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Avatar Rendering Complexity? Nevermind.


LolitaFrance Anthony
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I just changed back to using my human avatar, after using a tiny avatar for the past several years. Now I'm seeing the popup thing called Avatar Rendering Complexity.

When I use my human avatar the only objects I can wear are hair and shoes, beyond that my number is maxed out and I look like human shaped jelly to everybody? This is what its come down to?

Edit ~ Ibuprofen finally stopped my headache, and I can think a little bit better. I guess there's no work-around for the issue. I'll just permanently use my tiny avatar, with an Avatar Rendering Complexity of 25529. I refuse to look like a gummy bear in the shape of a person to everybody around me, while I look normal to myself.

 

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If you are completely naked other than hair and shoes with no makeup, tats or jewelry, you need to buy new hair and shoes as they are way off the scale of avatar rendering complexity, or the people that see you as a jellybean have very low end or very old computers.

You should educate yourself about this issue by reading this: https://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Avatar-Rendering-Complexity/ta-p/2967838

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I agree with Amethyst , but i'm missing a very important number in your complaint: what is your ARC set to?

Without many problem you can put that to 150.000/250.000 just see how your grahic card responds to it, keep an eye on the temperature.

Of course there are many who still go over 250.000 but that is realy not needed.

Lot of people with a unrealistic high ARC will tell you to put the slider on unlimited... be wise, just tell them to get down and not want to fry your machine.

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LolitaFrance Anthony wrote:

I just changed back to using my human avatar, after
...
several years
.

....

I guess there's no work-around for the issue. I'll just permanently use my tiny avatar, with an Avatar Rendering Complexity of 25529. I refuse to look like a gummy bear in the shape of a person to everybody around me, while I look normal to myself.

 

The part in bold is the entirety of your problem. You are wearing hair and shoes which are several years old. Standards for those in particular have changed a great deal in recent years. Update them to better choices and your complexity will plummet.

System clothing doesn't add much, if anything, to the ARC. Flexi skirts do. Jewellery, especially the old prim-heavy ones, can be outrageous in their rendering cost.

The work around is just learning how the costs work and making better choices in what you wear. If you can't be parted from that particular hairstyle or anything else, lower your complexity in other things till you find a balance which suits you.And it's not a big deal if others can't see you in all your glory. Those of us who tend to keep our settings low while we shop or travel around probably have our minds on other things.

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Your hair and shoes must be horribly made, because they eat up ressources they shouldn't be consuming. You can look very detailed and wonderful with lots of extras and even a mesh body without going over 100.000. In the end you can't influence if someone sees you as a JellyDoll or not, but being mindful of it helps a lot. Many people chose to cut off rendering somewhere around 250.000-300.000, so staying below that is a good idea. (Just don't freak out on shopping sims, because people there tend to reduce the rendering to an absolute minimum to have a better shopping experiance in crowded sims).

In the end avatar rendering complexity isn't there to ruin your day, but to make Second Life more bearable for those with weaker computer set ups. Its impact has always been there, but now LL gave people an easier controll on avoiding render-intensive avatars.

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They are all great answers above.

You really need to audit the weight of your attachments one by one and see which are blowing you out of the water. 80K-120K should be quite fine and will allow most people to see you (A few people using very old computers won't, but it's not a great loss)

If you use Firestorm you can also turn that annoying message off, their site has the commands.

Get your av to about 80K-120K (very doable) - turn off the annoying message - and then it's just like nothing changed.

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The problem is that since SL opened, there have been no real limits on the amount of rendering resources your avatar can eat up, so content creators have had no incentive to learn how to optimize your work and framerates have suffered.

Recently LL introduced the "jelly dolls" feature which helps increasing framerates by de-rendering avatars around you with exceptionally high draw weight. Unfortunately, LL is bad at diseminating information about SL updates (why is there no "new changes" popup when you log in?)

 The good news is that optimizing content does not mean worse looking content, so if content creators do take to optimizing their work SL could end up looking better than ever and with higher framerates to boot.

 

(Except draw weight barely takes textures into consideration so that will always be dragging your framerates down. Dammit, LL.)

