Should Resident Trees Be Allowed In Bellisseria & Should Each Theme Content Pack Include A Selection of Optimized Trees To Go With Theme

[MoiraKathleen]

2 minutes ago, Paulsian said:

same here just a random place and big grey blob trees animated apparently messing with texture rendering on surrounding objects including linden home houses and landscaping. This is with the recommended graphics settings. 

They should all render for you, though it might take a bit longer than you'd like.  The viewer's recommended graphic settings are based on your PC and it's graphic capabilities, and it's a good starting point, but it doesn't mean that those settings are perfect for every situation you will come across when visiting different regions, nor do is mean that those settings would be the best settings for someone else.  I usually start with the recommended and then do a bit of tweaking for my normal, when I'm at my home, graphics.  A while back they introduced the abiltiy to create different settings in the viewer, and save them so that they could be easily switched between.  Some people have one setting for 'every day around their home area', a setting for busy shopping events, a setting for going out to the club, a setting for taking pictures, and so on.

[Paulsian]

Maybe it's the scale of the lower optimized trees; being so large they are messing with the surrounding render efficiency. I'm literally walking around any everything official is fine besides areas near these large grey blobs are near. Hmmm maybe something to look into for viewer team.? 

Alternate possible solution all trees require a tree classification official / non official indicating they are a tree (or any plant larger than 4 meters (just throwing that size out there). So that people who would like to stop, wait, and see the beauty can do so and others can simply say don't so any unofficial trees. This option would likely increase performance. 

I'm getting the feeling that people want freedom to have their own trees & people like the official trees but maybe if offered in a less impactful way they would be more used (if offered), and people are seeing the same problem I am.

I'm grateful for all comments and I'm hopeful something can be worked out to benefit the entire community. 

[Mercedes Avon]

2 hours ago, Paulsian said:

Same here, In a perfect world the 1 land impact trees would not take 5 minutes to render. Takes away from the overall beauty a bit. 

If a tree is taking 5 minutes to render, then I am not sure the tree is the problem.

I do agree that having more of the landscaping included in the covenant packs is a great idea for those who want to use it. I just would not want to be forced to use it.

[Rabid Cheetah]

27 minutes ago, Mercedes Avon said:

If a tree is taking 5 minutes to render,

lol I at first thought you were going to say something like "If a tree rezes in the woods, but no one is there to see it..."

[Nika Talaj]

36 minutes ago, Mercedes Avon said:

If a tree is taking 5 minutes to render, then I am not sure the tree is the problem.

This.  Even a multi-mesh-tree screen does not generally take more than, say, 15 seconds to rez for me.  I know you didn't want to hear about settings, but I think you would get more enthusiasm for your ideas if people shared your rezzing issues.

Oh yes, very occasionally I'll have a bad login where a few textures will just NEVER rez.  But I don't think that's what you're experiencing.

I think you have to commend all who've responded to this thread on their self-discipline in not diving into your setup to see if anything needs to be tweaked!  I'm not ALL that self-disciplined, though .... the  only thing I'll say is, I don't suppose you're on a slow wireless connection?

[Chroma Starlight]

It's better to live a place that resonates with your heart than to try to change a place that doesn't. Perhaps if you moved to a climate where there are fewer trees? 
 

Grignano, week1

[Paulsian]

1 hour ago, Chroma Starlight said:

It's better to live a place that resonates with your heart than to try to change a place that doesn't. Perhaps if you moved to a climate where there are fewer trees?

Nice, I don't see any um grey blobs trees and um looks like an interesting place to put a linden home. As long as I can have all official content including official reasonably spec'd optimized selection of trees and ability to derender all the ones that mess with performance I will be happy.  

[Paulsian]

1 hour ago, Nika Talaj said:

.... the  only thing I'll say is, I don't suppose you're on a slow wireless connection?

I have 300 mps wired connection and only running sl & I have a dedicated graphics card, i would say not entry level maybe a tier up setup but decent. I am using the official viewer.

With fantasy coming there will also be tons of tall glow blobs, it might be good time to maybe figure out solution / options.  Apparently there is a known issue with if your sl speed is set too high the cache gets over whelmed, not sure if that is only an official viewer issue issue or what. Performance of the viewer rendering is holding sl back. The gamers I personally know, they do not like the performance it looks bad and they won't touch sl. What's causing it? Could it be the large objects fighting all the other objects around them and then that causes chain reaction, we have official content (large trees) fighting with unofficial content. Just a theory. I don't remember seeing any grey blob trees during the height of sl18b. or sl17b, or sl16b? hmm 

[Chroma Starlight]

1 hour ago, Paulsian said:

Nice, I don't see any um grey blobs trees and um looks like an interesting place to put a linden home. As long as I can have all official content including official reasonably spec'd optimized selection of trees and ability to derender all the ones that mess with performance I will be happy.  

