The Three Big Bugs

[animats]

As I see it, Second Life has three big bugs that keep the big virtual world from performing well.

• Level of detail. Second Life often chokes on complex user content. Some of this is because content creators are uploading models with far too many polygons. Some of this is because the upload pipeline for mesh optimization is way behind the state of the art. And some of it is because viewer level of detail handling needs to be smarter.
• Region crossings. Movement is cramped in SL because region crossings don't work as well as they should. I've discussed this extensively elsewhere.
• Inadequate sim-side concurrency. Sims start to choke around 15-20 avatars. That's far too low. The sim code seems to be mostly single-threaded, and can be easily overloaded.

Parts of SL thus feel like being stuck in a traffic jam. Modern MMO games do not feel like this. This is a major turnoff for new users.

This is a technical debt problem. The design decisions that brought us here were reasonable in 1999, but are obsolete today. This is a problem that can be solved within the existing SL architecture. Not easily. But it's not impossible.

Fixing SL is probably easier than fixing Sansar. Sansar lacks important functionality that is yet to be written. It also lacks users and a use case.  SL has about the right functionality; it's just the performance that's bad.

[Candice LittleBoots]

Not sure if this could be classed as a bug, but it's a pretty lucky one.

I suppose it had to happen eventually.

 

[Chic Aeon]

44 minutes ago, Candice LittleBoots said:

Not sure if this could be classed as a bug, but it's a pretty lucky one.

I suppose it had to happen eventually.

 

Back in the day I had three C's come up in a row at a VERY BUSY and VERY POPLAR event (role play garb and I have forgotten the brand alas). I was the only C there so I hopped on the chair three times to clear it and let the others (at least 20 avatars) have a chance. I think it was a 30 minute timer. 

And yes, this is off topic but we have HEARD those comment for years so YOUR news is more interesting that that LOL.    

Oh well.