Should Merchants Be Required To Post Clothing Comlplexity On The Marketplace?

[Arielle Popstar]

17 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Do does this mean I bring in laggy-assed mesh and not take the trouble of optimizing it?

Here is a technical explanation https://beqsother.blogspot.com/2022/03/how-to-use-new-firestorm-performance.html

[Paul Hexem]

40 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

you are fooling yourself if you think it saves much of a load on your viewer. It makes minimal difference. Not worth worrying about. May as well set to no limit complexity.

This isn't entirely true. Having everyone around you rendered as a gray blob will improve performance simply due to having less textures and objects rendered.

Sure it's a bit like claiming you're an accurate shot because you always hit the target while omitting that you use buckshot, but still.

[Arielle Popstar]

3 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

This isn't entirely true. Having everyone around you rendered as a gray blob will improve performance simply due to having less textures and objects rendered.

Sure it's a bit like claiming you're an accurate shot because you always hit the target while omitting that you use buckshot, but still.

Well I am currently standing in a club with 21 others with complexity set to no limit. FPS is at 53. I turn the complexity down to 100k to get 7 of the 21 to appear as gray blobs. My FPS climbed to 60 FPS, an increase of only 7 FPS. Not worth it to my mind to put up with gray blobs for such a marginal increase.

[Ardy Lay]

I use LL's viewer.  It displays how long the rendering each avatar in the scene takes, in microseconds, and has a setting to not render avatars that have taken over a set amount of time.  Not sure how it might decide to again render an avatar if they reduce their complexity so they will take less than the limit time to render.  Is this some of Beq's work contributed upstream?

[Paul Hexem]

1 hour ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Well I am currently standing in a club with 21 others with complexity set to no limit. FPS is at 53. I turn the complexity down to 100k to get 7 of the 21 to appear as gray blobs. My FPS climbed to 60 FPS, an increase of only 7 FPS. Not worth it to my mind to put up with gray blobs for such a marginal increase.

Buckshot increase, like I said.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

5 hours ago, Perrie Juran said:

Perhaps the horse has been out of the barn too long but shouldn't Merchants be required to post the complexity of the clothes and other wearables they sell on the marketplace.

All of us pay attention to the Land Impact of rezzables we buy.  Why not the impact of the clothes we buy also?

Most of us live by the mantra, "No demo, no sale." But beyond checking how good clothes actually look by demoing,  how many of us look at the complexity before we buy?

Having to list the complexity would bring more awareness to the issue and also finally embarrass some merchants into being more serious about optimizing their offerings.

It could make for a better SL for all of us.

 

No, because

*technical explanation mode activated*

Complexity scores have been shown to be completely misleading and utterly useless hot garbage nonsense  that do nothing but give ignorant bigots another reason to ***** about other people.

*end technical explanation mode*

 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

3 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

Hmmm...I think I'll go by what LL says, and the system they set up....who is this Beq being touted as the God of SL with all knowledge?

Short version? 

He's the guy who makes the viewer 70 % of Secondlifers use instead of the hot mess that is the official LL fail viewer with its broken useless complexity garbage.

[ChinRey]

8 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

who is this Beq being touted as the God of SL with all knowledge?

Beq Janus is one of the three Firestorm developers and the one who does most of the development of maintenance of Fs. She's also the only person I know of who is both a developer of SL/OS related software and a skilled content creator.

8 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

Do does this mean I bring in laggy-assed mesh and not take the trouble of optimizing it?

It's mostly about fitted mesh so fortunately it's not that relevant to content creators like you and me, Luna.

[Ardy Lay]

Is all this hooliganism in mesh attachments why some of them delete themselves when rezzed on the ground for inspection?

[ChinRey]

23 hours ago, Ardy Lay said:

I use LL's viewer.  It displays how long the rendering each avatar in the scene takes, in microseconds, and has a setting to not render avatars that have taken over a set amount of time.

Oh, I didn't know LL had adopted it for the official viewer too. That's the feature Beq was working on when she wrote the blogpost me and Arielle linked to.

