Poorly Optimized Avatars Are the Pollution-Spewing SUVs of The Virtual World - Comment of the Week

The debate over poorly optimized mesh bodies which threaten Second Life's existence as a shared, virtual world, continues -- this time, with an apt metaphor from Soda Sullivan:

The official avatar needs a complete overhaul. It has been the subject of many debates fro years and years and let's face it, the verdict it in and this avatar was built wrong. It is too tall, it is ill-proportioned, and the improved mesh avis are complicated as hell to try to get a new user comfortable with customizing... This overhaul should have been done over a decade ago and now it is crucial.

Linden Lab wanting to keep "hands off" makes perfect sense in most cases, but not here.

Think of cars. Currently our roads are full of gas-powered mammoth vehicles that are literally killing us with their exhaust. So , the government wants people in electric cars. They [encourage] manufacturers in that direction with both carrot and stick. Governor Linden should act the same way with the avatar. Make a new basic avatar, and then set down some rules of the road for anyone who wants to make their own heads, bodies, etc.

Or to put it another way: Wearing a poorly optimized mesh body in public spaces is like driving a massive SUV with a busted catalytic converter around town. Enough people do that, and everyone just stays indoors.

Unless and until Linden Lab does do anything about this, there are alternatives. Reader Lelani Carver reminds readers there is a kind of Prius Hybrid of mesh bodies on the market:

The Project Ruth 2.0 project continues; free (dollarbie on the Marketplace), open source mesh avatar for SL and Open Sim. I’ll have to check in with the current version. One fork has some nice Bento hands, HUDS, and other features.

If Linden Lab continues refusing to encourage mesh bodies with low fuel emissions (so to speak), it might fall on the community to do so -- for example, embrace fuel efficient mesh like Project Ruth, while socially ostracizing pollution-spewing mesh in public spaces.

Comments

[sirhc desantis]

In meatspace I take the bus or shanks' pony and in world I still use the real body (ok with mesh boots - library ones haha and a hoodie or tee) - am I actually on the right side for once? Be a first.

And yes the ruth/roth project is a rather nice alternative. Our mesh person has played around a fair bit with it. Still not perfect but a damn sight more controllable, although personally not knowledgeable enough about if the bone name thing (I think it was) causes problems. Far as I know they have only released stuff over at OS, not in SL.

[Summer Haas]

This seems rather straight forward to me, set a low but reasonable maximum rendering limit on avatars and only allow disabling it until you've changed regions, then it reverts back to the max. Same should be true of LOD. Reduced to 2.0 every time you change regions. Eventually people will get with the program.

This still allows people to have high rez photo shoots when they want to and it's sufficiently annoying enough to get everyone to pay attention to what they are wearing.

Another thing that would help dramatically is a change in the way certain regions work. It should be possible to set them so it is impossible to see or interact with anyone else. Shopping sims that are brought to their knees with 40+ avatars have no reason to render everyone and send updates on everything that is going on. I suspect we would see a massive improvement in performance if these servers could have all prim positions locked, physics disabled, and didn't have to calculate any avatar interactions.

[Gattz Gilman]

I thought I saw one of the test LL clients, where they had the avatar system layers bakes into a texture that can then be applied to the worn mesh. If this really is properly done, this could really help, but that would also mean that LL would have to tell all these mesh body makers to stop and ban/block all current mesh bodies, which I unfortunately can't see that happening. The current system body sliders don't offer the level of detail that people look for in the current mesh bodies for all the different body types.

[Mandy Galileo]

Is there a ranking among the main mesh bodies (both male and female) so as to see which ones are lower impact than others?

[DiJodi Dubratt]

@Mandy Galileo My friend Wasnot Resident and I have put together a spreadsheet of the most popular/available mesh bodies (female.) Stand by, we may publish as soon as we've had a chance to make sure the metrics we're measuring are a true indication of performance. There are so many factors that impact performance, I've been hesitant to think we have it nailed down to one major factor. Anyone who has constructive information to contribute may contact me in SL via IM. If you just want to complain, save your breath. Thank you.

[DiJodi Dubratt]

And I'd just like to clarify that I have a Maitreya Lara body, with feet and Bento hands, and a Vista Lia head. It took me a long time to put all of this together, and I've spent a lot of time, energy and money on curating an inventory of clothes, hair and etc. for this body. I certainly don't want to get rid of it. I like it! However, it's difficult when I put together a low complexity outfit and go to a music event, and routinely have only a 4.0 frame rate. After 10+ years in SL I know a lot about how things work, but I can't seem to pull together the information I need to make the lag situation better. Hence this little project.

