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

[Phil Deakins]

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Locke Nider wrote: 

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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?

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If I hadn't replied, the OP wouldn't have known how wrong his/her premise is.

[Perrie Juran]

We really are comparing TV Dinners (MMO's) to good Home Cooking (SL).

One is a heck of a lot more work than the other.  But generally tastier too.

[Perrie Juran]

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Gadget Portal wrote:

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.

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There may be some here who would say that if the GPU manufacturers were more cooperative with the Open Source community, Open GL could blow Direct X out of the water.

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussion-Forum/Linus-Torvalds-on-GPU-manufacturers/m-p/1572165/highlight/true#M68640

[Deja Letov]

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Gadget Portal wrote:

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), h

ow 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?

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my guess is because SL was never intended to be like those mentioned MMO's. user content, as much as you'd like to dismiss it is a HUGE issue. Not just the number of prims and textures, but there are lots of people scripting and writing some horribly bad and laggy code because they don't know any better. with an MMO most of it, other than maybe character movement is served locally from your machine, nothing like that in SL..simply because you can't. And cache...hardly. SL is constantly changing. You could try and cache, but what do you cache? Just textures? That doesn't help scripts, moving objects, avitars with huge amounts of load, etc.

The biggest difference is those games are optimized and designed for that load, they are meant to be played by thousands of people, they have the technical team behind them to back it up. I can guarantee you SL does not have the numbers that these gaming companies have in comparions to how many servers they are taking care of.

I'm not even sure for the comparison to be honest. A MMO to me developed by a gaming company is nothing like SL. SL is basically a glorified chat room where you can show off the size of your digital ... prowress.

 

[Chronometria]

I recently took part in the RFL charity giant snail race across bay city and the problems of sim crossings were crippling. Snails are not even vehicles, they are just avatars and despite their size they are actually quite simple.

 

On the very first sim crossing, we lost two of those racing to a crash. Of the ten or so racers competing, around 5 pulled out from attempting to complete the course as their computers simply couldnt handle it.

 

So in the task of "cross a portion of bay city on foot", half the computers participating failed, which is a pretty sad state of affairs.

[Kenbro Utu]

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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, 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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I don't play MMO's period, so in that you are correct.  So educate me.  Are you saying there are MMO's which allow you to upload your own textures, create objects with almost any set of parameters and script those objects to perform in a certain way?  Do they allow you to own a plot of land (server space) in which you have full control over terraforming, lighting, and access, etc?  Do they allow complete customization in every facet of your character to the point SL does?  

 

I would not be surprised to find out that these sandbox MMO's require the content to be first downloaded to your hard drive.  If I can be proven wrong, please do so.  

[Pussycat Catnap]

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Chronometria wrote:

So in the task of "cross a portion of bay city on foot", half the computers participating failed, which is a pretty sad state of affairs.

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When crowds sim cross its always been a bit rough.

 

That said, in my new set of cars, I've been racing around Bay City the last few days. Not always through empty sim either.

BUT its usually just me crossing a sim border at the same time. Only now and then with a passenger.

There -are- a number of curious tricks to doing this. You need to turn down most graphics and be light as you can on scripts. BUT you need to turn DISTANCE UP to high enough that a good amount of things rez before you reach them - but not so high that this overburdens you.

Too short or too far a camera distance can both unseat a vehicle user.

For walking, I'd wager being at 64 to 88, maybe 96. At 64m and walking, you should have rezzed a lot of the coming sim's graphics before crossing - so that it just becomes a scripts handoff.

When I drive through Bay City, I try to go between 120 to 248m camera range. Insanely high... but if I don't sim borders turn into brick walls. On some mainland sims, I've needed even more. On closed sim racetracks, I ramp it up to 200m+, so I can have the whole course in 'ram' and be able to go as fast as I can manage to turn.

Its hard to know, best to test in advance. The racers for the snail thing might have been better of raising up their cache as high as it could go, and then flying through the race course route once ahead of time - starting at the end and going to the beginning.

Not ideal, but sometimes vital.

 

[Ceka Cianci]

i never had to contact support on a sim crossing..where i can remember more than a few times being stuck for hours until support could get my char unstuck from drifting around the WoW map..untill we learned you had to head for water to have your ghost die of fatigue to get back..

that or being on a boat and it fail and if we didn't have some talent that could get us out we could have DrownDed!! DROWWWWWNDED!! GilBerrrrrt

sorry had to do mah gilbert grapes brother impression lol

[Maelstrom Janus]

Why dont I believe these people who seem to be able to tp without trouble., who never go to laggy sims etc ... Ive been in sl five years an tps fail more than they ever have as does trying to cross borders in a vehicle - despite promises this would be fixed....

