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What did SL do wrong during the early days?


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That's strange indeed. And usually it would be the other way around, because AFAIK especially Firestorm has different default settings (higher) for the RenderVolumeLODFactor than the official viewer. Which will make objects show their higher LODs more often than the offical viewer on default settings.

So in theory, it should be the other way around. FS would be heavier on rendering than the LL viewer with default settings.

Beyond that though, FS used to default to Advanced Lighting Model turned off by default on certain graphic presets, where the official viewer has that setting enabled already. (I dunno if this is still the case though)

So I guess your issue boils down to differing settings..

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Apparently that is caused by the LL viewer forcing the graphics card profile into permanent maximum settings, at least on nVidia cards so probably on Radeon too I  expect. That's another thing I discovered recently. I didn't even install the official viewer because it does it instantly and irreversably unless you know how to manually reverse it.

https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Second-Life-Viewer/Second-Life-and-nvidia-drivers/td-p/2958144

The Firestorm people removed that bit of code when it became apparent.

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arton Rotaru wrote:

Beyond that though, FS used to default to Advanced Lighting Model turned off by default on certain graphic presets, where the official viewer has that setting enabled already. (I dunno if this is still the case though)

It still is. With mid+ and high gaprhics settings, the SL Viewer has ALM on, Fs off (according to rumours because one of the Fs developers didn't want to get rid of her good old invisiprim shoes ;) No big issue really. It jsut takes a single mouse click to switch it on or off.

The Firestorm viewer is definitely heavier to run than the official SL Viewer. All those extra bells and whistles doesn't come for free after all. But it should all be cpu load. The graphics card load should be pretty much the same for all viewers. (Except for the LOD factor of course. That adds a lot of extra gpu load but again, it is fairly easy to adjust regardless of which viewer you use.) However, the official viewer used to have a bug that caused it to drive Nvidia cards unneccessarily hard. It was fixed long ago but I suspect that's what caused Steph's problems.

 

As for bloated viewer, I don't know of any Second Life viewer that isn't. :P

 

Edit: Didn't see Vulpinus' post before I posted mine. Do you mean they haven't fixed it yet? The JIRA isn't public so I can't check there. It only affects Nvidia cards, not Radeon btw.

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ChinRey wrote:

As for bloated viewer, I don't know of any Second Life viewer that isn't.
:P

I don't know of much of any software that isn't. Streamlined, efficient code is a rarity these days. Too many easy-to-use development environments and do-it-all libraries.

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I know, I'm late to the game........  ;)

I don't think that LL did anything wrong.

When I started back in 2007 I made a few friends who had been tasked by their companies to explore SL in order to see how they could use it.  And overall they found that it was logistically too limiting.  

No ROI.  Just consider how hard it is to advertise anything in SL.  And to a population who'd rather not see RL in SL......   It just wasn't viable.

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It isn't corporations that entered SL; it was PR firms. They over-hyped SL because some of them were afraid of missing the next big thing after missing Twitter. When the corporations came in, most didn't try to sell to avatars, i.e. avatar clothes or homes or vehicles, but real-life products that no one came to SL to get because they could go to a Sears or an IBM or a Century 21 in real life or on the web, and didn't need cumbersome SL to access this. The corporations found it difficult to adapt to virtuality -- there is no mass media in SL and hence no advertising --- the Lindens, who are something between communists and libertarians, hate mass advertising so they never allowed it, i.e. by selling their splash screen space or by creating roadside networks.

Developers who once worked developing the internal world of SL and their own inworld businesses stampeded to work for the corporations via the "Big Six" companies called "Solutions Providers" -- nearly all of which are defunct now because they failed as well. That meant that SL's "special sauce" and biggest asset -- its powerhouse resident economy -- got gutted and suffered. It never really recovered, and when it did, it was mainly with breedables and gatcha, both of which are a form of gambling and don't build lasting economies.

The Lindens have an allergy to business -- except for their own -- like most technocommunists or state capitalists.

So they didn't do the minimum to secure what in fact is the most robust economy of any social media platform in the world, with more revenue per capita than Facebook (especially Facebook!):

1. They did not secure private property -- anyone could be kicked "for no reason or any reason" even for a speech offense.

