Cerise

First: do not panic. The default settings for this feature do nothing.

This was dropped into viewer-development-shining-fixes a couple days ago. Changeset here for the far too easily amused.

There are two new debug settings, if you set them you can automatically hide avatars with performance sapping attachments.

If an avatar's attachments are heavier than the thresholds you choose, it will be rendered with the same gray impostor that is used for muted avatars. This feature only does the gray impostor thing, it does not mute their chat etc.

The feature does not hide your own avatar.

The debug settings are:

• RenderAutoMuteByteLimit - Maximum bytes of attachments before an avatar is automatically visually muted (0 for no limit).
  
  Start with a value around 2000000 (2 million) to experiment, that is about where avatars with crazy attachment loads start to disappear. Lower will make more avatars disappear, the default 0 will make everybody render as normal.
  
  
• RenderAutoMuteSurfaceAreaLimit - Maximum surface area of attachments before an avatar is automatically visually muted (0 for no limit).
  
  Start with a value around 100 to experiment, that is where avatars with lots of stringy alpha flexi blingy stuff start to disappear. Lower will make more avatars disappear, the default 0 will make everybody render as normal.

There is a new menu item, Develop>Render Metadata>Attachment Bytes, that will be useful to pick byte and area thresholds. The older draw weight display is a composite of several things, so it does not have any convenient correspondence to these new settings.

Vaelissa Cortes

This is a very good thing!

Ok, people, stop loading your avatars full of BS and get to optimizing!

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Eunoli Rain

This could be awesome for big group roleplay and other events for two reasons: 1) to help with the lag that always comes with the dressed-up group and 2) people like to be seen so they'll be more careful what they wear.

Faithless Babii

ohmai..thats a great thing. Now I can attend venues that I found just soo lagged out by blingtards and the like..hurrah!

KT Kingsley

Is there a way to measure the surface area of your own avatar's attachments? And is the "bytes of attachments" the same as the srcipt memory usage we're more familiar with?

Innula Zenovka

But the flip-side of that is that big group roleplay won't necessarily be enhanced if half the participants look to you like grey cut-outs. One of people's main complaints about such events is that avatars don't rez properly and look like grey ghosts (that's one of things I dislike about crowded clubs when first I arrive). Unless I've misunderstood, this ensures that'll happen. I'd far rather play round with my graphics settings (draw distance, in particular, and turning off attached lights and particles to kill bling) before resorting to that.

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Free Xue

Then don't turn the debug settings on? I dunno, this seems a win win to me.

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Cerise

Develop>Render Metadata>Attachment Bytes does show values for you, even though you cannot visually mute yourself. The byte value is what the viewer uses only, it varies with LoD and it does not include server side stuff like script load.

Leah Mayo

I rather want to strip them naked than gray out

Innula Zenovka

Yeah. But what I'm saying is that, if someone uses this, the cure seems almost as bad as the ill, only in a different way. Maybe I'm missing the point, but it doesn't seem to me to be tremendously useful, except maybe in very extreme circumstances.

Khamon

It may reduce render lag in your client but will do nothing for all the data per avatar being sent to every client in the sim. I'd like to believe that people will want to be seen and learn to dress efficiently; but my SL experience, of people being willing to patiently wait ten or fifteen minutes for an environment to render, has me thinking they'll just consider me a pompous fool for not wanting to see their faburadious dregs.

Heavens did I just say all that in one sentence?

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Andromeda Rage

Meesa liking dis.

Perhaps I won't have to selectively derender the 5-billion-attachments lagtards as often now...

Darien Caldwell

I suppose it will be great for people with low end machines. I don't see any other reason people would purposely want to break their immersion.

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Rebel Television

I think immersion could be aided a bit while leaving this feature on, by being able to create a whitelist of people who you want to render normally even when they're past the threshold, that way you still get the performance benefits of filtering Noober McDouche, who may not be aiding your immersion much in the first place.

Aschen

It'd be nice if they gave that option for, say, a certain radius within your avatar. So anyone within immediate conversation distance you can see just fine, but anyone a block away gets the dub avie. Be especially helpful for crowded rp sims. That way you can still rez the nice build.

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Innula Zenovka

Isn't that what avatar imposters do? Are they not working any more?

Aribeth Zelin

No, there are people who will refuse to remove their 700 script avies, or at least the heavily scripted parts, even for a class type situation. I doubt they'll bother for this, either.

And I can see a major use - for djing or hosting. You'll still hear people, you'll still be able to be friendly and welcoming, but you won't be to where the lag is makng yo loe leters, ethr.

But there is a problem with this - its scripts that slow things down to a crawl on the server end of things, and that's where anyone with a fast connection and good computer is getting the lag from - that and the physics engine having to deal with all the avatars.

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Hitomi Tiponi

mmm - that is going to be a pain to code into skin preferences, hopefully LL will put something in soon.

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Eata

There should be official limits, perhaps 10MB data (I imagine a lot of old sculpt stuff is a lot like this) and 2MB scripts.

Nephilaine Protagonist

YAY

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Adeon Writer

Oy, I hope my mesh conversion commission is done soon. Features like this were exactly why I wanted to be rid of all these sculptmaps.

Vaelissa Cortes

Immersion is absolutely destroyed in Second Life already by default. This due to the staggering amount of ill proportioned and unoptimized avatars paired with the poorly scaled areas with sub par build quality that can be seen almost everywhere.

I was just briefly at an place in-world that was full of terribly proportioned avatars with face lights, 7-14MBs of script memory and 400+ script times (per person). They also had outfits full of excessive sculpts and unnecessary 1024 textures galore. The sheer frustration of seeing this kind of crap everywhere is a large part of why I rarely leave my home sim.

Having such avatars immediately derendered with no action on my part, and better yet, having them know that people can't see them due to all the junk they have, would be great.

Adeon Writer

Wait, wouldn't profiling all of this data be a FPS hit in of itself? Viewing ARC values is a FPS hit, after all.

eighthdwarf Checchinato

Sure...
some examples why such automatisms are bad:

• You're at a party, want to participate - and wonder why nobody replies to you: reason is, you've been automuted.
• You're in a RP sim, want to play your character, but everyone ignores you, and your RP is over before it began. Reason is, you've been automuted because of the textures on your RP outfit, and the scripts in your RP attachments.
• You're in a BDSM sim on the way to your Master/Mistress, and want to approach them, or want to meet other subs - but you're ignored by everyone: your collar and cuffs and stuff which you need for your play caused you to become automuted.
• You're the bride at a SL wedding, wearing a complicated and beautiful dress, and a necklace and earrings and a tiara - but nobody recognizes you nor reacts to your presence, because you've been automuted.

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Leah Mayo

Don't know if that's possible, but I think land settings would be a better place for the new settings - the server simply wouldn't send info about "too heavy avatars" to the viewers, including the offender themself.

And if the server could derender particular attachments of an avatar untill its total ARC is below the limit set by the land owner, then my dream of stripping them naked would come true!