Avatar Complexity too high ?

[Penny Patton]

3 hours ago, TDD123 said:

Ok .. upgraded my av with all sorts and now .. it has a high complexity of about .. *gulp* .. over 200K. I noticed others have way less ( a very few have more).

My PC renders it without issues though. Am I causing rendering issues to others therefore ? Can I be banned reasonably because of just that ?
Thanks for answering.

P.S. Please KISS it to me

You're probably experiencing more of a performance hit because of your avatar than you realize. SL tends to run so poorly for anyone, regardless of their computer's specs, that people tend to overlook performance issues that would be unacceptable anywhere but SL, such as texture thrashing (where textures keep going blurry after rezzing because your hardware cannot keep them in memory due to the sheer amount of textures being streamed all at once) or stuttering (where your computer freezes for a moment or two every so often), let alone the fact that for SL's visual quality, anyone with a computer with a dedicated videocard made in the past 10 years should be experiencing a steady 60fps at all times, at max settings.

When SL itself is such a burden on your hardware, being able to judge just how much any individual part of SL, such as an avatar, is affecting you can be difficult.

That said, if you're noticing that most people have a lower draw weight than you, you probably want to reign it in a bit. It's difficult for anyone to offer any exact numbers to shoot for because avatar complexity is calculated client side, based on your own hardware. (Hey, Linden Lab, you really should fix that. ARC should be a consistent metric for it to have any meaningful use.)

 And it gets worse. Avatar Complexity isn't a very accurate method of determining an avatar's actual rendering complexity. ARC fails to take textures into consideration in any meaningful way, and textures these days tend to be the undisputed number one cause of performance issues in second life. Nothing else even comes close. I can tell you that you should always aim to have less than 100MB of textures on your avatar. Even 100MB is excessive for an avatar, but it's downright reasonable compared to what most people have going on these days. 200-300MB is is common, and avatars with 500MB to 1GB are not as uncommon as you'd think. (And it will only continue to get worse as long as LL continues to twiddle their thumbs and hope that the problem will just go away by itself.*)

That said, all that means is that not all avatars with low complexity are actually easier to render, but avatars with high complexity are always an excessive burden on your videocard.

3 hours ago, TDD123 said:

Well .. being jellydolled is a good free choice I guess for those with limited PC specs.

It's not about computers having limited specs. No one is running SL as well as they should be. You could have a computer that runs most modern games just fine, but struggles with SL because almost no SL content creators bother to optimize their work to make it appropriate for realtime 3D rendering. Some even just snatch high-poly models that were never intended for realtime rendering and upload them to SL. We're talking models created for advertising or pre-rendered footage purposes.

At the same time, if you take an older/less powerful computer into a sim that was made by someone who understands the need for optimization, that computer will get better performance in SL than people with much more powerful computers will ever experience in Second Life.

 

*Linden Lab's CEO Ebbe Altberg has more or less said that he just hopes the problem will go away by itself, despite the fact that it has gotten exponentially worse over the years and there have been no sign of that changing. Dare to dream, Ebbe. Dare to dream. You might want to start looking into a plan B, though.

[Ted McGregor]

OK. Extensive explanation of yours and thank you for that.

I dont mind being 'singled out' and confined to my own homestead because of this. I understand though that this and other issues have always affected SL, but cannot or will not be coped with by LL.

But I find that entirely their business and not mine. I was only curious to the how and why of this complexity and it's possible implications. Now I know (better).

Thank you.

Edited July 9, 2019 by TDD123
Added JPG

[Hunny Bunny]

I found a winner yesterday with a complexity of 1,155,568 so 200,000 doesn't sound that bad.

[Eva Knoller]

8 minutes ago, MichaMoz said:

I found a winner yesterday with a complexity of 1,155,568 so 200,000 doesn't sound that bad.

We need a shocked face button: 😲

Did you happen to render them to see what they looked like?

[Hunny Bunny]

Did not even think about it but then some things you can't unsee so, perhaps it was for the best.

[VanillaLovelace]

Sometimes it is only a single item of your Avatar (a piece of clothes etc.) which makes the complexity rise from 50k to 70k or even higher. Happened to me 2 weeks ago, when I was wearing a pretty old (but very beautiful) non-mesh bracelet. 