2. They allowed the few techies with abusive and disruptive ideas to take over the view, i.e. a few 16 m microbaron ad extortionists, who could have built a world-wide tasteful ad board business, instead opted to put their 16 m blight on prime waterfront, on mountain tops, etc. Eventually -- it took four long years! -- the Lindens stopped both microplot extortion and blight like "The Bush Guy" who was never about politics.

3. The Lindens have a vast aversion to governance, and never adequately dealt with griefers, enabling many to flee SL, and allowing some of the most notorious griefers back again and again on new alts -- some of whom were dear Linden friends.

4. The Lindens believed - and still believe -- that only content creators are worth bothering with as a class of prosumers and so coddle and fete them (which is why I dubbed them the Feted Inner Core) and scorn and ignore land barons, small businesses, amateurs, etc.

5. The Lindens allowed a few of their Silicon Valley buddies to give terrible press to SL on ideological grounds, whether TechDirt simply because people wanted copyright respected and ultimately LL got rid of copybot, or Chris Pirillo, who never got SL, or Howard Rheingold or Larry Lessign who had their lefty ideological axes to grind. LL never cultivated good press from mainstream journalists because they themselves were not mainstream, but near-cultists (Burning Man, etc.).

6. LL had trouble governing its own staff and running its business -- it first hired residents as staff -- a terrible idea. Then raided people from every huge tech company in the world -- a good idea but too much of a shock after their small boutique cultural roots failed to cope with the 2006 influx of big business. 

7. LL tends to blame its customer instead of first its board, then its staff for problems in Second Life. That's funny, because in the rest of Silicon Valley and business in general, CEOs are fired if they can't produce and so are staff.

The problem with SL is not that it doesn't have the latest game engine or lag or sim seams -- millions will play Habbo Hotel or The Sims Online or World of Warcraft with not even one/one hundredth of the creativity and capacity available in SL. The problem is governance -- governance of the company, and governance of the world.

 

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ChinRey wrote

Edit: Didn't see Vulpinus' post before I posted mine. Do you mean they haven't fixed it yet? The JIRA isn't public so I can't check there. It only affects Nvidia cards, not Radeon btw.


I just tried it with my GTX 760 OC. My GPU clocks reverted back to idle clocks (GPU 135Mhz/Ram 162Mhz) after closing the viewer.

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Long post by Prokofy with many good points but:


Prokofy Neva wrote:

4. The Lindens believed - and still believe -- that only content creators are worth bothering with as a class of prosumers and so coddle and fete them (which is why I dubbed them the Feted Inner Core) and scorn and ignore land barons, small businesses, amateurs, etc.

Not really. I'm a skilled content creator and I also have a little bit more than two sims worth of mainland rentals - hardly a land baron but I think it's enough for me to get a good idea what it's all about. The grass is usually greener on the other side of the fence of course but in this case it's pretty much the same.

 

Comments to two or three of Prokofy's best points:


Prokofy Neva wrote:

3. The Lindens have a vast aversion to governance

...

6. LL had trouble governing its own staff and running its business

Same thing seen from two different points of view really. I think this is one of the two core problems of Linden Lab and Second Life and the cause of most of the others we see. This seems to have been the first issue Ebbe addressed when he took over. They have done quite a bit of progress since then and I think by now everybody at Linden Lab is beginning to realize how important it is. Doing something about it is a different matter though, old habits die hard. The fact that they are making progress here gives us a glimmer of hope for the future. The fact that they're still so far behind, is reason for serious worry.

 


Prokofy Neva wrote:

The problem with SL is not that it doesn't have the latest game engine or lag or sim seams

I disagree about lag and sim borders actually. Those are important factors that reduce the quality of experience for everybody and keep quite large potential user groups away. Even more important: they are the reasons why Second Life isn't a virtual world.

But apart from that, yes, this is the second core problem and it's one Linden Lab still hasn't noticed.

Ebbe has occasionally mentioned the rise of a mass market virtual reality in the future and it's always puzzled me if he believes so strongly in that, why isn't LL trying to make it? I think the answer is that they actually are trying but they've got it all wrong. They try to find technological solutions to problems that have nothing to do with technology.Their solutions both in SL and Sansar are to add more, more, more! More features, fancier graphics, more advanced software.

