(SL) The end of days

[Lord Derryth]

Hi,

My name is Lord Derryth.  Most people know me as Deeds Greenacre.  I've been in SL for over 14 years now.  I've been noticing some strange things happening on my sim.  I built an Urban Zombie Apocalypse city.  For those that know me.  I have an OCD. Things need to be aligned and perfect.  We all know that SL is not perfect and it never will be.  My roads are in pieces and I use snap to grid to align perfectly with one another.  For some odd reason.  I've been aligning my roads for the past two weeks.  You see.  My sim is either haunted or SL on it's last leg.  My roads keep getting unaligned.  

I've noticed buildings moving in front of my own eyes.  I don't know if this is a delay of some sort or maybe the sim keeps rolling back 5 seconds.  There have been many people stating the same things I have.  Their sim is becoming unpredictable and things are moving around.  

I get it.  Sansar!  The new project that LL decided would be a great idea.  Sadly!  It was a poor idea.  As I stated before.  I've been in SL for 14 years.  I've seen this world grow before my own eyes.  Why bring Sansar into the virtual world?  If it's broken, fix it.  SL seems to have been broken for 14 years and never fixed.  Now we have sansar.  Call this conspiracy theory.  Is LL trying to destroy SL and push us to Sansar?   I have never seen SL or been in SL dealing with such lag and unpredictable servers for this long.  I'm talking about going on 9 days.  Can't log in.  Get disconnected.  Lag to the point nothing loads.  Items on sim moving.  Major city uneven and nearly destroyed.  Everyday feels like a Tuesday.  What is really going on here?  

 

Is it the end of days??  

 

PS

What is this Cloud stuff?

[Parhelion Palou]

LL has no interest in pushing us to Sansar. Sansar is meant for different types of users. LL wants to keep SL going (and eventually get Sansar released). They're different products and LL has different teams supporting them. LL has been been working on SL more in the last few years than for many years before that.

I suggest checking your connection. I've had cases where I was happily working on something only to find my connection to SL was failing and the servers didn't know about my changes. I'd log off & back in ... things were back to somewhere earlier in my modifications. I haven't had any of the problems you describe in the last several weeks. That indicates the servers are OK, but some of the network connections may be glitched, anywhere from your end of the connection to LL's servers.

The cloud stuff is LL planning to save money by moving SL servers onto a cloud service (basically a lot of servers that are rented out to users or companies ... but much more complex than that). I think Sansar runs on a cloud service, and Sansar experiences only run when someone wants to enter them. Putting SL into a cloud service will be more complex than it was with Sansar. SL wasn't designed for it, LL will need to leave regions running (at least for now ... things will break otherwise), and LL will have to figure out how to quickly transfer data between servers during region crossings. I don't expect to see it happening any time soon.

[Penny Patton]

I've always suspected that when LL says "Sansar is a completely different product aimed at completely different people" it's the same little white lie a company like Nintendo gives when saying "The Nintendo DS is a completely different product from the GameBoy line." They're introducing a new product they fully expect to take the place of the old product, but they're hedging their bets in case the new product doesn't do as well as they hope. It's a common, and sound, business tactic to prevent current customers from panicking. Not that SL users are prone to panicking.

Still, if Sansar isn't aimed at the same sort of people who use SL, I'm not entirely certain who their target audience is. They haven't made it very clear in their....I was going to say marketing but I have seen no marketing for Sansar beyond videos and whatnot they've shared with the SL userbase and the odd interview given to a tech blog.

 All that said, "prim drift" is a pre-existing SL problem. It was a problem back when I joined SL in 2005 and it remains an issue today. No conspiracy. No sign of the end-times. Just yet another bug LL hasn't bothered fixing. In addition, LL is not going to try and force SL users into Sansar. Linden Lab may not have ever figured out the appeal of their breadwinner, or learned how to properly cultivate its userbase, but they are very much aware that SL keeps their lights on, and they will go to great lengths to avoid rocking that boat too much.

Linden Lab have gone to such great lengths to keep their existing SL userbase that it has actively hindered their ability to draw in new users. We're talking about a developer that fully realizes their overhead default camera placement is awful for an immersive, third person experience, and yet they doggedly stick to it because they're afraid that different camera settings, no matter how much better they might be, might upset the existing userbase. We're talking about a developer that deliberately created SL's default windlight settings to mimic pre-windlight Second Life as much as possible, because they were afraid too much of a change would push users away. 

