But all the time there were people claiming that the ARC has no meaning whatsooever, that the effect is grossly overestimated, and that it is doctoring on a symptom and not the cause of SL laggyness. My friend Tarissa found an interesting blog post, that seems to debunk the myth of ARC = lag.
"Technically, ARC is supposed to measure the computational requirements of rendering a specific avatar with a specific attachment combination. But, it does this in abstract parrots — meaning that it’s units do not correspond directly to any computational power measurement I know of — and the abstract parrots fly wherever they damn well please."says Rika Watanabe, and continues to line out the experiments she made with high-ARC-objects, that actually bring down the rendered frames per second (FPS) only marginally. She concludes:
"So in effect ARC does little more than promote people competing who can get it higher, and causes lynch mobs when the lag is actually results from poor server performance or excessive numbers of avatars on screen."The full article can be found here: http://rikawatanabe.wordpress.com/2008/08/27/arbitrary-rage-cause/
I think further investigation is needed, before ARC is used to discreminate even further. I also think ARC actually distracts from the real issue - that the SL grid is not really scalable and has some inherent design flaws. It's ridiculous that a sim crashes when there are 80 avatars on it, and it is ridiculous that an empty sim gets attributed the same CPU power like a full sim. Assigning a fixed number of CPU's or servers to a sim is not exactly scalable.
And let's not forget that scripts and uninspired use of textures have a huge share on lag as well. Sim owners are better advised to streamline their scripts and tune down their textures than to discreminate against high ARC avatars.
And no, I don't know the ARC of my avi - never bothered to check.
Update 1: My ARC for my typical outfit is 1054.
Update 2: You can switch off rendering of all other avatars via Advanced -> Rendering -> Types -> Character - that is pretty antisocial but will make you move smooth even in laggy sims
8 comments:
Judging by the picture, your ARC would be somewhere in the 1000-2000 range, depending on whether your attachments are flexi or not. :)
I'm so glad that my friend Eloise Pasteur pointed me to this article of yours :) After painfully trying to remain under the ARC 1000 limit (a limit which I set arbitrarily...), I got excited by the fantastically realistic designs that I bought at this year's Hair Fair... only to watch my ARC settings to go up to 4600+!
Ack!
Believe me, I couldn't be more frustrated... on the other hand, I don't notice absolutely no difference on performance really, so I was wondering why the immensely high ARC setting. Sure, it has a lot of alpha'ed textures and flexies...
All this could be avoided if LL allowed us to create more realistically-looking hair. However, that requires quite a lot of effort — namely, importing different (and complex) meshes, or creating "hair groups" (like on Poser and other 3D modelling tools), or, well, flexisculpties... none of the above are available in SL and won't be for quite a while (probably measured in years, not weeks).
Then again, the ARCnazis naturally couldn't care less. Give people a metric to discriminate others, and they will discriminate.
ARC seems to me to be something of a tool to give you an idea where problems may be. It's similar to people saying to take off or disable particles, animated textures, etc. Little do people know that you can actually disable particles, animated textures, and spinning objects.
I hadn't given thought to ejecting people with high ARC. I am aware that people may be doing this, but I personally do not consider it.
I'd like to see the ability to click on an object to inspect its ARC before I purchase it. It would help sell me on a few sales. I don't like having to wear something to determine the delta after I purchased it.
I believe that lag usually comes from mass updates. When you get a lot of people together, you have different animations that are triggered, movement, physics, and even scripted objects moving flexy objects for you to make them appear more wavy. The best way to decrease the lag in a sim is to leave. Instant gratification.
I've never checked mine either, Peter.. unless its something that somehow can be utilized equally, I figure somedays mine will be high, and others its low.. and if someone didn't like it, they could ask me to leave, and I would...*shrugS*
Dedric, you can switch off rendering of all other avatars via Advanced -> Rendering -> Types -> Character - that is pretty antisocial but will make you move smooth even in laggy sims
Peter, I wrote my opinion on ARC as well a while ago, it can be found here: http://www.secondeffects.com/2008/05/arc-from-here-to-infinity.html. Yes, I agree with what you are saying, but it sure would help if the hardware requirements of SL kept pace with the hardware in people's homes.
Absolutely! What also "helps" stigmatize ARC is the totally arbitrary green/yellow/red coloring.
Some spot on comments here. It DOES make you discriminate even if you don't realise you are doing just that! If I kit Kitty out completely in my usual spangle I DREAD to think what the ARC will be. Even though I whinged, I really don't want to see people booted out of sims because their ARC is too high, because that negates the point of SL, which for me is freedom of expression. My only niggle was that the majority of peeps knowing how busy Hair Fair would get would be super lovely if peeps just accomodated the event a bit more, by dressing down a tad. BUT when you sit and think about it, you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't. Personally I have a horrible feeling that ARC will become a huge stumbling point in the next 6 months...my Kitty-sense is telling me that it will become a bit of a political hot potato.
OR it could be that I've just drunken my very large glass of Red wine a tad too quickly....Hic!
=^..^=
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