Mythbusting: Stripping your avatar for teleports (^_^)

[Imnotgoing Sideways]

"Why can't I teleport" has been to strip your avatar to reduce the lag while transitioning from one sim to the next. The conversation often flows like this:

* Icant Gonowhere: ACK! I can't teleport.
* Idont Actuallyknow: Take everything off then try again.
* Icant Gonowhere: You mean get naked?
* Idont Actuallyknow: Sure. It's all the stuff you're wearing that slows you down.
* Icant Gonowhere: Okay, I'll try.
* Icant Gonowhere: Wow! That worked! Thanks!
* Idont Actuallyknow: It always worked for me.

Of course, one or the other assumed that they were supposed to account for ALL clothing. Either by reserving some "underwear" items, skimpy outfit, or simply teleporting in the bald buff to get around.

Wrong.

Clothing layers don't contribute to lag while teleporting. You can still wear the whole roster of your outfit and expect to have a minimum ARC and move about laggy teleports and laggy sims to your heart's content.

What does contriubute is attachments. Anything you can right-click on and see "Detach" in the menu will be a contributor to sim, teleport, and rendering lag in some way. Obviously some more than others.

* HUDs: Usually heavily scripted. If Mono scripted, they will cause the entire sim to stall for a matter of entire seconds while they load up in the sim server's RAM.
* Hair: Usually contains a ton of alpha textures with a prim count that spans 50 all the way up to the 250 range. If scripted for resize, it can load a sim with up to 8 or even 16 Megabytes of un-utilized allocated memory.
* Shoes: While often not the most prim-heavy items, shoes tend to be made within the culture of builders in SL that think no-modify + resize scripts actually protect their products. So... Count them when it comes to script induced lag.
* Other attachments: A prim is a prim is a prim and adds to your rezzing needs when entering a sim. Even though attached prims are a client-side effect, the sim still needs to "build" you for all the other people who see you.
* Functional (BDSM/Sex/Interactive) attachments: Some of these can be HEAVILY scripted. Some builders in this field use modular scripting methods so each and every function can possibly be a standalone script.

Why does clothing not contribute? Because, no matter what you wear, it's all baked to the same collection of 3 textures. "Baking" referrs to the function of a texturing engine that combines images into one image to be put to further use. Your avatar will ALWAYS contain the same set of 512x512 textures to present your "skin" to the world. That's why you see an entire portion of your body get blurry when wearing even the smallest clothing item. It's a bandwidth saving measure that speeds up and stabilizes your presented appearance as much as possible for everyone who sees you.

That said, there is no tattoo, shirt, jacket, pants, skin, eye, glove, or sock item that could ever contribute to teleporting lag. And, there is never any need to go naked at all while teleporting around the grid.



..... Unless that's your thing. =^-^=