[Ted McGregor]

Noticed that as well while stripping down every attachment. Saw a significant drop when removing an invisible one with merely robotsounds for movement.

As said before .. if only wearing basic eyes the number is about 200. That's a starting reference and anything you add from then on will significantly increase the complexity.

Which of course doesn't help against the laginducing pollution inworld regarding too many objects, surfaces, textures, scripting, and anything else.

 

 

Edited July 10, 2019 by TDD123

[VanillaLovelace]

6 minutes ago, TDD123 said:

As said before .. if only wearing basic eyes the number is about 200. That's a starting reference and anything you add from then on will significantly increase the complexity.

wow, basic eyes with complexity of 200k is indeed very high. I am not sure if this is a possible solution for your avatar, but maybe there is a way to replace the basic eyes with other eyes of lower complexity?

[Orwar]

1 minute ago, VanillaLovelace said:

wow, basic eyes with complexity of 200k is indeed very high. I am not sure if this is a possible solution for your avatar, but maybe there is a way to replace the basic eyes with other eyes of lower complexity?

   200, not 200,ooo.

[Ted McGregor]

5 minutes ago, VanillaLovelace said:

wow, basic eyes with complexity of 200k is indeed very high.

No, no, no.

What Orwar said.

Edited July 10, 2019 by TDD123

[VanillaLovelace]

Just now, TDD123 said:

No, no, no.

What Onwar said.

LOL .... ok, sorry .... I thought the eyes of your avatar were the source of all evil ... and the overall complexity of about 200k you mentioned before. 

[Ted McGregor]

No. The 200K was when everything is fitted as I see fit. Which has raised to about 300K now and still enough room to attach.

I'd better apply a shopping limit to myself right now ..

[Nalates Urriah]

Lag is annoying. Discussions of lag and what causes it is even more annoying as few actually know anything about it. But… the discussions are necessary… I think they help.

On 7/9/2019 at 8:29 AM, TDD123 said:

So what is it based on ? Vertices ? Textures ?

I don't notice FPS drops ( in my own home alone it's over 100 FPS easilly ) nor high usage of either CPU or GPU.

Penny gave a good explanation. It is incomplete but, that goes for any explanation given about SL. There is too much complexity to cover all the points.

23 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

That said, all that means is that not all avatars with low complexity are actually easier to render, but avatars with high complexity are always an excessive burden on your videocard.

It's not about computers having limited specs. No one is running SL as well as they should be. You could have a computer that runs most modern games just fine, but struggles with SL because almost no SL content creators bother to optimize their work to make it appropriate for realtime 3D rendering. Some even just snatch high-poly models that were never intended for realtime rendering and upload them to SL. We're talking models created for advertising or pre-rendered footage purposes.

At the same time, if you take an older/less powerful computer into a sim that was made by someone who understands the need for optimization, that computer will get better performance in SL than people with much more powerful computers will ever experience in Second Life.

 

*Linden Lab's CEO Ebbe Altberg has more or less said that he just hopes the problem will go away by itself, despite the fact that it has gotten exponentially worse over the years and there have been no sign of that changing. Dare to dream, Ebbe. Dare to dream. You might want to start looking into a plan B, though.

On those video cards... My GTX 1060 is seldom pushed to 100% use. I mostly run in the 15 to 50% range. I think anyone checking the utilization on there machine (CPUID's HWMonitor - free- is a good tool) can quickly see if they have a hardware bottleneck.

You can also press Ctrl-Shift-Alt-4 to toggle Avatar Rendering on and off. If you have the stats panel open you can see the dramatic change in performance for a number of meterics in the panel.

And Ebbe's comment... Yeah, he said those words. But, as written it is implying an out of context meaning. The context (paraphrasing) is the problem is hoped to be solved as a byproduct of other improvements and features being made to the system. If anyone doubts that, visit a Tuesday UG meeting and talk with Oz Linden. Or Corner Ebbe on Twitter and ask about it.

