Interesting Debug Settings

Strawberry Singh has a post on her blog titled Debug Me. Whether you follow her blog or Plurking you know she does some great pictures, which is an understatement. In Debug Me she is explaining some of the Debug Settings she uses to improve her pictures. You’ll have to visit her site for her settings. I’ve written a little about the settings from a performance aspect.

  • RenderGlow – This is mostly a visual change with little impact on render time. The viewer has a number of glow settings that do affect performance. So, you can control glow in most any scene of visual and performance aspects. Use your web browsers page search/find on the Debug Settings page to find them all. Some improve the rendering of glow at the cost of a slower render, but it is not a big performance factor.
  • RenderVolumeLODFactor – This changes how objects in SL are rendered. It has an impact on performance, but the amount of impact depends on the scene and camera location. So, you won’t see a 1-to-1 relationship between the setting value and performance. Berry gets good results with the value high, but that is in photos. If you are exploring SL, a setting of 1 or 2 is going to improve rez time and FPS. But, you will see the distorted sculpties and mesh objects that change shape as you get closer or move away. Higher values stop that changing. For photos a large setting can solve the problem sculpties looking funny.

  • RenderUnloadedAvatar – This setting is a matter of personal taste. Once the Shining Project completes it will provide a new render process for avatars, this setting will then be irrelevant. What is does is force the viewer to use Ruth/Roth components to complete the rezzing of an avatar that won’t render. Whatever part of the avatar is missing and preventing render is replaced by a default part. So, what you see may or may not be close to what the avatar really looks like.
  • Meshbytespertriangle – The Debug Settings page describes this setting as: Approximation of bytes per triangle to use for determining mesh streaming cost. I can’t find any information on how the viewer uses this. It may only affect the numbers in the Build Panel, but I don’t know.
  • Meshmaxconcurrentrequests – This setting tells the viewer how many mesh items it can request from the server at one time. Default = 32. If you have a slow or marginal connection, stay with a low setting. This setting is about rez time and should have no visual impact. Nothing breaks if you decrease or increase the setting. So, you can experiment. The setting only matters when you are in an area with lots of mesh objects.
  • MeshminimumByteSize – This is a sister setting of Meshbytespertriangle.
  • YawFromMousePosition – This is a setting that may help you get the image you want. It is described as: Horizontal range over which avatar head tracks mouse position (degrees of head rotation from left of window to right). Possible values: 0-360 with 90 as the default. Smaller numbers will reduce the amount of head turn as the mouse moves across the screen.

 

Unfortunately there is no setting to turn on Berry Style Image… you just have to have some talent.

4 thoughts on “Interesting Debug Settings

  1. LOL I cracked up at the last line, thank you so much Nalates for this detailed post! I am not technical at all so I just go around pressing all the shiny buttons until I get something that looks good, it’s great to have a detailed explanation of each setting. Thanks! <3

    • Welcome 🙂

      Pressing all the buttons is how I learn… I read the instructions last, when nothing works, if at all.

  2. what is the highest possible number we can use for the RenderVolumeLODFactor setting in Debug please?

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