[Lord Derryth]

@Parhelion Palou There seems to be an issue that everyone in SL is having.  Maybe some are lucky enough not to feel it.  I've never had network issues with SL.  Something is brewing and it's really bad.

@Penny Patton It blows my mind away that instead of making SL bigger and better, they decide to go the opposite direction.  Look at me for example.  I built a post apocalypse city.  The size of the sim limits my ability to expand and make it look grand.  Especially when driving or wanting to do more.  I get it it's expensive to have a sim.  How doe sit really work?  Why can't they upgrade the system and allow for a sim to be 4 times the size and allow us to choose how many prims we want?  Suppose I want a sim 10 times larger than what I have but for half the prims?  I could build a game within a game in SL that allows for endless play time.  I've heard about people flying airplanes from airport to airport.  How do you do that on a sim when from corner to the other takes 3 seconds to achieve?  14 years is a long time for SL to be out and still feel and play the same as it did when it first started.  I've seen it grow with my own eyes yet.....nothing has changed besides the cosmetic side of it.  We all know in the video game industry it's not about looks.  It's about how the game plays.  Granted this is not a game.  It's a great platform to make a game within a game.  I'm so limited to what I can do it drives me nuts.  I think $300 a month for a sim is too much if you ask me.  Time to expand the sims and let our talents run wild.

[Penny Patton]

SecondLife has many problems.

Some of these problems come down to LL believing they can develop and market a virtual world driven by user generated content without any professional artists on staff to help guide the presentation, develop the tools, and point out easily avoidable problems relating to content creation. Most of the problems we experience in SL every time we log in, from the lag to the cost of land, stem from this one critical error on LL's part. I have not noticed any new network issues with SL recently, but I'm willing to bet the problems you describe are related to worsening of VRAM and bandwidth bloat SL which has been plaguing SL from the beginning, but getting worse as LL provides content creators with more ways to sabotage their own content. If you want to talk about the cost of sims, I can show you how to turn one sim into four complete sims simply through adjusting your camera, reducing the size of your avatar, and building more closely to 1=1 scale. Nobody does this because LL starts people off with 7-8' tall avatars and then nobody wants to be the short guy in the sim, even if it would save them literally hundreds of dollars a month.

Some of these problems are a product of LL's inability to understand the draw of their own product. SL appeals to a lot of people, no doubt about it. But if you ask anyone at LL responsible for guiding SL's marketing or development, the reasons they give will either be woefully vague and incomplete, or total gibberish. This is why SL continues to lack critical features, baseline functionality, and seems to have no direction whatsoever to its marketing. This is why we don't have NPCs, why we're forced to deal with the harassment from awful mainland neighbors if we're unwilling to shell out $300/mo for a sim, why it took almost a decade for LL to give us a proper way to mask avatar bodyparts out (remember invisiprims?), and this is most certainly why LL has not been able to give a clear indication of who their target audience is for Sansar.

 My point is, LL isn't doing anything to hurt SL now that they haven't been doing (or neglecting to do) for the past 15 years. If anything I'd say there's been more positive changes in SL development in the past few years than we've seen in a long time. Experience tools have added a lot we can use to make our sims more engaging, animated mesh is coming (assuming LL doesn't render it useless by tacking on excessive land impact costs to it), we're finally getting long overdue improvements to Windlight, some of which were promised to us in 2007, and LL seems like they finally might be at least trying to encourage better made content through features like "Jelly Doll" derendering of avatars with excessive draw weight. I'm not saying LL is doing a great job now, just that they're taking small but encouraging steps in the right direction. It's too early to say if we'll see any tangible improvement to the SL experience, or if it will be "too little, too late".

[BilliJo Aldrin]

People want SL to look and run like a video game, where everything is preconstructed  optimized and downloaded onto your computer one time.

Man oh man i get 80 fps playing WOW, why can't Linden Lab fix it so I can do that here.

Sansar was born dead on arrival. It will never succeed.

I've never experienced any of the problems the OP is complaining about, especially "prim drift"

I joined second life 8 years ago, it was an awesome experience, and it only gets better and better.

My beef with second life? They need to change the way mainland  is sold, and they need clear up the horrible bottleneck with adult rated land.

 

[Phil Deakins]

What bottleneck?

[BilliJo Aldrin]

5 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

What bottleneck?

There isn't enough adult mainland. Land flippers have it all locked up and are charging outrageous prices for it. If the number of adult sims doubled or tripled, or better yet quadrupled the prices would have to fall.

