I was never curious enough to look into the matter.

HUD's don't add to the render weight reported in the viewer, which is mostly meant to represent how much work it is for other people to render your avatar. However, all the textures in your worn HUD's do get loaded into your video memory at full resolution and aren't removed as long as you're wearing them. This can be a culprit if you have "texture thrashing" problems, because mesh body HUD's often contain textures for complete skins, etc. That was a major problem with the old Wowmeh and Toddleedoo bodies.

[Lexbot Sinister]

4 hours ago, Bitsy Buccaneer said:

Which is why I advocate looking at the geometry itself via wireframe or edit and zooming in and out to see how LoD changes are handled.

And if it's rigged mesh, you will see exactly none of it happening, because **** drumroll**** it doesn't happen.

 

You can't compare rigged mesh to non-rigged mesh in complexity, because they aren't handled the same by the viewer.

 

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-11627

 

Rigged mesh has been having an unfair advantage over other attachables for... as long as they have existed?

Don't compare someones piece of non-rigged jewelry to someones onionskin body, because LoD's don't work on them the same at all.

The reason why you don't see worn mesh crumble into lower LoD's is because it doesn't.

I don't want to explain this in detail, because it feels like i'm letting on a huge cheat secret that most mesh body, head and clothes creators have known for a long time now, being able to get really low render weight for really complex meshes.

This gives rigged mesh an ENORMOUS, unfair advantage over non-rigged mesh.  The eyes in the snapshot? All they need is to have something at all 4 LoD's to get that high complexity, which they might need for photography, to work with the photography techniques most use. Zooming out and then camming in, would otherwise make their LoD's crumble, while not affect the rigged mesh at all.........

Edited April 3, 2017 by Lexbot Sinister

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

My apologies then. I'll see if I can get my posts removed from the thread.

I thought looking at a rezzed object still told you something about it's geometry and construction, even if it's rigged when worn.

Edited April 3, 2017 by Bitsy Buccaneer

[Clover Jinx]

5 hours ago, *****cat Catnap said:

Well, I happen to feel I should not be the cause of anyone else suffering lag. I feel that's just being nice to other people. I do wish others would consider logic like that... don't just think of yourself - think of the lag other people around you have to suffer, and work to make their experience better.

This is my thinking as well and wish more would stop to think about this. I was naïve and thought jelly dolls would help change things more so than it has, but that will never happen when the immediate reaction and advice seen in chat groups was to crank it all the way up or turn it off so as not to see the "ugly things".

I actually had a fairly prominent shoe designer tell me last month that while she considers complexity in creating her stuff when it comes to her own avatar she just layers it on.

I've included complexity numbers for each look I blog, but this thread has given me some more tools and things to consider, so thank you all.

[Pussycat Catnap]

4 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

HUD's don't add to the render weight reported in the viewer, which is mostly meant to represent how much work it is for other people to render your avatar.

That's a good point. Also - if the HUD contains a mesh model, like the Belleza HUD which contains a copy of the mesh body that can be rotated - I imagine this would tax your own system some.

Generally a good idea to not war HUDs unless you're actively using them. This is the major reason why I've stayed with Firestorm - moving my AO out of a HUD (first went with it due to a stability issue on my Macs with the official viewer, but that was a long time ago. However the built in AO kept me there).

(I've written some no-HUD bento-part AOs now as well, using command-line controls, but they require a bit of recoding for each user so I've yet to distribute them).

[Pussycat Catnap]

4 minutes ago, Clover Jinx said:

I've included complexity numbers for each look I blog, but this thread has given me some more tools and things to consider, so thank you all.

Thanks for including the complexity numbers for things you blog. That makes me hope your blog is popular and growing.

While I can't do it here, I have and continue to call out designers who do bad complexity - and it did force me to change shoe brands a bit back (though I usually go barefoot in SL). I don't bog fashions and such - but when I do blog something that includes mention of a product, I call out good complexity as well.