Personally Ive always believed there was a 'propaganda' machine in operation to pour scorn on those with valid and oft heard complaints.....At the same time Im getting a heightened sense that the people in charge dont actually care that much about whats going on in sl for the long term users... not that the people at the top of the totem pole seemed to care that much anyway.... just keep taking the money and run I think.

[Ceka Cianci]

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Maelstrom Janus wrote:

Why dont I believe these people who seem to be able to tp without trouble., who never go to laggy sims etc ... Ive been in sl five years an tps fail more than they ever have as does trying to cross borders in a vehicle - despite promises this would be fixed....

Personally Ive always believed there was a 'propaganda' machine in operation to pour scorn on those with valid and oft heard complaints.....At the same time Im getting a heightened sense that the people in charge dont actually care that much about whats going on in sl for the long term users... not that the people at the top of the totem pole seemed to care that much anyway.... just keep taking the money and run I think.

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because that may be true for you..

i remember 2006 lag and tp's and constant crashing over and over and taking it all in stride because it was the norm..a lot just adjusted then..or 30 minutes for a shirt to change or having to fly  up above the clouds until hair rezzed..or never seeing anyone fully rezzed looking like melt people at a club..

if a tp fails now and i click cancel..i don't have to relog like before..it actually leaves me connected..

stuff rezzes really fast and i can't remember the last time my hair didn't show up or prims were stuffed up my butt lol

 

i mean when did high speed internet really start to become something everyone had?

like 2000 or later?

how could there have been something like sl that was doing all what sl could 20 to 30 years earlier?

 

i don't question people crashing or bad tp's still happening or LL sucking in the past at what they do..i just think the timeline is a little off..

and i'm looking forward to see what this new thing they were talking about in the blog helps change..

although..i am no where near as commited to this world as i used to be..

if we still had problems like back in 2006 now..i would have left a couple years ago..but it's gotten better for me in that sense..

aside from the boredom LOL

 

[Deja Letov]

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Maelstrom Janus wrote:

Why dont I believe these people who seem to be able to tp without trouble., who never go to laggy sims etc ... Ive been in sl five years an tps fail more than they ever have as does trying to cross borders in a vehicle - despite promises this would be fixed....

Personally Ive always believed there was a 'propaganda' machine in operation to pour scorn on those with valid and oft heard complaints.....At the same time Im getting a heightened sense that the people in charge dont actually care that much about whats going on in sl for the long term users... not that the people at the top of the totem pole seemed to care that much anyway.... just keep taking the money and run I think.

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I wouldn't question that it's happening to you so why question that it's not happening to others? Years ago, back in 2008 and 2009 it happened to me all the time. In the last couple of years though I can tell you, I don't experience failed TPs...granted I don't go to a lot of places, I stick to a main few, but when I go shopping or something I do tp and I don't get failures. I also don't get lag, but I've been on the exact same sim as someone else and was told they had lag, while I didnt. That's the truth and not really fair for you to call people a liar simply because they may have better internet connection, better hardware setup or just plain better luck.

[Talia Davidov]

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Gadget Portal wrote:

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!"

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I do not think you really do understand.  The huge difference is the content you so casually shrug off.  Lets take one of your example MMOs, WoW.  When they first introduced flying you could not fly everywhere, why is that?  One of the reasons is some places simply didn't have the geometry to be looked at from every angle.  When a game designer makes a game, they use the absolute minimum amount of model and texture as they can get away with.  However, in SL the makes didn't make the things you see.  We the users made things, and they are not optimized like a game creator optimizes their builds.  They can not be by the very nature of the environment we exist in.

Then once again there is the big part, that you so easily dismiss, that as others have said, all the content in a MMO is ON YOUR HARD DISK.  None of it has to be downloaded.  You shrug it away and say "Cache" end of discussion.  But even assuming the cache system was the most efficient on the planet, something we all know is not true, the sheer amount of data to be downloaded would be impossible.  Unlike an MMO that has a limited amount of content, the content in SL changes by the minute.  New textures are uploaded constantly, a great deal at the mind numming 1024x1024 max even when not needed (not to mention the alpha along with it).  New geometry is also uploaded constantly in mesh and sculpties. 

None of this even considers scripts and their added loads.  Anyone can write a script, some of them are works of art, and some of them . . .well not.  For example, there was a resident that had a moving snake, just one tiny snake that moved in one of my skybox rentals.  That little snake was taking up more than 1/3 the sims script time, lagging the entire sim.  MMOs simply do not have these things.