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Avatar complexity is a score for how hard it is for a graphics card to render what it's seeing. But its an objective score rather than relative.

Which is to say that you and I both look at person C and they will (or should) have the same score.

- But we might have different graphics cards with different capabilities.

 

A good thing to do is set your graphics preferences to 'default' and see what score it puts in there for Complexity. I personally thing it allows too much... or maybe my card is a lot better than I thought it was...

But what is supposed to happen here is that an object which is 'dangerous' to your graphics card get de-rendered and turned into a simplified jelly.

- That can be because the object will cause you to perceive lag, or because the object will crash your viewer, or because the object will overheat your graphics chip and fry your computer... (this last one is rare, but it does happen to a very few people).

 

I generally tell people to try and get under the complexity score they were using during the beta of all of this; 80,000. The more you go over that score the more likely you're going to be causing problems for someone around you.

For myself I also set my complexity limit at close to 80,000.

- If you're noticing there's two concepts here for the same score.

 

One: Your complexity score - this is how hard it is for the computers of those who see you to render you. The higher this score is, the more potential you have of harming other people's SL experience. So good manners says to keep it as low as you can.

Two: Your complexity limit - this is the score at which your computer will turn others into Jelly in order to protect YOU. People above this limit are hurting YOU, so your computer de-renders them into Jelly like a bloke putting on a condom to avoid an STD. If you raise this score above the default, you're having 'unprotected-SL', and your graphics engine might get cooties.

 

One thing I hear a lot from people is that they cannot get their score down because they like all their bling and hair that cuts through their body when they dance and those sculpty raver-pants they bought they bought in 2009...

- I can run out there in a mesh body, necklace, bracelet(s), tiarra, dress, hair, fangs, tails, cat ears, mesh eyes, platform shoes, whiskers, sunglasses, belly piercing, and more... and keep my score in the 40,000s. Almost 15,000 of my complexity is taken up by "neko parts". So humans can do everything I do on 25,000... So... no excuses. Just shop.

You just have to buy things that you demo, and check the complexity score before buying...

 

Often the highest complexity people I meet are SL nudists on pre-mesh default avatars... So the common excuses... that's just people who don't update their fashion. Still rocking the bell bottoms and pet rocks of the 1970s... Still even rocking... Trends have moved on.

 

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Mew! I am annoyed I never created an Alt with the last name Catnap :3

Same here, my tail and eats and fangs are not really that heavy. Most of my ARC comes from my really heavy Gos feet. They are very high poly and wearing them pushes me up to 60K - but they do look so nice, so I allow myself that one sin. As penance for obscene counts on my feet I removed almost all my jewellry.

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That's pretty low. Generally, any given toaster should be able to render avatars with a draw weight below 30,000.

As for fault, I place the blame squarely at LL's feet. They created a virtual world where anyone could dive in and start creating, which is awesome, but they failed to take into account that someone with no game design experience isn't going to know why it's so important to keep polygon counts low and texture memory small.

If they'd put reasonable caps on both, there never would have been a need for the jelly dolls feature and everyone would already be putting effort into creating the best looking content with the lowest resource footprint, making it easy to put together a detailed, amazing looking avatar without making anyone's videocard cry.

 

(They really needed to cap texture use on enviornments, too. Maybe by having textures count towards land impact cost.)

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sl introduced jellydolls or firestorm? i thought it was firestorm.

 

i know i'll get ripped for this but........

personally i don't see the point. yeah i get all the "reasons", but the logic seems to me to be "hey i know how to reduce lag, lets not render everything completely". how much inspired thinking did that take?

that's actually counter to the idea of a virtual universe.

that is so far from an elegant solution to the problem of lag, in fact it is no solution at all.

so you spent all those lindens on avatars, clothing and jewerly just so others can't see it?

sure lag is an issue but jellydolls just create another issue, some crap i'd rather not look at. is it any different than when avatars used to load as gray bodies?

i remember when LL came out with server side baking and what have you, bragging how now you won't see anymore gray avatars(turns out in reality you don't see anything where prior at least you know someone was there), jellydolls are now essentially the same thing of a different color.

