Why doesn’t LL limit creators more?

[JPG0809]

So a lot of lag issues has to with creators not properly optimizing their content when it comes to textures, polys, etc.

If this is the case, why doesn’t the lab construct a way to limit and refine the way creators can upload creations so it doesn’t bog down the grid.

Im not saying get rid of the heavy content already inworld, just refine it.

 

[Orwar]

   You can easily check items yourself and decide whether it's worth its rendering costs and/or script content, there's no need to limit it. If people are unwilling to educate themselves on how that works, and just blindly throw money on things that appear pretty ... Meh? 

[animats]

I'd like to see the Marketplace system do more inspection on what's for sale.

• For most objects, offer a 3D preview of the objects using WebGL. Let the user rotate, pan, and zoom the object, and display it at different distances to show all the levels of detail. Clothing items should be showable on an avatar model without selling the avatar. Sellers should be able to opt out of the 3D preview, but their sales will probably drop.        
• Show the mesh statistics and land impact of each object for sale.
• Automatic LOD outline checking - if an object is solid at high LOD but see-through at a lower LOD, that should produce a warning message on Marketplace. (The uploader should make that check, too.)

Many of the problems with model quality in SL reflect the lack of proper tooling. Compare the asset creation pipelines for Unity or UE4.

[Amanda Crisp]

I’m *guessing* this has to do with the amount of Staff LL has to throw at any given issue.

Having just shed some jobs at the Lab, they are more than likely having to prioritize where they utilize their talent. However, if this is a big issue it will probably bubble up their priority list as more people bend their ears about it.

If its a matter of developing a Tool to do the work, that would probably get tagged for completion more quickly than something involving an ongoing human oversight presence.

I like your ideas !

..and I’ll give you an uninformed answer A.K.

[Maryanne Solo]

Creator levels of quality/compliance? Both inworld and marketplace.

And what a $hirt-fight, Whine-athon that would be lol.
Nevertheless SL is teaching you 3d mesh - so yeah. Bring it on.

SL learning platform, repeat after me SL learning platform.
Probably the best one there is?
Or go the Autodesk, (or whoever), G-Max route.

Edited February 29, 2020 by Maryanne Solo
Spelling

[Pussycat Catnap]

So there are tools, like land impact, complexity, and LOD - that do all of this.

BUT...

As Niran of Dragon Viewer will remind us all anytime somebody hands him a keyboard; those tools were made with extreme flaws and then released into the wild before being rightly fixed.

Niran's Dragon Viewer rates my preferred mesh body at about 550,000 Complexity, and the top brand at around 200,000 - and his math on this is backed up with data. And I could get all of the quality I get on the body I like, with about 1/10 the polygon count; and thus a complexity like that more often seen among Furry avatars - if it was optimized for it. Likewise for the top mesh body. It should be noted here that the 200,000 of that top body is new - it used to be more... so these people CAN -START- optimizing if they try to... and a discontinued 'light' version of my preferred body was once a lot lower than the current heavy version...

But they've been hesitant to fix these tools because they'd rather us suffer the lag than the suffer the drama of the period during which mesh bodies get hammered to update.

And the same story can be repeated for Land Impact...

Ever see a very complex piece of mesh that has only 1 land impact? Guess what - that's a hack. The formula can be hacked by messing with things like triangle swaps at uncommon LODs and I suppose other tactics as well... These hacks allow for very processor intense items to be put out there under a claim of being 'low land impact' or 'low complexity'...

In the old days it was LOD... ever buy something and it came with instructions to set your LOD to 4? That advice is akin to saying "included bag of white powder works best when snorted through the nose" - it's about the worst possible advice a maker could give you... but it lets them pretend the flaw in the item is not theirs, but SLs...

This is why over time SL has made it more and more annoying of a process to set your LOD above 2-2.5 (where it should be).

 

This stuff could be done programaticaly:

1. Announce a corrected Complexity system is coming in 6 months. After that day, the ability to set 'unlimited' on Jelly Dolls will no longer exist, and you can only select up to 2 other accounts that can always see. FORCE TPVs to obey this policy. In other words: the system gets fixed, and people can't just dial out of it... so they pressure mesh body makers for updates... or Furry Avatar makers realize their day has come, and put out human bodies of the quality their furry customers are used to.
2. Announce a correct Land Impact system is coming in 6 months. After that day anything that uses just a triangle in any LOD range has that range replaced with the most detailed version of the object, and it's land impact accordingly re-mathed. Fix other loopholes as well. Suddenly all your 1-LI gatchas are using 375-LI each... say goodbye to laggy crap.
3. Restrict LOD settings in Viewers to not be able to go above certain values unless other graphics settings also go above certain values - settings that can only be 'viably used' on computers powerful enough to also handle that higher LOD... IE: lock away the ability to low end computer users to 'kill their own experience' by setting values that were originally hidden in the debug menu precisely BECAUSE incorrectly setting them ruins your experience... This could be done by simply disabling the 'rendervolumeLOD' setting in the debug menus and instead tying the LOD used to where the slider is on the graphics settings. 3.75... would only be for Ultra, 4 would simply not be obtainable unless you were using linden employee 'god mode'... (because there is no reason to use 4, but if there is a reason to use 4, it's probably an internal reason related to some technical troubleshooting).

 

 

Edited February 29, 2020 by Pussycat Catnap

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

2 hours ago, JPG0809 said:

So a lot of lag issues has to with creators not properly optimizing their content

It's the consumer who buys these objects and rez them to cause 'lag' in their place. I would not call it lag, btw, just a drop in frame rate. It's people's internet speed and computers who can't handle most of the content.

2 hours ago, JPG0809 said:

why doesn’t the lab construct a way to limit and refine the way creators can upload creations

If they do, I reckon consumers will just rez more of these limited and refined objects, so the effect will be the same.

Generall, I think the sim decorator deserves most of the blame. They use all that stuff to decorate their sim, and if they can walk around among all that confortably, but others can't, it mostly means that those other's computers are less powerful.

But there's also something to say about creating awareness among consumers about the (non-)efficiency of the products they buy, that may make their visitor's frame rates drop.

Maybe LL can restrict creators on adding detail, but then, likewise, they should restrict decorators in rezzing things and even restrict access into SL to people with faster internet and computers. None sound very realistic. More realistic is to try to convince people to buy items with less triangles, or buy a better computer.

You can also try to convince creators to add less detail to their products, but good luck with that. They have to compete with other creators who will sell more if their products look better (more detail). There's market capitalism for ya.  

Edited February 29, 2020 by Arduenn Schwartzman

[Coffee Pancake]

2 hours ago, JPG0809 said:

So a lot of lag issues has to with creators not properly optimizing their content when it comes to textures, polys, etc.

If this is the case, why doesn’t the lab construct a way to limit and refine the way creators can upload creations so it doesn’t bog down the grid.

Im not saying get rid of the heavy content already inworld, just refine it.

 

The scope of potential creations and techniques in SL is very broad, and anything when used to excess can have a negative impact on performance.

The real problem when you get a lot of content (and avatars) in one place, at that point the specifics of which mesh thingy is bad or what item has too many textures, etc is kinda irrelevant. Mix that up with ever possible combination of hardware on the grid and any semblance of sane limits just went up in smoke.

It's impossible to police as all the objects taking part in the current lag fest while cumulatively and conditionally present a poor experience, every single item can be objectively tested in isolation and in the vast majority of cases be fine.

The real achilles heal is sadly the SL infrastructure code on your PC. Everything, no matter how complex, has to be downloaded, decoded, rendered, animatated and so on. All this song  and dance between the depths of SL and your screen impose a significant load on your computer, which in turns slows down processing other stuff. This is just down to how SL is designed and works, and there is nothing we can do about that ... aside from start over with a different virtual world with a different architecture and .. oh wait that was Sansar, and it failed, sorry.

You could have 40 people, all wearing the most optimized context all show up together for a party and it will still stink.

 

Best you can do is to design your own content and spaces in way that is at least aware of SL's inner workings. Simple things like not inviting all your friends to party in the middle of a mall or your cute gatcha animal collection. Breaking up a location in to multiple parts that are physically separated and require some travel can go a long way to giving SL the time it needs to get everything ready to render.

Heavy content is often only heavy content when provided context. That context can be location, other avatars, or being worn by an avatar who is moving about a lot.

 

The only answer is lower your draw distance (this has a dramatic impact on the amount of stuff your viewer is trying to get stuff to render for), some viewers let you limit which other avatars you see, etc. Disabling shadows will free up a lot of CPU time while stuff id loading in causing it to load in faster, turn them back on when everything has settled down.

 

be patient and dont be quick to blame - if it seems like one person or one thing are ruining your day, it's far more likely that's just down to how SL decided to send / your pc chose to render their content with everything else.

 

I personally like to blame all my lag on kittys house .. and the million things in it .. but looking at the actual data and picking apart the viewer, half the problem is my own avatar .. or a neighbors avatar I can't even see .. (and this is by far the worst) my own impatiently camming about while stuff hasn't finished rezzing.