Oh yeah, <ctrl>-I and <ctrl>-3, supposing you're happy with the trees in your inventory. If not, marketplace.secondlife.com provides a library of options. I didn't actually build much of my last round of homes 'from scratch,' as was the old philosophy, instead just working with existing assets, my own sense of aesthetics, and a bit of virtual geomancy until the scene or experience felt right. What makes me happiest of all is that despite working at a higher level of abstraction, maybe even because of it, the results were also higher in impact; that deeper experience was almost the sole domain when working while in that creative process. Doing this on a 64m^2 patch makes you really appreciate larger builds; the ethos is to bring everything to its own life, an authenticity that stands up to more than just cursory glances. Stuff like that makes SL fun.

Edited July 19, 2021 by Chroma Starlight

[Paulsian]

It also appears that any unofficial landscaping that has transparency will force to be rendered before some neighboring linden home outside textures as well as street textures can. Anything unofficial with transparency appears to be breaking the official stuff. Why? I just witnessed a tree rez and then render and then animation and then vanish and then rez and then render and then animate and then vanish. Why would you want a tree to vanish, render, animate and wait a few seconds vanish and repeat? If I lived across the street from that my performance and texture rendering would suffer on my parcel and surrounding parcels.  

I love pretty things too, I have been staring at pretty unofficial content for awhile now and wondering why are the texture renderings fighting each other to fully spawn. They all have one thing in common they have transparent properties, some are very tiny some are very large. I'm pro prettiness. I hope they figure it out, because when I'm in my house and I have to wait for the neighbors plants to render before I get out of the grey walls of abyss there's a big problem.

[Paulsian]

1 minute ago, Chroma Starlight said:

Oh yeah, <ctrl>-I and <ctrl>-3, supposing you're happy with the trees in your inventory. If not, marketplace.secondlife.com provides a library of options. I didn't actually build much of my last round of homes, as was the old philosophy, instead just working with assets, aesthetics, and a bit of virtual geomancy until it felt right. What makes happiest of all though is that despite working at a higher level of abstraction, maybe even because of it, the results were also higher in impact because that was almost the sole domain where working while in the creative process. Doing this on aw 64m^2 patch makes you really appreciate larger builds; the ethos is to bring everything to its own life, an authenticity that stands up to more than just cursory glances. Stuff like that makes SL fun.

Well said. 

[MoiraKathleen]

2 hours ago, Paulsian said:

I have 300 mps wired connection and only running sl & I have a dedicated graphics card, i would say not entry level maybe a tier up setup but decent. I am using the official viewer.

With fantasy coming there will also be tons of tall glow blobs, it might be good time to maybe figure out solution / options.  Apparently there is a known issue with if your sl speed is set too high the cache gets over whelmed, not sure if that is only an official viewer issue issue or what. Performance of the viewer rendering is holding sl back. The gamers I personally know, they do not like the performance it looks bad and they won't touch sl. What's causing it? Could it be the large objects fighting all the other objects around them and then that causes chain reaction, we have official content (large trees) fighting with unofficial content. Just a theory. I don't remember seeing any grey blob trees during the height of sl18b. or sl17b, or sl16b? hmm 

I'm not a gamer nor a technical person, but here's my thoughts...

To me, one of the major things that makes SL unique is that just about anyone can build things (or create in outside 3D modeling tools and upload).   So there will be unoptimized, non-game quality content, particularly as so much of the content in-world is created by users.  There are discussions about this by users in the forums from time to time, but I think the challenge is to figure out a way to address this and still allow amatuer creators to create content and not break existing content / inventories.  The answer though, in my opinion, is not to have LL create all the the content - if that was to happen it would completely change what SL is. 

I believe what you are referring to regarding "known issue with if your sl speed is set too high..." has to do with the network maximum bandwidth setting in preferences.  From what I understand, that has to do with UDP (?) traffic of which there is not as much of as there used to be in SL's earlier years. This was discussed somewhere in the forums this past week, but I'm not sure in which thread.

If you are experiencing texture thrashing - where a texture loads, and then unloads and then loads again, that may be from the Hardware Texture Memory size in the LL viewer (where it is capped at 512 MB).   Several other 3rd party viewers have a larger cap for that.  When I'm not using the LL viewer, I use Kokua viewer, and it caps out at 2048 MB, and I beleive that is what Firestorm caps out at also.  So you might want to try one of the 3rd party viewers to see if that helps with that issue.  Firestorm is very popular, has a very active group for help in-world, they regularly hold classes at their regions in-world about using the FS viewer, they have an extensive help wiki, and many here in the forums use Firestorm exclusively.  Kokua is very similar to the LL viewer in look and feel, but with some of the 3rd party viewer enhancements as well.  Others like Catznip which has some helpful inventory features that others don't have.  Black Dragon has great tools for those seriously into taking pictures in-world. 