[Phil Deakins]

Ah, ok. Ty.

[Richardus Raymaker]

people scream, fix secondlife.

To fix secondlife correct you need to break it first. And then everybody leaves.
The also need to stop with supporting old computers and opengl. More people would leave.
And we ignore old content in this case.

To keep secondlife iptodate is going to be harder and harder.
But it will work for some years or many years.

Stop comparing secondlife with sansar. The are not the same.
But sansar is already better then secondlife. simple building,
in price range people can use it. Correct camera angle and build scale.

Most problems like a first person mode and correct camera angle 
could be add to secondlife, i wish the did. But the not know it or ignore it.
Bith thing would make secondlife and uhmm. opensim so much better.

The last thing about moving prims. Maby flosting point / rounding errors in secondlife ?

[Kia Kiyori]

It's my understanding that Sansar was never meant to replace SL. Thing is, though, you can't stop creative types from creating - it's in their blood - sooner or later, Sansar (or something like it) was going to happen.

I could be quite wrong here, but I've gained the impression that Sansar's ultimately aiming to be a massive VR dedicated to real world, international business and education - without all the 'messy' stuff that attached itself to SL (and grew like strange new life forms in a bachelor's fridge).

[Phil Deakins]

OI! There are no strange new lifeforms in MY fridge!

[Anna Nova]

15 hours ago, Lord Derryth said:

My roads keep getting unaligned.  

One thought on this.  You have not recently moved the area to a greater height, have you?  Like a skybox type experience, moved up a 1000 meters?  That can cause the issues you are having as the z-coordinate only has so many decimal places, and higher means less precise.

[Janet Voxel]

I think LL is going to squeeze SL until it’s not profitable anymore. So it’s not going anywhere for a while.

So far Sansar has been pretty underwhelming. I do think all of the improvements LL has made the last couple of years have been to test out features of  Sansar. Sansar might fail, that’s a pretty big possibility. They’ll still have second life to fall back on.

[Penny Patton]

7 hours ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

People want SL to look and run like a video game, where everything is preconstructed  optimized and downloaded onto your computer one time.

Man oh man i get 80 fps playing WOW, why can't Linden Lab fix it so I can do that here.

It's pretty easy to get SL running much better than most residents have ever experienced. Yes, it requires optimizing content, but optimizing content isn't hard at all. The only reason SL content is so unoptimized is that LL has rarely done anything to encourage it and most people are completely unaware of why SL runs so poorly.

Look what happened when LL introduced the "jelly dolls" feature to derender avatars with excessively high draw weight. Sure, many people complained or simply turned off the feature, but others took notice. They didn't want their content to fall out of favour because it would lead to avatars being derendered, so they took steps to reduce the draw weight of their content. I recall one content creator in particular with a popular avatar attachment that originally added about 50k of draw weight to an avatar by itself. Before the Jelly Dolls feature they rebuffed any complaints about this. However, shortly after the Jelly Dolls feature was released they relented and released an optimized version of the attachment that looked identical but was much easier to render and had a much lower draw weight impact.

Discourage unoptimized content and content creators will produce better content.

 And my mainland home in SL looks so good that when I post raw, unedited screenshots, people think the shots are from a videogame, not SL. And yet I get higher framerates at my home than I do anywhere else in SL, just because of simple optimization.

[BilliJo Aldrin]

Yes when jelly dolls were first introduced I said oh what a stupid feature. Now  I jelly everyone due to needing to let my graphics card struggle as little as possible. 

I love your place, do you allow visitors?

[ChinRey]

5 hours ago, AnyaJurelle said:

It's my understanding that Sansar was never meant to replace SL.

It was at first actually. But it only took LL a few weeks - a month or two at most - before they realized that wouldn't happen so essentially you're right.

 

8 hours ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

Man oh man i get 80 fps playing WOW, why can't Linden Lab fix it so I can do that here.

Even with all the limitations we can't avoid, it's fairly easy to get 80-100 fps from a moderately powerful game computer within the SL framework. All it takes is optimized content.

[Kia Kiyori]

8 hours ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

Man oh man i get 80 fps playing WOW, why can't Linden Lab fix it so I can do that here.

It's funny but my fps in SL is far, far, better than what I get WoW atm - go figure.

Getting 80-140 fps despite my graphics card being 3 years old - but only since I realized it was still factory set to Intel and not Nvidia, so I fixed that in a hurry. Big difference. Huge. Massive.

