Why Isn't There a Combat Section in the Forums?

[Rhonda Huntress]

If you open up the Market Place home page, you will see a list at the bottom left of common communities.  Being a commercial page these will be where significant amounts of money are spent that is outside of the norm.

Communities

• Tiny
• Goth
• Gor
• Fantasy
• Vampire
• Furry
• Steampunk

If you want to know which group is most likely to have a new sub-forum created for their discussions, there is the priority list.

If you want to start a new and unique RP sim, randomly pick any two form the list.  Tiny vampire; gor steampunk (what will the priestkings say?!), Goth furry.  Pick 3 for something crazy.  Fantasy goth vampires!  Well, that's horribly redundant.  Tiny fantasy furry steampunk pirates of Gor!   We need a forum for that. 

[Jerilynn Lemon]

CLEAR!

It's still breathing but barely. I don't see this thread lasting much longer, but final arrangements should be made.

[Tyro Gutter]

tl;dr Roleplay sims have combat, but people who remain in SL for combat aren't the same audience most roleplay sims appeal to. Combat subforum might have more merit than you think.

Hi I'm the military RP larper who made some of the videos Parx posted attempting to make a bad point. I'm not going to argue that combat play doesn't sometimes intersect with RP, I am going to argue that the topics of discussion and communities attracted to both communities are different. A long time ago, you had many RP communities basically dependent on their desired combat meter of choice, ie DCS2. You still have many communities that are very active that don't make a distinction between combat and RP, such as the Goreans and some of the remaining DCS2-based RP sims; that's where I think some of the questions of redundancy here are coming from. After people argued for approaches to resolving combat in some of these roleplay sims that didn't involve your ability to fight within a meter and the people exclusively on RP sims for the combat on them waned, you had a divergence. Like I said, not every community did this, but I know the ones I gravitated towards definitely did. This was years and years ago.

The audience for the multitude of combat communities in Second Life is fundamentally different from Roleplay sims and they're all more complex than games within SL. In many of these communities, you have people starting discussions about rules, balance, technology, groups, etc. I'm not an active participant in the SL forums (this is my first post,) but what kind of reception would I get in the roleplay forum if I began talking about the way my combat group wants to implement shields within ship-to-ship combat in LLCS in the roleplay forum? It's not exactly an appropriate scripting topic either, it's a game balancing discussion. It isn't a game in of itself, it's a discussion revolving around a specific aspect of a "game" in Second Life, so the games forum doesn't seem appropriate either. You might believe that it would only be relevant to the LLCS community, but a combat community using spaceships or one developing vehicles for use in their combat meter may also have something to contribute to that discussion.  Same for a discussion regarding rules for movement enhancing devices.

Even the combat enthusiasts within GOR would find merit to discussions such as that if there was a topic started about close combat weapons. Any posts would directly benefit the Gorean combat system and how people develop for it and consider its balance. This isn't an interesting topic of discussion for roleplayers, they care about the story, not the combat system they utilize to resolve and explore their story. Things like this are interesting to people like me who remain on SL for its combat.

It's a shame Parx only posted videos of people within the SLMC doing combat because you do have very active communities practicing combat daily that I think would cross-pollinate well with one another and with us, but like I mentioned they confuse combat and RP. It isn't a bad thing, because most of these sims are built upon them basically meaning the same thing, but your hardcore RPer who works hard on a character is not the same person as someone on the same sim who knows the ins and outs of the combat meter and has set macros via their gestures to utilize the meter to its fullest potential and earned a reputation on that sim by being a fearsome combatant.

That said, you might be thinking I would also want a combat subforum to benefit my own community. The answer to that is yes, that would completely be in my self-interest because I enjoy combat on SL. I don't think that's necessarily valid considering most communities would want a discussion board having to do with their niche in the community to raise awareness about themselves. I also believe highlighting the more positive aspects of the combat communities would add another thing to bring people to SL or bring them back, but I think that's a bit of a longshot at this point in its lifespan.