Unlike LL's own jellydoll function this feature actually works as intended. It's not relevant to ARC and the jellydoll function though. It's a completely separate and more reliable system.

For those not familiar with it, select "Improve graphics speed" in the "World" menu, click on the "Avatars nearby" button and adjust the "Hide the most complex avatars..." slider to a suitable amount. The setting you want depends on how powerful your computer is so it's impossible to give any general advice.

---

Maybe I should explain a little what it's about (WARNING: Long explanation probably only for those who just have to know how thing works).

1. Monitor frame rate

As everybody probably know, a TV or a computer monitor works by drawing a new picture several times a second to create the illusion of movement. Each of these pictures is called a frame. Standard frame rate for a monitor is 60 fps (frames per second) which is more than enough to create smooth animations. Some monitors may have a frame rate as low as 30 fps (which is still more than enough for most people), high speed ones can be as high as 144. VR headsets are usually set to 90 fps.

2. Viewer frame rate

The viewer frame rate is how fast the render engine can create new pictures to be displayed. If this is lower than the monitor's, the monitor will have to redraw the same picture while it's waiting for the next one. If it's higher, the monitor will skip some of the pictures. So the actual frame rate you get is always the lowest of the two.

Obviously there's no point in having a viewer frame rate higher than the monitor's and it's strongly recommended to set a max frame rate in the graphics preferences either by enabling Vsync (which automatically sets the viewer's max fps to the same as the monitor's) or (for Firestorm) setting it manually.

3. Good fps values

This is different for different people and depends on your health, your age, your focus and lots of other factors. But we need a standard of course.

• 10 fps is not good but us humans are good at adjusting our view of the surroundings and the longer we watch, the less noticeable the jaggedness tend to become. Although it's not ideal, many people can live with it.
• Good old fashioned TVs and movies typically have a frame of 24 fps which is a bit on the low side but not lower than what most humans can be satisfied with.
• With 40 fps most people will never notice any jaggedness at all on a screen.
• 60 fps should be more than good enough for all human beings for display on a screen (although there may be some extreme cases who can still see the picture jump from frame to frame).
• 90 fps is regarded as good for VR headsets (actually 180 fps since 3D viewing requires separate images for each eye).

As a very general rule of thumb: 20 is acceptable, 40 is good, 60 great and anything higher is overkill.

4. Render time vs frame rate

Render time is measured in microseconds (μs) and as the name implies it's the time it takes for the viewer to create the image of an object, an avatar or a whole scene. If the viewer runs out of time, the frame rate drops.

• If you want 20 fps, the viewer has 50,000 μs to create the whole picture, avatars, objects, everything.
• 40 fps: 25,000 μs
• 60 fps: 16,667 μs

Now, if you look at illustration no. 7 in Beq's blogpost, you see the laggiest avatar had 46,000 ARC (which is very loow) and took 4820 μs on Beq's computer. I don't know what hardware Beq has but I'm quite sure it's well above average. Let's say it would take an average viewer 10,000 μs to render that particular avatar (it's probably much higher). Five of them in the scene and we're down to 20 fps even before we take everything else in the surrounding into account. Ten such 49,000 ARC avatars and most people in SL will have serious trouble keeping their frame rate at an acceptable level.

By comparasion, the 14th avatar listed in the illustration had 128,000 ARC (way over the recommended setting for the jellydoll function) and took 1,553 μs to render. Let's again assume the average SL computer is half as fast as Beq's so 3,000 μs. Five such avatars and you should still be able to keep a nice and smooth frame rate (unless there are other heavy items in the scene of course), ten of them and your computer should still manage a frame rate higher than what you see on your TV.

Edited July 22, 2023 by ChinRey
Typos

[Ceka Cianci]

Honestly, Some days I think I'm just  too complex of an avatar for the average viewer..

I'm thinking about getting a tattoo for my cleavage and back side that say's, Viewer discretion advised..

 

[AmeliaJ08]

10 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

What would most likely create a big offender?

And do you know, do particles actually create lag for people?  I had to take off my particles at that event where they tried to optimize the experience... some cute little crescent moon particles floating out of me, and it was traumatizing.