As far as resident solutions / options, many use a 3rd party viewer, many have spent time fine tuning graphics preferences for different region situations, having a handful of saved presets for different situations.   Many derender items that cause problems for them or that they prefer not to see.  Several settings in graphics preferences that can make a difference are draw distance (I usually cap mine at 128, but others may keep it around 64 or 96 depending on where they are and how much content is in that area.  Mesh Level of Detail LOD for objects can worsen performance if it is set too high.  Whether Advanced Lighting Model is on or not, and whether shadows are on or not can also affect performance.  You can play around with some of these setting by going into preferences -> graphics and trying out the different settings on the quality and speed slider (low, mid, high, ultra - and points inbetween) and see how the different settings affect different setting values and your performance and rendering.  Many people find settings where they are happy with the performance and save going "all out" (ultra) for special situations, like for talking pictures.   It can be a trade-off for what's most important for you.  

There are also threads in the forums from time to time that cover or discuss topics like best practices for creating mesh for SL, tips for setting preferences for better performance, and tips about how to buy good quality content (in terms of render/load quality - land impact, texture sizes, number of tris, LOD's and so forth).   

Bellisseria, though very beautifully themed and landscaped, has quite a few houses and a lot of content on each region (both default landscaping and houses, and resident content on each parcel) so rendering may be more difficult here for some than on other regions in SL, or for others here in Bellisseria, depending on each person's PC capabilities and viewer settings.   

[Prokofy Neva]

You can de-render on the Firestorm viewer, which I don't use.

You can't on the regular SL viewer as it goes against the original philosophy of the Lindens, which they may no longer uphold, but there may be technical issues. I'm for them not putting in that function. I think problems have to be solved at root and not de-rendered.

I found some redwood trees almost exactly like the Moles' lovely trees, who knows, maybe it is the same person who made it on their alt, and I was happy to put them out because the redwoods on the sim are only across the street.

Maybe those are the very ones you see as blobs, although they are well made. I dislike planar trees with bad textures especially and prefer sculpty or mesh 3D trees -- the Lindens trees are not all fully 3D and I'd rather have 3D around me.

And that's just it. There enough restrictions on the Bellisserian homes that you shouldn't ask to put more. You could try abandoning and finding a new spot without such trees perhaps. I've done it myself over the butterflies.

[Nika Talaj]

5 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I found some redwood trees almost exactly like the Moles' lovely trees

Orly?  And whose are they?  Such a tease!

Paulsian, 300mb/sec is indeed just fine for SL and Belli, so long as you aren't sharing it with a bunch of people gaming or watching films.   I ran for years on a 20mb/sec link with no problems.  Belli IS demanding, with all the small parcels stuffed with user content, but you shouldn't be having the issues you describe. 

I'm curious about your hardware and settings.  The client provides a really nice summary of those in the Help menu, under "About".  On Firestorm that is the last item in the help menu; it brings up a dialog box with 3 tabs.  Usually clients default to the "info" tab, which is what you want; you should see a summary of where you are at the moment,  your hardware, and some relevant settings.  There may be a button at the bottom of the info tab to copy the info to clipboard; if not ctrl c or a screen grab will work as well.  If you're willing to have us take a peak, just paste that info here for us to look over.  [I use Firestorm, and just checked mine this way.  I believe Firestorm is the same as LL's client in this regard.]

One little performance hint: if you haven't done so already, you may wish to tell your antivirus not to bother checking your SL cache folder, particularly the texture cache.

[MoiraKathleen]

16 minutes ago, Nika Talaj said:

The client provides a really nice summary of those in the Help menu, under "About".  On Firestorm that is the last item in the help menu; it brings up a dialog box with 3 tabs.  Usually clients default to the "info" tab, which is what you want; you should see a summary of where you are at the moment,  your hardware, and some relevant settings.  There may be a button at the bottom of the info tab to copy the info to clipboard; if not ctrl c or a screen grab will work as well.  If you're willing to have us take a peak, just paste that info here for us to look over.  [I use Firestorm, and just checked mine this way.  I believe Firestorm is the same as LL's client in this regard.]

Yes, this is the same in the LL viewer - from the viewer top menu bar, "Help" -> "Abouit Second Life"  and then the "info" tab in the pop-up window (which is the default tab).  There is a "copy to clipboard" button which will copy all the information from the "info" tab for easy posting here. 