Edit: That said, it has occurred to me that the best way to perhaps highlight the need and desire for what I'm talking about may be to actually incentivize our own guys to proactively make posts discussing what we would like to discuss in potential forums. Maybe people will want to "contain" it.

Edited December 10, 2017 by Tyro Gutter

[Shouka Starchild]

Parx, did you know that we did indeed recruit at many roleplay sims, including Midgar, Toxic, and many others? This is the reason we've been forced to triple-demote you, and why we are rightly being labeled a roleplay group. This is your required reading as part of your training. Axios!

-Vaukreyn Animebutts, founder and leader of the Coercion Combine

 

Edited December 10, 2017 by animebutts

[Tari Landar]

7 hours ago, Tyro Gutter said:

dit: That said, it has occurred to me that the best way to perhaps highlight the need and desire for what I'm talking about may be to actually incentivize our own guys to proactively make posts discussing what we would like to discuss in potential forums. Maybe people will want to "contain" it.

Or you could, as MOST communities that do not feel they have a specific place here on the forums....create a forum that you can control both content and attendance of/to. It is very clear that some folks are hell bent on trying to be exclusive on who gets to discuss combat, or anything remotely related to it. That would better be served in a different place, this forum will chew them up and spit them out-and that's just the milder folks  

I can  say, that I(and I may be completely alone in that) would love to read(because I read a TON, even when I go long periods of not posting at all) threads about combat......if they were presented in a much better light that wasn't trying to put down every single person that did not view all combat in the very same manner, or had differing opinions and wanted to join in discussions. It would be as interesting to me as the countless discussions I've had with some pretty nice  folks inworld about it, even more so since this thread started. Though those folks didn't come at me like..well..idiots, inworld, they were actually polite in wanting to discuss things HERE first, and then inworld. I've even been to some pretty cool sims I've never seen. But...those only came about becuase not everyone that participates in combat *wants* to be as exclusive as OP suggests/acts , nor do they want to come off as jackasses all the time, lol. Some of them seem to actually want more participation and think the ability to discuss at will in some place might aid that. Or, at least, that's what I got from our convos. 

I think the forums are a great way to get more folks to join....just not threads like this one, which contain a lot of "let me 'splain why you're wrong about all combat" instead of "let me 'splain to you how WE do things", instead. There's a couple of really good posts in this thread, ones I thoroughly enjoyed reading, even learned some new things...but it's mostly derailment and proof positive that some combat folks would probably feel better, and serve the grid better,  locked up in the cornfield forever fighting for their dear pixel lives against  rabid pixel vegetation...'cuz their people skills suck, lol.

I know it well...'cuz sometimes my people skills suck too, and that's precisely where I should be when it happens  

Edited December 10, 2017 by Tari Landar

[Tyro Gutter]

6 hours ago, Tari Landar said:

Or you could, as MOST communities that do not feel they have a specific place here on the forums....create a forum that you can control both content and attendance of/to. It is very clear that some folks are hell bent on trying to be exclusive on who gets to discuss combat, or anything remotely related to it. That would better be served in a different place, this forum will chew them up and spit them out-and that's just the milder folks  

2

We do actually have our own boards, but nothing involving VICE, Gor, DCS2, those guys with the mechs, etc. The problem with the LLCS community is, as you can see here, you have these guys who at best meme-lord about things that make them look cringy or, at worse, bring up internal drama like Parx and Wyatt, so most attempts to create a neutral space on our own in the past have failed. I understand why people on SL would say "Well sounds like a you problem~!" and it is, but I believe Parx is aware of that and it's why he attempted to make a point about a combat forum involving other communities ... and then only proceeded to showcase our community, because he isn't very smart. But as I tried to explain before, most communities integrate combat with something else, so it wouldn't necessarily occur to any of them to showcase their combat in livestreams and videos like we do sometimes.

By the same token, we could create a forum for all the combat communities, sure, it's an idea that may have some merit. It actually isn't that hard to set up a nice looking forum, I've helped do it before. We actually have had two forums within our own community that had a registration API where you could only register new accounts by clicking on a box inworld (one still active.) I can't really give you a good reason why no one has not attempted to reach out to people of similar interests beyond Linden combat to involve the other communities in discussions that might be of interest to them.

