Visual Complexity

[Christin73]

After an update to the viewer lastnight i noticed everything I put on ups my "visual complexity". First off what is visual complexity? Is there any way to turn that off from popping up everytimg you put clothing on or tp someplace?

[Oz Linden]

---

Christin73 wrote:

After an update to the viewer lastnight i noticed everything I put on ups my "visual complexity". First off what is visual complexity? Is there any way to turn that off from popping up everytimg you put clothing on or tp someplace?

---

If you look at that message, you'll notice that the words "visual complexity" are a link... if you click on it, it will take you to a page that explains what it it is and why you should care about it.

There is a debug setting that controls how long that message is displayed; at the next update, you'll be able to set that to zero to supress them entirely (but you shouldn't).

[Nalates Urriah]

This is Avatar Complexity Information (ACI). If you want all the gory details I have a series of articles: http://blog.nalates.net/?s=ACI&submit=Search

A setting in Preferences->Graphics - Advanced controls what this number does. To reduce the amount of work a viewer has to do, avatars with an ACI over the value you set render as Jelly Dolls... single color avatars officially called muted avatars.

It is possible to disable this feature by setting the value to unlimited. BUT... use a high value like 300,000 or 350,000 and take advantage of the protection against video creashers used by griefers. For good performance use 150,000.

As more people use this viewer you will start to see a popup that tells you how many people are refusing to render your avatar.

The point of this feature is to be like Land Impact Cost, but for avatars. Prior to this viewer there has been no consequence for designing expensive to render avatars and clothes. This viewer will change that. There will incentive for people to perchase low ACI avatars and clothes, which is easy. While I see avatars with 350,000 ACI and up I can wear Slink hands, feet, and body along with mesh hair, shoes, and clothes and have an ACI of 50,000 to 80,000. 

 

[Conifer Dada]

Hopefully this feature will encourage people to watch their complexity.  I tried it out at a club.  I set the limit to about 200,000 and one person near me was blanked out.  I didn't notice any improvement in performance but then I lowered the limit to 150,000 and 5 or 6 people were blanked out and there was a marked improvemnt in frame rate.  

I think this new feature will teach people to keep their complexity down.  Sometimes high complexity is traceable to something like a belt or necklace that has so many polygons that it looks almost the same in 'wireframe' as in normal view.  

I'm thinking of stating my complexity limit on my profile.  If lots of people do so, others will come to realise that if they 'load' their avatar too much, most people will see them as a solid plain colour.

[Aethelwine]

Is visual complexity the same as render weight? If so isn't that metric broken what with it appearing to reward high triangle and vertice mesh in heads and bodies? The catwa heads for example are insanely complicated and yet it's render weight is low