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

[ChinRey]

8 hours ago, Klytyna said:

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

Yes. Mine is three years old now and a fairly cheap general purpose computer (3.2 GHz Intel Core i5-4460 and AMD Radeon R7 240 for the technically interested). I don't have a way to test the performance of your computer but it's probably far better than mine.

 

8 hours ago, Klytyna said:

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

I couldn't find anything like that in SL!

But really, are you saying Opensim performs better than SL? Whitecore is vastly superior to SL in some ways (and just as inferior in others) but Opensim is essentially an outdated version of the SL software. Most significantly, none of the three  physics engines used there can match HAVOK in performance so an OS server will have a lot more work to do on the physics than an SL server has. Also, keep in mind that the Zombie Breakout host has to do triple duty as sim server, assets server and bot server. So really, anything it can do, an SL sim can do better.

As for client side performance, it's exactly the same viewer. No difference there.

It's a myth that Second Life can't handle high speed action. I don't have any experience with combat rp (I generally prefer to make love not war) but a few examples that are slightly related:

• In one of the animesh test sims there is a display of 60 dancing animesh characters. They are all very different so no assets instancing worth mentioning. The render load they cause is so much lower than what you generally get in an SL club with three people, you can't even compare them.
• You probably remember helping me with the low lag butterfly rezzer. In one of the tests I had 1,000 scripted prims moving around in a sim, changing position independently and semirandomly ten times a second. The server didn't even flinch at the load.
• When I was beta testing Kaliska's catamaran, I did a run all across the Blake Sea at 48 knots - from Half Hitch to Bering and back again, steering off into neighbor sims at odd angles every now and then. Traversing a sim took about ten seconds and I didn't even notice the crossings. (I did eventually crash when I went southwards and crossed over to Arabian but by then I had done more than 70 sim crossings with no problems at all.)
• A friend of mine has taken to NASCAR racing recently and I went to watch her debut race. About ten cars racing each other around one of those race tracks simplified enough that even an American can navigate at full speed. No server performance or connection issues whatsoever, some visual glitches but not too many and the content was far from well optimized. My friend is planning a car rally across half of Sansara - from Langdale to Kania - now. (Digression: I was checking out the planned starting point earlier today when somebody tried to pass in one of those ASC powered ripped mesh LoD disasters that usally passes for cars in SL. It was quite funny to see how she inevitably got stuck on the sim border me and my friends barely notice when we cross it with all kinds of vehicles )
• Oh and - this may be even further off topic than the other examples but - if you're looking for a bit of innocent fun, why not head over to SOHO New York and take a ride on Xi's amazing Cyclone Roller Coaster. Better hurry up though. The sim owner has announced she's closing the sim and it's an old prim build that was far too big to be taken into inventory so there is no backup of it anywhere.

It's all about content. Compared to the usual standard in SL, well made and well optimized content gives the server and client computers ten times as much effective power you can lavishly spend on speed, on more content or on higher graphics settings - whatever you prefer.

Edited December 12, 2017 by ChinRey

[Klytyna]

2 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Yes. Mine is three years old now and a fairly cheap general purpose computer (3.2 GHz Intel Core i5-4460 and AMD Radeon R7 240 for the technically interested). I don't have a way to test the performance of your computer but it's probably far better than mine.

I'm always amused when people say stuff like...

"Oh my pc is ancient, its over a YEAR old, it's only a 128 bit Inhell-inside i13, 16 core running at 10 ghz, with a mere half terrabyte of mainboard ram, and a pathetic 64 gb video card... not like yours... "

Seriously if I told you the specs on my machine, your first reaction would be to call me a liar and claim nothing that old can log into SL at all, then demand to know how I manage to run with ALM turned on for the last 3 years, and all I'd be able to say in reply is "Pure Professional PC Configuration Tech Skill"

 

And yeah I've had conversations like that.

Back in 2013 some cretin claimed his PC couldn't run a mesh capable viewer because it was too old, and when quizzed on the specs, announced he only had twice as many cores, running 50% faster, with four times the ram. Which was why HE ran a non mesh viewer, Frankenviewer.

And yes I then proceeded to verbally kick the crap out him for being guilty of unlicenced posession of illegal quantities of weapons grade stupidity, and for publicly lecturing me for wearing 'mesh thigh boots' that offended him by not rendering on his screen, ruining his SL with my shameless lack of legs, as I happened to walk past the cretin minding my own business 

The blather about animesh, or sailing in the blake, or nascar is just that, blather.

El Kapitano, went on abouty how lag is all 'reusing small textures, as if thats the only factor. But seriously... for regular combat junkies, who pew pew every day, the damn textures are in their cache, and as long as they dont add up to the point where texture thrashing becomes an issue, are NOT a major source of lag once initially loaded.

What IS a major lag source is... physical prims... every bullet, grenade, missile, explosion prim, vehicle, rezzed follower scripted energy shield, all that stuff, jacks the sims physics time through the roof, the server attempts to maintain the 22 ms 'frame time ' by cutting back on script time, but eventually, it hits a wall, and frame time increases.

The Moron tech lag-meters display the sim fps/phys fps/dilation showing the fps rates dropping from 44.9 to 40 or 35, and your sim is in deep brown... neck deep and rising, and it has bugger all to do with how lean your prims are, or how well you tile your 64x64 textures that all your regulars wont be streaming because they are already in cache anyway.

As for lod disaster rip-cars... Odds are her sim crossing problems probably had more to do with inventory size and ping times than the quality of the lods on her ripped GTA-V Shopping-Assault-Vehicle.

Don't get carried away with 'optimised content eliminates all lag', thats almost as daft as the oldies who claim that "anything over 1000 m up causes no lag", and even 'optimised' textures can lag your gpu if theres too much alpha blend or even worse, system shine (that old low/med/high stuff) & glow which have horrendous render weight multipliers.

 

[ChinRey]

40 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

Don't get carried away with 'optimised content eliminates all lag'

I'll never claim that there is only one cause of lag and besides, I prefer to test rather than assume whenever possible.

Two prims textured with a 1024x1024 pixel texture:

 

Exactly the same scene, only with the texture scaled down to 512x512:

 

40 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

As for lod disaster rip-cars... Odds are her sim crossing problems probably had more to do with inventory size and ping times than the quality of the lods on her ripped GTA-V Shopping-Assault-Vehicle.

That was a digression and we probably shouldn't let it threadhack the discussion but I can't imagine ping time was the issue. This is what typically happens when people try to get across that sim crossing with an average overscripted ripoff car. I live far enough away from the SL servers my ping time never drops below 200 and I find it hard to believe that every car driver have worse than that.

I'm not sure if ivnentory size matters, it shouldn't now that the assets are handled by separate servers but you never know with SL. Do you have any data about it?

Script load was of course a signinficant factor. The ACS is a horrendously bodged motorcycle script to start with and it doesn't get better when "makers" who are even worse at scripting than mesh try to modify it to suit their game rips.

 

Edited December 12, 2017 by ChinRey

[Tyro Gutter]

9 hours ago, Klytyna said:

 

Kapitan Klueless

 

I like this, thanks for picking my name a week from now!