[Lexbot Sinister]

2 hours ago, Bitsy Buccaneer said:

My apologies then. I'll see if I can get my posts removed from the thread.

I thought looking at a rezzed object still told you something about it's geometry and construction, even if it's rigged when worn.

Sorry, it wasn't my intention that it would feel personal.

It's still possible to look at mesh in wireframe and decide if " does this shape really warrant this much geometry" but if you are wearing the rigged mesh, you won't see any LoD swaps.

Looking at the rigged mesh while rezzed on the ground, will indeed show that the object might not have any lower LoD's. The first thought then would be " No lower LoD's, this is garbage then?" but that is in a roundabout way false as well. Why would you need lower LoD's for a rigged mesh, if it doesn't collapse with distance? It would only add to complexity!

This is an oversight, a genie we can't put back into the bottle.

 

Your addition to the discussion is absolutely valid, otherwise we would have nothing to discuss

 

1 hour ago, *****cat Catnap said:

While I can't do it here, I have and continue to call out designers who do bad complexity

...which means calling out the designers that haven't found the complexity "trick" yet. Or designers that do unrigged mesh, and can't use the trick. That bunches them together with designers that both do the trick AND get high complexity numbers because of overly dense mesh. Do you know how to tell the difference between the three?

If you don't, i wouldn't be so quick to name and shame.

 

(please read the jira posted earlier)

 

 

Also it appears i wrote the zoom out, pan in backwards. It's Zoom in, pan out. I do it without thinking usually >.<

Edited April 3, 2017 by Lexbot Sinister

[Klytyna]

And this...

This is the worst part of auto-blob, not the flawed calculations that are wildly unpredictable and unreliable, where adding a different system lipstick tattoo to your system head causes the autoblob feature to recalculate your RCI 20kb lower, for no obvious or apparent reason, not the "you are wearing a hud with a texture!" panic spam that constantly complains that your zhao-2 ao hud that uses exactly ONE texture for all the buttons might cause texture lag, not the "oh noe! your avi is too complex for me to admit you are here" idiocy. None of that...

The Worst part is that in a SL with a gently declining population, some dingbat in a 1k RCI avi made 14 years ago, has designed and implemented a 'new feature' that basically tells people to run around like headless chickens, attacking each other because they wear rigged "cheater" mesh not unrigged mesh props, or because their hair comes from "the wrong store", encourages dingbats to run around "naming and shaming" trying to stop people from wearing mesh, or drive content creators out of business.

The REAL issue, the REAL result of Auto-Blob, is YET more internal self destructive divisions in SL.
 

[Nalates Urriah]

On 4/2/2017 at 0:25 AM, Marianne Little said:

Please, it must be possible to just click that thing and get a number just for it? Worn or rezzed on ground.

And I am getting really afraid that I post a render weight that is wrong, and now you tell me that the number I see, depends upon my computers powers?! *Head explodes*

Being able to click on the items and get its render weight would be a nice feature. Have you put it in the JIRA as a feature request?

The ACI setting is designed to allow one to improve their computer's performance. So, it sort of is an individual setting. I suspect a standard uniform calc could be implemented. But, that wouldn't do as much for each individual user.

The ACI calculation result is somewhat uniform. Think of it this way. The setting sort of translates to the percentage of your video card horsepower to use. You can I have your ACI limit set at 350k or 90% of your cards ability. I use the same setting and use 90% of may cards power. If I have a new card and you an old card, my 90% of horsepower will render more complex avatars in less time than yours.The same avatar requiring 90% of your cards power may only use 40% of the new card's capability.

So, it everyone had the same cut off point based on a uniform setting across all computers regardless of hardware, people with the newer cards would be penalized, seeing more Jelly Dolls and not using all their card's capability. Why would we want that?

 

Edited April 5, 2017 by Nalates Urriah

[MoiraKathleen]

Except for one or two really fancy evening dresses, most of what I wear had been fairly low in ACI - generally I'm between 40-60,000 (I'm not a high fashionista, lots of jewelry and makeup type).  I did have one hair which was 200,000+, but I've since found other hair I like much better which is much lower in numbers as well.   I keep the preference setting around 160,000 now that I have a better computer than I used to.  