On 7/9/2019 at 8:44 AM, Orwar said:

 There's some talk about how the Avatar Complexity is arbitrarily generated, I'm not tech-savvy enough to comment on that. But when you've got people whose complexity is >200K and 150+ scripts running, it's obvious that they haven't taken others' performance into consideration - whether it's through ignorance (how anyone could possibly be unaware of their complexity and script time usage by now is beyond me, though) or if they're simply so narcissistic as to not care.

ARC is a made up number and I think it fair to say it is arbitrary. But, it is not a whimsical or out of the rectum number. The Lindens did go through and pick the factors that are used to calc the number. They picked the metrics that they thought would best serve the SL users and the type of hardware they use, old to new. It wasn't a random selection. The equation was well considered. That doesn't mean it is great. But it WAS the most representative their combined minds could come up with. To say there is a better way... well the open source creed of 'You can do better? Then provide the code or shut up...' might apply. 

That means only @NiranV Dean actually has the room to talk. Niran is walking Niran's talk. I am NOT saying you can't talk on the subject. Free speech is a real thing. But, check out Niran's blog (NSFW) and learn why Black Dragon has a different ACI calc process.

I tend to agree with Orwar on "...ignorance and ...narcissistic"  and it too is beyond me how anyone cannot know. But, I know there are literally thousands that don't. I do ascribe it more to ignorance then narcissistic tendencies. I save the later so as to give word more credence in insults, when needed, not to say Orwar is wrong.

On 7/9/2019 at 9:01 AM, TDD123 said:

18750
I cannot drop the eyes .. too smexy ..

2713 without the eyes.

Oh this is priceless!!! 😈😍🤣 You really should click over to the 'How Does your avatar look today thread and post the image. They will get a kick out of it.

23 hours ago, TDD123 said:

OK. Extensive explanation of yours and thank you for that.

I dont mind being 'singled out' and confined to my own homestead because of this. I understand though that this and other issues have always affected SL, but cannot or will not be coped with by LL.

But I find that entirely their business and not mine. I was only curious to the how and why of this complexity and it's possible implications. Now I know (better).

Thank you.

Don't accept that concept. The Lindens in the engineering staff are now mostly made up of engineers that like being in-world. Most of the lead engineers involved in setting directions for development were playing in SL before they were hired. Oz Linden is one and Ebbe has spoken about how he worked to be picked as the lead in SL development.

Attend some of the UG meetings and talk with Lindens. Also, if you keep up with the SL development and goings on, you'll see the Lindens working hard to improve SL, its performance, and reliability. They aren't just adding the stuff that is fun programming for them.

I think the reason we do not see the un-optimized-content and high ACI avatars clamped down on is the Lindens' support of creative freedom for all. When we object to that it is almost always for personal reasons, a bit over on the narcissistic tendency side. I see few proposing things that add to the creative freedom. Most are much more in the fascist-like controls area. 

Novice creatives that have never built models for real time rendering are allowed to build and sell. To have the Lindens enforce standards to prevent that goes down the Blue Mars road of fascist-like content control. It doesn't end well.

I have and do lobby the Lindens for better user controls and information, like ACI being in your face. Sort of the Consumer Reports idea. The Lindens do pursue those ideas. ARC and ACI were proposed by users. The Lindens' take is that helped to improve things. People think about the ARC of their outfits. Now ARCTan is on the To-Do-Soon list. This is to be a revamp of the ARC and ACI we have now. Computers and the Internet have changed. The metrics and equation used for ACI now are out of date. As Penny pointed out, the lack of a factor for textures has resulted in a distortion of what the number should be. Niran's Black Dragon viewer shows how drastic a change is possible as more pertinent factors are added and weighted differently.

The Lindens are coping. Just not the way their detractors want.

Edited July 10, 2019 by Nalates Urriah
a serious typo or two...

[Lindal Kidd]

4 hours ago, MichaMoz said:

I found a winner yesterday with a complexity of 1,155,568 so 200,000 doesn't sound that bad.

That is getting up into graphics crasher territory.

[Maitimo]

On 7/9/2019 at 7:13 PM, Eva Knoller said:

Regarding complexity settings, my personal complexity rarely tops 100k (normally 50-60k range) unless I am busting out some very old jewelry, but I love avatar watching and would miss out on a lot with a 50-75k complexity setting. When I am at crowded events on a shopping mission I show friends only, but otherwise apparently keep a fairly high setting. I also love to perv profiles. I am interested in how other people express themselves, performance be damned!