The recipe for a successful virtual world for the future can be said in a single word: Simplify!

That is a lesson LL still has to learn.

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Vulpinus wrote:

Hmm... Having just tried on mine (I risked installing it again), it too seems to have reverted back down. So it looks like that is fixed.

Glad to hear that. :)

And really, even back in their most irresponsible days, a bug as serious as that would have been something they would have addressed the moment they discovered it.

 

Edit:


Vulpinus wrote:

So much for that theory. Sorry for the confusion (that's what happens when we trust what's found on the 'net
;)

Not at all. Turns out this incident only was three months or so ago, much later than I thought, so it's still the most plausible explanation to Steph's problems.

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Perrie Juran wrote:

When I started back in 2007 I made a few friends who had been tasked by their companies to explore SL in order to see how they could use it.  And overall they found that it was logistically too limiting.


Interesting. Yes, I suppose most companies would do their own research before signing up. The ones people saw in SL were the ones that forgot. ;)

This got me to think about something: I remember some news articles about SL back in the early days. But apart from that, I can't remember ever hearing anybody in Real Life or at any internet forum not directly related to SL, as much as mention Second Life. I've certainly never ever met anybody who said that they have or had a Second Life account (apart from the people I met through SL of course).

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

The problem with SL is not that it doesn't have the latest game engine or lag or sim seams

I disagree about lag and sim borders actually. Those are important factors that reduce the quality of experience for everybody and keep quite large potential user groups away. Even more important: they are the reasons why Second Life isn't a virtual world.

 

 
Let's talk about sim crossing lag. When you cross from one sim to another, it's not like just crossing the street. Your avi requires 4 computers/servers to operate properly. You have your personal computer, the server your base avi is on, the server your inventory is on and the server that the sim you are in is on. If you move from a sim on the SL server to another on the SL server, your transition is relatively smooth. If you move from a sim on the SL server to a sim on a Magnum server, even if the the sims appear to be right next to each other, all that info on your avi has to be handed off from the current sim server to the new sim server. It does take at least a few seconds and yes, sometimes it doesn't go smoothly; even less so if you are moving to a homestead sim. Given the complexity of moving from one Simulations, ie Sim to another and moving across servers, and taking into account that the servers may even be in different cities and even states and you have people from all over the world connecting, I think they do a pretty good job.
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steph Arnott wrote:

I tend to think that is if i was head of say Mercedes advertising department and people making SL Mercedes cars is free advertising. Cheap as chips at no outlay.

My statement was more of a generalization.  But that was the general feel of many companies.

I guess a SIM devoted to Frito's or Beano could have its attraction.  And I could enjoy driving a virtual Rolls Royce.

But most of us would have been put off by what we considered "virtual spam," seeing it as an intrusion into our World.

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Vulpinus wrote:

Hmm... Having just tried on mine (I risked installing it again), it too seems to have reverted back down. So it looks like that is fixed.

So much for that theory. Sorry for the confusion (that's what happens when we trust what's found on the 'net
;)

When you posted that link, I remembered that I have also read it back in the day. But I never paid much attention to it, because I had my Global Profile configured to run at full steam all the time anyway. :matte-motes-big-grin: And have any other app just use the global settings. :matte-motes-delicious:

Now that I have reconfigured the profiles, I may keep it like that. Who knows what it's good for. :matte-motes-smile:

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It's not so much that SL screwed up by courting RL businesses. More that they dropped their hardcore user base and bent over backwards to accommodate any investors who took a punt. First of many times SL users would realise LL simply doesn't 'do' feedback, once some new-fangled idea's taken thir fancy.

I remember visiting an inworld pizza franchise, where US-based residents could order a RL pizza. Because when you want a pizza delivery, your first thought's to go onlne, open up a viewer, wait to rez, click a box, open a web link and be directed to a page listing your nearest restaurant. As opposed to the annoying and stressful ritual of picking up the phone.

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CallumBH wrote:

...

More that they dropped their hardcore user base and bent over backwards to accommodate any investors who took a punt.

...

That reminds me, did I remember to mention how important market surveys and market analysis are to a successful business? :P

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