Icarus Lytton

Thank you for your in-depth reply - it seems very very few people know about this. Even people who sell Flash games didn't know this it seems. I hope HTML 5 games will be possible then since I love my Arcade in SL - and it's a lot less straining on the sims than if they were Second Life games.

At my hangout I built this nice arcade with loads of working arcade cabinets. Or at least, they used to work. It seems the games load fine (Flash based) and key presses work fine too but the second you try to type anything or use the cursor keys to move, it won't work. SInce most games require the keyboard this means almost all games are broken. Does anyone have any idea why these games no longer accept any input? Playing the same games in a browser works fine ... .

Thank you for all the suggestions and help. I've tried practically all the suggestions and while most didn't help, here's the few that did help and what I discovered: - increasing cache: I think SL was forced to constantly load and reload because I left Cache to a default 1GB - I raised it to its maximum of 6GB and my fps went up a little - I decreased the networkspeed as well to 1250kbps which makes moving less stutterish now But most of all, I discovered what causes the massive performance hit: particles. They hit my fps waaay more than they used to. I've removed all particles from my sim and now my fps went from 13 to 40fps.

I have the latest Firestorm viewer and this was on practically every sim I went to. Only exception: if I cam to someone far away, the FPS rockets up. Very odd. It seems even a single avi causes the fps to plunge, no matter what settings I use. My network speed is wired at 250Mbps so more than enough.

This one has stunned me. I bought a brand new GeForce 970 and even overclocked it 10% yet get perhaps 20-25fps in Second Life (with shadows and such turned on). Odd thing is, the GPU is only 20% stressed and my CPU only 15%!! My cache is on a SSD with plenty of space left so I can't think of any bottleneck yet somehow, the performance is no better than with my old GTX670 card. I also did a clean reinstall. Would anyone know the cause for this? And is there a solution? As a test, I turned everything to the absolute minimum. You know the FPS I got? 18. 18fps.

Hello all of you! I'm a long term builder in SL but I've always been hanging in the dark a bit when it came to what affects performance. Because of the way Avatars can have such a huge impact on performance (by wearing badly made and/or prim/PE/script heavy elements) it's often hard to link viewer lag to any specific element. I've just created a new hangout on a new sim - size 16000sqm. Personally I have a very powerful viewer and can turn on all the bells and whistles and still keep a good framerate but for some of the visitors the hangout is unbearably laggy whenever just a few avatars are present. I've tried experimenting but the results aren't really clear so I decided to come to this forum to see if any of you could help me out. My questions are basically this: - what are the main causes of viewer lag (besides the obvious elements such as particle count and view distance and other viewer settings)? I suspect alpha textures contribute a great deal - In games, they design areas in such a way that you can only ever see a certain amount of polygons at once to avoid performance hits. How would you do this in SL? Is placing a large prim going to stop the viewer from rendering the items behind it? Does it work with sculpties as well? Or do you have to use actual raised land for this to work? From my experience, SL seems to not give a **bleep** what you actually see but still renders it or part of it at least - or is there a trick for this? I hope someone can give a clear answer because I couldn't find any topic on this (strangely enough) despite it being quite a big issue for building - especially with all the high-detail and low-prim mesh abound (which seriously made lag worse).

I'm having the exact same problem. The only fix is clearing cache and rebooting. Every time I relog without doing that, I freeze. I can't interact with anything and I can't IM back to people. It's been going on for weeks now, no mater what sim I'm in, no matter what outfit I have on and my connection is just FINE.

Okay I'm going to write a nice and long reply to this: I tested a lot of different viewers - Singularity is the only one that didn't have the problem. Areas that would lag massively on Firestorm, run butter smooth on Singularity. The fact that it runs on V1 code kinda shows me the problem lays with the viewer code and how it handles mesh in memory. Also, I don't really buy that whole "mesh has always existed so it shouldn't be different" etc. Why? - prims are saved in memory with text - what is saved is the UUID of the textures and all the settings of said prim. The viewer basically applies these settings to the prim and since the prim is hardcoded, it doesn't have to be cached as mesh - sculpties = cached as a texture, NOT polygons. - avis and everything else mesh = hardcoded into the viewer. User-made mesh is loaded in memory as mesh - not as text, not as textures - so it IS the first time the viewer has to constantly load and unload mesh into memory. I also did quite a few tests with my friend and we found out the following: It's not about how complex the mesh is. It's a problem with how it caches it. I spawned about (and I'm not kidding) 500 mesh items with each item having over 30k polygons. that's 15 million polygons and I got 45fps. I THEN zoomed in, hiding my avi (and its mesh hair, boots, etc.) and zoomed back out and the exact same scene suddenly saw my fps drop to 0.8fps. And it remained there indefinitely. Please someone explain to me how this is NOT a viewer problem - because it seems to me that when I zoomed out and it had to load the mesh on my body, it started to spaz out. I've tried a million different settings, all sorts of stuff, and it all boils down to this: the performance is completely random and when I get 80fps one minute, I'll get 1fps another minute when nothing new has appeared. My graphics card isn't taxed, my memory hasn't run out - yet my entire PC is down to a crawl. It's like some bad code in the viewer is sending stuff in an endless loop. So does anyone have any ideas now? I do appreciate all the answers but it's not the solution and this lag shouldn't happen so drastically.

