Are graphics issues impacting on the SL experience

[cibernut]

Given that SL experience is an entirely visual one, shouldn't LL be doing as much as possible to address existing draw rates?  To give an example, the other day I was standing infront of what at first looked like a car that had seen better days, only to then see it improve bit by bit until finally there was in fact a gleaming, brand spanking new auto.  OK, this is obviously partly a graphics card issue, but if many people are experiencing the same problems (as they must be, unless everyone has the latest gfx card, which I doubt) the isn't this impacting on players experience and ultimately impacting on profits?  

[Ohjiro Watanabe]

As well as how good your graphics card is, and your CPU, and how much memory you have, and what else you are doing on your computer at the time it also has to do with your connection speed and how busy the sim is and the settings that you have selected in your viewer.

It is true that you do need to have a reasonably good computer to get the most out of second life. If you are struggling with a low spec machine I would suggest that you go to Preferences/Graphics and click on the Refresh button and see if that improves things.

[markkemp]

The problem lies with how creators are using textures.

Many do not realise that the average graphics card has only 512mb of memory for textures on it. And even if they had more SL is limited to 512mb anyway.

Creators unfortunately are usually not professionally trained for game texture optimization. For example, you will get a pair of high heels that uses 5 different 1024px textures. You take a look at the textures and you can see that their UV islands are using hardly any of the 1024px available. This is enormously wasteful of graphics card resources.

In contrast, take a look at the professional character models for World of Warcraft. They only just are upgrading to a single 1024px texture after a decade of success. And look at how well they cover their UV islands - not one pixel is wasted unecessarily.

http://media.mmo-champion.com/images/news/2013/november/bconArtOfWoW060.jpg

That being said there are some very experienced and very considerate creators too, and salute their altruism!

As a texture creator I sell my textures in 1024px full perm, because that is what creators (my customers) demand. But I try to include 512px versions as much as I can when I know I am selling to the casual users. There is very little more I can do though - textures I create are probably damaging SL, when they could be helping it.

Also there is a problem with meshes. Creators are using maximum vertexes and not providing different LOD for the greater draw distances. Instead they should be baking high res textures onto the simpler geometry to hide the lost detail.....

The problem is there are too many inexperienced creators here and I don't know if LL can (or indeed morally should) do anything about it. After all I was inexperienced too when I started - as were all creators. You have to learn somewhere.....:matte-motes-nerdy:

IMHO there should be a varying % LL marketplace seller fee depending on how much textures and vertexes your meshes use. That way creators would be incentivised by a balance of sales against profit margins to optimize their creations. We might all learn to be professional game developers in the process.....

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/listing_guidelines#fees-and-commissions  <----solution is HERE

[cibernut]

Thanks for the responses.  Yes, I see the issues - and for the record my spec is a dual core AMD, 8GB ram, and 1GB gfx card, so by no means the greatest spec but not the most minimal spec either - I would say a good average.  If creators are using very complex textures, etc, that both gpu's and the SL system can't cope with then this must be half the problem - but this doesn't alter the fact that this is the reality of the sitation.  If ppl are having to wait minutes on end for items to be faithfully rendered, they will either go elsewhere or they will logout.  I really think LL should lay down strict guidelines that content creators should stick to...  

[markkemp]

Yes, but unfortunately noone wants stiffled creativity in Second Life. And when you start creating you innevitably do things in a sub-optimal way. 

That's why I suggested a varying marketplace seller fee depending on how optimal a product was. Professional designers could be further incentivised if the fee varied between say 2% to 20% say (the current fee is 5%). Then the experienced designers could halve their marketplace fees....Even that solution isn't easy though because some products are simply sub-optimal by nature and certain merchants might end up unfairly penalized.

Alternatively an "optimization/lag rating" could be put on all marketplace listings so that customers could include optimization in their value equation when deciding whether or not to make a purchase. Casual customers can't be expected to assess a product for optimization in any other way.

 

But if we put strict guidelines we put barriers for people to become creators, and then we are all worse off.

Big problems that I think they will be looking to solve holistically in SL2....

[cibernut]

Yes I see what you mean, I think...  So less optimally designed items would mean a higher seller's fee being charged and more optimally designed one's would mean a lower seller's fee - from 2% to 20%.  Good idea.

