We’re talking about the big events, like fairs, SL birthdays, Burning Man and such…. events that last for days, but you’re lucky to get there because each time you try to you just learn that sim is full and won’t let you in. And while you’re cursing the sim limitations, you know that even if you get there, it would be impossible to walk and see anything.
Lately people got a bit sensitive about lag, so (some of them) try not to wear attachments made of hundreds of prims and all the HUD gadgets they have. Some got a bit oversensitive so they bitch around to anybody that have ARC in yellow of god forbid in red. While some of the things we wear really add to the lag, some are just pure myth. You might want to check Rika Watanabe’s article about lag, but there is something else I want to talk with you here.Let’s say you’re an responsible avatar that doesn’t want to torture yourself and the others, so before you go to the busy event, you strip all the unnecessary things from your outfit. You wear your simplest hair, find some nice clothes that is made of nice textures on system mesh and no prims. You forget about jewelry, you might even go barefoot. Actually, that is almost expected from you.
If you have managed to teleport to this year’s Hair Fair, you probably saw vendors near each of the rezzing points that offer you basic clothes that cause minimum lag. Which was a nice idea. Or not?
Sure, it will make your walking a bit easier. But there is the other side of the coin. As Annyka Bekkers said:
expecting hair shoppers to go *bald* to hairfair is about as realistic as holding an AA meeting at a tavern
If you’ve ever attended a fashion show, in any of the worlds, you know that it’s not only about the fashion on the catwalk. It’s the audience as well. And while one might say it’s all vanity and that you came to see the things not to show yourself, it’s not that easy.
When we want just to see the things we use web, not second life. Point of second life is to be present, and that means to rezz the avatar. And avatar has an identity that is, beside the other things, presented by its look. So what’s the point if we all go there dressed in the same textures? Being somewhere as yourself is not a matter of vanity as much of the proper use of the medium. In that case we could watch the machinima as well and see how the new hair styles look like. But most of us escaped here from the world of television and passive looking. We wanted to be present, we wanted to interact. We also wanted to be ourselves, not just a generic avatars. And "being as yourself" doesn’t mean just having the name tag above the head.
So one is facing the challenging job these days. Since it is not comfortable nor well mannered to go to the busy places with too heavy outfits, it’s advisable to have an outfit for laggy places ready. Short hair, primless clothes made of good textures. Take it as a challenge, to look good and to look like you but with simple and resources-light stuff. Sure, it would do a great deal if fashion bloggers would pick up the idea and teach the young generation that it doesn’t take hundreds of prims to look good and stylish. And that each occasion has appropriate way of dressing.
Oh and yes, that DCS’ should be detached and MystiTool put to sleep. Thanks.
Amusingly, the “hair” in the lag-reduction pack at Hair Fair a sculpty dollop of whipped cream. Scultpies can be more laggy than many hair prims.
Well, the only hair that doesn’t lag is the system hair. But does anybody want to look like Philip? :)
Hi Dandellion, have you read Gwyneth Llewelyn’s up to date explanantion of what causes lag? You can read it here: http://analutetia.com/blog/anatomy-of-lag/
It’s very interesting because most of the things the Hair Fair organisers wanted people to do wouldn’t make a real difference, and at the same time they didn’t ask people to do the things that really would help – like reducing your draw distance.
I went there naked though (PG, but naked) :)
Did you see the post on the SCD blog where they poke fun at people for wearing things “that cause lag” but the story was written by someone who had an enormous draw distance. Talk about arrogant and ignorant.
Yes,m that happens all the time, people are harrasing others about ARC’s and particles while wearing radars and having full draw distance.
Draw ddistance is especially important. Not only that it lags you (which is kinda obvious, system need much more data to download, compute and render) but also everybody around you. Because if we are, let’s say, 300m apart and I have full draw distance, then I request the servers for the data I don’t need but that you do, filling up the bottleneck.
I asked about that two times on plurk (here and here) and as I expected, so many people were not aware of that. Now, imagine how many people ion the grid are living happily rendering everything on the sim they’re on and neighbouring sims, just because their computers and bandwidth can take it, and lagging everybody?
*blushes and timidly raises her hand, with a 256m draw distance*.