[Caleb]

I'm starting to feel that the problem is in the root SL avatar itself. Everything that has been built on top of it just drags it's problems with it in trying to accomodate the standard.

There is an amazing set of male avatars on marketplace that has solved a lot of problems. It has a superior UV than the SLUV. Very simple and logical to work with. No visible seams and perplexing contortions. The complexities range from 1500-4000. It's built with 1 1024 texture and still manages to look very detailed. It responds to sliders well, especially the head. The shapes are stunningly well proportioned and realistic ranging from very thin to body builder. They accommodate standard size mesh clothing. Bento and animates very smoothly I think it's the dream team of avatars, but it will go unnoticed until it can get past some status quo humps.

It would have to sacrifice it's better proportion to fit the deformed popular SL heads which people are invested in and protective of. It would have to use many more textures and sacrifice it's superior construction to adopt SLUV and become Omega compatible. The creator is still working it all out and I really hope he sticks with it.

It's entirely possible to make better looking avatars that are more realistic, better proportioned, and less of a drag on the system. We might need to work harder on our diffuse, normal, and specular maps and not make the mesh do all of the lifting. People are just going to have to see it to believe it and this is where LL could really step in and lead, instead of pretending that all of this excess is working.

[Orca Flotta]

You all are forgetting that not everybody wants and needs a pure human body. Often slightly humanoid, even cartoonish is what people want, or anthropomorphic. And let's not forget our bacon n waffles lovin' tinies! For all that the classic SL avie was the best, most modifiable solution.
And it's for fukn FREE!!!

[Blaise Glendevon]

Oh, god. The hysteria is getting ridiculous. If you have a steam-powered paperweight, turn your graphics down. Simple.

[Yohi]

LL can just start fining people once they've agreed to the new monetary changes. LL will fine you "to the extent the law allow$$." Yay

[JohnC]

Go into wireframe mode and take a look at the Maitreya body, for example. The mesh is so dense it almost looks solid. Two thirds of these polys are doing nothing at all, except indicating that whoever made the mesh had absolutely no idea about optimization, or never intended this mesh to be used as it is being used. This poly Behemoth is then duplicated 3 more times for various layers.
According to many statistics, it is used by 50% of those who wear mesh bodies and can quite reasonably be called the currant standard body in SL. The other mesh bodies are not far behind.
It is not being used by the average user because it it is the most beautiful body ever seen. Neither because creators have chosen it for its ease of use in clothes construction. No one has chosen it, it has just been around at the right time and place when people were desperate for an alternative to the hideous standard body. No one suggests for a moment that it should be withdrawn or hindered in any way. Just that a decent free alternative is offered by the company that, by all accounts, care so much about us paying users. The Ruth 2 project is a great attempt by the community as usual to do something about this situation. But it will fail because it will not be taken seriously by that same community. Only LL can change things now.

[Blaise Glendevon]

When Blueberry starts rigging for Ruth 2, you might have a shot. Not a minute until.

[JohnC]

What a bunch of sheep us SL users are.

[Mandy Galileo]

@DiJodi Dubratt that's great, please do your work carefully, i can be patient and thank you for doing it :)

[Subversive Vavoom]

SL is mostly a shopping and sexual simulator if you pay attention to where the money is being spent. If wearing mesh bodies that are poorly optimized were only a couple years old, I could understand the outrage. We're way past that now. Every single major sales event is geared towards them, and has been for more than six years. When everything is being created for the top four mesh bodies including rigged accessories, you can't possibly think thousands of creators are just going to stop. It's as if the people saying this haven't really played Sl very much in the last few years. Go to Uber, Fameshed, Collabor88, and look around. That's where the most money is being exchanged inworld on apparel. There's no stopping that kind of popularity, and frankly it just shows how out of touch you are with the platform if you think it could.

[Pulsar]

In fact sale events are among the worst experiences performance-wise. So much that there are events that force a maximum complexity now (the monthly Midnight Mania Madness for example).
I have a Maitreya Lara and other bodies and bento heads, and I'm online every day, I have fun being creative with clothes too, I go to events (not just the shopping ones), I use vehicles, my computer can run modern games and it has enough RAM that I can even put the Firestorm cache on a RAMdisk (BTW, to Orca, that's pretty simple to make on Linux :) if you didn't do that already), but still I can see how just things are and the reality as it is, and I know these bodies could be way better. And I agree with many things JohnC wrote (I'm not talking about the sheep LOL).

