SL can't do what MMO's did 20 years ago?

[Paul Hexem]

I was going through some of my old computer stuff today, and I noticed that Air Warrior came out in 1986. 26 years ago. Since then, we've had Meridian 59, Eve Online, Ultima Online, EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes, and you can't forget the behemoth, World of Warcraft (which came out in 2004, 8 years ago), among all the others.

Being online, teleporting between servers, entering dungeon instances, crossing virtual miles and miles of land... All of these games have been doing it now, closing in on 30 years.

Without even talking about graphics (user created content makes that an entirely different ball game), how come LL still can't figure out how to consistently do what these games have been doing for more than 20 years now?

Teleports still fail (and sometimes disconnect you completely), servers practically crash when more than 20 people are on them, sim crossing can still log people off, etc. It's madness. While yes, it's considerably better than it was in the past, it still feels like it's 10+ year old technology.

What's the bottleneck, really? I have a hard time believing that "well, you have to load user created content..." can disconnect you in mid-teleport, or dump you offline at a sim crossing, going into a region you've already clearly loaded, since you can see the content in it.

Any thoughts on this?

[Jo Yardley]

Well there sure is a lot that could be improved about SL, but for me teleports rarely fail, servers seem to manage fine with up to 50 people in our sim, sim crossing never logs me off.

 

[Paul Hexem]

Use vehicles on said sim crossings at all?

 

And you missed the point completely.

[Jo Yardley]

Yep, cars, bicycles, planes, zeppelins.

It is a bumpy ride and could be a LOT smoother, but no crashing of viewer.

And no, I am not missing the point, just sharing that my experience is different from the ones mentioned above.

[Paul Hexem]

Just today, a teleport kicked me offline. Another one failed a few hours later and I had to fly across a sim border to make it work. That's two failures I can remember in SL. Today.

 

Want to know the last teleport failure (into an instance, which is crossing servers) I recall in say... WoW? 2006. In CoH? 2007. Besides when the servers come down, you can go YEARS in WoW without a dropped connection. In SL? Days, maybe weeks. Months, if you're lucky. Why is that?

[Penny Patton]

When you cross into another sim, either via teleport or region crossing, a lot more information is being passed between swervers than what you have in even a modern MMO.

The more laden down with attachments and scripts your avatar is, the more likely you'll have a problem. By many accounts, the larger your inventory, the more likely you'll have a problem, while a fresh alt much more easily transitions between sims.

 Now say your vehicle is carrying passengers, that's an even bigger load than a single person, drastically increasing the chance of a problem.

 SL also, unlike any MMO, is constantly streaming content from the servers to your computer. In an MMO, most of the content is locally stored on your computer, so the only information that needs to be sent back and forth are things like player locations, who is attacking who with what.

With an MMO, everything tends to be self contained to a single server per environment. In SL, these environments need to constantly talk to each other, sharing information, so you can see beyond the borders of the sim you are currently occupying and people can see you. When on mainland you can generally see 3-5 sims worth of content at once, if your draw distance is fairly high. The sims, and the servers they occupy, are in constant communication to make that happen.

[lucagrabacr]

Maybe it has something to do with your internet connection's speed? Because I've seen people who can cross-sim, teleport to a crowded sims, etc, without crashing. And I know people who occasionally crashed when doing so (like me) simply because the difference in internet connection speed.

[MoiselleErin Teardrop]

I tend to have the same problems. Usually when it is a bumpy cross between regions is when I am driving or even in someone else's car. Walking or flying never gives this problem though. 

 

If there are a lot of avatars in a place I have real bad lag but that is cause my computer and not so much SL.

 

Since there is almost exclusively user created stuff, I imagine the LL servers are chock full of junk. I mean each time someone creates something new, unless it is identical to something else, it is new content to track.

[161488303349]

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Penny Patton wrote:

With an MMO, everything tends to be self contained to a single server per environment. In SL, these environments need to constantly talk to each other, sharing information, ...

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^^ that

Gadget have a look at this

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ar-powerup3/ar-powerup3.html

generally speaking can say that a typical MMO is designed like in Figure 1 diagram

SL is like in Figure 2 diagram

[Caitlin Tobias]

I am with Yo on this. The only time a simcrossing is somewhat nasty is with our rsailboat, we end up upside-down or in the air for a bit - but usually get back normally -  a viewer crash is never part of it. Same for teleports, I hardly crash on them and I am in sims with over 50 ppl quite regularly, things may be a bit slower at times then, but no crashes.