I have never ranted about avie induced lag, even if many times the only way to walk around is to leave my dear (and private) laptop and switch to our powerful desktop computer. I don’t assist to events, so never worried too much about ARC thingies.
But now the drawing distance worries me a bit. Not at events, since the organizers should use closed boots to avoid huge texture loading, and anyway I don’t assist to them, but I enjoy visiting landscape sims and being able to look at them in a “natural” way, up to where my sight reachs; never thought that I would be lagging other people only because my system can take it.
It would be nice if there was something similar to avatar impostors for prims, for example not loading the textures of small prims as they grow far from you, but meanwhile I will have to change my drawing distance when visiting a busy sim :-p
Changing drawing distance depending on the circumstances seems to be only way to go at the moment. What I would really like about that is quicker way to swithc graphics preferences. Some kind of pesets, so I can define my settings for laggy environment, “normal” situations, taking photos….
I am not quite sure I can follow you (dande) on the drawing distance affecting others. Can you try to explain again?
Hi Peter, the reasons are in here http://analutetia.com/blog/anatomy-of-lag/
but I’ll try and copy the essential bits. But it’s really worth taking the time to read that article – I keep coming back to it again and again because it makes a difficult subject approachable.
The sim will keep an interest list on behalf of each avatar. This is mostly what is in the immediate neighbourhood of the avatar (other avatars and their attachments, prims, textures). So only these get sent — and it depends on the setting you have for Draw Distance on your SL client. The lower it is, the smaller the interest list.
If someone drops in a sim with a Draw Distance of 256 m, it means that the interest list for that avatar will cover the whole sim (these days, with more and more advanced graphics cards, this setting is often the default — and most people don’t know, or don’t want, to change it). If there is nothing in front of the avatar, it means there will be no occlusion, and thus the SL client will request everything in sight — contributing to a huge spike in content transfer requests, and oh yes, these will lag the sim.
high ARC does not create sim lag! Seriously! A prim is just a prim, 200 prims on the ground or attached to an avatar’s head take exactly the same time to rezz (actually, prim hair will rezz first, since all attachments have priority when downloading). So what’s the problem with high-ARC prim hair (or shoes)?
To understand this, you will need to know that here is sim lag, and there is client lag. Sim lag happens on SL’s grid and affects everybody on the same sim. Client lag is what you experience on your own computer.
and further down:
But doesn’t it help? After all, if you’re not wearing 200-prim-hair, you will have less information to transmit, right? So it will surely help a bit? The short answer is no — the difference is almost impossible to measure. As said, 200-prim hair is usually just two or three textures to download. If your SL client doesn’t ever get them, that’s all right, they’ll just remain grey, but that doesn’t “lag” you. Remember that a sim with Time Dilation of 0.5 is two times slower than real time — and 0.10 is ten times slower. If the overall difference of having everybody wearing 200-prim-hair is 0.01 on time dilation (probably it will be far less), that is hardly important. The sim will not recover from lag even if everybody detach their hair, shoes, and HUDs. Avatars will still be requesting data; the physics engine will still be having a hard time to calculate where avatars are. No, the only way to deal with a sim crammed full of avatars — is to get rid of them. But that’s not an option!
Thanks Faerie, I hope this helps.
I think I wrote about that in some post, long ago, but I cannot remember which one. (But I discovered that, for unknown reason, search is not working on the site.)
Of course I know this article, but it was not clear that draw distance affects others. So basically you/Dande/Gwyn says that if I have a large draw distance, the sim is affected because it has to send ME a lot of textures and this bandwidht is not available to others?
Basically, yes. higher drawing distandce one has, more data is asked from the server. Sure that is not visible if there are just couple of avies on the actual and surrounding sims, but with more avies it can grow significantly.
Hi Dande. I just reread your comment that:
…”What I would really like about that is quicker way to swithc graphics preferences.”…
I’ve started using the new Emerald viewer and it has a wonderful innovation – a little slider in the bottom right corner to change your draw distance. Why did this take so long? No more opening preferences, just nudge the slider. I’m finding I’m using it a lot AND it goes down to 24m! which is really useful in busy shops.