I built a house using regular prims with a few mesh windows and stairs inside. Everything was very smooth until my sisters (it's a family house) started to furnish it. When I turn towards certain parts of the house, my fps drops from 50-80 to 1-2 fps and my viewer almost freezes. This won't go away - I have to turn away for this to work. The odd thing is, if I derender all the mesh items and restart my viewer, everything is smooth. Once I get the lag and I teleport to other places, I get lag whenever mesh is in view over there as well. It seems to me that there's some bug in the code with how it handles and loads mesh but I don't know what - I use the latest Firestorm viewer and it has me stumped. Does anyone have any ideas?

Too bad - I broke my mouse earlier from all the clicking and gave up. With textures being the heart and soul of designing, it's pretty bad :matte-motes-crying:

Basically, I decided I've had it with SL's slow way of dealing with textures so I got the idea to export all my textures and using Adobe Bridge to tag and sort through them instead, and dumping all my textures in folders A to Z and then just searching by name. The problem is, I have thousands of textures and exporting them is very tedious because I have to open one at a time - isn't there a faster way to do this?

Hmm I got some serious reservations about those numbers. I tried SL at work with a very cheap GPU and guess what? SL set it to "low" by default. I could crank it up to "high" and got a very smooth experience so I wonder just how reliable those numbers are considering every friend of mine has a much better card than the one at work. Those numbers should reflect the "regular" users anyway, not those that make an account, log on to have a look around and then leave again because I bet there would be worse hardware there on average. Usually those with crap hardware are also the freeloaders who wouldn't invest a dime in SL so what is your problem? That you wouldn't cater to them? Come on! Also, with each sculpty having so many poly's, you can't pretend that lots of sculpties don't have an effect - once rendered, they have more or less the same stress on a GPU than a 2048 poly mesh. I think there's a lot of truth about this being a question of money. If you can make entire meshed houses that use just 10 prims, it would mean people need less prims meaning less land gets sold and THAT is the main reason I think. All the rest is just fluff to cover up the crux of the issue. The high upload fees is another example of it being pure greed that is at the center here. Saying that the cost reflects the overheads is a real insult to my intelligence. When uploading the mesh, it could calculate the complexity of the model and then give a cost for the upload. Setting a flat fee that is not tied to the complexity is beyond ridiculous. This whole situation makes me really dislike how LL runs the place. I know they're not a charity, but I do NOT appreciate lying, hidden agendas and bull**bleep** being said to appease us. Either you're honest and come clean, or don't say anything at all. Crippling designers like this and acting as if it's the most normal thing is not going to make anyone happy. I can see why Lilith Heart is so upset about the whole situation - she has every right to be when the dream of meshes is being turned into a greedy nightmare.

Ahah that worked! And I found out the reason *facepalms*. Viewer 2 had set my main account to only be allowed in "General" locations. Of course, I couldn't change it until I was LOGGED IN! *facepalms again*

I tried that before - I tried several Mesh Sandboxes as location because that's where my alt was logging in fine, and I got the same error. I'm not sure what else I can do.

Like the title says, this is driving me insane. My alt can log in just fine but all my stuff, all my textures, all my scripts, etc. are on my main avi and I want to use him to build on Aditi, not my alt who was only used for screenshots. I create a support ticket (because the FAQ page was completely useless) only to be basically told by Linden Labs to F off but it seems that the problem is at their end: a few months back I could log in just fine. I also checked and have no groups with odd characters (which seems to be the main cause of this error). I'm at a loss now what more I can do - does anyone have any idea? (PS I posted it here because the good folks at LL failed to provide a forum for the beta grid - or I didn't manage to find it at least)