All of that said, I have really nothing else to argue about everything else you said. If you're open to reading about topics of interest to our community, then I'm open to making threads about it and I would implore others to whenever something comes up. If enough threads are made about the topic and there is a positive or negative reception on it, some in the forums may wish for a containment board; like I've already mentioned. I suspect it may be irritating at times to decide whether a specific topic of discussion should be "General", "Roleplay", or "Games."

[LittleMe Jewell]

[MoiraKathleen]

1 hour ago, Tyro Gutter said:

We do actually have our own boards, but nothing involving VICE, Gor, DCS2, those guys with the mechs, etc. The problem with the LLCS community is, as you can see here, you have these guys who at best meme-lord about things that make them look cringy or, at worse, bring up internal drama like Parx and Wyatt, so most attempts to create a neutral space on our own in the past have failed. I understand why people on SL would say "Well sounds like a you problem~!" and it is, but I believe Parx is aware of that and it's why he attempted to make a point about a combat forum involving other communities ... and then only proceeded to showcase our community, because he isn't very smart. But as I tried to explain before, most communities integrate combat with something else, so it wouldn't necessarily occur to any of them to showcase their combat in livestreams and videos like we do sometimes.

By the same token, we could create a forum for all the combat communities, sure, it's an idea that may have some merit. It actually isn't that hard to set up a nice looking forum, I've helped do it before. We actually have had two forums within our own community that had a registration API where you could only register new accounts by clicking on a box inworld (one still active.) I can't really give you a good reason why no one has not attempted to reach out to people of similar interests beyond Linden combat to involve the other communities in discussions that might be of interest to them.

All of that said, I have really nothing else to argue about everything else you said. If you're open to reading about topics of interest to our community, then I'm open to making threads about it and I would implore others to whenever something comes up. If enough threads are made about the topic and there is a positive or negative reception on it, some in the forums may wish for a containment board; like I've already mentioned. I suspect it may be irritating at times to decide whether a specific topic of discussion should be "General", "Roleplay", or "Games."

In addition to "General", "Roleplay" or "Games" there is also the "Creation" forum area which has sub-forums for topics like scripting, LSL, mesh, building and texturing, animation, etc., so depending on what aspect of combat you're posting about, it would seem to me that some of those sub-forums under "Creation" might also be options. 

If you have an outside forum, you can include a link to that in your signature area here, to help interested parties find your outside forum. 

If you're trying to highlight the existence of the combat sims, and to draw in new people, another good question might be why there isn't a combat category in the Destination Guide...  Have any of the combat sims tried to get a listing in the destination guide? and if so, what category did they end up under there?

[Tyro Gutter]

1 hour ago, moirakathleen said:

If you're trying to highlight the existence of the combat sims, and to draw in new people, another good question might be why there isn't a combat category in the Destination Guide...  Have any of the combat sims tried to get a listing in the destination guide? and if so, what category did they end up under there?

1

tl;dr I don't know why zombie killing and VICE sims aren't in the destination guide. I believe in order to make an attempt to get a linden combat sim into it would call for a sim, owned by a military or not, to actually feature a well-made tutorial for LLCS , provide equipment just below or equivalent to the basic essentials of most of the military groups on the grid, and have an environment you can't experience clientside lag in. That sim currently does not exist. It might in the future.

-

I can't speak for zombie combat sims or VICE sims, but I know our LLCS community is very, uh, obtuse to learn because it's so involved just to get started and there's been no sim that really "holds your hand" so to speak. There's no combat developers or refs or GMs that have a directory where you can seek them out for help like RP sims with complex meters do, so learning the ropes is reliant on someone going out of their way to ask, but most of the people asked aren't interested in helping unless those people are willing to get involved with the military aspect of LLCS, which might at a glance seem to be the community in of itself but the idea of picking up a gun and shooting someone on damage land is distinct from an organized body training and equipping people for combat.