Lag... not really. There's a lot of false SL wisdom as far as things like that, the actual hardware 'cost' of rendering these simple particle effects is pretty small.

It depends really, all a particle effect is doing is using some basic functions. I have seen some silliness where a high resolution texture was used as a particle, it can lead to big ugly grey squares floating around before the asset server has a chance to deliver the actual texture to everyone (you may have seen this effect when SL isn't performing well) but once it is loaded... it's just another alpha texture, no different to any other.

I suppose many people and places might just see particle effects as superfluous and given how they can move around in other peoples vision might prefer to just have a blanket ban on them, they are probably the #1 griefers tool in the wrong hands after all and regardless of how simple they are they do represent a small load on people's hardware.

 

[ChinRey]

5 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Lag... not really. There's a lot of false SL wisdom as far as things like that, the actual hardware 'cost' of rendering these simple particle effects is pretty small.

That's a truth with modifications. A few particles aren't going to cause any significant problems for any reasonably modern computer. A massive number of them, however, can bring even the butchest game computer to tears and make it beg for mercy.

Edited July 21, 2023 by ChinRey

[AmeliaJ08]

Just now, ChinRey said:

That's a truth with modifications. A few particles aren't going to cause any significant problems for any reasonably modern computer. A massive number of them, however, can bring even the butchest ghame computer to tears and make it beg for mercy.

Everything in moderation

 

 

[Katherine Heartsong]

12 hours ago, Marigold Devin said:

I don't care if they do or don't include the complexity of their clothes, because my dear Perrie, as long as my bum doesn't look big in it, I don't give a hoot what the complexity is. 😆

@Marigold Devin be singing the truth.

Edited July 21, 2023 by Katherine Heartsong

[Katherine Heartsong]

11 hours ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

Firestorm tells you whenever your complexity changes, its easy to put something on , then take it off again to see how complex the item is.

I strive to keep my complexity to under 150 K 😁

100K is usually my max, and I can get formally dolled up for usually no more than 50–60K. There are a few pieces of jewellery I bought that I now regret because 40K for a simple necklace is just stupid.

[Arielle Popstar]

The complexity numbers from what I have seen are highly dependent on the level of detail a mesh object is uploaded with, so much so that a typical mesh body can vary between 2000 to 300,000 just by adjusting the Medium, Low and LOD settings between the default settings or 0 for all three. The vertices and triangles of the object seem to have less bearing on complexity then the LOD. That is the current situation in Opensim and likely the same or close to for SL.

[Luna Bliss]

9 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

12 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

Hmmm...I think I'll go by what LL says, and the system they set up....who is this Beq being touted as the God of SL with all knowledge?

Short version? 

He's the guy who makes the viewer 70 % of Secondlifers use instead of the hot mess that is the official LL fail viewer with its broken useless complexity garbage.

Yes I like Firestorm much better, so kudos to Goddess Beq!  

[Perrie Juran]

After further reading on this subject I have decided to put my opinion "on hold" for now until LL figures something out.

Coincidentally the subject came up in this weeks Content Creators User Group with Linen Lab today.

From Inara Pey's notes on the meeting:

"

ARC  – Avatar Render Cost

• Intended to be a means of calculating the overall cost of rendering individual avatars by the viewer, ARC has long been acknowledged as inaccurate.
• Currently, the project to adjust both ARC calculations and the actual cost of rendering in-world objects to make them more reasonable – Project ARCTan – remains inactive."

I won't paste the rest of Inara's notes here, they are somewhat lengthy, but they are definitely worth reading.

https://modemworld.me/2023/07/21/2023-week-29-sl-ccug-meeting-summary-senra-gltf-etc/

[Lindal Kidd]

On 7/20/2023 at 9:03 PM, ChinRey said:

No!

The avatar rendering complexity number is just a joke and does not in any way reflect how heavy an avatar actually is to render. Look at this post on Beq's blog: http://beqsother.blogspot.com/2022/03/how-to-use-new-firestorm-performance.html

Scroll down to illustration no. 7 on the page. It's a list of the avatars that were in the area when Beq did the test with their ARC numbers and the actual render time they took. The most telling comparasion is perhaps between the first and 14th avatar on the list: A third of the ARC = three times as high actual render cost!