[SaraCarena]

Badly optimised textures is a good point but there`s other factors too such as connection quality, isp, rl location, viewer settings.........Oz Linden mentioned in this weeks TPV meeting that they are working on radically changing how mesh and textures are delivered to the viewer, which sounds promising :smileyhappy:

What is your draw distance set to cibernut? That`s a BIG factor in scene drawing.

[Madelaine McMasters]

There are some intractible reasons for the relatively poor graphics performance of SL compared to other computer games. Others have delved into some of these reasons. I'll discuss some others.

Unlike MMORPGs like WoW, or single player console/PC games, the interior of SL is not built by a single design team. If you watch those other games carefully, you'll discover that there is extensive re-use of textures. You'll see the same brick textures all over the cities and the same plant leaf textures on flowers and in the trees. This re-use is carefully coordinated to evade your detection, and is how such games can cram the game's entire texture library into the GPU memory/DVD/disc cache. In addition, as noted by others, the textures will have no more resolution than necessary. That's not true in SL. People have painted the smallest objects (jewelry) with 1024x1024 textures.

In SL, it's a free for all. Everybody uploads their own textures, at whatever resolution they wish. So, every time you enter a new sim, or perhaps even walk across a single sim, you encounter hundreds of megabytes of new textures that must be downloaded to your computer's cache. The de-fuzzification of the car you witnessed was the result of the progressive loading of the car's textures. To quickly give you some sense of the scene, SL first downloads low resolution versions of the textures, bringing in additional resolution over time. As the download progresses, the car becomes more sharply defined.

Note that you can set SL's cache to be twice the size of a DVD on which entire rich-experience games are shipped. And even then you'll see SL downloading new textures everywhere you go.

On the server side, everything in SL is dynamic. Users can come and go, their creations can too. Scripted objects can move on their own and collide with each other and with avatars. As none of this can be "pre compiled", the servers must constantly re-calculate the entire scene to update the viewers, detect collisions, etc. In more cohesive games, much of this work can be anticipated by design, so the computations are far less onerous.

There are things you can do to improve performance, as others have suggested. Keep your draw distance down, don't turn on fancy rendering aids unless you want to take photographs, turn down the maximum number of non-imposter avatars. Imposters are 2D poster renditions of avatars that are updated far less often. This reduces rendering load, particulary for avatars with very high rendering costs caused by massively complex hair and attachments.

Much of the peformance penalty is the unavoidable consequence of opening SL to creation by others. I think the benefits are worth the costs.

;-).

 

[Qie Niangao]

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SaraCarena wrote:

What is your draw distance set to cibernut? That`s a BIG factor in scene drawing.

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Right, and not just drawing, but also download: It's necessary to make the best of a not altogether optimal situation.

The thing is, stuff is loading much faster now that it was a year or so ago, before the Lab invested considerable resources in development projects to improve what was a really bad situation. It's still nowhere nearly as fast as it was when I began SL, back in 2006, and creators used much fewer textures on simple parametric shapes (prims) that download hundreds or thousands of times faster than Mesh or even worse, sculpties.

The thing is, the world was very much simpler and less impressive back then. Stuff was so sparse that we could even afford the wind flexing the Linden trees. Now, the world is so much more complex (who even uses Linden trees anymore?) that the prim's massive download advantage is more than offset by the fact that their rendering geometry is slightly more complex than comparable Mesh.

Still, the gradual filling-in of detail described here certainly seems to be network delay. Best thing for that, for any given bandwidth, is reducing the draw distance, as suggested.

It may be of interest that SL was founded by an ex Real Networks guy, and derives from the then-common assumption that by now bandwidth would be too cheap to meter -- that everybody would have gigabit connectivity to the cloud for negligible cost. Obviously, we're still waiting for that, along with those flying cars we were promised.

[Vivienne Schell]

"Much of the peformance penalty is the unavoidable consequence of opening SL to creation by others. I think the benefits are worth the costs."

Not sure if SL is worth the cost of a high end PC for the average american housewife. And it´s not the newbie building a prim house who causes the trouble, actually. It´s the creator selling highly detailed, supercomplex, overkill scripted and system abusive avatar attachments in very first place. Knowing or not knowing that these kill the performance for everyone. That´s what happens when not regulated commerce rules over common sense, you know.