Just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about, to successfully fight on one of these LLCS sims you need to join a "spawn" group, set your home on a spawn parcel (where you probably did not teleport into,) read their rules to determine which guns, movement enhancers, etc. are allowed, find a gun that is allowed, and then most of these militaries will not fight on equal terms with you because most do not provide equivalent gear in their spawn hubs to their own. And then you need to join a different spawn group, set your home again, and read the rules of each and every different military sim you go to. Even VICE has a respawn system of some sort. LLCS is unintuitive, even the process of setting your home and joining 5+ spawn groups turns people off of the entire practice. Which is also why many people involved in LLCS turn to just being in a military. Aspects of roleplay aside, a military gives you the knowledge you need to operate in the play space, a team to play on, times and places to fight,  and (usually) legal equipment to fight with.

I do intend to make a well-made "how to get yourself set up" tutorial series for fighting in military-owned sims, I just haven't bothered to do so just yet. There are also efforts by groups to attempt to turn their hubs into mini-tutorials, but nothing has been made that doesn't involve a ton of reading or busy-work that turns off people who just want to arrive to the sim, shoot people, and leave. The kinds of people who do that end up getting banned from most places because they are misconstrued as griefers when they're just unaware that flying around the sim with a very powerful marketplace gun isn't acceptable gameplay. People like me also do not enjoy fighting 1-2 people who are relatively inexperienced; I'm part of a military group because I enjoy team-based combat, so I'm helping contribute to the problem of driving off newer people because we typically do not respond well to them sticking around for an hour or two.

Which kind of gets at the core of what is "wrong" with LLCS and the military communities in general. We haven't made a decent sim to get into the destination guide. Every attempt to form some sort of neutral, well represented and fun combat sim fails. People putting money into those projects want to serve their own factions, as is their right, but you have feuds going all the way back to the teen grid and beyond that hamper that level of coordination. Not only that, but many of these people are more into the politics of the community rather than considering how they can make a fun game that not only runs well and is fun to play but is usable at an acceptable framerate (consistent 40+ FPS) for up to 40+ people at a time on hardware that isn't state of the art. So, egos and incompetence is what's stopping the creation of a neutral competitive space that sticks around longer than a couple months.

That said, that's me talking about my own sphere. You do have communities that have combative aspects that boil down to going into mouselook and fighting other people, but very often these systems are tied into roleplay sims or something else ... so combat isn't necessarily the first classification they'd prefer under the guide.

[Klytyna]

1 hour ago, Tyro Gutter said:

than considering how they can make a fun game that not only runs well and is fun to play but is usable at an acceptable framerate (consistent 40+ FPS) for up to 40+ people at a time on hardware that isn't state of the art.

Oh this bit's EASY to do, you leave SL, and write an actual dedicated First Person Shooter MMO game engine that has absolutely nothing in common with SL.

 

[Tyro Gutter]

1 hour ago, Klytyna said:

Oh this bit's EASY to do, you leave SL, and write an actual dedicated First Person Shooter MMO game engine that has absolutely nothing in common with SL.

 

Combat is interesting in SL for the same reason everything else becomes more interesting: user-generated content and virtually limitless* possibilities. Shooters MMOs do not have a great track record lately and one would be significantly more expensive to develop and maintain. Plenty of people in SL are into things that would make other people in SL scratch their heads.

[Klytyna]

5 hours ago, Tyro Gutter said:

Combat is interesting in SL for the same reason everything else becomes more interesting: user-generated content and virtually limitless* possibilities. Shooters MMOs do not have a great track record lately and one would be significantly more expensive to develop and maintain. Plenty of people in SL are into things that would make other people in SL scratch their heads.

You missed the point, which sadly is what the whole ePeen vs ePeen community tend to do. Probably because they start every damn post with "TLDR" then proceed to spout more clueless ePeen vs ePeen crap.

This time, TRY ACTUALLY READING STUFF.

SL will not give you 40 fps for 40 people on outdated hardware, ever.