[Pulsar]

Talking about being stuck, hysteria and "OMG I'm going to lose my preciousss body!". In theory Maitreya (or Belleza, etc) could well create an optional low-poly version of their body, and that would still be 100% compatible with all Maitreya-compatible fitmesh outfits and bento gloves for them.

Moreover, after Bakes on Mesh (BOM) will be released, body creators will adjust to it (actually some aren't just watching it happening, they rather have a version ready as soon as BOM will be released). In theory they could release a new version without the infamous onion layers. Do you think you will lose your body and the market will collapse?
Meanwhile, makers like Altamura went to a smart idea, that's possibly useful where BOM can't be satisfying enough (e.g. usually socks aren't like gloves and the t-shirt cloth doens't follow your breasts like body paints. Let alone materials): they provide you an optional extra layer, to wear as attachment.

Of course if costumers eat whatever is on the dish and they don't care or aren't aware, the chef will keep to serve you the same rat soup. At that point the only thing that can encourage improvements is indeed either new features from LL or some resources cap.

[JohnC]

"There's no stopping that kind of popularity, and frankly it just shows how out of touch you are with the platform if you think it could"
By that kind of reasoning the most popular item or idea in any area of life will always be the most popular item ad infinitum. It is an argument that contradicts itself. Besides, consumers and fans are a fickle bunch, most of whom are just following the person in front. There are very few actually consciously choosing anything.

[Lamb Chop]

Subversive Vavoom- I'm with ya. I'm still rockin' my high waisted elephant bells.
Some things just can't be stopped until someone like Strawberry Singh says stoppit. Then it stops.

[Larda]

If you really want to stop this, all you have to do is start giving these resource hog avatars the label of being " fat or obese".

[Acacia Merlin]

What am I not understanding? I wear a Maitreya mesh body and a classic head. My complexity is usually under 30,000 and never above 60,000. Everything seems to work fine on my old Mac, and I mostly stay in less populated areas.

[Blaise Glendevon]

Acacia Merlin - You're seeing an actual example of virtue signaling. At first, I thought it was some weird thing internet neckbeards made up, but this is what it looks like in the flesh. They're so superior, with their low-resource mesh parts no one makes anything for.

[Blaise Glendevon]

Larda - Thank you for, at least, acknowledging the gendered basis for all this hullabaloo.

[whatever]

unfortunately with all the optimization efforts we put into our content we dont really improve the performance, we just give more room to poorly optimized crap

[Soda Sullivan]

For all that is holy Wagner, if you are going to keep quoting me, at least correct my spelling! You have about 20 or so great comments here that both describe the issue and offer viable solutions to it.

@ DiJodi Dubratt, I hear more requests from people for something like this every day. I think it will go a long way to educating John Q Customer about what they are buying, and why there might be a problem. I hope you can get it to the public, and I hope creators receive it as a positive tool (they won't.)

I find the argument that mesh creators are not just going to stop designing for the more popular bodies a false argument that is proven false in SL repeatedly. The mesh head is a perfect example. For a while some creators were only making things for Catwa and Lelutka because that is what customers were buying. Along comes the Genus hot-new-thing and creators are falling over themselves to try and get stuff out for Genus ASAP. If you build it, they will come.

I hate to keep using Maitreya as an example, but i only do so because they are the most popular body in SL right now. This is true not because of something unique they are doing, they were just in the right place at the right time and made a shape that people like. You could cut thousands of polys out of that body and it would still look great with a good skin on it. And could we all stop the notion that mesh bodies and heads should be "no mod" this is just stupid and based entirely on a false notion of "security" that actually does more harm than good.

LL has to step in and show these people how to do this. Bring in experts, offer classes, teach them to fish! Once that is done , then you bring out the hammer. Poorly made high poly bodies that come complete with high definition HUDS will need to be named and shamed and restricted. Period. If Blueberry ants to keep maing clothes for an avi that no one will use, more power to them. Full stop. LL should also offer its own, well made PROPORTIONED mesh avi.
Bottom line, the more information you give to the consumer and the creator, the better choices they will make.