[Vivienne Schell]

Yup, Quie. As they now are assuming that everyone will use an Ocolus Rift within the next two years and whatevr. That´s the method of Silicon Valley prophecy. LL execs, as so many other software garage and company execs are "children" of this business, and the most seem to have forgotten that (and why) the "new market" crashed the world economy a decade ago. Now the "spirit" is back, talking of the "next generation" kind of processing while not even being able to handle the recent one.

:matte-motes-shocked:

[Parhelion Palou]

Commenting on several things:

The 'next generation' means just that ... the next generation of software. LL has not said that it will be designed to use only the latest & greatest. It will work with the Oculus but not require it.

Of course VR and AR (augmented reality) devices are going to be the best thing since fire. That's the way the hype cycle works. People will try them on everything and eventually AR/VR devices will settle into the uses that they fit.

As for LL talking of the next generation kind of processing while not being able to handle the current, I'd say LL is handling SL pretty well. The problem is they are limited by the design of the system, by having to remain compatible with SL's content, and by having to deal with 11+ years of changes to the software. Starting anew (the next generation) is the way to go.

SL doesn't require a high end computer. An $800 (US) computer can run SL well. That's a low or low/medium end computer.

Encouraging efficient content design by taxing inefficient content in the marketplace is an interesting idea, but how would it be implemented? I think an automated process to determine efficiency would be hard to build.

To Cibernut: The amount of memory on a video card is of secondary importance. The card's performance is primarily based on its processor. An NVidia 650 card (approximately $100 US) would work well.

[ObviousAltIsObvious]

Second Life itself was created to support a specific hardware device that LL built. the hardware project was never completed, but SL managed to be quite successful on its own meris.

the Rift hype is pretty much the same thing. LL keeps mentioning it as a UI option because it is a way to get Linden Lab mentioned in the news, and that is about all there is to that.

 

[Perrie Juran]

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ObviousAltIsObvious wrote:

Second Life itself was created to support a specific hardware device that LL built. the hardware project was never completed, but SL managed to be quite successful on its own meris.

the Rift hype is pretty much the same thing. LL keeps mentioning it as a UI option because it is a way to get Linden Lab mentioned in the news, and that is about all there is to that.

 

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This is the first time I can recall ever hearing this.  

I'd be interested if you know any documentation. 

[Kenbro Utu]

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Vivienne Schell wrote:

"Much of the peformance penalty is the unavoidable consequence of opening SL to creation by others. I think the benefits are worth the costs."

Not sure if SL is worth the cost of a high end PC for the average american housewife. 

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It's not my conversation, but it just bugs me how far you missed this point.

 

The "cost" being referenced is the performance penalty, not the monetary cost of running SL.  The "purchase" of the cost is that SL is open to creation by others.  

[ObviousAltIsObvious]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

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ObviousAltIsObvious wrote:

Second Life itself was created to support a specific hardware device that LL built. the hardware project was never completed, but SL managed to be quite successful on its own meris.

the Rift hype is pretty much the same thing. LL keeps mentioning it as a UI option because it is a way to get Linden Lab mentioned in the news, and that is about all there is to that.

 

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This is the first time I can recall ever hearing this.  

I'd be interested if you know any documentation. 

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http://secondlife.wikia.com/wiki/The_Rig

 

[Perrie Juran]

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ObviousAltIsObvious wrote:

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Perrie Juran wrote:

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ObviousAltIsObvious wrote:

Second Life itself was created to support a specific hardware device that LL built. the hardware project was never completed, but SL managed to be quite successful on its own meris.

the Rift hype is pretty much the same thing. LL keeps mentioning it as a UI option because it is a way to get Linden Lab mentioned in the news, and that is about all there is to that.

 

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This is the first time I can recall ever hearing this.  

I'd be interested if you know any documentation. 

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http://secondlife.wikia.com/wiki/The_Rig

 

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TYVM.  That's a piece of SL history  I dont recall ever having heard before.  Very cool.