It's engine is inherently unsuitable for fast paced high numbers PvP, that's why the plan to promote SL on Steam, shortly after the introduction of Pathfinding (which was basically intended to allow better attack pathing for LLDS prim zombies), failed to "save SL" by sucking in 40 million Steam accounts, all paying premium so they could access the new official premium only "enhanced zombie kill" sims.

Quite simply, 40 million 'leet gamerz' didn't want to pay the cost of a new "hella kewl FPS game with leet grafix man" to shoot Dr Primensteins clunky LLDS lurching horrors

All that happened was that a 'new feature' created almost specifically for fps combat junkies, instead caused months of disruption to the aviation and sailing communities, and produced a feature which, if it's settings were not 'optimised' to take into account all the linksets on the sim caused what LL referred to euphemistically as "performance degradation".

Unfortunately the optimisation tools weren't released in a public viewer for several months after Pathfinding was rolled out, leaving disabling it altogether as the only viable option, an option only available on private estates to people with estate powers. 

Leaving all Madlands sims to lag gently in the afterglow of yet another failed attempt by LL executives with no clue as to who uses SL, what they use it for or why, to "save SL" by mindlessly pandering to some panda-time minority who made a lot of noise...
 

[Tyro Gutter]

12 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

You missed the point, which sadly is what the whole ePeen vs ePeen community tend to do. Probably because they start every damn post with "TLDR" then proceed to spout more clueless ePeen vs ePeen crap.

This time, TRY ACTUALLY READING STUFF.

SL will not give you 40 fps for 40 people on outdated hardware, ever.

It's engine is inherently unsuitable for fast paced high numbers PvP, that's why the plan to promote SL on Steam, shortly after the introduction of Pathfinding (which was basically intended to allow better attack pathing for LLDS prim zombies), failed to "save SL" by sucking in 40 million Steam accounts, all paying premium so they could access the new official premium only "enhanced zombie kill" sims.

Quite simply, 40 million 'leet gamerz' didn't want to pay the cost of a new "hella kewl FPS game with leet grafix man" to shoot Dr Primensteins clunky LLDS lurching horrors

All that happened was that a 'new feature' created almost specifically for fps combat junkies, instead caused months of disruption to the aviation and sailing communities, and produced a feature which, if it's settings were not 'optimised' to take into account all the linksets on the sim caused what LL referred to euphemistically as "performance degradation".

Unfortunately the optimisation tools weren't released in a public viewer for several months after Pathfinding was rolled out, leaving disabling it altogether as the only viable option, an option only available on private estates to people with estate powers. 

Leaving all Madlands sims to lag gently in the afterglow of yet another failed attempt by LL executives with no clue as to who uses SL, what they use it for or why, to "save SL" by mindlessly pandering to some panda-time minority who made a lot of noise...
 

Yes, you can. You don't have to change a single thing with Second Life to make it happen. We've done it before; I've never said that we haven't, I'm saying the projects aren't typically sustainable.

SL can give you above 40 FPS, in a sim with 40 people, on ultra settings, if you make the sim correctly. I can pedantically explain why, but I don't have a lot of motivation to engage with you when you insult me when I never intended to come off as condescending or insulting to anyone here.

I never suggested making a fundamental change to the viewer or the grid, and I've conceded that there's no reason to have a combat forum unless there are enough people talking about topics that would need to be contained there. Please do not accuse me of poor reading comprehension when you strawman me.

[Klytyna]

10 minutes ago, Tyro Gutter said:

SL can give you above 40 FPS, in a sim with 40 people, on ultra settings, if you make the sim correctly.

Clueless tech-illiterate bs...

YOU might get 40 fps on YOUR pc, on ultra, if you tune your settings via the advanced controls rather than using the idiot friendly "one graphics slider to rule them all", on a carefully stripped down sim, carefully pruned of all large texture maps, alpha blend, etc.