(We have joked in the past about a performance TP booster feature .. you TP someplace and after arriving the screen stays black just showing you any local chat .. no movement, no people, no camming, nothing else .. for a good couple of miniutes .. and then POP everything loaded and on your screen super fast.

 

---

 

For a better technical solution, hopefully 2020 will be the year the disk cache gets some love from LL.

[ItHadToComeToThis]

I have been saying for years that LL needs a mesh complexity triangle upload limit. If your object is above it, tough, make it better. It should have been implemented from day one.

[Hunny Bunny]

1 hour ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

restrict access into SL to people with faster internet and computers.

Yanno, they're gonna have your racist, body shaming, elitist, prejudice head for this.  🙄

 

[Orwar]

41 minutes ago, ItHadToComeToThis said:

I have been saying for years that LL needs a mesh complexity triangle upload limit. If your object is above it, tough, make it better. It should have been implemented from day one.

   I don't think that a flat ceiling of a triangle limit would do much, to be honest. People will still make high-poly clutter objects with a level of detail that makes no sense for SL - I'm currently in wireframe mode staring at a 19,595 triangle muffin in absolute astonishment, and next to it is an ashtray with 27,184 triangles. For those objects, that's much too high, but that's not to say that there are objects where that kind of triangle count would be (potentially) called for; skyboxes with multiple structural elements for example.

   Besides, the work-around to a limit would be to do what people already do - make your mesh teacup and mesh saucer separate and then link them in-world. A limit would do nothing except possibly give creators an indicator that they're about to do something silly. Both the muffin and ashtray are from one of the more popular SL home decor brands though, I would be surprised if the creator is genuinely that stupid; but with high poly objects and over-sized textures, things are easy to make to look flashy up close, and people buy them because of it.

[Lyssa Greymoon]

Because not everything will run on grandma’s 1994 e-machine.

[Da5id Weatherwax]

3 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

It's the consumer who buys these objects and rez them to cause 'lag' in their place. I would not call it lag, btw, just a drop in frame rate. It's people's internet speed and computers who can't handle most of the content.

No, it's not just causing framerate drops in "their place" - Amongst the biggest offenders in this regard are avatars, clothing and accessories - they are causing those framerate drops for everybody, wherever they go. And you can't genuinely point at "people's internet speed and computers" as the cause. I'm plugged directly into a fiber connection and I still see download delays in the texture console when somebody who is wearing several dozen 1024x1024 textures walks into wherever I am. I can tell without actively looking when somebody wearing an insane 500ktri hairpiece walks in to the club where I'm performing and I promise you I do not have a low-end GPU (if it were the club where I work they'd be getting the hairy eyeball since I'm the security manager there)

 

Now, personally I think that the more aggressive solutions some folks propose will never fly - There is no percentage for LL in trying to weather the manure-nado that would result. A steady, incremental approach that winnows out the worst offenders while making it easy for creators to keep up with the changes as they release updates in the regular course of their business, on the other hand, is something I would wholeheartedly applaud.

[Theresa Tennyson]

1 hour ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:

No, it's not just causing framerate drops in "their place" - Amongst the biggest offenders in this regard are avatars, clothing and accessories - they are causing those framerate drops for everybody, wherever they go. And you can't genuinely point at "people's internet speed and computers" as the cause. I'm plugged directly into a fiber connection and I still see download delays in the texture console when somebody who is wearing several dozen 1024x1024 textures walks into wherever I am. I can tell without actively looking when somebody wearing an insane 500ktri hairpiece walks in to the club where I'm performing and I promise you I do not have a low-end GPU (if it were the club where I work they'd be getting the hairy eyeball since I'm the security manager there)

Most of the worst offenders are made for and marketed with static photos. For that use appearance is more important than frame rate.

Then a bunch of people take the same items to a crowded club...

[FairreLilette]

I think possibly, but do not know for sure, is that the high polygon items are really made for 2D photography which is very popular in SL.  

The problem is also all this scripting wherein everything has a hud or an applier....it's nuts.  Perhaps BOM will get rid of some of the scripts.

I NOW use 512 x 512 AND 256 x 256 as well as a very occasional 1024 x 1024 texture...it depends on the item.  About 95% or higher of items look great with 512 and 256...a very few need a 1024.

Here on my eggs and jewels...I have 256 x 256 textures and the clothing 512 x 512, and they look fine to me...even with the forum photo system dropping some of the detail.  That's why many use Flickr, the photos do not lose detail as they tend to do on the forum here.  