Am not saying SL is perfect, but a lot seems to have to do with my own connection when I experience trouble. I blame my ISP for having the hiccups every now and then .

 

[Ziggy21 Slade]

I agree with Penny

Apart from the architectural differences she mentions, none of the MMOs in your list allow for user created content and that is one massive difference, user created content IS SL, without it our world is empty, to draw a comparison between this and a game which you buy on a CD with contents that are set in stone is really comparing chalk and cheese.

[Poenald Palen]

Sim crossings?

Sims, in the olde days, run on ONE computer for each one. That is what I heard. You paid for a simulator, the hardware and softrware running on it.

Now, they federate things and computers are much faster. Some argure to simplify physics for vehicles, make more computing power available and things will run smoother for one sim tracks. We see federating started, which is supposed to mean you get more CPU and network priority if you need it. We also see the physics shapes upload added to the mesh, so you have more control of the physics shape. But, roads are still a tiny bit of an issue, though I have seen work arounds for prim roads and some even say low poly mesh (uh, very aprubpt changes with perfectly flat boring sections...like prims lol) work better. There are some tricks to it, but supposedly this reduces collisions and such.

I say we NEED MORE COLLLISIONS happening! We do not need uneccessary collisions, but we need some detection so we can make vehicles react to things and be more real.

But, LL could also preload a vehicle chasis. You edit it, a special box opens or opens with a tab...heck, you can even just use the description field or a special script function and drop that in the script, to make it all work. It would have shocks and all that. Preloaded, but with parameters like wheel base, ride height, and so on. Basically, all it takes to set a vehicle now with a scrit minus all the "fix stuff".  scripting people put into make a vehicle script. What, 10 people who make car scripts loose some money. I mean, OK...but 10000's of users get better support and so on. The strange thing is though, I have seen glitches in other car games with MASSIVE hours long downlaods...oh, those updates where new cars I will never buy, graphics I did NOT want, upgades for those things I didnt want to even see...why didn't they leave them on the web? Because, you are can't run a browser while running the game well enough because it takes full screen. Not only that, but what about imulse buys? So, they loaded the stuff in there in the garage/store thingy. It was free to play, so DUH they need to sell stuff!

Same with SL? It is free to play, it is a world. SO, 90% of users wanted teleport and didn't want to drive or fly to teleport hubs.

But, yeah....when teleports tail, that is weird.

I do know that it all works better early morning, after midnight! Less people ='s better Sl experience. Now, for a social world....a social based 'game' sort of world, is that good? Nope.But, to be honest the usage patterns prove most simply would preffer thier own sim and only use a few publicish spaces!!! They hang at one bar for a while, teleport in for 5 minutes of shopping somwhere, and then back to a friends house to rez stuff and play? That is what I have heard, they hang around the same place each log in!

I wonder around, drive mainland now and then, try a track or three. But, yeah, it is one of several locations aside from wondering mainland slowely and laggily. If I had freinds, or when I chatted a bit and 'hung out' I would hang at one of like 3-4 tracks! Funny stuff. There where like several tracks, now more. Some closed, but there are more now. If you want to include actual tracks, not just sims...heck some places have several tracks or at least a couple one one sim! So, it is mabe 20 actual tracks? I dont know. I only hang at 1-3 locations these days and it is by myself! I think there is almost a dozen at one location, 2 at another, and the other changed a few times but has at least roads and an offroad terrain track. When I was new? Sandboxes all the time it seemed! Much shopping and wondering around at stores to see all there was to see! Now, I spend more time at the marketplace checking out new things. The marketplace is a killer app that sort of makes me sad, but I am lagged so much less and it is so faster I preffer to check it out first and then TP in world.

[Poenald Palen]

Maybe the future will be less...uh, 'up in the air' with sim crossings when we see what this new effort will produce:

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Tools-and-Technology/Project-Shining-to-Improve-Avatar-and-Object-Streaming-Speeds/ba-p/1583465

Largest hardware upgrade in SL history thrown at the problem, combined with more efforts to reduce lag. Which reminds me, I need to get to working on my stuff to try and trim the fat. Just have mesh issues to deal with, as well as new scripts to get a hold off. In a few months maybe I will find it easy going, god knows it will be a month before I get my cars sorted with the latest upgrade getting new attention this month, after a few abandoned efforts. Still alive though, still going....now this...is there hope?