But you CANNOT guarantee that 39 other people on "outdated hardware" will match YOUR  framerate, and please dont even begin thinking that you can counter this with "our free lag meter post says sim fps 40" as those generally useless simfps/physics fps/dilation numbers are an indicator of "oops too damn late" when they seriously drop. Real nmbers to watch for are stuff like agent time and physics time, the latter by the way is noticably affected by... physicsl prims, such as those fired from LLDS weaponry.

That's why a bunch of fools firehosing with ultra high rpm prim miniguns can literally lag a sim to death.
 

[Tyro Gutter]

1 minute ago, Klytyna said:

Clueless tech-illiterate bs...

YOU might get 40 fps on YOUR pc, on ultra, if you tune your settings via the advanced controls rather than using the idiot friendly "one graphics slider to rule them all", on a carefully stripped down sim, carefully pruned of all large texture maps, alpha blend, etc.

But you CANNOT guarantee that 39 other people on "outdated hardware" will match YOUR  framerate, and please dont even begin thinking that you can counter this with "our free lag meter post says sim fps 40" as those generally useless simfps/physics fps/dilation numbers are an indicator of "oops too damn late" when they seriously drop. Real nmbers to watch for are stuff like agent time and physics time, the latter by the way is noticably affected by... physicsl prims, such as those fired from LLDS weaponry.

That's why a bunch of fools firehosing with ultra high rpm prim miniguns can literally lag a sim to death.
 

Do you always pre-empt a potential response by going on a tirade that has nothing to do with the actual response?

I am exaggerating about 40FPS and 40 people, but I am not far off. What I'm getting at is you can have a playable FPS, have the sim look very good, and have a substantial number of people on a well-made sim. I do not use a lag-meter to test it, that would be silly. I utilize inferior hardware to benchmark a sim.

In regards to physical prims, physics lag is caused by different things than clientside lag or even script run / script-time. All of it is different, and we've made great strides in making all of them playable. What I am talking about is clientside lag; most people making combat sims are not good about reusing textures, tiling things, using object occlusion, or any number of other things to actually reduce clientside lag. I'd be foolish to say I can guarantee 15+ FPS on a ten-year-old rig, but I can say people in my community are capable of making an enjoyable combat experience that doesn't look like a slideshow for large groups of people on relatively dated hardware.

In regards to actual Sim Physics FPS and script run, most groups are capable of engaging others without Physics dipping below 35 or 40, and script run sticking to 95%. This doesn't sound especially impressive for most sims, but it is if you have dozens of avatars simultaneously firing weapons with multiple rez nodes each, throwing explosives, rezzing kill-prims, and sending messages to each other. And yes, when I talk about those specifics, I am talking about the diagnostics built into the viewer, not scripted systems liable to make lag worse.

I'm not an expert, but I have some knowledge in this topic, and I think you're severely underestimating how well we're capable of maintaining sim performance when a full battle is going on and how well our own equipment functions when the sim cannot perform well enough. Even homesteads perform relatively well under duress when groups with well made equipment are fighting, and homesteads can't perform nearly as well as full sims in combat.

We take a lot of this into consideration- when we make a system, usually we'll intentionally utilize an extreme amount of the system to see if the sim lags too much or not. If it does, we change it to be less laggy. Then when it works well, we intentionally cause whatever lag we need to cause to push its functionality to its limit, and if it breaks we either build redundancies or change how it works. Then we do it all again until we're satisfied.

[Klytyna]

31 minutes ago, Tyro Gutter said:

In regards to actual Sim Physics FPS and script run, most groups are capable of engaging others without Physics dipping below 35 or 40, and script run sticking to 95%.

Forget physics FPS, by the time that numbers dropped to 35, your sim is sick unto death... scroll down the crtl-shift-1 display PAST scripts run, to the 'frame time' section at the bottom... Look at physics time, agent time, script time and spare time, they are far better indicators of server side lag than damned Sim Fps/phys fps/dilation which are the only 3 numbers most "lag meters" tend to show.

It's like claiming somebody with terminal cancer is "perfectly healthy" because they have a "normal heart rate" and only begining to wonder ifther's a problem when their heart STOP beating.