To compare MMOs and SL is truly comparing apples and oranges.  They are different environments for different purposes.  Is there room to improve SL, OH YEAH!!!  But comparing it to what it isn't designed for doesn't do it.

[161488303349]

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Maelstrom Janus wrote:

Why dont I believe these people who seem to be able to tp without trouble., who never go to laggy sims etc ... Ive been in sl five years an tps fail more

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most of my teleports that fail these days say: unable to do the teleport at this time. try again later (or whatever that message is). this compared to how it used to be for me when it would start the teleport and then viewer crash

[Paul Hexem]

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Talia Davidov wrote:

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Gadget Portal wrote:

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!"

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I do not think you really do understand.  The huge difference is the content you so casually shrug off.  Lets take one of your example MMOs, WoW.  When they first introduced flying you could not fly everywhere, why is that?  One of the reasons is some places simply didn't have the geometry to be looked at from every angle.  When a game designer makes a game, they use the absolute minimum amount of model and texture as they can get away with.  However, in SL the makes didn't make the things you see.  We the users made things, and they are not optimized like a game creator optimizes their builds.  They can not be by the very nature of the environment we exist in.

Then once again there is the big part, that you so easily dismiss, that as others have said, all the content in a MMO is ON the YOUR HARD DISK.  None of it has to be downloaded.  You shrug it away and say "Cache" end of discussion.  But even assuming the cache system was the most efficient on the planet, something we all know is not true, the sheer amount of data to be downloaded would be impossible.  Unlike an MMO that has a limited amount of content, the content in SL changes by the minute.  New textures are uploaded constantly, a great deal at the mind numming 1024x1024 max even when not needed (not to mention the alpha along with it).  New geometry is also uploaded constantly in mesh and sculpties. 

None of this even considers scripts and their added loads.  Anyone can write a script, some of them are works of art, and some of them . . .well not.  For example, there was a resident that had a moving snake, just one tiny snake that moved in one of my skybox rentals.  That little snake was taking up more than 1/3 the sims script time, lagging the entire sim.  MMOs simply do not have these things.

To compare MMOs and SL is truly comparing apples and oranges.  They are different environments for different purposes.  Is there room to improve SL, OH YEAH!!!  But comparing it to what it isn't designed for doesn't do it.

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People are still saying "lots of data like this is supposed to fail to download" why?

It's supposed to be slow? Sure, that's a good argument. But fail? Seriously?

A failure to teleport is a failure to transfer data for example, and that shouldn't be acceptable in a time when we can download an entire software package or HD movie in minutes, sometimes seconds (excluding those nitwits that wear 10 or 20 or more mb of scripts, they deserve every failure).

[Perrie Juran]

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Gadget Portal wrote:

People are still saying "lots of data like this is supposed to fail to download" why?

It's supposed to be slow? Sure, that's a good argument. But fail? Seriously?

A failure to teleport is a failure to transfer data for example, and that shouldn't be acceptable in a time when we can download an entire software package or HD movie in minutes, sometimes seconds (excluding those nitwits that wear 10 or 20 or more mb of scripts, they deserve every failure).

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Teleports, and specifically failed teleports, are an issue that I suspect are affected by the same problems that affect SIM  crossings.

It's more than just downloading the information to your computer.  You are correct, the problem is a failure to smoothly and quickly transfer data.  Not just the download to your computer which I suspect is a minor issue here when it comes to teleports.  The SIM servers and various Asset servers are failing to transfer data on Linden Lab's side of the equation.  They are failing to complete the request to move you from Sim A to Sim B and to transfer all the appropriate data first internally and secondarily to your computer.

Supposedly addressing (fixing) the issues surrounding this transfer of data, especially as it relates to SIM crossings is a priority at the Lab.  Of course, whether this is just lip service or if they are really devoting extra resources to this issue is up for grabs.

There also will be the issue of scalability which I pointed out in the article I linked earlier, SCALING VIRTUAL WORLDS: SIMULATION REQUIREMENTS AND CHALLENGES (pops).  But still, what the actual problems are in getting the various components of the service to talk to each other, that is way above my expertise.  Apparently it is harder to fix than what meets the eye.  Unless there is someone at Linden Lab who is getting their jolly's by watching our frustrations with the failed teleports and they are just leading us on.

I too have been hit by a cluster of failed teleports recently.  Some of them I do see a common denominator too (teleporting out of a busy SIM), but others I don't see one.

Yes it's annoying.  But on my end I can either choose to be patient or I can chose to allow it to 'ruin' my time here.

[Perrie Juran]

 

And on a related note, time for a humor break..................

 

[Ajax Renfort]

...SL, the 100mb loads from a hard drive... in Texas

 

Good thing I'm in Texas