If I understand Beq right, LL has done some tweaks after that test to make the ARC figures a little bit closer to the truth but only a little bit - a drop in the ocean.

Now, if LL had adopted Beq's code for measuring actual render load or something similar to calculate ARC, I would have agreed it would be a good idea. But they haven't and they won't. As it is now, ARC is just a way to shame and block people with perfectly safe and sound low lag avatars and let the big "offenders" go free.

Chin, you are quite correct. Nevertheless, I still pay very close attention to Avatar Complexity. I might not worry about it when demo'ing clothing, because most clothing adds little to your complexity. But I do take note of it when assembling an outfit. Hair and jewelry are the biggest contributors. I have one beautiful jewelry set that I never wear anymore because it shoots my complexity up over 400,000. I have a lot of very pretty flexi hairstyles that I seldom wear, for the same reason.

But why pay attention to a number that is not really a good indicator of how much you are lagging everyone down? In a word, vanity.

When I take the time to assemble an outfit, I want to be seen, and not just as a gray blob. If I keep my Avatar Complexity below 100K, or better yet below 50K, most people will see me as fully rendered.

[Luna Bliss]

52 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

I have one beautiful jewelry set that I never wear anymore because it shoots my complexity up over 400,000. I have a lot of very pretty flexi hairstyles that I seldom wear, for the same reason.

Yeah I had a ring with 250,000 in complexity.....it went into the trash.

God I've got to find that setting again that makes the message pop up on my screen telling me what my complexity is STOP...it ruins some video shots.  I think I remember where it needs to be unchecked now that I think about it.

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Chin, you are quite correct. Nevertheless, I still pay very close attention to Avatar Complexity. I might not worry about it when demo'ing clothing, because most clothing adds little to your complexity. But I do take note of it when assembling an outfit. Hair and jewelry are the biggest contributors. I have one beautiful jewelry set that I never wear anymore because it shoots my complexity up over 400,000. I have a lot of very pretty flexi hairstyles that I seldom wear, for the same reason.

But why pay attention to a number that is not really a good indicator of how much you are lagging everyone down? In a word, vanity.

When I take the time to assemble an outfit, I want to be seen, and not just as a gray blob. If I keep my Avatar Complexity below 100K, or better yet below 50K, most people will see me as fully rendered.

Jewellery is so often the cause of huge complexity and it's so common that it genuinely makes it hard to buy.

I can only assume that creators often work on products at a large scale and then scale them for export without reducing mesh complexity despite the huge number of very tiny triangles now being essentially invisible to the eye, it must be difficult to work on such tiny things though.

 

[Ardy Lay]

1 hour ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

creators often work on products at a large scale

loupe vision

It's like tunnel vision in that one focuses so much they miss what others are seeing.  It's a hazard to oneself in many ways.  In the real world a jeweler can die in a fire when perfecting a piece of jewelry.  In Second Life, perfection is often the enemy of usable.

[Psyche Starling]

On 7/25/2023 at 10:05 AM, Lindal Kidd said:

Chin, you are quite correct. Nevertheless, I still pay very close attention to Avatar Complexity. I might not worry about it when demo'ing clothing, because most clothing adds little to your complexity. But I do take note of it when assembling an outfit. Hair and jewelry are the biggest contributors. I have one beautiful jewelry set that I never wear anymore because it shoots my complexity up over 400,000. I have a lot of very pretty flexi hairstyles that I seldom wear, for the same reason.

I've got a dress in my inventory. First time I put it on, I put on everything in the folder and my complexity shot up to 500,000. 😲

I thought it was the flexi skirt. Nope. Systematically took off every piece until I found the culprit. It was two ornamental roses on the belt. They blended in with the dress such that they could barely be seen anyway. Without them, I was a very manageable complexity of like 40,000 or so. Roses went into the trash.

[BillFletcher]

Merchants should not be required to do anything other than to deliver what they advertise. If a consumer wants specific things from a merchant that they don't offer, the consumer should just shop elsewhere.