Anyone more knowledgable want to chime in and tell us if the new hardware help with sim crossings and teleport crashes, please?

[Perrie Juran]

Actually, I think we can reverse this and ask the question, "Why can't more MMO's do what SL is doing?"

Most MMO's have nothing that approaches the multitude of varied experiences that are available in SL.  SL is "Your World, Your Imagination."  MMO's like the ones you listed are "Their World, Their Imagination."  (Perhaps this is really a big distinguishing point when dealing with the debate over whether SL is a "game" per se or not.)

Because they are "Their World, Their Imagination," it is easier for a MMO to design the game to fit within existing hardware and programming architecture.  What you see and what you can do is actually very limited.

Now no doubt, when SL was first put together, decisions were made based on cost.  Some of these decisions negatively impact us today.  For instance, reliance on Open GL versus Direct X.  If I am understanding correctly what I have been reading about graphics problems (I'm really technically over my head here), if SL had used or relied upon Direct X rather than Open GL, we wouldn't be seeing many of the graphics problems we do.  But it would have cost LL more to use.  So the base architecture has been more difficult to scale.  And it has created a problem that if LL changed to use what may be better programs, that it would break too much existing content.

There is an excellent paper on the challenges of scaling Virtual Worlds.  Quoting from it's conclusion below, the problem is that there is "a gap between the demand and the existing solutions."  MMO's try to live comfortably within the limits of existing hardware and software capabilities.  Linden Lab as I see it continues to push these limits.

So the question is would you rather have a static world, one where you are limited to "Their World, Their Imagination," or a vital world, where it is "Your World, Your Imagination."  To have the vibrant world of the latter, more resources are needed than your average MMO.  The trade off is that this vibrancy sometimes can degrade performance if your hardware, internet connection, etc, are not up to the task.

SCALING VIRTUAL WORLDS: SIMULATION REQUIREMENTS AND CHALLENGES

"There has been decades of research on parallel and distributed simulations. Yet the growing popularity of
virtual worlds brings unique challenges to the simulation of a fully-immersive 3D space with high realism
and in which massive numbers of users interact in real time. In this paper, we discussed these unique challenges and explained the gap between the demand and the existing solutions. Many existing distributed
simulation technologies need to be enhanced to operate in a scale that is orders of magnitude larger than
what they have been applied to before. On the other hand, current virtual worlds adopt a simulator-centric
architecture and static partitioning to simplify distributed simulation problems such as time management
and load balancing. As we observed, this architecture also has scalability limitations.

Virtual worlds are both computation and communication intensive and require solutions that address
resource constraints on both fronts. We are working on a new architecture that detach actors from the
Scene and enable application of scalability solutions independently on different actors and. There are still
many open research problems to be addressed in scaling virtual worlds beyond their current capability."

 

[Czari Zenovka]

Having played EQ for over 7 years and WoW for a time, I can say that I've had much better customer service with both of those than SL, especially lately.

[Pussycat Catnap]

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Poenald Palen wrote:

Sim crossings?

Sims, in the olde days, run on ONE computer for each one. That is what I heard. You paid for a simulator, the hardware and softrware running on it.

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And.. and.. you had to upload both ways, no download. On frozen lines. With no insulation jackets. and...

Couldn't resist.

But yeah...

All that uploading and download wrecks havoc on SL's speed. The more they can push into some kind of pre-done cache, the better. The upcomming plan they have -might-, if it works like it sounds like it will work, have an amazing impact on all of this.

Or it might just break a few things and change little.

We'll just have to wait and see.

 

[Paul Hexem]

I'm not talking content as much as technology, Perrie. The content is a factor, sure, but only in some cases. You pointed out a good one with OpenGL over DirectX. Terrible decision.

 

Hopefully those improvements listed in that message from LL will help modernize the technology behind SL.

 

[Dana Hickman]

One thing that I've noticed is that although sim crossings are rough, they're not any worse than they were back in '06 or '07. What's a lot worse since that time is teleporting across sims that are hosted at different colocation facilities. There's also a lot more issues with LL VPNs now than I ever remember them having in the past. How many times have people seen a TP fail with the usual fail message, and the only way to get there is to TP to another sim first and then on to the original destination? That happens a LOT.. some kind of virtual "netsplit" where one part of a locations 2-way communication isn't working to one facility, but is to another. Quite annoying.