 

 

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I like being able to set rendering complexity.  What i've found is if I go to a crowded club, or sometimes even a slightly crowded club, avatars take ages to rez and there's also bad lag.  I've made a custom 'club' complexity setting of 150,000. When I activate it, about half the people usually turn into colourful jellies.  And the other half then rez more quickly.  But the best bit is that if I then go back to the previous complexity setting, the jellies then render almost instantly. 

I can't understand why so many people have such high complexity - it's not as though their avatars are necessarily the most realistic or best looking, it might just be that they're unwittingly wearing mesh socks made from 10,000 polygons  and containing 15 scripts! 

I think LL needs to bring in a counterpart to resident-set complexity.  That would be in the form of allowing land owners to set a complexity limit for avatars visiting their land.  

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shaniqua Sahara wrote:

sl introduced jellydolls or firestorm? i thought it was firestorm.

 

i know i'll get ripped for this but........

personally i don't see the point. yeah i get all the "reasons", but the logic seems to me to be "hey i know how to reduce lag, lets not render everything completely". how much inspired thinking did that take?

that's actually counter to the idea of a virtual universe.

that is so far from an elegant solution to the problem of lag, in fact it is no solution at all.

so you spent all those lindens on avatars, clothing and jewerly just so others can't see it?

sure lag is an issue but jellydolls just create another issue, some crap i'd rather not look at. is it any different than when avatars used to load as gray bodies?

i remember when LL came out with server side baking and what have you, bragging how now you won't see anymore gray avatars(turns out in reality you don't see anything where prior at least you know someone was there), jellydolls are now essentially the same thing of a different color.

 

 

LL created the "jellydolls" feature.

 

 

And, honestly, I agree. More or less. LL created the lag problem by refusing to curb bad building habits. (Or rather, not knowing enough about content creation themselves to see that this would be a problem. This is why you hire content creators, LL, to know how your own product works so you can do a better job developing it.)

Still, given that LL can't go back in time and fix the past, being able to derender excessively laggy avatars at least gives us some control over our own SL experience, and it shines a light on the problem. Hopefully this will convince content creators to optimize their creations. In the long term that would be the best outcome.

 LL also needs to give us tools to know how much attachments are going to affect our render weight before we buy it. The Marketplace should include a space for creators to include draw weight information, although since LL decided to make draw weight numbers different from computer to computer I'm not sure exactly what content creators are supposed to tell us.

They clearly did not think their brilliant plan through.

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shaniqua Sahara wrote:

sl introduced jellydolls or firestorm? i thought it was firestorm.

 

i know i'll get ripped for this but........

personally i don't see the point. yeah i get all the "reasons", but the logic seems to me to be "hey i know how to reduce lag, lets not render everything completely". how much inspired thinking did that take?

that's actually counter to the idea of a virtual universe.

that is so far from an elegant solution to the problem of lag, in fact it is no solution at all.

so you spent all those lindens on avatars, clothing and jewerly just so others can't see it?

sure lag is an issue but jellydolls just create another issue, some crap i'd rather not look at. is it any different than when avatars used to load as gray bodies?

i remember when LL came out with server side baking and what have you, bragging how now you won't see anymore gray avatars(turns out in reality you don't see anything where prior at least you know someone was there), jellydolls are now essentially the same thing of a different color.

 

 

Server side baking renders the standard avatar, not attachments. That worked fine except it came out not long before people started wearing mostly attachments. Now you often get to see a face and perhaps hands via server side baking, but most of the rest of the avatar is attachments that rez (or don't rez) the same way anything else does.

Jellydolls are designed to help reduce lag in a place that LL can't control - people's computers. It allows people to get better framerates (or be in SL at all) by their computers not rendering complex avatars. If you don't want to see jellydolls, set your complexity limit to the max and don't worry about it.

As for a virtual universe, because everything is rendered by the client computers and there are all sorts of settings the user can use to vary what renders and at what quality, people generally *don't* see things the same in SL.

 

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