Creator-centric

[Medhue Simoni]

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ChinRey wrote:

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There are no content creators nor experience creator working for LL. There are nobody at the board or staff meetings or at the office to give them firsthand information about what a 3D world creator actually needs. LL has always tried their best to make SL as creator friendly as possible but without that in-house expertise, they often miss the mark.

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Well, I think the problem is really that they are letting coders pick and choose which creators to listen to. This gives us crap like Fitted Mesh.

 

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ChinRey wrote:

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One example: As I'm sure you all know, there is another team, independent from but partly financed by LL, who are working on another virtual world right now. They're going to base the graphics on voxels which apparently are quite a lot heavier on the computers than mesh. Their reasoning is that voxels can provide better graphics and by the time they're ready to open their world, the average computer will be twice as fast as today so they can afford to use heavier graphics.

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Actually, I just heard Phillip talk about voxels, and they are just basically using them to render things that are far away. He said that it's very good for that purpose

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ChinRey wrote:

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That's exactly how Ebbe started his SL2 pitch too. "Better graphics", cause that's what all creators want. Or more correctly: that's what all non-creators think all creators want. And of course we do, but not at any cost! I mean, what's the point of making a wonderfully detailed replica of an old motorbike if the environment is so laggy you can't actully ride it? And how are we ever going to find time to use all those wonderful new features anyway? - I mean when you already spend three times as much time fighting the unfriendly interfaces of buggy, bloated and barely compatible software as you do on actually creating?

Anyway, as I said, Ebbe started with the "Better graphics" cliché but now he suddenly talks about "experience creators". Now, being a pixel doll can actually be a nice experience (don't knock it if you haven't tried it) but it gets boring fast and I have a feeling what Ebbe had in mind was something a bit more action-filled. And since they clearly want SL2 to be for the masses, they need all that action to work on a perfectly normal average - and even slightly below average - home computer. That means the stipulated doubling in copmuter speed won't even be enough to get today's SL down to an acceptable lag level. There's certainly no room to spend any of it on improved or "improved" graphics.

Here's a very simple test:

Make a small race track - say about 1000x500 m in overall size. Fill the tribunes with 500 spectators, half of them on "average" home computers, the rest on two year old laptops. Start the race - twelve cars, fifty rounds, full speed, all drivers on "average home computers". The day we can do that with no significant glitches or lag, that's the day increasing graphics quality becomes more important than reducing lag. In SL1, of course, you're struggling with 20 avatars running through some basic dance animations in a club....

So, yes, better graphics would be nice. But there are so many other more important and urgent updates and the only visual feature that should be anywhere near the top of the priority list right now, is working mirrors.

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The solution to lag is all about preloading the items for the simulation. Half of the issues with lag are a direct result of caching problems, or the fact that things aren't preloaded, and must be seen first before it is loaded. If the caches were preloaded with everything in the sim, even animations from avatars, then that would cut down on lag. Of course, I know almost nothing about these things, so it's all just speculation. That said, prepackaged games run smooth, like racing thru the streets of chicago in Watch Dogs, because all the information is already on your pc. Maybe, there should be a switch for the new world where you can tell the viewer to preload everything, or not. This might be needed if you are running a tablet or something that can't hold everything in the scene.

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ChinRey wrote:

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It can't be anywhere near 15%. One important point many people seem to overlook is that nobody

has

to deal with L$. We can do all our SL buying and selling with RL money if we like. We can even invent our own in-world valuta if we want to.

As it is now we don't want to, of course. L$ is reasonably safe, free to use and very, very practical. Things will look very different the moment LL introduce any kind of general transaction fee though.

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Yes, we could sell our items on our own websites, but those would only be full perm items. If you did not want to sell your items full perm, then you would have to sell thru LL's marketplace or inworld. Platforms like Daz and Unity have this problem much more than SL. I can easily avoid Daz's and Unity's high commission by just selling the items on my own site, which I already do. The customer gets the exact same thing they would get buying from Daz or Unity.

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ChinRey wrote:

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It's not that simple unfortunately. I know I'm repeating myself here but from an RL perspective, what you do when you buy a sim is simply rent a web server. Yes, it's a server with some special software and some special possibilities and limitations but it's not significantly different from any web server you can rent from any web host. Back in 2003 200 dollars a month was a perfectly reasonable price for a dedicated web server, in fact it was a little bit below average market price. But prices on the open web host market have dropped significantly since then and now you can easily get a dedicated server for 50 dollars/month.

