Tag Archives: Complexity

Second Life’s Jelly Babies – BUG?

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The coming Quick Graphics Viewer now in RC has some odd behaviors. Well, it is an RC version, so no surprise. One of the ideas with this viewer is to reduce render lag by telling the viewer to avoid rendering complex avatars. These are avatars with lots of high polygon count attachments and large textures that require lots of computer power to render.

The Candy Princess - by Bewitched Difference @ Flickr

The Candy Princess – by
Bewitched Difference @ Flickr

There is a setting in Preferences* that lets you set a personal limit for what you want your viewer to render. Any avatar over that limit will render as a jelly baby. But, if you change the setting to NO LIMIT you’ll find there are still avatars that render as jelly babies. What’s up with that?  Continue reading →

Avatar Complexity Update Week 37

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Second Life™ is getting a new tool to hopefully induce people to reduce avatar generated lag; the Avatar Complexity Rating. I’ve written about it before and I am trying to play with the Project Quick Graphics Viewer version 3.8.4.304761, which adds avatar complexity settings and notices.

Complexity KB Value

Complexity KB Value

The notice that appears in the upper right of the screen just after login tells you your avatar complexity number. I suggested that it be colored, green good and red bad, just as the Show Avatar Render Complexity Information (ARC) display does.

Instead, they added a link in the notice to this SL Wiki page: Avatar Rendering Complexity.

They note the other factors that can cause avatars to be rendered a Jelly Babies;

  • total attachment surface area
  • total attachment byte size

You can change the values of these settings in Debug Settings. See:

  • RenderAvatarMaxNonImposters – The maximum number of avatars closest to your camera who may be fully rendered. Avatars beyond those will be rendered as ‘imposters’, which means that the rendering will be a little simpler and they will be updated less frequently. Increasing this value can cost you in performance if you’re in a crowd. This does not cause them to render as Jelly Babies.
  • RenderAvatarMaxComplexity – Any avatars over this complexity will be drawn as solid color outlines. Changing this value directly may cause problems; use the slider in the advanced graphics preferences floater.
  • RenderAutoMuteSurfaceAreaLimit –The limit for the total surface area of attachments before switching to solid color rendering. The default (10 million square meters) is intended to protect against deliberate abuse and should rarely be encountered.
  • RenderAutoMuteByteLimit – The limit for the total number of bytes of attachments before switching to solid color rendering. The default (10 million bytes) is intended to protect against deliberate abuse and should rarely be encountered.

As you may have guessed, the last two are mostly to stop some griefing issues. But, those settings can be used to improve viewer performance.

Changing RenderAvatarMaxComplexity in the Debug Settings doesn’t seem to be a problem. Whether I change it in the Preferences panel as the Lindens recommend or in Debug Settings the change is reflected in the other. But, getting to the Preferences setting is much easier. Whether changing the setting there affects other settings not affected by using the Debug Setting, I have no information. It is a possibility, but I have not seen anything that leads me to think that happens. But, this is a Project Viewer and it will change.

Link to more pages below…

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