[Bree Giffen]

Content is THE factor in everything and anything to do with the differences between SL and MMOs. SL content isn't made by a single game design team. There are no rules in place on how to create anything and no developer lead to stop anyone from making an object that is over-textured, over-built and over-designed. Take jewelry for example, in SL you'd see it made of 50 prims, using mutiple textures and maybe some scripts inside. It would have all sorts of data tied to it, like the creator(s), the owner, the price, groups, etc. In an MMO, jewelry would be painted onto the avatar using the minimum texture size needed and with a limited color palette.

You take that content design difference between SL and MMOs and then you multiply that by every single thing on a sim that isn't nailed down. To render a scene in an MMO would be like maybe 50mb of data. In SL, due to design, it's like 100mb. Then take into account that the 50mb in the MMO loads from your hard drive to your cpu. In SL, the 100mb loads from a hard drive... in Texas, then it goes through the series of switches and routers between your state and Texas and goes to your hard drive which goes to your cpu.

[Paul Hexem]

I don't buy the "it's more data" line. I mean, yes it is. I agree. But that's a lazy excuse, not a good reason.

 

For one, I'll point out the 40+ man raids of MMO's. That's a whole truckload of data, and it still ran smooth. More than that, many users have connection speeds up to and above 25Mbps. I'm one of them. If there's a hangup in data transfer, guess who's end it's on? Probably not ours.

[Kenbro Utu]

You still fail to understand.  There is no comparison to an environment that is simply delivered by your hard drive, and one that has to be dynamically downloaded at the moment, complete with any changes that happen in real time, and avatars whose images are not stored on your computer.  In an MMO the only information being passed is bascially location and actions, very minimal data compared to the amount needed for the graphics.  It is the difference, no matter what you feel.

[Paul Hexem]

I understand just fine. I just don't sit back and tell people "It's SL, all that content means its supposed to feel like their servers are on 56.6k!"

 

Yes, all that content means things will take time to download, but it's a tired excuse for all the other problems. People coming in here and touting that line are doing a great job apologizing for LL without really understanding that downloading data isn't the only factor. Besides, ever hear of a cache? Once that crap has downloaded the fist time, guess what? Less data gets passed back and forth than an MMO. If you don't believe me, get a network monitor and watch the data stream.

 

Granted, SL has a terrible cache system, which adds to all these problems, but it's still there.

 

If downloading lots of data was an excuse for things to fail, nobody on the Internet would have to provide reliable service and you would never be able to download movies and software/games like we do today.

[Phil Deakins]

You're premise is flawed. There were no MMOs back in the 80s or at any time in the 90s. There were MUGs/MUDs back then - the M meaning Multi- as in Mulit-user. - but no MMOs - the first M meaning Massively. I.e there were no Massively Multi-user ones at all. Consequently this thread is a waste of time since it's premise is wrong.

[Locke Nider]

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Kenbro Utu wrote:

You still fail to understand.  There is no comparison to an environment that is simply delivered by your hard drive, and one that has to be dynamically downloaded at the moment, complete with any changes that happen in real time, and avatars whose images are not stored on your computer.  In an MMO the only information being passed is bascially location and actions, very minimal data compared to the amount needed for the graphics.  It is the difference, no matter what you feel.

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Then you probably haven't played that many MMOs.  There are plenty of 'sandbox' MMOs out there that allow custom content and moving things around, and they move a heck of a lot faster than SL.  And I'm not talking about something as simple as minecraft either.

 

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Phil Deakins wrote:

Consequently this thread is a waste of time since it's premise is wrong.

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Then why reply?

[Freya Mokusei]

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Locke Nider wrote:

Then you probably haven't played that many MMOs.  There are plenty of 'sandbox' MMOs out there that allow custom content and moving things around

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Would you mind listing some? Since there are 'plenty', here are some of the more basic comparative requirements...

Specifically, those that allow multiple parameter-per-part changes and a changable number of parts per object. Also custom (uploaded) textures to a resolution of 1024x1024 (also, alpha), uploaded animations and uploaded sounds.

Please also list any that allow server-side script-handling (but also XML-RPC/HTTP to outside scripts and email) and fully-customisable physics per object. The ability to turn any object into a drivable, physical vehicle is of course necessary too.

And don't forget the ability to purchase parts of the world (not a shard, not a folded space) and design them from the ground upward.

Thanks.