However, I think a way to check polygons is an important topic because consumers do not know what they are buying half the time.  Plus, as a human avatar, you see yourself, so you think it's others.    

 

 

Edited February 29, 2020 by FairreLilette

[NiranV Dean]

6 hours ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

As Niran of Dragon Viewer will remind us all anytime somebody hands him a keyboard; those tools were made with extreme flaws and then released into the wild before being rightly fixed.

I have to remind you that according to the scouter your polygon count is OVER 9000!

Also, your avatar is apparently jack sh** optimized but i suppose you already knew this.

 

Also also, LL does not want to restrict content creation more because it would be against the whole idea of SL.

Also also also, LL does not want to make the complexity rating "correcter" (heck is that even a word?) because it would shame and punish bad content and i quote "We do not want to punish bad content".

With that in mind, whatever the Linden gods come up with in the upcoming ArcTan rework, can and will not even be remotely close to a usable value that in any way allows you to make even rough estimates of how bad content really is. I'm calling it right here, right now, in ArcTan you will still see a perfectly optimized, low poly, combined texture, 40mb texture memory using avatar have the same if not higher complexity numbers than a randomly cobbled together 3 million polygon avatar with 500mb texture memory usage. Why? Because i am very confident that whoever thought it was a good idea to make a handful of lights cost as much as 3 million polygons times 2 will have his or her hands in ArcTan again skewing all values. I came up with my complexity values out of my head from tests and my past experience, i didn't even put much thought into these and its really not hard to see which kind of things are real performance killers. Giving projectors a high number is a no brainer, these things kill performance like nothing else. Alpha blending surfaces, we all know alphas are slow as sh**, rigged mesh being much slower than static ones, absolute nobrainer, you can rez the same crap mesh on land and have it impact you tons less than when you attach it.These things really don't take any educated guesses to get right, neither do they need rigorous testing on different hardware. Sure an AMD card will suffer on different things because its a different manufacturer and they have sh** openGL support but it doesn't change the fact that certain things remain bad at all times regardless of hardware. What's even more is that a test on a wide range of hardware is a wasted effort, you shouldn't be testing on potatoes. You test it on hardware that is capable of properly running your application, hardware that is not so powerful that it doesn't care and neither so weak that you wont see a difference. The performance impact will scale up and down depending on the hardware, slow hardware will see proportionally less impact because they already run at a much lower framerate, losing roughly a quarter of your framerate at 20 fps isn't as bad as doing so with 100 fps but you get much more accurate measurements with 100 fps than with 20 fps because it allows you to see smaller impacts too. It goes the other way around too, faster hardware will see a much bigger impact on bad content. That is until you hit an exception for both of these, at some point you'll go into a hardware range that is so slow that even looking funny is gonna break everything, same for fast hardware, slapping a NASA PC to SL is not gonna get you very accurate readings anymore because the PC is simply so overly powerful that it will churn through anything you toss at it with ease.

Anyway, my complexity numbers are quite big but they do what they are supposed to do, they quickly identify troublemakers and effectively get rid of them. They could use some finetuning, or well some scaling down so the numbers don't appear as big as they do now but overall they are much better than anything LL has shown so far. I'm quite happy with them.

[SpiritSparrow Skydancer]

9 hours ago, Orwar said:

   You can easily check items yourself and decide whether it's worth its rendering costs and/or script content, there's no need to limit it. If people are unwilling to educate themselves on how that works, and just blindly throw money on things that appear pretty ... Meh? 

That is a majority of SL spending.

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

4 hours ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:

And you can't genuinely point at "people's internet speed and computers" as the cause.

You can't genuinely NOT point at people's internet speed and computers as a cause for low framerate. I'm not telling that all people should have faster computers. I'm telling that a faster computer will help, as will making more efficient mesh.

[LittleMe Jewell]

10 hours ago, animats said:

Automatic LOD outline checking - if an object is solid at high LOD but see-through at a lower LOD, that should produce a warning message on Marketplace. (The uploader should make that check, too.)

Something being see-through at the lowest LOD is not necessarily an issue.  If it is indoor furniture, you will likely never see it at the lowest LOD distance - unless you have put the item outside or a really large room.   In those cases, it it darn near disappears at the lowest LOD, I sure don't care.  I only care that it does not break up at my maximum indoor viewing distance.

Even for outdoor items, if it is something like a small bush or flower set, I don't think I really care that it disappears at 75-100m away.

That is part of why it is so hard to apply a definitive criteria to things.