9 hours ago, Tyro Gutter said:

is usable at an acceptable framerate (consistent 40+ FPS) for up to 40+ people at a time on hardware that isn't state of the art

You made a definition... I stated that your definition is unrealistic in SL.

7 hours ago, Tyro Gutter said:

Plenty of people in SL are into things that would make other people in SL scratch their heads.

You missed the point... I made the point quite plain.

1 hour ago, Tyro Gutter said:

SL can give you above 40 FPS, in a sim with 40 people, on ultra settings, if you make the sim correctly.

You made a BS claim... I pointed out your error.

41 minutes ago, Tyro Gutter said:

Do you always pre-empt a potential response by going on a tirade that has nothing to do with the actual response?

I am exaggerating about 40FPS and 40 people, but I am not far off.

You make an irrelevant and inaccurate allegation and admit you originally LIED.

Hmmm, why do I even bother, You're all Pandas anyway, chew your bamboo, dwindle and pass into memory.

 

[Tyro Gutter]

1 minute ago, Klytyna said:

 

Hmmm, why do I even bother, You're all Pandas anyway, chew your bamboo, dwindle and pass into memory.

 

 

I do actually enjoy your feedback and responding to what you say until you just devolve into acting more toxic than you accused me and mine of acting.

I wasn't lying, I said you can achieve the numbers I was providing with below state of the art hardware. If we're going to guarantee those numbers for everyone on every platform, I think we're going to have to lower our expectations. I appreciate your insight on more of the statistic menu and I'll be sure to review the documentation on it so that I can have a better grasp on what I'm talking about.

If you wish to end the conversation, then you have the option to stop conversing.

[ChinRey]

14 hours ago, Klytyna said:

SL will not give you 40 fps for 40 people on outdated hardware, ever.

 

It's engine is inherently unsuitable for fast paced high numbers PvP, that's why the plan to promote SL on Steam, shortly after the introduction of Pathfinding (which was basically intended to allow better attack pathing for LLDS prim zombies), failed to "save SL" by sucking in 40 million Steam accounts, all paying premium so they could access the new official premium only "enhanced zombie kill" sims.

Oh, you had to say that? I had to head over to the OS Grid to play some Zombie Breakout of course.

I couldn't manage to get all the way to 40 zombies because I kept getting killed but my computer had no problems staying above 40 fps with 20 of them in the sim.

Those zombies are OS NPCs - for those not familiar with Opensim, they are bots run by the sim server. The avatars used by the bots are about average for SL avatars or possibly a little bit higher in render weight. The scene is a fairly simple old style prim build but well designed although not in any way optimized for speed. The computer I used is an off-the-shelf mid-to-low range Lenovo desktop box, certainly not one recommended for games. Viewer: Firestorm with more or less standard medium graphics setting - I onyl cranked up the hellydoll filter a bit so I could see all the zombies properly.

I can't draw any firm conclusion from such a quick test of course but I'm fairly confident my computer at least could handle a 40 avatars battle scene in SL provided that both the scene itself and the avatars were well otimized.

[Tyro Gutter]

3 hours ago, ChinRey said:

 

I can't draw any firm conclusion from such a quick test of course but I'm fairly confident my computer at least could handle a 40 avatars battle scene in SL provided that both the scene itself and the avatars were well otimized.

1

Yeah totally. So what typically hampers decent framerates on most sims is no reusing of textures, people using multiple 1024x1024 textures everywhere (more crap for you to download from the sim and render), not using small textures (64x64, 256x256, 512x512, etc.), not regulating the render cost / amount of textures on avatars, and not being aware how object occlusion works; which is basically blocking your line of sight so that the viewer renders fewer things behind an object. There's also other things, but in my experience, those seem to be the most common issues.

