SW City Town Square is about 11 years old and has undergone changes all throughout this time, retrofitted with the latest n’ greatest AW had to offer.

I can’t overstate how much effort has gone into making this area run at peek performance over the years, applying any new performance trick that came around. Throughout the last couple weeks, thanks to some performance related Q&A with chrispeg, the latest series of performance sweeps has been completed.

What’s changed:

• Reducing object count by replacing clusters of objects with scaled objects while maintaining the exact same appearance as before. This has been going on since scale first came out, and the object count has been reduced several thousand in the area.
• Many objects built before prims came out have been upgraded into their prim equivalent, which shaves off many unwanted polygons.
• Only showing particle emitters when you can see them (applies to PEs that were indoors or underground).
• Some underground areas are invisible until you go down there.
• Removing over-zealous use of the ‘visible no radius=#’ commands. This does more harm than good when used on low poly objects, whoops!
• Replacing all the tbtree###.rwx tree objects with the newer t_awtree##.rwx objects (2162 vs 191 polygons!) Approx 20k polygons removed by doing this alone.
• Replacing masked based windows with opacity commands
• Thanks to Absolute Monarch’s texture counter app, I was able to track down textures that were only used a few times in the scene and replace them with more commonly used textures. A texture uses the same amount of memory whether it’s used 1 time or a 1000 times, so too much texture variety is bad!
• Replaced the ad rotators with php rotators, removing the need to store all the ads in the rotation in memory.
• Replaced all the signs that were spelled out letter by letter (using the letter masks) with single object signs. Less objects, less texture variety.
• Upgraded all the astart/astop/animation sequences around town with the new timer commands.
• Countless more one-off tweaks specific to buildings in the area

You still won’t get butter smooth performance in the 150m-200m vis range, though I can at least get into the teens frame rate @ 200m vis which is not too bad considering the density and complexity of the area.

Are you familiar with how laggy town square is? I’m curious to hear if you notice an improvement now