The only thing that really bothered me was getting messages that others might not be able to see me (at my low 40-60,000 setting, even) but I just found out how to disable those messages yesterday.  It's fine with me if others have their setting very low and can't see me other than as a jelly doll- I just don't need to see the messages about it.

[Penny Patton]

On 4/5/2017 at 7:42 PM, Nalates Urriah said:

So, it everyone had the same cut off point based on a uniform setting across all computers regardless of hardware, people with the newer cards would be penalized, seeing more Jelly Dolls and not using all their card's capability. Why would we want that?

 

This makes sense if there is no long term goal of reigning in draw weights, but reigning in draw weights really should be the end goal.

To me, Jelly Dolls shouldn't be the goal. Simply turning laggy avatars into brightly coloured pixel blobs should not be the whole of the solution. If LL can get content creators to optimize their work better then jelly dolls should fade into a half-remembered footnote in SL history while we all enjoy a better looking, smoother running, SL experience. The messages Moira talks about are a part of that. Yeah, it's kind of a nag, but it makes people aware. Rather than increased cutoffs and disabling messages, I'd personally like to see less laggy avatars. 

Jelly Dolls have already influenced some content creators to do just that, because no one wants to see Jelly Dolls and some customers are calling on creators to make content that doesn't draw down framerates. That's good. I think that push would be even stronger if there was a more uniform application of draw weight in addition to the added benefit of allowing customers to make more informed purchasing decisions.

Of course, it's worth repeating that it is insane that we, LL's customers, even have to think about things like draw weight. LL could have avoided all these issues with nothing more than better designed creation tools.

 

[Chase01]

@Clover Jinx

What a neat idea! Showing the complexity of the outfit you're blogging about is a nice resource for those who are a lot more conscious about it. Its kinda like marketing eco-friendly products.

I agree Penny. Aside from those (creators and users) that don't care, the biggest issue is general awareness. A few months back I was sitting in with two big creators and they were discussing complexity and creating efficient products. It was really interesting to listen too and they both were saying how important it was for them do this (as part of their craft) even if the general populous didn't get it due to that awareness factor.

[Penny Patton]

11 hours ago, Chase01 said:

Aside from those (creators and users) that don't care, the biggest issue is general awareness. 

I think a large part of those who don't care is denial. There are so many content creators who just don't realize their creations cause any sort of performance impact and refuse to hear otherwise from other SL users. I've been banned from at least one shop for talking about optimization and performance. The owner of said shop left me a very....passionate message about how since everyone else has the same bad habits they do it must clearly not be such a problem. And I believe this kind of mentality exists, at least in part, because LL has never successfully engaged its own userbase in a way in which they could communicate about these issues. LL doesn't tell people certain habits are bad, and the tools allow it, therefore it must be fine, is the reasoning. When they introduce a feature like Jelly Dolls, LL does a very poor job of explaining why they've done it.

And this extends to what Klytyna is complaining about. It's crazy that LL has put the onus of drawing down avatar draw weight on the userbase but since they have, it is even more exasperating that they've done such a poor job of communicating about it. LL just lets misinformation spread and never makes any attempt to correct it. A lot of SL users, even content creators, firmly believe that textures have absolutely no impact on performance. For the longest time most SL users believed that since AgentSize exists, it must be correct, and were left confused at why LL had two separate measurement systems, one for avatars  and one for prims. The fact was, LL knew AgentSize was bogus since like 2005 but just never bothered to fix it. (They even later implemented AgentSize into the appearance editor around 2010-2011, knowing full well it was broken but saying they would fix it later, and then just never did.) Is it any wonder users are so confused about draw weight and so many content creators continue to churn out unoptimized content?

When LL does try to communicate, it's through the blog or office hours. Really, how many SL users, even content creators, read the blog or attend any of the office hours? LL is the developer, it should be easy for them to reach ALL of their users in-world.