How to Slim Down Your Second Life Avatar's Draw Weight

This is a great tutorial by SL content creator Penny Patton on how to trim a Second Life avatar's Draw Weight. That Linden Lab feature shows you how much effort it takes to render your SL avatar onscreen (green being fast, red being slow), but as Penny notes, it's caused SLers to complain that the range "was unrealistic, that we'd all have to wander around naked to get ourselves down into the green, or even the orange." However, she goes on, "the truth is, the rendering levels displayed by Draw Weight are not unreasonable at all, it's just that content creators are making no effort to produce reasonably optimized content for avatars." (And so, thanks to the Tragedy of the Commons, we have a whole world of slow-ass rendering avatars.)

However, there's some solutions to this, which Penny lists in much detail -- and as you can at right, it's possible to greatly trim down avatar Draw Weight without hardly changing an avatar's appearance. Solutions such as:

• Many attachments, including new mesh attachments, tend to have a prim hidden inside of them which serves no purpose other than to clog VRAM up with a huge texture nobody sees. I ripped out every single one of those "root prims".
• My mesh body has several clothing/tattoo layers. I don't use those, or any of the scripted functions of the body. So I ripped out every unused layer, plus the scripts.
• I replaced every sculpted prim I could with a mesh attachment.
• I removed every single attachment which was covered up by other attachments. My eyes, for example, have sphere prims over them with a texture adding a glistening effect. It looks great, but with my mask no one can see them. So off they went!

Much more here. Trouble is, most SLers will probably not make the effort Penny's making. Maybe Linden Lab should offer users a L$ stipend for getting their avatars in the green.

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Comments

[Carl Metropolitan]

Since nearly every mesh avatar component or attachment on the market is "no modify", Penny Patton's advice is useless to most SL consumers.

The only way a user can make such changes is to limit oneself to a _very_ small pool of creators that offer "modify" mesh avatar items—or use third party tools to break Second Life's DRM (which is clearly against the ToS, as well possibly illegal under the DMCA).

[Ciaran Laval]

Is the green, amber, red range still hardware specific, or has avatar draw weight create consistent thresholds?

[Kim Anubis]

Hamlet, by how much were you able to reduce your avatar's draw weight when you followed the tutorial?

[Issa Heckroth]

Great advice for those who can/want to use the information.

Sadly thats not 99% of the SL population, most of who really could not give a toss. I used to run an RP sim and getting people to understand the issue, let alone actually getting them to remove their offending items is like pulling teeth.

The blame is squarely with designers and LL. I dont see why end users should have to be concerned with this in all its technical detail.

Hopefully this is one of the areas LL is looking at for SL2. Its undeniable that avatars should have a system similar to PE/LI. Maybe a 100PE limit. With that many of our lag problems would disappear overnight *along with our most self-centered and blinged-up users*

[Kim Anubis]

I don't think there should be a hard limit on avatar weight because it's fine if someone wants to wear ten thousand prims of armor in the comfort of their own virtual home or for a costume in a machinima. It's only a problem when visiting land owned by someone else where others will be impacted. We don't need to reduce or remove the freedom to build or be whatever you want in SL. I have seen avatar weight checkers at various shopping events and airports all over the grid. If you can't find one with automatic warning or ejection, well, my company's for hire, and we can give it any kind of interface you like -- or ask the Lab to build it into the parcel management tools. This isn't a challenge that calls for removing creative freedom or personal expression -- it can be fixed with a little code.

[anamegoeshere]

While I find the article useful I would like to say that public activities in SL are rarer than people think. So, arguing about this is strange and weight values, ARC or otherwise, are for sim owners mostly because THEY rule their sims. Users who are wondering why they lag at home are maybe not in a position to strip all of these things and so on. In the old days you didn't need modify permissions to delete scripts. It isn't a modify or no modify issue really.

Vetting creators is silly. Virtual reality users may be focused on getting close to a reality. I didn't say THIS reality, so those who blast out that it isn't real so forget it, we all end up block people should keep in mind how people use SL.

Not all users have the same technical troubles as well. I am not sure what these prims inside of others are, but I do no resize scripts could be deleted. Once again, in the "old days" you could delete scripts from even no-mod items, I think.

RP sims (this was years ago) many times had rules. These numbers are for them, bringing in ALL of SL lag as being created by creators is a bit strange considering most people )according to a news or research study I ready years ago) don't move around SL that much at all. They spend time in the same few places.

So, when it counts, sim owners handle this. Otherwise, it is a private thing between a few people at a persons home or sim.