[Polenth Yue]

The problem you're seeing isn't the trees or alpha textures or any one thing that you can ban to solve it. This is caused by lots of content which uses different models and textures. Unless you ban people from using anything other than a few items that share textures, this will always happen. You can't really do that, because there isn't much appeal in a home that can't be decorated to someone's personal tastes.

You can improve it by dropping draw distance. That means you'd only load texture from the nearest few homes.

[Matthieu Quander]

56 minutes ago, Polenth Yue said:

The problem you're seeing isn't the trees or alpha textures or any one thing that you can ban to solve it. This is caused by lots of content which uses different models and textures. Unless you ban people from using anything other than a few items that share textures, this will always happen. You can't really do that, because there isn't much appeal in a home that can't be decorated to someone's personal tastes.

You can improve it by dropping draw distance. That means you'd only load texture from the nearest few homes.

This.   When I lived on a homestead island, I typically ran my draw distance at ~350 meters to cover all of it from any viewed angle from any location.  In Bellisseria, I keep it at close to 200 unless I am doing photography.  The other thing I have recently started doing is using the stepped draw distance feature in Firestorm.  It works really well as long as you don't immediately start moving your camera around all over the place when you immediately rez. 

Edited to add that if you are inside your home with the blinds closed, then you can set your draw distance to the minimum, but that's obviously not the OP's situation.  

Edited July 19, 2021 by Matthieu Quander

[Marianne Little]

If a Mole can make similar palms as in Bellisseria and sell it under another name, please do so. The palm trees in the Stilt regions have an unique color, and the palms people put up look so wrong.

[Kylie Jaxxon]

9 minutes ago, Marianne Little said:

If a Mole can make similar palms as in Bellisseria and sell it under another name, please do so. The palm trees in the Stilt regions have an unique color, and the palms people put up look so wrong.

I get what you are saying, but from someone that has lived in Florida for years, all palms are not the same color in fronds or the bark everywhere.

[Matthieu Quander]

1 hour ago, Kylie Jaxxon said:

I get what you are saying, but from someone that has lived in Florida for years, all palms are not the same color in fronds or the bark everywhere.

True, but the differences aren't limited to people's homes, they are all over.  The Bellisseria stilt region palms all look the same, so when residents use something different, they do really stand out, and even nice quality trees can appear out of place.  

[Evangeline Ling]

...

 

You know what... nevermind you guys continue to HOA the heck out of Belli trees...

 

I'll leave you to your tree debate while I go color all mine purple, full bright them, and make them 1% transparent so they all have alpha issues...

 

Enjoy your debate though!!!

[Paulsian]

8 minutes ago, Evangeline Ling said:

...

 

You know what... nevermind you guys continue to HOA the heck out of Belli trees...

 

I'll leave you to your tree debate while I go color all mine purple, full bright them, and make them 1% transparent so they all have alpha issues...

 

Enjoy your debate though!!!

I appreciate your honesty. You are correct, in some cases trees / plants are being weaponized to cause the linden home textures to malfunction; alienating and driving residents to move away or cancel membership & creating negative feedback, but in all cases there is a trending problem with compatibility. 

 

 

[Evangeline Ling]

28 minutes ago, Paulsian said:

I appreciate your honesty. You are correct, in some cases trees / plants are being weaponized to cause the linden home textures to malfunction; alienating and driving residents to move away or cancel membership & creating negative feedback, but in all cases there is a trending problem with compatibility. 

 

 

No...

You 100% missed the point... That is NOT my point

My point is this entire thread is silly.  People are getting on here attacking people's trees of all things.  Nobody is out there weaponizing trees to make your day bad or to make SL malfunction.  I am a pilot and I fly through Bellisseria almost everyday and I have no such issues probably because i have my computer graphics card up to date and my drivers updated.  If textures on trees are not rezzing for you, as others have already pointed out, that is on your machine and/or internet service not on SL and certainly NOT on your neighbors.

Forcing uniform Linden trees on everyone as the topic of this thread suggested is about the single stupidest idea I have seen put across these forums.  How about we just reduce everyones LI to 0 LI everyone gets an empty house and can rez nothing.  I bet you would still have texture issues because your computer graphics is not updated to what it needs to be.

If your textures are not rezzing in then lower your draw distance, update your machine, or perhaps consider a different faster internet service

[Paulsian]

29 minutes ago, Evangeline Ling said:

My point is this entire thread is silly.

I appreciate your feed back.

[Paulsian]

4 minutes ago, Nika Talaj said:

/me glances at Paulsian's inworld profile,

I'm simply asking the following, lets try to keep focused: Should Resident Trees Be Allowed In Bellisseria & Should Each Theme Content Pack Include A Selection of Optimized Trees To Go With Theme