Any way to get rid of these lines?

[Chosen Few]

The link limits have always technically been 256 for non-physical objects, and 32 for physical.  In older version of SL, there was an implementation bug, which caused the count to start at zero instead of 1, effectively lowering the limits to 255 and 31.  That has since been fixed.

 

As for the idea of using thirty 1024x1024's, that's just insane.  You shouldn't have that many in an entire scene, let alone on one object.  Every 1024x1024 consumes either 3MB or 4MB of video memory, depending on whether or not there's an alpha channel.  That means thirty of them comes out to somewhere between 90 and 120 megabytes.  If someone has a 128MB video card, you'll be using their entire capacity.  On a 256MB or 512MB card, you'll be using half or a quarter of capacity.  Any of those scenarios can be summed up in three words:  LAG FROM HELL!   Even on a 768MB or 1GB card, the situation wouldn't be pretty.

In the words of Egon Spengler, "This looks extraordinarily bad." 

 

 

 

By the way, thanks for the hugs and such, guys.  Everyone does realize I was only kidding about the whole "Am I invisble" thing, right? 

[Josh Susanto]

I've already been running a bunch of 1024's in one frame without any detectable lag.

How can that be?

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

I'll take Chosen's word for the video memory used by those pictures..and I'll take yours for not having any lag with the pics on your screen. You might get very unpretty results though when the object is worn. Every time you teleport to a new region, all that data needs to be sent to the server. Then all that data needs to be sent to every user on that sim. Let's say 10 people near the object... and 30 3MB textures.... Then you are looking at nearly a Gig of data that needs to be transmitted....wow:) "why oh why is everything flat grey on this sim?"

[leliel Mirihi]

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Josh Susanto wrote:

I understand that most people would consider 4096 or larger to be total overkill, but overkill is subjective.

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This is not subjective. 4096x4096x24 +33% for the mipmap is 64MB for just one wall. That wall by itself would be a lag monster for a significant number of people in sl.

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If I can make an 8192 version of the right kind of photo image,

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256MB for one wall!

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I expect there could be some demand for that, at least as a wall in a sex club or something like that.

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I expect not once people figure out how badly it causes them to lag.

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At a 31 prim limit, I should be able to produce a framed photo at 6144x5120 than an avatar can carry around attached. Most people don't max out their avatar prim limits as quickly or consistently as they do land prim limits, and not everyone has land, but everyone has an avatar.

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I strongly recommend you reconsider this idea. A large number of people in sl do not have enough vram for this kind of thing.

 

 

[leliel Mirihi]

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Josh Susanto wrote:

I've already been running a bunch of 1024's in one frame without any detectable lag.

How can that be?

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You won't see much if any lag until you go over the limit for your video card and then your frame rate will drop by 90% because it will be swapping textures from system memory.

[Josh Susanto]

This makes good sense to me. But the place where I seem to be able to rez about as many 1024's as I want is still consistently less laggy than clubs and telehubs and other places I usually regret ending up.

So, OK, you're all correct; I need to be aware of the lag my projects will cause.

But if people don't care about all the other lag, why should someone care about the lag caused by a hypperreal oil painting?

[Chosen Few]

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Josh Susanto wrote:

 

But if people don't care about all the other lag, why should someone care about the lag caused by a hypperreal oil painting?

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I would submit that people very much DO care about "all the other lag".  It's one of the most often complained about topics in all of SL.  It happens most poeple are too ignorant to look at what actually causes it (their own actions), so they tend to blame it on the system, which means most of the complaints are about the wrong things.  But they are complaints, nonetheless.  Nobody's happy with all the lag in SL, not one bit.

As for your 'oil painting', you seem to be speaking as if you expect it to exist in isolation, as if the lag it causes somehow won't be added to the rest of the lag that's already there.  Take an already laggy scene in SL, throw hundreds of megabytes of additonal texture data to the mix, and you end up with uber lag from hell.

[Medhue Simoni]

Not that I want to encourage Josh to proceed with this, but in any controllable game, there are places for things such as this. Much like was talked about at the last mesh meeting, mirrors cause massive amounts of lag. In any game, you are not going to see a big mirror in the middle of the combat area or in the middle of gameplay. The mirror will be tucked away inside a small bathroom or something similar, so that your pc is not rendering too much in the scene. Of course, you can't really control where people put these items in SL. Overall tho, as a fellow creator, I think this is a terrible idea, and this comes from an art fanatic, who has studied art history extensively. Mirrors, on the other hand, I would love to see in SL.

[Josh Susanto]

I don't intend to prescribe uses to products, but what I have tended to imagine is essentially what Medhue describes.

One reason why people put up huge visual barriers to other sims or even parts of the same sim is to enhance other limits to rendering. 

I don't see why someone can't put a truly hyperreal oil painting inside a 1-prim mesh viewing room at the edge of an island, for example. 

If you look at the total data costs of a lot of what female avatars have for hair and shoes, the painting idea doesn't really seem so extreme, does it? 

[Chosen Few]

There's really no comparison between a processing effect like a mirror, and the memory vampire that is a giant collection of giant textures.  Even if we were talking about an entirely closed system, on its own region, entrable by only one avatar at at time, I still could never condone hundreds of megabytes of memory being dedicated to a cloud pattern on a wall.  It's beyond ridiculous.

[Chosen Few]

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Josh Susanto wrote:

 

One reason why people put up huge visual barriers to other sims or even parts of the same sim is to enhance other limits to rendering.

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That only stops objects from being drawn (assuming object-object occlusion is enabled).  It doesn't stop textures from being downloaded and stored in active memory.

 

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Josh Susanto wrote:

 

I don't see why someone can't put a truly hyperreal oil painting inside a 1-prim mesh viewing room at the edge of an island, for example.

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The whole kit and kaboodle will be downloaded and stored in memory, even if you're standing on the outside of the box, and you never look in.

The physical process of drawing the textures on screen isn't the problem.  Tha'ts easy.  It's the fact that they have to be loaded and kept in memory.

 

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Josh Susanto wrote:

 

If you look at the total data costs of a lot of what female avatars have for hair and shoes, the painting idea doesn't really seem so extreme, does it? 

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Yes, it's still extreme.  Hair and shoes don't add up to hundreds of megabytes of texture memory.  But even if it did, two wrongs don't make a right.

 

 

[Josh Susanto]

So it's just a question of waiting for technical limits to catch up with the demands of the object?

OK, I guess I can wait. 

Plenty of other stuff was "impossible" when I first came to the internet.