LL still charges 2003 level prices for their hosting services. You may think it's because they're greedy but there is actually another very good reason why they can't just drop the land tier: The L$ exchange rate is closely connected to land tier so if LL changes one of them, they'll have to change the other too. What do you think would happen if suddenly overnight you had to pay 1000 L$ for a U.S. dollar?

It will happen sooner or later anyway of course but it's easy to understand why LL tries to delay that crack for as long as possible.

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This would only happen if LL tried to adjust things so that they still maintained the same $ value income from the land. This would be completely unreasonable. With the new world, they can price land however they want, and it won't affect SL to any large extent. There will be some affect, but no more than when a different world opens from a competitor. As LL does better and better with the new world, and has 2 legitimate income streams from 2 worlds, then they can easily cut prices on land in SL, without destroying they whole business model.

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ChinRey wrote:

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I think that's an important part of their current plan yes. Seems to me the package they're planning for right now, contains four items:

1. A software system to simplify game buiding
2. A dedicated (mandatory) hosting service for those games
3. A dedicated (mandatory) viewer for those games
4. A selection of auxiliary services (user registration, money transaction etc.)

Now, the auxiliary services certainly have some value but not

that

much. The special viewer may be an advantage but it may also be a liability. It certainly isn't enough on its ow to persuade game developers to choose LL's package. The dedicated, mandatory web hosting is a clear liability, even if LL drops their hosting fees down to regulalr market price. LL will have to seriously sweeten other parts of the deal for developers to swallow this.

In the end it all boils down to how well the game building software holds up against the competition. Hard to say right now but I have a suspicion LL has yet to realize there is a competition at all.

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Well, a world like SL is a unique thing, and use case. Allow me to put forth a scenario that is easily doable today, and something I've thought about for a long time. Let say that I have this grand idea for a game/movie/world. When it comes to game, or world, or movie, they all use the same assets. Ok, maybe not exactly the same, but they could be the same assets. As an animator, it's all the same to me, and I might actually do all this. So, I could make a Unity game, prepackaged for almost any device used today. No multiplayer or any of that. Just a more single track type of game. While I'm creating cutscenes, I can also create a whole movie for the game. If any of it gets popular at all, then I would want a place for all the fans to gather and play together, which is where something like SL fits in nicely. Again, they all could use the same exact assets, so the cost for creating all of this becomes very small, compared to any AAA game trying to do anything similar.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Pamela Galli wrote:

When I hear "Creator-centric" I think of concentric circles drawn on my back. Because when LL tries to do what it conceives of as "helping" merchants, I have learned to duck.

I am pretty resigned to the fact that I have had a very good run in SL, but LL is planning to kill it one way or another, probably several ways. Or maybe not kill, but seriously wound.

 

I have a 4 sim store packed with content. It has taken me three years to get 2/3 of that content converted* to mesh, and trust me it has been a huge effort. Other than one PT employee who does MP listings, I have done it all, including Customer Service and managing the business end on top of learning Blender and keeping to a weely new release schedule.  Just now the store is looking like i want it to. 

So I dont care how wonderful SL2 is going to be. After playing catch up to mesh for 3 years -- yes, I realize most mesh "creators" are just importing things off the internet, but I dont -- I cant look forward to starting over again, OR to trying to figure out how I am going to run two stores in two different grids when the one I have now takes all my time.

 

* By converted I mean, making new mesh stuff, not some "conversion" process.

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I'm proud of you. Seriously! It's not easy what you have done, and shows a real dedication to both 3D and to your customers. I'm hoping, that all these changes makes it easier for us to make profits across many platforms with very little effort. Instead of making different products for every different platform, we'll just need to make 1 product that works on all platforms. Of course, this will take time to evolve.

[Pamela Galli]

I have listened carefully to all you have said about different selling platforms -- I dont have any clear direction formed but it is at least very much on my radar now and it had not been.  The question again is how many hours a day can I sit at this computer? :-)

[Tamara Artis]

"Creator-centric" as I would like it to be, is the control over what a person as a creator, can sell. I don't mean a specific kind of a product but any kind of a product that is optimised for a virtual world that happens in real time. In today's SL anyone can be a creator and we all know about multiple 1024x1024 textures slapped on 1 door knock or same sized textures on shadow prims. Don't let me start to speak about our avatars, one of the heaviest things to display these days. Have you ever tried to go into that wire-mode (I have no idea how its actually called but you click Ctrl+Shift+R and see everything in triangles or whatever it is) and take a look at average (up-to-date) avatar? If you can see through it then its easy to display and if you can't see through it then it has heavy impact on your graphics. Same is with mesh furniture we buy.

