Knowledge is Good, Ignorance is Bad

I have been pondering long and hard about the experiment LL has designed with regard to knowing what a resident’s avatar costs in terms of ‘rendering’.  In more basic terms, it will tell you how hard your graphics card is working to draw you and others residents, their clothes, and attachments by displaying a number above them and color coding it (green = good, yellow = moderate, red = bad).  The higher the number, the more graphics resources needed, the lower the frames per second, the poorer the experience for you… and everyone else.

I see this upcoming feature (currently only in the Release Candidate) as a useful tool to tell me why I’m getting 2 frames per second (FPS) with my expensive high-end graphics card at a gathering of only 20 residents.  Is it my computer? My internet? What’s causing this… I want to know.  What I do with the information is up to me.  I prefer knowledge over ignorance - ALWAYS - and you should too. 

I read the official blog replies (only took 5 hours to cap at 150), and frankly, there are a lot of ignorant and self-centered residents out there.  I wonder how many of them actually downloaded the Release Candidate client and tried it out. 

This blog is about my crossover thoughts in both worlds, but I’d like to have some fun with this and take the virtual world issue out into the real world.  Say you have an attachment on your cell phone that tells you how bad or good someone smells.  Nobody can tell that you’re using it, so you enjoy total privacy over the information revealed (of course, everyone has an phone attachment just like yours, and you know they have it and are using it too).  You now arrive at a large party and begin to mingle.  Most of the numbers are green, a few yellows, and one stand-out red.  By looking at them, you could have probably guessed they reeked even without your tool.  They stand out and they know it.

The smell is everywhere; you’d have to leave the party to escape it.  It is ruining everyone’s good time here, people are murmering hints.  Some of your friends whisper to you saying they can’t stand it anymore and leave for another party.  The hosts are beginning to panic, all their hours of planning and hard work to put this party together are going downhill fast.

Someone should just ask this stinky one to leave.  That will fix the problem, simple.  Don’t they understand that they’re ruining this party for everyone?  Do they even care?  If they would just go home and change, that would make it so much better for everyone.  But they have rights too and do as they wish.

After all, you showered, shaved, primped, perfumed or cologned and dressed properly before you came to the party.  You care about what others think about you.  Yes, its a shame that expensive personal scent you bought last week came up as red on your phone - thank goodness you checked!  But, at least you know now, so you can save that for a smaller gathering where it will be more appreciated.

Now ol’Stinky here could have put some effort in like you did, but they just chose not to.  Surely the have the same phone that you do, so they obviously know.  Perhaps this stink bomb isn’t really here to have a good time, but to ruin everyone else’s time?  How selfish! How rude! How insensitive to the hosts, the guests, and you!

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And that’s really at the heart of the matter here - how the community will change.  Linden Lab (LL) does not seem to be ignoring other (arguably bigger) problems thrown out in the blog replies like the asset server (Prospero in office hours last week told residents about upcoming hardware upgrades as well as sim-side code changes to ease the load).  LL gave us a tool, and that gives everyone the same information. 

If I meet someone who affects my in-world experience, I may choose to offer assistance to help them understand.  I may offer them something less render-intensive.  If they refuse, then that says to me ‘I don’t care about your experience’.  And that serves as information to form my opinion of them.

I think that vendors will soon show Avatar Rendering Cost (ARC) on their products.  Before, they had no way to tell - they do now.  Has uber-high resolution clothing, flexi hair and complex attachments always affected experience?  YES!  Can residents so informed now choose what to buy? YES!  I’m even inclined to buy something more expensive if it has a lower ARC - that’s going to be a win for the vendor who puts a lot of work into making their product.

So I for one welcome the new tool.  I look forward to the time where this can be expanded so a builder can look at what they’ve made - not just wearables, but buildings, trees, etc) and optimize it for best user experience.  I’d love to see a LSL command like “integer llDetectedARC(key id)” so scripters can build tools to allow others to manage this information effectively (hmmm, that’s a good idea, actually…). 

Fact #1: We all stink.  Fact #2: We all have stunk.   Now we know how bad or good, thanks to this information.  Just like in the real and virtual world, we can either adapt or die; the choice, as always, is ours.

Me?  I’m getting a flexi haircut!

Tags: second life, Avatar Rendering Cost, ARC, market change, resident impact, asset server, adapt or die, Linden Lab, community response