[BilliJo Aldrin]

Isn't anything over about 30 fps just giving you bragging rights?

[Anna Nova]

2 hours ago, janetosilio said:

I think LL is going to squeeze SL until it’s not profitable anymore. So it’s not going anywhere for a while.

So far Sansar has been pretty underwhelming. I do think all of the improvements LL has made the last couple of years have been to test out features of  Sansar. Sansar might fail, that’s a pretty big possibility. They’ll still have second life to fall back on.

It would be nice to be able to go and see Sansar, I am not against it in principle.  But they only released a Windows viewer, and I will not use anything sold by Microsoft, ever.  I buy my computers in bits, so I can avoid even having to throw it away.

[Anna Nova]

2 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

It's pretty easy to get SL running much better than most residents have ever experienced.

......

 And my mainland home in SL looks so good that when I post raw, unedited screenshots, people think the shots are from a videogame, not SL. And yet I get higher framerates at my home than I do anywhere else in SL, just because of simple optimization.

 

Penny,  Those shots are stunning.  How can we get you to teach this optimisation?  Can you point to any tutorials?

[Anna Nova]

1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

Even with all the limitations we can't avoid, it's fairly easy to get 80-100 fps from a moderately powerful game computer within the SL framework. All it takes is optimized content.

It is?  I have an nVidia GTX1080ti (OK the CPU is only an 8-core AMD FX-8350, but I have 16G memory, and my connection is 50G+) and I never get more than 60fps.

I gotta find out about optimising.

[Penny Patton]

2 hours ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

Yes when jelly dolls were first introduced I said oh what a stupid feature. Now  I jelly everyone due to needing to let my graphics card struggle as little as possible. 

I love your place, do you allow visitors?

Thanks, and sure. Normally I keep it private (It's my fortress of solitude, so to speak) but I've opened it up to visitors for a bit. Fair warning, it's pretty adult content-wise. ^^; IM me inworld and I'll send you a TP or a landmark.

12 minutes ago, anna2358 said:

Penny,  Those shots are stunning.  How can we get you to teach this optimisation?  Can you point to any tutorials?

I do have an SL blog where I talk about a lot of the practices I use to keep framerates high and get the most value out of land space and many other SL issues. Most of the articles are fairly old (many predating mesh) but I intend to revisit a lot of these topics with better written articles, revised for any changes and new features added since the originals.

http://pennycow.blogspot.com/

[Janet Voxel]

1 hour ago, anna2358 said:

It would be nice to be able to go and see Sansar, I am not against it in principle.  But they only released a Windows viewer, and I will not use anything sold by Microsoft, ever.  I buy my computers in bits, so I can avoid even having to throw it away.

You haven’t missed anything. It’s somewhere between alpha and beta. It was pretty to look at, but it lacked many features SL has and none of the instances I went to were really interactive. Overall it was pretty meh.

If it stays like that, I won’t be back. It completely lacks a social aspect.

[Phoebe Avro]

On 17/11/2017 at 1:22 AM, Parhelion Palou said:

LL has no interest in pushing us to Sansar. Sansar is meant for different types of users. LL wants to keep SL going (and eventually get Sansar released). They're different products and LL has different teams supporting them. LL has been been working on SL more in the last few years than for many years before that.

I suggest checking your connection. I've had cases where I was happily working on something only to find my connection to SL was failing and the servers didn't know about my changes. I'd log off & back in ... things were back to somewhere earlier in my modifications. I haven't had any of the problems you describe in the last several weeks. That indicates the servers are OK, but some of the network connections may be glitched, anywhere from your end of the connection to LL's servers.

The cloud stuff is LL planning to save money by moving SL servers onto a cloud service (basically a lot of servers that are rented out to users or companies ... but much more complex than that). I think Sansar runs on a cloud service, and Sansar experiences only run when someone wants to enter them. Putting SL into a cloud service will be more complex than it was with Sansar. SL wasn't designed for it, LL will need to leave regions running (at least for now ... things will break otherwise), and LL will have to figure out how to quickly transfer data between servers during region crossings. I don't expect to see it happening any time soon.

Ebbe Linden did say he hoped all SL residents would move over to Sansar when he first talked about it in these very forums, but then again I don't think LL knew what Sansar would be and still don't.

As to prims moving , I have seen prim drift many years ago on the Mainland but not on my private sim, some times lag can make an object move back a bit when your moving it.

Edited November 19, 2017 by Phoebe Avro