An average customer doesn't need to know about low-poly products and why they are important for smooth experience but after lagging like crazy we are forced to learn why certain objects make us laggy while others don't. 

Another thing is how creators outside SL see those that are inside SL - mafia. I'm not saying there are no good creators here but the amount of copybotters and wannabe creators is so big that the good ones are simply overlooked. Discovering new products and merchants is far more than finding new cool things to play with, too often it includes a detective work to make sure I am not buying ripped content. 

As for the shared experience, I would love to see some kind of HUDs similar to ones LL introduced recently, you give permission one time and simply interact with objects or users. It would be interesting to see a whole new game in-world where you climp up on social level and need to interact with a certain number of people each day, or visit a certain number of places. 

And I have an idea for taxes too, imagine each time we put a product in the merchant box in the viewer it takes a certain amount of lindens from us, like a listing-fee. Then another level of taxes for products we keep on the MP, pay a small weekly amount of lindens for each product listed even for ones that are not selling good. I see it as a nice incentive to try harder and make quality things or simply remove products that are not selling and "clean the trash". It could even be applied to shops in-world, making your both MP and in-world products connected (no need to update the slurls) and a certain fee for every product set to show up in search or set for sale in-world would give a certain amount of L$ to LL for each sale it makes or for as longs as it is rezzed. If there are predesigned shopping areas creators could simply move in into one of them and rezz their products there - fee that LL takes from each product would be the rent - the more you have, bigger your rent. 

[ChinRey]

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Pamela Galli wrote:

When I hear "Creator-centric" I think of concentric circles drawn on my back. Because when LL tries to do what it conceives of as "helping" merchants, I have learned to duck.

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That's how it is. I think the saddest thing is that all the people at LL seem to be really, really nice guys who really, really want to help. It's just that they never understood what their customers actually needed.

 

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Pamela Galli wrote:

I am pretty resigned to the fact that I have had a very good run in SL, but LL is planning to kill it one way or another, probably several ways. Or maybe not kill, but seriously wound.

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I don't think SL2 will have that much effect on SL at all. Obviously it all started as an attempt to update SL but by now it's evolved into something so completely different  you can't really compare the two. I can't imagine anybody at LL still believe everyody will flock from SL to SL2 the moment it opens.

 

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

Well, I think the problem is really that they are letting coders pick and choose which creators to listen to. This gives us crap like Fitted Mesh.

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To be fair, it wasn't LL who came up with fitted mesh. At least two clothes developer came up with different hacks to create mesh that followed the avatar somewhat and LL eventually gave in and made it official. I'm not sure I'd call the fitted mesh idea crap anyway. I think it's a brilliant solution to a problem that shouldn't have existed in the first place.

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

Actually, I just heard Phillip talk about voxels, and they are just basically using them to render things that are far away.

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They must have changed their minds then. Their website certainly makes no such reservations: https://highfidelity.io/

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

The solution to lag is all about preloading the items for the simulation. Half of the issues with lag are a direct result of caching problems, or the fact that things aren't preloaded, and must be seen first before it is loaded.

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Oh yes, caching is a solution to much of the problem here. But even so, a poorly made sim in SL can easily contain half a gigabyte or more of raw, uncompressed graphics data. You can't really expcet the viewer to start caching preloading before you've actually entered the sim (unless you've been there before that is) and no matter how compressed it is and how fast your connection is, that amount of data takes time to download. And you graphics card has to deal with the full, uncompressed amount and that's a challenge even for the strongest of them.

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

That said, prepackaged games run smooth, like racing thru the streets of chicago in Watch Dogs, because all the information is already on your pc.

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That's part of the answer but it also runs smoother because there is so much less data. Builders who make graphics for computer games have no choice, they have to use the resources efficiently.

Many SL builders don't care about resource efficeincy at all. Why should they? And even those who do care, where are they going to find the information they need to figure out how?

It's this culture of wastefulness that is so alien to all true builders (both in RL and SL) and so evident when the automatic response to "Better, Faster, Greater" becomes "cooler graphics".