The reason you may have also gotten such high framerate on the zombie sim is because the zombies probably were utilizing the same texture, so your viewer didn't have to render anything new.  Keeping frames high by making sure people are using avatars that aren't render-heavy is a task, but part of that in my specific community is partially managed by militaries having uniform regulation. The RP-aspect of being in uniform accidentally makes it so that someone fighting a military only has to worry about how many extra and unique attachments each fighter has rather than worrying about an entire avatar. Just to give you an idea of how bad this problem can get, it's not an uncommon sight for us to go to an RP sim and see one avatar with more unique textures on their avatar than our entire sim. You'd think this would make our sim ugly or low-res, but the situation is quite the opposite.

You also have some other rather weird things that affect framerate. For instance, try having multiple IM windows and UI elements open. You may see a notable impact on clientside FPS.

 

[Grevan Snowdrop]

Took a break from this thread, just to come back and get a good laugh out of it. 
The counter arguments for a sub forum are still weak as a week before, doing nothing but swinging "We always did things this way around here"-club. 

B: "Hey, we are a Community of players, currently forced to share a sub-forum with a group we have nothing in common with."
A: "No you are the same." 
B: "I beg to differ. Here, this is what we do, this is what they do. So yeah, a sub-forum for us would be nice, so we could stop interfering with one another."
A: "No you can't have a sub-forum. You are not many enough."
B: "Here are numbers that prove otherwise." 
A: "We don't care for numbers! You never had a subforum, therefore you shall never have one!"
B: "Oh and you are representing the Lindens here?" 
A: "Oh shut up!!!" *runs out of arguments and starts trolling* 

So, it has been proven to you, that the combat community is different from the roleplay community. 
It has been proven to you, that the combat community is as big as the roleplay community. 

From my point of view, since all the 'white nights of the new and modern SL' (loved when you said we had no clue about the modern SL) are doing nothing than trolling and/or ignore facts (Hello Trump supporters!), there is no sense in keeping the discussion alive. 
Points have been made, arguments have been brought up, but there is not a single bit of ground left to be won for either side. As a matter of fact this thread seems to attract more trolls than anything. But I guess that is what these forums are made out of these days. 
 

Edited December 12, 2017 by Grevan Snowdrop

[Jerilynn Lemon]

On 12/9/2017 at 2:21 AM, animebutts said:

I am sorry to say the plea for leniency you submitted has been denied. You are no longer a representative of the Coercion Combine, as you are trying to deflect the blame of a criminal within onto me. You will be demoted to E-1 for your blatant disrespect to the leader of the Coercion Combine,  and will have to undergo training again. 

Thank you for your time.

Axios! -Vaukreyn Animebutts

PS. The only group I am apart of, and have ever been apart of, is the Coercion Combine, as its founder and leader. Good luck in training!

At the least, there's no double secret probation involved, always a plus.

[Shouka Starchild]

48 minutes ago, Jerilynn Lemon said:

At the least, there's no double secret probation involved, always a plus.

The double secret probation is reading the entire Stinky Steve anthology.

[Tari Landar]

55 minutes ago, Grevan Snowdrop said:

So, it has been proven to you, that the combat community is different from the roleplay community. 
It has been proven to you, that the combat community is as big as the roleplay community. 
 

And LL has proven combat, like most other communities, is not getting a subforum....LL was asked, and they have answered.   Should pretty much be the end of..right? They are the authority on such things after all  

[LittleMe Jewell]

1 hour ago, Grevan Snowdrop said:

So, it has been proven to you, that the combat community is different from the roleplay community. 
It has been proven to you, that the combat community is as big as the roleplay community. 
 

It does not really matter what you may or may not have proven to any of "us".  LL already said 'no' and they decide on sub-forums, not the other residents.

[Klytyna]

12 hours ago, ChinRey said:

my computer had no problems staying above 40 fps

Your computer... Not mine, not some random passing crowd of 39 people, yours...

Kapitan Klueless claimed that 40 fps for 40 people on "outdated hardware" was a guarantee... And to add idiocy to insult, then implies that his definition of 40 fps is the Sim Fps/Physics Fps/dilation figure of 35-40, NOT clients running at 40 fps... the SERVER running at 35-40, and if a sim server is running at below 40 fps, thats a sick sim.

And you're not even testing in SL but on an OS grid! Fantastic...