O Holy Nope! Worst Practices.

[Fauve Aeon]

I was looking for tutorials on making things sparkly, found this.

No wonder comments are disabled. Bad idea, doubling up a clothing mesh to add a sparkle layer. 

 

[Tonk Tomcat]

When i see the mesh wireframe... 🙄

 

[Penny Patton]

I've found that most SL content creators I encounter in-world don't know about emissive masks.

18 hours ago, Tonk Tomcat said:

When i see the mesh wireframe...

Love it. Someone should make a guide like that for texture use, too. I rarely see avatars with under 200MB of textures on them, and I'm increasingly seeing avatars pushing 500MB to a Gigabyte of textures. And people wonder why SL runs as poorly as it does.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

20 hours ago, Tonk Tomcat said:

When i see the mesh wireframe... 🙄

"It's my ART"

[NiranV Dean]

20 hours ago, Tonk Tomcat said:

When i see the mesh wireframe... 🙄

 

I like. We need more of this.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

There are a lot of very low poly full perm mesh out there. That being said, this is a horrible way to achieve this look.. It just looks bad.. I have this FP dress, as is it adds about 1000 to ARC, with a 1024 texture that has alpha it adds 1500..

Wow, huge jump..

Such numbers...

Bad poly... 

That was sarcasm btw.. 

Personally i just add a spec map with the dots i want to shine.. 

[Fauve Aeon]

On 12/15/2019 at 2:43 AM, Penny Patton said:

I've found that most SL content creators I encounter in-world don't know about emissive masks.

Love it. Someone should make a guide like that for texture use, too. I rarely see avatars with under 200MB of textures on them, and I'm increasingly seeing avatars pushing 500MB to a Gigabyte of textures. And people wonder why SL runs as poorly as it does.

I agree with a lot of what is said about optimization. I’m learning things as I have time so I do better, largely due to reading helpful applied information people like Penny and Niran. It’s a process. But I do still use some of what I had before I started learning about optimization. I still like some of it. Yes, even if it’s no mod and badly made. Going forward, I shop less, trash more, demo more, buy fewer but better things most of the time. Most. 
 

I have often thought that more in depth info graphics than before/afters with shorter text summaries might help. But being willing to learn and make changes is something else. Many simply are not that interested or willing. Another thing, the commodity lacking is often time. Time to learn what’s wrong, why it’s happening and how to fix it. If someone’s creative time and in-world time already feel limited, and (I suspect) maybe they aren’t really keen learners, people will often prioritize other things. I bet if the most knowledgeable people ever distilled the list down to a top 10 and a top 5 ‘THINGS YOU CAN DO TO MAKE YOUR VIEWER RUN BETTER’, more people would bite on one or two of them. 

I also think that prioritizing things that others cannot control is best.  I can already control much of what I will render and how, including the option to choose some of texture size limits and control pretty completely who I choose to render (if anyone) before I even arrive at a busy destination, pop in with ‘render friends only’ as a persistent state, or just make my people minimum very low. I can’t control how hard anything other than my own things hit a region though so I’m assuming on the info I have read that it is active scripts and the memory they consume. If I’m ‘too high ARC’ for someone they can derender me with 3 clicks?

Maybe I’m oversimplifying, but in a mostly user-made largely hobby world, if a resident can control something from their viewer menu to tailor their experience, where does the responsibility truly sit? Clearly LL will not force creators into professional best practices boxes, but they did raise the bar to allow imported mesh, and so many other really good advancements. The Lab people don’t even seem as forthcoming as they used to be because they have to be so very careful about anything they even whisper one time at midnight to their cat since someone will surely grab onto it like a dog with a bone and start screaming ‘your saaaaidddddd’...so that’s also never a good place to be. 

[Penny Patton]

On 12/16/2019 at 11:33 PM, Fauve Aeon said:

I can’t control how hard anything other than my own things hit a region though so I’m assuming on the info I have read that it is active scripts and the memory they consume. If I’m ‘too high ARC’ for someone they can derender me with 3 clicks?

Maybe I’m oversimplifying, but in a mostly user-made largely hobby world, if a resident can control something from their viewer menu to tailor their experience, where does the responsibility truly sit?

Its' much more than scripts and script memory. It's things like polygon counts and texture memory as well. And you actually have very limited control over the rendering impact of your environment (unless you make everything yourself). Sure, you can limit the max resolution of textures, but if the sim has 80GB worth of textures and you cut that in half or even down to a quarter by restricting max resolution, that's still more textures being crammed into your videocard than you have memory for.

 As for derendering avatars, that's hardly an optimal solution. If I have to derender nearly every single avatar in SL to make it run decently, then what's the point of having avatars at all? Should LL be honest and make that a part of their marketing? "Sure, you can make your avatar look however you like, but you're the only person who will be able to ever see it!" They're not going to draw in many new users with that.

 And no one is suggesting LL restrict content creation to pro-level creators. Optimization is pretty basic stuff. If you have the skills to create the content at all, then you have all the skills you need to optimize that content. People don't do it for one reason, and one reason only: LL has never incentivized optimization. There's no penalities for unoptimized content and most SL content creators do not understand how their content is directly impacting everyones' ability to render SL. If that ever changes and LL imposes penalities on unoptimized content (ie: higher land impact costs, restrictions on avatar attachments, etc) you will see every single SL content creator overnight suddenly discovering they had the ability to optimize their work all along.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

5 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

Sure, you can limit the max resolution of textures, but if the sim has 80GB worth of textures

You still download them and store in cache at their full size, the only gain you get is what then goes to your graphics card, and I suspect that when you do a 180 turn and the textures get reloaded for the new interest field, it's the full-sized cached textures that get passed through a size limiter before getting reloaded to the graphics card. I've been testing this using Firestorm and I can't see any real improvements clamping things to 512x512 maximum, dropping draw distance is still the only way to turn around in a reasonable amount of time and see what's been creeping up on you.

 

ETA in case I've drawn the wrong conclusions or even done the wrong tests, here is how I did that assessment.

 

With Firestorm set to unlimited textures, clear cache, log into a spot. Turn around a few times with pauses in between. Take times for turning first one way then the other way for how long it takes all visible textures to go clear and sharp.

Log out, record the size of the texture cache sub-folder.

Log in, alter firestorm to limit textures to 512Mb max, clear cache and log out.

Log in, again, turn around a few times until certain that all the textures within draw distance have loaded. Take times again for turning first one way then the other to record how long it takes to get clear textures again.

Log out, check the size of the textures sub-folder.

 

I found no change in size, and I recorded perhaps a 2-3 second difference between turns with fullsize and limited textures.

Edited December 19, 2019 by Profaitchikenz Haiku
Senility

[NiranV Dean]

On 12/19/2019 at 3:00 PM, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

You still download them and store in cache at their full size

Sounds like that's highly depending on how you implement this. You could make the Viewer save the loaded version instead of the full res version. Also if full res was always saved then i wonder why my texture cache hardly ever goes over 1GB even when i explicitely tell the Viewer to load everything full res and give me 8+GB of texture memory.