Complexity needs a rework

[moocowmoomoo]

As it is now, creators can put lowest and low LOD on 0 and avoid upload cost and land impact. This is great because most people will never use those settings. What's not great is it also messes with how complexity is calculated. It has a big impact and a lot of big name creators are doing this.

Complexity should be measured by number of vertices and texture memory usage.

Some of the biggest clothing creators in SL are consistently putting out shirts and pants with 50,000+ vertices each and some tops have as much as 175,000 vertices and 30+ MB texture memory usage. This is why second life is a slide show. There is no punishment for doing this either. 

Let's not even get into the biggest name hair creators using 300,000+ vertices in hair.

 

[Selene Gregoire]

Avatar Complexity calculation utilizes a modified version of Avatar Render Weight. Unfortunately, the nature of the beast means it isn’t a “one size fits all” calculation, as it does have a reliance on the hardware running the viewer as well so there are variances. 

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Rendering_weight