Avatar Draw Weight

I’m a big fan of Linden Lab engaging in a go green campaign to try and encourage people to create and build more efficiently. However these things are often misunderstood, lead to finger pointing and can spoil people’s fun, so can overly complex avatars with lots of attachments but we should be encouraging freedom of expression.

However, it’s always good to have measures to look at, which brings us to the replacement for Avatar Rendering Cost, now it’s Avatar Draw Weight. This will display a score for your avatar, and other avatars around you. I’ve never been a fan of this score displaying the scores of other avatars as it can lead to finger pointing … wait I already covered that! To check your own draw weight, go to preferences, enable the advanced menu and then from the advanced menu, go to performance tools and select “Show Draw Weight For Avatars“.

This will then display a score above your head, and above the heads of others around you and you’ll probably see a lot of red scores. The scores go from green, through the colour range to yellow and then through the colour range to red. When I turned this on I saw a lot of red, I noticed I was deep in the yellow, so I removed my hair and got myself into yellowy green territory.

Now this is where it can all get a bit silly, hair is a big points scorer, but surely we don’t want to walk around a world of the baldies, although I personally don’t mind going bald, I know plenty of others do. There’s also the issue of stifling creativity with these sort of initiatives, we don’t all want to look the same with plain avatars just to come in with the right Avatar Draw Weight, this is where Linden Lab could do a bit more in the education stakes. This is a shared virtual world, so we should be mindful and considerate of others but the campaign needs to be taken to content creators first, consumers buy goods to have fun, we don’t want to ruin that fun. There are times when it’s helpful to go underdressed to venues, clothing and hair fairs being two good examples and that’s where people are going to want to try out new clothing and hair! Really, Linden Lab need to get creators onboard with this.

There is a scoring mechanism, which is explained here. The number of prims your attachments contain is an important factor and hair can often take up a lot of prims, flexi prims will score higher than normal prims, so will alpha, yadda yadda yadda. You might want to open up your calculator app.

If you think someone is causing performance issues, the current advice is to mute them. However that means you won’t be able to talk to them! There may be a solution in the pipeline for this, as reported by Cerise over at SLUniverse:

“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.”

Personally I think this is better than showing everyone’s scores for finger pointing but it will mean people need to understand why they are seeing grey people, the advantage with this setting is that it won’t mute those grey avatars in terms of chat.

As I said, I’m all in favour of a go green campaign but it needs Linden Lab to lead the discussion with content creators and it needs people to understand what the settings mean, we don’t need a burn the witch campaign.