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New Black Dragon Feature Shows Your Much Lag Your Second Life Mesh Avatar Is Causing (Likely a Lot)

Black Dragon viewer mesh optimization feature

Pictured: Niran in a Belleza 5.2 Bento mesh body — which has over 1.5 MILLION triangles

There's a new update to The Black Dragon viewer for Second Life, and it comes with a great new feature: An option to check how well-optimized your mesh avatar is — and shows you via a color code whether it is (green) or poorly optimized (yellow/orange/red):

So rather than confusing the user with an artificial "maximum" it now clearly states that it is simply recommended to stay below a certain point. Reaching this point also no longer immediately results in the "super bad" red rating but rather gives you the "eh" yellow/orange rating, see it as warning. As before you get a summary of all ratings together, right now its still very simple but i might actually add a 3-point answer that takes the 3 worst offenders and gives you hints and possibly even guides (or links to those) how to solve these.

As previously reported, most of the top-selling mesh bodies in SL are very poorly optimized, and a key culprit for Second Life's poor performance in general. Linden Lab refuses to do anything about this — the CEO basically told me "So what?" when I asked him face to face — but Black Dragon creator NiranV is a passionate advocate of optimization, and wants to improve SL's environment:

His hope, as he tells me, is "[t]o shed some clarity where Linden Lab obviously fails. Every time this has come up it has been said that there's little to no tools for the user or content creators to get some information about their stuff.
"So here it is."
 

Click here to consider supporting via Patreon future updates to Black Dragon. Because NiranV is making all this effort to improve Second Life on his time, and not making anywhere near as much money as anyone at Linden Lab to do so.

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6 responses to “New Black Dragon Feature Shows Your Much Lag Your Second Life Mesh Avatar Is Causing (Likely a Lot)”

  1. Pulsar Avatar
    Pulsar

    Good idea. It would be awesome if other TPVs follow.
    Even a message that says: «your attachment “TooLazyToCare Jane hair special no-mod full bright edition” attached to your right hand, is 800k triangles and 100 Mb textures and it is affecting your viewer performance and everybody around you» so you become quickly aware of which part is causing troubles.

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  2. Joey1058 Avatar
    Joey1058

    1.5 MILLION?! Not even God used that many polygons! LOL

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  3. Down With Underboob Avatar
    Down With Underboob

    So I took Black Dragon out for a spin at a fairly busy club. There’s only one avatar in the place who is “decently optimized” per the report. This guy is wearing a system avi and system clothes. The only non-system items are that Jian newfoundland dog from FLF and a hat. Black Dragon even flags the dog (as it apparently registers as 2 animesh objects and not just one) and says that things “can be improved.”
    Now how can it be improved? Cutting the dog in half?
    I like what BD offers, but please get real. Nobody wants to go back to looking like an avatar from 2008. Photographers like to use BD’s capabilities, but again, they’re not going to use system avatars to pass these complexity tests.
    Show me some mesh bodies, heads, and clothes that pass these tests and don’t look like they’re from 2008, and I’ll consider trying them. Does he think we’re all going to run around bald? I don’t want Warcraft hair in SL. Until then, I’ll stick with what I have. I’m satisfied with the 15-20 fps I get at this club and I can get upwards of 100 FPS when I’m hanging out on my platform at home in Bellisseria.
    I’d also point out that he’s tilting at windmills if he thinks designers are going to start posting complexity/triangle counts in their vendor ads.

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  4. seph Avatar
    seph

    There is no ‘optimizing’. Second Life’s material system is en par with what was available in the late 90s/early 00s, except it’s worse due to a bunch of other reasons like the barely existent lighting system to take advantage of the sparse materials there are.
    When you say ‘optimize’ you take ‘look good’ out of the equation because more polygons is the only way to get desired detail in Second Life. ‘Optimize’ for games usually means ‘ok stay looking as good but better performance’, often accomplishable by transferring mesh detail to material textures. Either not possible in Second Life often, or not worth it because of bad lighting or people not having materials even on.
    The way to get reduced poly counts in Second Life is for Linden Lab to develop a better material and lighting system. ’til then mesh IS optimized; to look good and satisfy customers.
    Trust me if low poly and uglier was a selling point everyone would be making it and buying it.

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  5. Barbie Avatar
    Barbie

    I think the best you can realistically hope for is making a case where people wear less of the oldest of their items that make complexity jump well over 100k. Anything under 100k arc in the official viewer should be considered OK for the average consumer. Most SL creators are hobby-level artists, not trained game asset creators. Also most average SL residents with high complexity are just there to play barbie dress up I guess, so they aren’t going to care about their complexity numbers all that much. They aren’t in SL to ‘wear the sensible shoes’ so to speak. None of this optimization initiative is coming from LL itself so y’all crying about it are just fellow residents with a bug in your a$$ about it. Let me live and wear my jewelery, derender me if you perceive I’m making you lag. You want a lag-free area? Buy a region and banish all the so-called unoptimized content, creating your perfectly made utopia.
    Instead how about this: if everyone who seems so passionately concerned about optimization could agree on maybe the top 3 points that would have the greatest amount of positive effect for the most people overall and present them in a calm and easy to understand approach as a series of lessons or best practices – written and presented for largely non-technical people – then at least some of the average users might listen to that and take some steps. Maybe.
    Fussing over scripts vs texture use vs mesh complexity sometimes seems like I’m just watching a nerd slap-fight where the geekier-than-thou argue and push their SL technical pet peeves. When you get down to the bones of it all though, not everyone is a content modder (or wants to learn to be), and very very few want to wear something like a cartoon snake avatar – no matter how well it is designed.
    Fellow geeks may listen to all this hand-wringing complete with nods and agreement but the rest of us?
    We’ll be over at the club.

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  6. Isabella Avatar
    Isabella

    You say in the comments to ditch the old stuff. Well, new stuff is riddle with complexity.
    Many known brands don’t care about it, they are noobs trying to gain money and be “their own boss”, not to make SL a better place. Nope. And LL doesn’t care either because of juicy linden dollars

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