I am the same. My own avatar is usually between 40k and 80k depending on my outfit and which body & hair I'm using, but I usually keep my settings unlimited for viewing others, even in clubs, because I love to see what other people do with their avatars. For shopping events I'll revert to a no-mesh system avatar of around 9k and show friends only (which basically means show no-one, cos I never go to shopping events with friends).

[Ted McGregor]

@Nalates Urriah I certainly hope you don't misunderstand me as being ignorant or fatalistic towards these numbers confronting me in current SL.  Both Penny and you ( and others of course ) have more in-depth knowledge over these indicators than I will. I always have been an end-user and always will be.

Allow me to show you were I am coming from :

In these forums I saw mention of an event that baffled me ever since I personally learned about it. When I was born ( yeah .. that long ago ) men were on their way to the moon. The calculations to orbit the moon were done by a programmer ( a woman I believe ) on a machine that's so limitied compared to what we have nowadays, that it is a miracle these men landed there. An absolutely heroic and commemorative feat, that will mark human history for a very long time after we are no longer here. That was 1969.

Around 1992 I was introduced to my first computer. The command line interface known to many as DOS was my first introduction into PCs. Playing various games I pondered and tried to imagine a possible future were we actually 'dive' into these gaming worlds and instead of being in control outside I dreamt of being able to reside in environments like these. Be an actual part of it. This was the time prior to BBSes, Internet ( not availiable in my country then ) and so much more. The rise of 3D computing was impending ( Wolfenstein3D) and Voodo-cards , the first graphics with NVidia-GPU's namely the nv1 ).

Programming and hardware have come a long way since then. I dived into the SL hype in 2007 like many others on a very limited machine compared to now as LL started implementing feature after feature ( I arrived when Windlight was about to be introduced ). I consumed a lot of information  about SL, but never at a creator level.

I was root on my own Debian-server. I ran my own OpenSim-server from home. I travelled the Hypergrid from there. Even made a primitive lousy T-shirt about it which Maria Korolov handed out as a freebie.But this path of involvement with the intricate workings of SL is something I no longer pursue .

I left SL around beginning 2015 and have now returned after 4 years. That seems like centuries within SL. All this time I never touched SL or anything related. I came back to find lots of things working for the better. To my surprise though I see that certain indicators that were not noted by me back then are now implemented and used. Hence this thread I started.

I have now, as I already said, the explanation of those who know enough about it and far more than I need to know. I hope you don't think I am judging LL by my statements. I accept their handling of it all as benevolent dictatorship. Evenso with moderation. I have no illusion about my input. It's irrelevant to me as well. LL will be LL. as it always has.  For the better or worse.

In the meantime I think I will focus more on my individual pleasure within SL bearing in mind what eventual restrictions are in this changed environment wether I agree with it or not.

This of course goes way beyond my initial post of this thread, but I thank you for your considerations nonetheless;. I'll bear them in mind.

 

Edited July 10, 2019 by TDD123

[Ted McGregor]

OK ..  Most of these high complexity issues I had were linked to older items in my inventory. The high count was basically generated by 'ancient' items I still wore which no longer are that useful inworld or have been replaced by better items.

I went about to look for alternatives and found them. I have the 'look' I want and can wander around unhindered I hope with a complexity of about 50K.

It makes my SL far more enjoyable now.

Final : Thanks a lot to all who have  participated in this thread for giving me the required insights.

 

 

Edited July 11, 2019 by TDD123

[Eva Knoller]

28 minutes ago, TDD123 said:

OK ..  Most of these high complexity issues I had were linked to older items in my inventory. The high count was basically generated by 'ancient' items I still wore which no longer are that useful inworld or have been replaced by better items.

I went about to look for alternatives and found them. I have the 'look' I want and can wander around unhindered I hope with a complexity of about 50K.

It makes my SL far more enjoyable now.

Final : Thanks a lot to all who have  participated in this thread for giving me the required insights.

 

 

Glad to hear you found some newer alternatives! 