Given that - I would like to be able to see a preview of the item at each LOD level, like we can in the uploader window.

Edited February 29, 2020 by LittleMe Jewell

[Qie Niangao]

It may make some difference how valid the numbers are, but it won't matter much unless there's incentive for folks to care about big numbers.

Politically, the best solution would be to give the reins to landowners: Visitors, your complexity must be THIS low here'bouts or get used to being seen in 2D by everybody including your own viewer.

Technically, though, that's pretty infeasible. For one thing, I don't think regions know avatar complexity by any measure, except as reported by viewers, and then only to relay to other viewers... or something like that. Pretty sure some big changes would be needed to starve viewers of avatar data that's overly complex according to criteria set by the region or parcel.

[FairreLilette]

1 hour ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

You can't genuinely NOT point at people's internet speed and computers as a cause for low framerate. I'm not telling that all people should have faster computers. I'm telling that a faster computer will help, as will making more efficient mesh.

Gawd, we've been discussing internet speeds since Dial-Up.  Dial-up what a madhouse, especially at high traffic times (off of work) or Christmas!  

I'd like to see Machinemas of people who say they have no lag WITH a bunch of high polygon avatars and 1024x1024 textures.  I've seen Machinemas with one or two people but I'd like to see one with a lot of avatars.  Anyone know of any Machinemas that show this amazing SL world with fastest internet speed, fastest computer and a lot of mesh avatars?  Again, I'm not talking one or two avatars but a lot of mesh avatars in the Machinema.  

We tinies can view 80+ avatars and make Machinemas with 80+ avatars...what about the high polygon mesh human biggies?  How many can be filmed in a Machinema?  

Edited February 29, 2020 by FairreLilette

[LittleMe Jewell]

9 hours ago, ItHadToComeToThis said:

I have been saying for years that LL needs a mesh complexity triangle upload limit. If your object is above it, tough, make it better. It should have been implemented from day one.

This would definitely help some things.  I found a ceiling to floor length curtain in inventory (roughly 1x3m, give or take a bit) that was a single object and made up of darn near a MILLION triangles.  I just shook my head --- well, and promptly trashed it.

Edited February 29, 2020 by LittleMe Jewell

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

There is a limit to vertices per mesh object: 64k vertices per LOD for each mesh (source).

LL could lower it to 16k. But that will just result in creators uploading and linking 4 mesh objects.

I can only think of one solution on the creator's side: increase the upload fee for mesh. I doubt whether that would curb the most successful creators in SL, which happen to be the ones to put most of the detail in their meshes. It would definitely discourage and stifle beginning creators.

[Lindal Kidd]

10 hours ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

This stuff could be done programaticaly:

1. Announce a corrected Complexity system is coming in 6 months. After that day, the ability to set 'unlimited' on Jelly Dolls will no longer exist, and you can only select up to 2 other accounts that can always see. FORCE TPVs to obey this policy. In other words: the system gets fixed, and people can't just dial out of it... so they pressure mesh body makers for updates... or Furry Avatar makers realize their day has come, and put out human bodies of the quality their furry customers are used to.
2. Announce a correct Land Impact system is coming in 6 months. After that day anything that uses just a triangle in any LOD range has that range replaced with the most detailed version of the object, and it's land impact accordingly re-mathed. Fix other loopholes as well. Suddenly all your 1-LI gatchas are using 375-LI each... say goodbye to laggy crap.
3. Restrict LOD settings in Viewers to not be able to go above certain values unless other graphics settings also go above certain values - settings that can only be 'viably used' on computers powerful enough to also handle that higher LOD... IE: lock away the ability to low end computer users to 'kill their own experience' by setting values that were originally hidden in the debug menu precisely BECAUSE incorrectly setting them ruins your experience... This could be done by simply disabling the 'rendervolumeLOD' setting in the debug menus and instead tying the LOD used to where the slider is on the graphics settings. 3.75... would only be for Ultra, 4 would simply not be obtainable unless you were using linden employee 'god mode'... (because there is no reason to use 4, but if there is a reason to use 4, it's probably an internal reason related to some technical troubleshooting).

[Tolya Ugajin]

13 hours ago, JPG0809 said:

So a lot of lag issues has to with creators not properly optimizing their content when it comes to textures, polys, etc.

If this is the case, why doesn’t the lab construct a way to limit and refine the way creators can upload creations so it doesn’t bog down the grid.

Im not saying get rid of the heavy content already inworld, just refine it.

 

Or perhaps region owners could better monitor the junk on their land?