Second Life: The Jelly Babies Are Coming

I went to the Open Source UG Meeting this morning. Not something I usually do. I had some questions and this UG is a good place to get certain questions answered.

So… what is a jelly baby? The picture explains it better than words.

Render Muting Effect

Render Muting Effect

The solid color avatars in the image are what we call jelly babies. I first heard Whirly Fizzle use the term. I like it. I’ve also heard avatars rendered this way called Gumby or Gummies. I talked about this in: Second Life Performance: Render Muting

Avatars render this way when we set a limit on avatar render weight. The two main Debug Settings are:

  • RenderAutoMuteRenderWeightLimit – Maximum render weight before an avatar is rendered as a simple impostor (0 to not use this limit). – 0 to 4,294,967,295
  • RenderAutoMuteFunctions – Developing feature to render some avatars using simple impostors or colored silhouettes. (Set to 7 for all functionality) – 0 = off, 7=All on, values from 1 to 6 give inconsistent results.

The first sets the limit and the second enables the limit, turns it on.

The plan is these settings are to be moved into the viewer User Interface (UI). I was curious where the Lab is in that process, so today was a day to ask.

Oz Linden tells us the code is already in the viewer. The feature is waiting on some server side changes. Part of the feature is to be something that will let the user know how many people are seeing them as a jelly baby. No word on how this will work or look. But, it should be interesting when it hits the main viewer.

For now you can check render costs this way:

We now find the render cost value displayed in two different ways. Try:Top Menu->Advanced (press Ctrl-Alt-D if you do not have that menu item)->Performance Tools->Show Draw Weight for Avatars. This will display a colored text above avatars showing their ‘render cost’. This does clutter the screen, but makes it easy to see which avatar has what ARC.

The other option is to display the values using: Top Menu Develop (Ctrl-Alt-Q) ->Show Info->Show Avatar Render Info. This puts the information in a table in the lower right area of the screen. You see the same values either way. You do get more information with this display. You will see more of the values used by the Debug Settings, which I’ll get to. (from Render Muting – link above)

Down the road and on the list is a feature to show the increase-decrease in Avatar Render Cost (ARC) when we add or subtract something from our appearance. It isn’t on the short list yet, but maybe this year. See: BUG-7928 – Information on mesh render cost.

3 thoughts on “Second Life: The Jelly Babies Are Coming

  1. I’m really glad LL has quickly identified the issue, grabbed it by the root and provided a clean, sustainable solution instead of adding to UI clutter with yet another clumsy hack…

    Seriously, such a feature should encourage creators to provide optimized, efficient content, not require me to break my view of the world in order to get acceptable performance… But I guess it’s about 12 years too late to start thinking about it, now….

    That whole thing sound DoA to me, and the resources on developing it would have better been spent elsewhere…

  2. Pingback: Second Life Render Cost and Limits | A Kat and A Mouse

  3. Pingback: Second Life 2015 in Review: April 2015 | Nalates' Things & StuffNalates' Things & Stuff

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