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

Yes, we could sell our items on our own websites, but those would only be full perm items. If you did not want to sell your items full perm, then you would have to sell thru LL's marketplace or inworld.

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Yes, but you don't have to pay inworld and you certainly dom't have to pay in Lindens. Today, you can click on jsut about any CasperVend vendor or CasperLet rental box and get the option of paying in U.S. dollars with your credit card. Your card is then charged by CasperTech who again transfer the payment as Lindens to the seller. It would be extremely easy to rewrtie the software to skip the exchange part and transfer the amount directly as U.S. dollars to the sellers account. It's just that right now Lindens are so much more convenient for those small amounts. It becomes far less conventient the moment Linden starts to charge commission fees.

 

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

With the new world, they can price land however they want, and it won't affect SL to any large extent.

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You mean they use completely different hosting rates for the two systems?

Hmmm...

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... ..

 

You know, that has so many different and interesting implications there isn't enough room on this whole message board for them all. I guess we just leave it open for now.

[ChinRey]

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ChinRey wrote:

 

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In SL1, of course, you're struggling with 20 avatars running through some basic dance animations in a club....

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I suppose it's not perfect netiquette to reply to your own posts but I just found another even better illustration of how critical the lag issue is in SL 2014:

Right now I'm standing in the middle of one of those empty low lag water sim. Nobody there but me. My avatar's render weight is 20501 (only wearing system clothes and a flexi hair) that is about a fourth or fifth of an average modern avatar. Graphics set to medium but with LOD reduced to 1.0 and draw distance to 56 m. Computer's a slightly old MacBook Pro, not exactly up to date but not unusually slow for a home computer today. OS X 10.9. The lag meter keeps telling me that the frame rate is too low - possible cause, too many complex objects in scene.

 

[Drake1 Nightfire]

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ChinRey wrote:

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ChinRey wrote:

 

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In SL1, of course, you're struggling with 20 avatars running through some basic dance animations in a club....

That all depends on YOUR specific computer.  I have no issues with 30 at a club dancing when I am DJing on the same PC as i am logged in with. I know people that have issues with 5 people chatting. Not every computer is the same.

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I suppose it's not perfect netiquette to reply to your own posts but I just found another even better illustration of how critical the lag issue is in SL 2014:

Right now I'm standing in the middle of one of those empty low lag water sim. Nobody there but me. My avatar's render weight is 20501 (only wearing system clothes and a flexi hair) that is about a fourth or fifth of an average modern avatar. Graphics set to medium but with LOD reduced to 1.0 and draw distance to 56 m. Computer's a slightly old

MacBook Pro

, not exactly up to date but not unusually slow for a home computer today. OS X 10.9. The lag meter keeps telling me that the frame rate is too low - possible cause, too many complex objects in scene.

 

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There is your problem right there... Why people keep thinking that notebooks and laptops can run SL with ease, I will never know. SL is one of, if not the biggest graphics hog ever. My wifes PC has minor issues and it has decent memory and a geforce 9800 card in it.

This is my system aside from the graphics card it's 7 years old.

CPU: AMD Athlon II X4 645 Processor (3099.98 MHz)

Memory: 6144 MB

OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601)

Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation

Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 650/PCIe/SSE2

I am standing at my home parcel with these settings

Draw distance: 136

Bandwidth: 1000

LOD factor: 4

Render quality: Medium-High (4/7)

lag meter is green across the board and i am getting 45 fps.

Perhaps it isn't SL that is the problem, but a very under-powered machine. Even a brand new Macbook has Intel HD Graphics 4000, very under-powered for SL.

[ChinRey]

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

There is your problem right there...

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No, there is LL's problem. because:

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Drake1 Nightfire continued:

Why people keep thinking that notebooks and laptops can run SL with ease, I will never know.

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That's not mystery at all. It's because that's essentially what LL tells you you can when you first come here. LL wants and always wanted SL to be a virtual world for the general public, and they seem to be even more keen on that when it comes to SL2. At least this is what they say. That means they'll have to make sure their software fits the average person's home computer because there is no way the average person will spend money on a new more powerful one just for the sake of SL.

 

[Drake1 Nightfire]

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ChinRey wrote:

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Drake1Nightfire wrote:

There is your problem right there...