[Bobbie Faulds]

A few things to increase your rez rate...increase your cache size to maximum...Most of us spend our time in the same places so ones you get those loaded, your golden..

Next, you should have your max bandwidth no higher than 1000, 800 is even better. LL can only pump out the graphicx as a certain speed. If you are trying to get it faster by increasing your bandwidth, you're actually making things worse and take longer...think of it like this. LL is sending out the stream, let's say the size of a standard hose. The hose is full and pumping along well.. Now, you hook that hose up to a 3 foot pipe and what happens? You actually get less and slower performance.

Now, your draw distance doesn't need to by higher than 120 unless you are doing something like taking pictures. You don't need to rendor what's half a sim away. I have a good rig but can really tell the difference when I've forgotten to turn my draw distance back down.

Be sure you are using avatar imposters. Also set your Max # of non imposters to 15 or so. You don't need to see everyone in the club..just those around you.

In your graphics, turn on e3nable lossy texture compression. That helps with your texture loading.

If your browser supports it, limit your framerate to 44 or 45. LL only has a max framerate of 45 so why do you need it higher...you aren't actually getting anything faster. On Firestorm, that's on the Preferences/Graphics/rendering near the bottom of the page.

Those few tweaks should help improve your perfomance. Many people have these up too high and then wonder why they have a problem.

[Vivienne Schell]

"I'd say LL is handling SL pretty well."

They certainly handle it sufficiently. But obviously not well enough to escape the niche or even keep the customers they have. Which isn´t exclusively a Linden generated failure, but they contribute decisively. Talking about "performance hits", to stay on topic: Allowing something absurdly excessive like "sculpts" and almost unrestricted resource abuse by avatar attachments is the reason for the flood of nice looking but performance killing items on the grid. Such things never were and never will be online game compatible in a technical sense, unless someone invents the affordable supercomputer and free LAN broadband for everyone. That´s not what i call a good handling.

"Starting anew (the next generation) is the way to go."

What leads you to the conclusion that they are able to handle this "next generation" thing in a better, more successful way as they handle SL? Imagine someone builds a car which breaks down any 100 km and then this company comes up and promises that the next one will be better, faster, next generation and whatever. Would you believe in such a company?

"An $800 (US) computer can run SL well"

Oh yes, on a fairly well built sim with not more than 10 other high poly mesh, sculpt, script and monstertexture cladded avatars in the 96m viewer range, without shadows and probably windlight disabled and LOD set to zero it will riun fine, as long as your avatar does not move. 2006 revisited. That´s true progress for the masses. Unfortunately not everyone on the planet likes to watch her little high poly mesh avatar in the non-existing mirror while dropping tons of highest poly attachments onto it. Tho, I must admit, these dolls look cute on the blog screenshots. They only look kinda lonely there.

" I think an automated process to determine efficiency would be hard to build."

Not at all. They implemented the "land Impact" meter in the mesh upload functionality, which is quite helpful. Unfortunately land impact does not matter for attachments. And why they do not finally stop further uploads of sculpt maps, i have no idea. And of course they have a problem with abusive content now, but only because they allowed it. And that´s not a graphics engine problem, it´s a 100 percent user handling problem.

"An NVidia 650 card (approximately $100 US) would work well."

No. But i must admit, it depends on what you do in SL. It can be enough, but if you don´t wanna bath in your very own lil metaverse, forget it.

[markkemp]

My feeling is the next generation SL2 will be as much about solving these problems in a holitic manner, as it will be about any graphics engine improvements.

Ebbe Altberg surely knows that any upgrade to the graphics and back end systems will be immediately overwhelmed by even more rediculously impressive (yet equally resource killing) avatar attachments. Unless something is done to solve these problems holistically from the very start.

[Tari Landar]

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Vivienne Schell wrote:

 

"An $800 (US) computer can run SL well"

Oh yes, on a fairly well built sim with not more than 10 other high poly mesh, sculpt, script and monstertexture cladded avatars in the 96m viewer range, without shadows and probably windlight disabled and LOD set to zero it will riun fine, as long as your avatar does not move. 2006 revisited. That´s true progress for the masses. Unfortunately not everyone on the planet likes to watch her little high poly mesh avatar in the non-existing mirror while dropping tons of highest poly attachments onto it. Tho, I must admit, these dolls look cute on the blog screenshots. They only look kinda lonely there.

