what is onion, arc or jelly doll

[Tenly]

I keep seeing these terms thrown around such as onion skinned avatars and jelly dolls. And also that "onion skinned avatars are aggressively punished using ARC and jelly dolls".

can someone explain that to me?

I understand classic avatar. or standard. you are not wearing a mesh body over it.
I would have assumed that onion skinned might refer to the mesh body you wear over your mesh body but I do not think Ive got that right. IVE no idea how an ARC (or what that is) or what a "jelly doll" is or how its existance punishes onion skinned avatar (whatever the heck that is).

enlighten me please?

[Fionalein]

onion: mesh bodies cannot combine textures (yet) so you ahve to wear them above each other much like an onion a mesh body consists usually of 4 skin layers skin - tattoo - underwear - clothing

jelly doll: most viewers have a maximum complexity setting. Avatars above that complexity are not rendered, they are replaced with a bubble (hence the name) or a cloud or something else depending on your viewer code

ARC: avatar render cost - a measure for an avatar's complexity

Edited June 23, 2018 by Fionalein

[Coffee Pancake]

Onion skinned mesh bodies contain several copies of (almost) the same mesh layered like a Russian doll. Multiple mesh layers enable each to have a different texture applied ... skin,tattoo, underwear &  clothing. 

They are a terrible hack to get around some of the limitations of SecondLife and objectively bad from almost every technical and performance perspective. 

What we really want (DESPERATELY) are script functions from LL that would allow a list of textures UUIDs to be merged into a single texture that can then be applied to any object.

[angeoco]

Here is a jelly doll with an ARC of over 1.5 million, that I saw at a club a while back! I have my max complexity set to 300,000, so that any avatars over that will be rendered as jelly dolls, to avoid overloading my graphics system and causing massive lag or even damage from overheating. My own ARC rarely goes above 50k.

[PheebyKatz]

Switching to a Bento head was like wearing several fewer heads for me. I went from almost 200,000 to 47,800 in one go.

Switching from flexi hair dropped a lot before that, but I still like flexi hair with some outfits.

A lot of people with high complexiy ratings just count on people to like them enough to render them, I guess. Over a million just feels ...wrong to do to people.

[Fionalein]

1 minute ago, PheebyKatz said:

A lot of people with high complexiy ratings just count on people to like them enough to render them, I guess. Over a million just feels ...wrong to do to people.

More like emotional attachment to their collar owners and other jewelry I guess...

[LittleMe Jewell]

Jewelry, especially older stuff, is one of the worst complexity offenders

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, angeoco said:

Here is a jelly doll with an ARC of over 1.5 million, that I saw at a club a while back! I have my max complexity set to 300,000, so that any avatars over that will be rendered as jelly dolls, to avoid overloading my graphics system and causing massive lag or even damage from overheating. My own ARC rarely goes above 50k.

Exceptionally high ARC avatars tend to be those with older flexi attachments such as skirts, hair and wings.

The only thing Jelly dolls  "protect" you from is the rendering of the avatar in question, the viewer still downloads all attachments etc. With everything working as planned, the render cost of a jelly doll willl be lower than the original avatar, although this is not always the case . ARC is a very imperfect measurement. I would say an arc of 1.5 million is an edge case where the avatar is being punished excessively for older content and does not represent it's actual render cost.

You also do not have to worry about overheating causing damage to your PC parts. Your CPU and GPU will automatically throttle back long before they are in actual danger and can run quite happily at high temperatures. Both of which have large heatsinks (etc) specifically designed to dump in excess of 100W, keep them dust free and you wont even be able to get them to thermally throttle no matter what you throw at them.