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No, there is

LL's

problem. because:

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Drake1Nightfire continued:

Why people keep thinking that notebooks and laptops can run SL with ease, I will never know.

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That's not mystery at all. It's because that's essentially what LL tells you you can when you first come here. LL wants and always wanted SL to be a virtual world for the general public, and they seem to be even more keen on that when it comes to SL2. At least this is what they say. That means they'll have to make sure their software fits the average person's home computer because there is no way the average person will spend money on a new more powerful one just for the sake of SL.

 

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As with any software, you still have to meet the minimum requirements. If you want a better experience, use better equipment.

Can i watch a blu-ray dvd on my TV, yes. Will it look as good as seeing it on my fathers 60" LED tv.. no. Is that the problem of the movie company or my own? Your analogy doesn't work. You can use SL on your under-powered system, but will get a better experience with more power.

[Perrie Juran]

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ChinRey wrote:

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Drake1Nightfire wrote:

There is your problem right there...

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No, there is

LL's

problem. because:

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Drake1Nightfire continued:

Why people keep thinking that notebooks and laptops can run SL with ease, I will never know.

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That's not mystery at all. It's because that's essentially what LL tells you you can when you first come here. LL wants and always wanted SL to be a virtual world for the general public, and they seem to be even more keen on that when it comes to SL2. At least this is what they say. That means they'll have to make sure their software fits the average person's home computer because there is no way the average person will spend money on a new more powerful one just for the sake of SL.

 

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I've not used it so only know the little bit that I have read but a possibility is to provide the new service in a similar manner to the way SL Go is run where all the computations are predigested for you.

[ChinRey]

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

Can i watch a blu-ray dvd on my TV, yes. Will it look as good as seeing it on my fathers 60" LED tv.. no. Is that the problem of the movie company or my own? Your analogy doesn't work. You can use SL on your under-powered system, but will get a better experience with more power.

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Or I can just log off and find something else to do. That's fair enough but if enough people do that, who's gonna pay SL's bills?

But there's one point I may not have explained well enough. Look at the scene I described again. This isn't highly detailed graphics. This is something a 486 computer back in 2003 would have rendered with no problems whatsoever.

Imagine if you try to watch that blue-ray dvd on your TV tomorrow and find out it doesn't work at all. Try it on your dad's LED tv, and get the same small low-res picture your own TV gives you today.

SL doesn't need all that extra computer power because of the heavy graphics, it needs it because most of the power is wasted. And the entire system becomes more and more inefficient every day.

This can't go on forever of course and it's almost certainly the reason why LL started the work on SL2. Unfortunately, no matter what happens to SL2, it's not gonna solve the problem for the existing grid.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

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ChinRey wrote:

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

Can i watch a blu-ray dvd on my TV, yes. Will it look as good as seeing it on my fathers 60" LED tv.. no. Is that the problem of the movie company or my own? Your analogy doesn't work. You can use SL on your under-powered system, but will get a better experience with more power.

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Or I can just log off and find something else to do. That's fair enough but if enough people do that, who's gonna pay SL's bills?

But there's one point I may not have explained well enough. Look at the scene I described again. This isn't highly detailed graphics.

This is something a 486 computer back in 2003 would have rendered with no problems whatsoever.

Wrong. In so many ways, just wrong. A 486 back in 2003 would never have been able to render flexi hair. Not unless it was  optimized. A small 256 or ven 128 texture. Not a 1024 like most ones are.

Imagine if you try to watch that blue-ray dvd on your TV tomorrow and find out it doesn't work at all. Try it on your dad's LED tv, and get the same small low-res picture your own TV gives you today.

That's the thing, the blu-ray would have to have changed it's minimum requirements. SL has barely changed what is needed to run SL. Sadly, intel graphics have never been good enough to run SL well.

SL doesn't need all that extra computer power because of the heavy graphics, it needs it because most of the power is wasted. And the entire system becomes more and more inefficient every day.

Yes, yes it does. Can you please show some evidence to back up that claim?

This can't go on forever of course and it's almost certainly the reason why LL started the work on SL2. Unfortunately, no matter what happens to SL2, it's not gonna solve the problem for the existing grid.

We have no idea why they started work on TNP, it's all guesswork. What problem? You need to realize that an Intel 4000 chip does not meet the minimum requirements to run SL. That is YOUR problem not LL's. They put the minimum requirements our there, it is your job to meet them.