 

"An NVidia 650 card (approximately $100 US) would work well."

No. But i must admit, it depends on what you do in SL. It can be enough, but if you don´t wanna bath in your very own lil metaverse, forget it.

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I think you are seriously underestating one's ability to customize, and optimize, his or her own experience, and viewer. The pc I am on right now is a, well, a far cry from the most current , up to date, and best performing pc in the world. In fact, my old pc, with a nice graphics card, had overall better specs than this one does. However, I don't have to go through all of the things you describe here, to enjoy sl. I keep windlight on, I keep LOD at 2, which is really all that is needed. I frequently visit sims with numerous sculpts, mesh and other avatars(which we all know are definitely not optimized). I manage moving about, and enjoying myself, just fine. The reason I can, is because I read, read, read, and I learn from what I read. I learned how to make my system work for me, how to optimize my viewer and as a result..my experience in sl. Of course there are always things thatc an be done to optimize the experience and viewer(s) overall, for everyone. However, residents have an awful lot more control over their own experience than they are, often, willing to admit. You cannot blame the company, or the viewer, for the ignorance many of the residents have. I use the word ignorance with its actual meaning here, that being...that residents simply do not understand HOW to make things work properly, and therefore are more likely to have a bad experience.

The information is out there, like it or not, people just have to be willing ti implement it.

I am not in the market for a new pc, or upgrading the one I have. In fact, it is quite outdated to be honest. I most definitely am someone who cannot afford to upgrade or get a new pc, so I know I have to make what I have work. It's not utterly impossible, or even remotely close to it. Even when I first began sl, and had a much, much older pc(before I was given a nice graphics card for it, it had onboard), despite the fact that my sl did not always look the same as everyone else's sl, I still enjoyed it. Why? Because it wasn't just about pretty landscapes for me, which is really all I was missing out on. I was still able to visit busy sims, clubs, work in sl, dj, create, have fun..etc..etc..I didn't let the lack of top notch graphics detur me from enjoying sl. Now I have much better performance and graphics capabilities, despite having a pc that's old and outdated.

You don't NEED a top notch pc to run sl. Anyone that suggests such is simply being willfully ignorant. It's not impossible to make an older pc, older graphics capabilities, etc.. work within sl. It might take more reading, learnng and tweaking, but it's not as utterly impossible as some make it seem.

Ftr, I *can use just about every viewer out there, with varied results. Firestorm is my chosen viewer, the official viewers have always run terribly on this pc, but I can make them work if I want to. Options exist, you just have to figure out which ones will work best for you.

[cibernut]

Right now I don't know what the exact draw distance is - I'll check later...  I do know though that the card attempts to draw everything including distant objects, maybe if I reduce the draw distance that might help.  My connection could also be part of the problem - it's supposed to be b/band but really it's ASDL at best via standard telephone cable, not fibre-optic.

[cibernut]

Most of what you say rings a bell or two - another MMO I used to play did re-use the same textures, etc, for many different areas but they were mixed in such a way that the landscapes didn't look too generic, also, much of the content was downloaded on to the HD which meant that loading content as required took very little time even though the physiccs engine was ce2.  The downside however was that it took a long time to download and install the client/content for a new install/account or every timethere was a version update.  I'll def' try your suggestions and se if that helps, so thx for the tips

[cibernut]

This takes me back a bit.  Used to have a SL account back in 2007 when AV chat was expresed via balloons like in cartoon strips, so I fully remember how objects were made from basic primitives and simple textures, but it was fun  Had no idea though that SL creator was in telecomms.  On gigabit connections and flying cars, well maybe one day, but there could be flying cars in SL

[cibernut]

I agree with this, I've noticed in the very few days of my latest SL incarnation that all the attachments seem to take much longer to render than the main objects themselves including buildings as well as AVs.  For instance I went into a fairly simple house that must have been set for public viewing and everything rendered fairly quickly, except for certain fixtures and fittings that only started to materialise minutes later, including a chandalier that probably took as much memory as the rest of the building.  The level of detail to the individual crystals was very high once it had finished renedering.