[Clara Hollyberry]

On 7/9/2019 at 2:20 PM, TDD123 said:

Back to my high complexity .. so I suppose that will be only for 'home use'.

 

My hermit within will forfeit contact or events like it always has. And now there are actually .... reasons. Well, this one is at least actual.

I think it's a decent combination of both "self" and "other" obligation in that the "self" could reasonably try to lower complexity levels in high-traffic areas while "other" could easily opt-out of rendering anybody over xxx (chosen value there).  Using that combination of both efforts is the sociable thing to do, in my opinion; and reserving super-duper high avatar complexity for photography seems logical enough.  (And so much fun!)  In my opinion over 200k is super-duper high complexity but you wouldn't annoy me with it because of my imposed cut-off; so I'd never stop you from wearing what you choose to wear (but nor would I see you!)  

[Ted McGregor]

It got sorted.

 

Now I'll have to come up with a different signature.

[Cinos Field]

The average female furry avatar with a mesh body, hair, fancy clothes and a bit of jewelry tends to be around 100k in my experience. Then up to some 120k if you really want to accessorise (guilty...). Humans without tails and muzzles are usually some 10-20k lower than that. All in all, though, if it hits numbers like 200k there's probably some very badly made items on you, like old hair.

[MrsSeren]

Highest I seen myself as a neko with bento tail; round 120,000 but usually round 50-80K complexity.

[monykony]

usually i'm between 50-120k 

that's because some creators makes items with to many triangles, that means to many complexity, i've a pair of earrings cute tough but only two earrings gives me 30k complexity .__.
i think that's almost the same complexity my body gives

 

so so so... to lower your complexity just take care of what you buy or use, guess i'm starting doing that for my furniture too -w-  having a big house makes you have tons of items but if i don't take care i'll be lagged on my own home :c and that's no good, well well... anyways, good luck.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

On 7/9/2019 at 5:29 PM, TDD123 said:

So what is it based on ? Vertices ? Textures ?

• texture count
• texture size
• number of separate faces
• whether materials are used or not
• triangle count
• glow
• transparency

There is no such thing as a free lunch

The big issue on wearables is typically texture size, count, and triangle count, the rest is rarely pushed to the point where it is actually a problem.

Edited July 18, 2019 by Kyrah Abattoir

[AyelaNewLife]

On 7/15/2019 at 3:02 PM, Cinos Field said:

The average female furry avatar with a mesh body, hair, fancy clothes and a bit of jewelry tends to be around 100k in my experience. Then up to some 120k if you really want to accessorise (guilty...). Humans without tails and muzzles are usually some 10-20k lower than that. All in all, though, if it hits numbers like 200k there's probably some very badly made items on you, like old hair.

Your 'real complexity' is almost certainly much lower than your average human avatar. The Kimono body is the only major one out there that at least pretends to be even remotely optimised. 

The complexity calculations are simply outdated. They were perfectly functional for their time, but the introduction of mesh has made them partially obsolete; in that you can build mesh creations to be extremely resource-intensive and yet appear to have a remarkably low complexity. It gives too much weighting to things that are no longer significant, and not enough weighting to the elements that dominate the rendering impact of the object; and so lulls people into a false sense of security regarding their actual performance weight.

Exhibit A: mesh bodies. Your average playable character in new AAA release consists of 20-50k polygons for the entire model, as a rough estimate. Maitreya Lara clocks in at 80-100k, and the Bellezas are twice that. And that's for the body alone, without hair or clothes or even a head. And yet the base complexity calculation tells me that my Lara only takes up ~10k complexity, equivalent to a couple of pairs of shoes. (That's without touching the three onion-skin copies of your body that exist for tattoo etc layers.)

So given that the baseline rendering impact for most SL avatars is high no matter what they wear... I wouldn't worry too much about monitoring the complexity of the stuff you wear. Perhaps keep the number of accessories you wear in double figures, rather than pushing for triple like your average tragically hip fashionista does these days. Leave flexi-anything in 2009 where it belongs. If any one item of clothing has a significantly higher complexity rating than the rest of your attire, give that one a miss. Adopt a "don't take the piss" attitude towards your clothing and attachment choices, and you're fine. There's not much else you can do that actually makes a difference.