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[ChinRey]

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

Wrong. In so many ways, just wrong. A 486 back in 2003 would never have been able to render flexi hair. Not unless it was  optimized. A small 256 or ven 128 texture. Not a 1024 like most ones are

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OK, a bit of poetic exaggeration there. :matte-motes-wink:

But obviously, no computer recent enough to even be able to log on to SL today will have any problem rendering something like that, not even if the hair had a 1024x1024 texture (which I told you it hadn't - look at the render weight for my whole avatar). There had to be some other explanation. Turns out it was a connection problem of all things. A problem with a trans-Atlantic connection caused some packet loss which of course again slowed down the connection, not enough for anybody doing regular internet surfing to notice (when I called my isp they found out it had been going on for three days without anybody else noticing) but enough to keep my cpu too busy to give my gpu the attention it needed. I'm not sure what happened. Either the viewer simply ignored the 9.9 GB cache and kept re-requesting the same data from the server or it was simply overloading with repeated negative status requests (like: "Hi, server! anything new for this scene?" "Nope!" "OK, Thanks!"). In either case it's seriously inefficient code.

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

That's the thing, the blu-ray would have to have changed it's minimum requirements. SL has barely changed what is needed to run SL. Sadly, intel graphics have never been good enough to run SL well. ... Can you please show some evidence to back up that claim?

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You mean empirical evidence? I'm afraid not. As far as I know, nobody's tried to scientifically test changes in lag level over time here.

But I have returned to the same sims with the same hardware (and with no changes to the sims) repeatedly over the last year or so and although it never occured to me to make any measurements, the increase in lag I've noticed have been so large that I'm absolutely confident it's real and not my imagination.

On one occasion I can be absolutely positve that a software change added considerable lag. When Project Interesting was introduced, I downloaded the new viewer immediately, long before that upgrade was mandatory. That meant I could switch back and forth between the old and new and test them against each other. Now Project Interesting is particularly interesting here since it was intended to reduce "perceived lag". I can assure you that any improvement in that respect was drowned by the amount of very noticeable real lag it added.

It's easier if we ignore the timeline aspect. There are so many anti-patterns and other examples of inefficient coding easy for everybody to see. Just a random list off the top of my head in no particular order:

• There are three completely different ways, with completely different coding, of making an object phantom. (Apparently - but this is unconfirmed - one of them actually forces the server to calculate the collision data even if it will never be used.)
• SL has as far as I can see (and I've really searched) never provided informtaion whether mesh object with the same asset id are instanced or not. The answer to that question is rather critical for deciding how many meshes can be made as efficiently as possible.
• Static sprites are fully supported by the SL code but only used for very limited purposes. Now, there is a question whether it's a good idea to keep or not (I think it is but I may be wrong) but since it's in the code anyway, they should certainly be used for all they're worth.
• SL has always had full support for one bit alphas but it was only made available to non-Linden builders last year, forcing people to use considerably laggier 8-bit alpha masks even when 1 bit would have worked just as well or even better.
• LSL scripts are still compiled in LSO as default even if Mono is nearly always the most efficient option.
• In LSL multi-condition if loops are not short circuited
• Mesh physics shapes can not be controlled directly by the maker. You have to choose between a triangle or a hull based model (with no real explanation or info about which is the best choice for which purpose). These are then converted in Havok models which can sometimes be considerably different from the original.
• A mesh upload requires five different models regardless of how many are actually needed. Also, all four visual models must have the same number of material faces and identical models are not combined but included separately in the mesh asset.
• Prims, sculpts and "SL mesh" are all specialized version of the general mesh system and they share numerous traits. Despite this, they seem to be handled by completely different code. Not only does this add unnecessary complexity to the software, it also reduces the possibility of applying features available to one to the other too.
• Sometthing similar is apparent when it comes to avatars and objects. There are numerous examples where the same code could have been used for both and where a feature available only to one would have been useful to both. But since they are (apparently) handled by completely different parts of the software, reusing code (both to simplyfy and to add features) seems impossible of at least very difficult.
• SL has two completely different systems for bump maps/normal maps.
• Usually in 3D design, normal maps are used to reduce lag. In SL they effectively increase lag. (How? Don't ask me)
• LL failed to respond to a popular demand for higher resolution and more flexible avatars. As a result a large number of different user-created solutions with lag inducing alphas and prim, sculpt and mesh attachments appeared instead of the fairly simple minor increase of the base avatar's mesh resolution that was really needed.
• LL failed to respond to a popular demand for more three-dimensional clothing. As a result we got mesh clothes, liquid mesh, rigged mesh and eventually fitted mesh. Personally I think fitted mesh itself is a good idea but it is rather render heavy and 99 times out of 100 clothing layers with normal maps would have been both better looking and less laggy (or possibly not - considering how normal maps on objects ended up)

And so on and so on. The list can go on forever but I can't.

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

We have no idea why they started work on TNP, it's all guesswork.

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Of course but I think the suggestion they started it because they decided the old code needed to be replaced is an educated guess. :matte-motes-wink:

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

What problem? You need to realize that an Intel 4000 chip does not meet the minimum requirements to run SL. That is YOUR problem not LL's.

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Not really my problem. I've got a more powerful computer I can use. The MacBook used to be my SL computer but things have grown so much laggier here the last few months (especially since Project Interesting) it doesn't really work anymore. I can still use it in my own low lag sims but many of my favorite stores and hangouts have become too heavy.

It is a problem for LL though, or rather two problems - or two decisions if you like...

The first one is about money. After all LL needs that to pay for their connection lines, their servers, to pay their workers and to give the owners some return on their investments.

Now, to get the money, LL needs paying customers. Basically there are two kinds of those. There are power users who are quite happy to spend a few thousand dollars on some cool hardware and there are casual users that aren't.

Now, LL can choose to focus on the power users exclusively. There are quite a lot of them after all. But if I understand correctly, they've chosen to try for the much larger market of casual users instead and if they want to gain that, they have to adapt their product to it. One of the most important rules in all kind of busniess is "the customer is always right."

 

The second problem LL have here is that it is actually possible to make a virtual world efficient enough to give somebody on an oldish laptop the same graphic quality as today's SL but with no speed problems worth speaking of. (And btw, just imagine what your computer could achieve in such a place!) It'll be expensive and time-consuming but it's certainly doable.

The challenge would be to sell such a world. Most of the people who would be immediately interested are well and truly established in SL or at IMVU and not likely to move soon even if this new world is better. As it is today, such a project would almost certainly go bankrupt long before it had recruited enough paying customers to survive.

Things may be a bit different the next year or three thougt because TNP has stirred things up a bit in SL. Most people here won't or can't move - at least not right away and I'm sure quite a few will simply move on straight to this new world. But many will start to look around for alternatives. There may well be enough of them to establish a new faster and more efficient SL soon. And once it's established with enough paying customers to cover the costs, it can start growing.

That's what I think at least - and I have actually thought quite a lot about it. :matte-motes-wink:

But the only way to know for sure what the future will bring is to wait for it to happen. Except one thing that I'm absolutely certain about: this is my last post on this thread. Been spending more time on the forum than in SL the last few days and I can't go on like that.

 

Cheers, everybody!

[Pamela Galli]

Sorry to hear that will be your last post -- your seem to have quite a bit of knowledge about the inner workings of LL and SL code and I have learned quite a few things from reading what you have to say. 

[ChinRey]

I know, I know. I said I wasn't going to post anymore in this thread (but I certainly will elsewhere on the forum). But I have to update a comment which no longer is true:

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ChinRey wrote:

...

The MacBook used to be my SL computer but things have grown so much laggier here the last few months (especially since Project Interesting) it doesn't really work anymore.

....

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The latest version of the SL Viewer (3.7.14.29638) fixed that. :matte-motes-big-grin:

SL still is noticeably slower than it was just a few months ago (visiting the same sim with the same computer and the same pref settings) but the speed improvements 3.7.14.29638 introduced means is enough that it is possible again to visit SL with a two or three years old MacBook Pro.

[Qie Niangao]

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ChinRey wrote:

SL still is noticeably

slower than it was just a few months ago

(visiting the same sim with the same computer and the same pref settings) but the speed improvements 3.7.14.29638 introduced means is enough that it is possible again to visit SL with a two or three years old MacBook Pro.

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[Emphasis mine.] Really? Because I'm seeing rather the opposite in both Windows and Linux. Did you happen to update or install any MacOS patches that could account for the slowdown?

(That's not to say there isn't a real tension between SL's graphics performance with ever more realistic content and its suitability for a wide range of hardware, but I'm just struck by a recent decline in performance, when that's not at all my experience on the other supported client systems.)