What the fitmesh LoD bug actually means

[OptimoMaximo]

51 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Yes but this is really Linden Lab's responsibility. It's not even always deliberate cheating. Export a fitted mesh from Maya to SL and it ends up at minimum size whether you intended it or not. At least that's what you told me earlier.

That is why there is a scale multiplier in the uploader in the first place, aside from the option of modeling to scale (avatars can be resized to be meter scale within the application and it still works, giving an output in meters scale). When you import something and rez it, as soon as you see it so small, shouldn't you understand that it is too small and for this reason it gets distorted too? Again, it's a matter of lazyness that leads to involuntary cheating, what does it take to type "100" in the upload window's field? It is either knowingly cheating or ignorant lazyness or greedy pressure or a combination of them. None of which should be tolerated because it's a behavior that goes to the expenses 1) of the platform that you feed from and 2) of the other users. If they want to appear and pose as "pro", at least have the decency to behave as such, get informed and learn the best practices. Since the introduction of mesh, the level bar has been raised and can't go back low. It's partially LL's responsibility for not having implemented a good formula, but the blame is on the people who deliberately exploits a bug for their own advantage and keep using the exploitation instead of reporting it to make sure that things don't go bonkers.

Edited August 23, 2018 by OptimoMaximo

[ChinRey]

But wait, there's more!

Theresa Tennyson reminded me of some tests I did back in 2016 when the jellybeans were introduced. I had completely forgotten about them and one of them is rather worrying.

Here's my post about it:

https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/375629-jelly-babies/?page=4&tab=comments#comment-1165072

The fitted mesh I used for the test, was an early version of the Maitreya body and it was very much a best case scenario:

• It was uploaded at full size, no cheating to take advatage of the LoD bug here
• It did not bloat the avatar bounding box and I did not wear anything else that could have done so either
• The tattoo layer and both clothes layers were full alpha, something that reduced the actual lag but not the calculated render weight

Yet, even under such perfect conditions it still caused more than fifteen times as much render lag as the render weight indicated!

I can't for my life see how the LoD bug alone can have caused this and if it did, it's far worse than any of us dreamed of.

There must be something else going on here too. Coffee mentioned cpu load and that may be a part of the explanation. Another test I did back then indicated that multiple identical copies of the same fitted mesh stack quite well which again may indicate significant cpu lag. But even if we combine that with the LoD bug, it's still hard to believe we can get results like I did on that test.

 

Edited August 23, 2018 by ChinRey

[Coffee Pancake]

4 hours ago, steeljane42 said:

I'm actually not sure if LL care or should care. Such low end users usually are not a part of the SL economy anyway, aside of in-world jobs and if they are, money they earn are still coming from paying residents.

That statement couldn't be further from the truth. Computer specification has no coloration to the amount of L$ a person buys or to that accounts value to the SL ecosystem as a whole.

Membership has always been tied to land ownership. The vast numbers of people owning or renting land on private estates where membership is explicitly not required, and the very existence of that market should make it obvious that membership status is a meaningless measurement.

[steeljane42]

8 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:

Since you quote just a section of what i said for your convenience, I'll do the same to my convenience.

Aside from the fact that the "stuff you can use" shouldn't be here in the first place, but it is because of lazy cheating, the paying customer you claim so important usually started 1) as new user 2) with F2P intentions because SL is advertised as such 3) on low end machines that got upgraded overtime. On this latter, how would LL retain a new user if "the game melted my GPU after few log ins"?

Then again, you want jelly dolls to go away AND the fixes, but ONLY AS LONG as YOU're not affected. Reality check: the Universe doesn't revolve around you. Guess what? After the LoD fixes we hope, with your current stuff, you'll cam 1 centimeter away from your pretty face and your meshes will crumble into single triangles for each piece it is made of. So sorry, go ask the creator why it happens, but i doubt they will ever answer to you saying the truth, which simply is "i had to pose as a pro, cheating on the system, to make my stuff look like high quality but i couldn't get it to work with a proper LoD system because i'm an illiterate on the matter, and as long as there is kettle to be milked as quick and as much as possible, like you, i couldn't care less". Second reality check: high resolution meshes do not belong to this kind of environment, and if you get them in, it's to be considered CRAP. Regardless whether it looks good. Also because what you pay isn't consisting only in the mesh itself, add your video card reduced life span to it. Those creators are the source of the problems, not LL. And as such, once LL cleans up the mess, those creators have to fix the problems you get from the clean up. I don't know about you, but usually people want to live in a clean place, not among piles of crap.

Then you talk about "improvements"... so reducing lag (which is not the goal of such discussion, anyway, but apparently it's the only thing you are able to get about it all) isn't among the things anyone would include in the list of improvements, along with machine's rendering overhead that reduces other performances you aren't even aware of. Right. Well said. Being "just numbers", as you said, will definitely affect how you will see others and how others will see you... you know, this and all virtual worlds RUN ON AND BECAUSE OF NUMBERS.

Nah, I just don't like full text quotes, is all, but here you ago, full one this time. Now to the rest.

Shouldn't be there, same as 500k complexity overscripted flexi hair or 1m complexity gowns or all those weird sculpt builds from the past? But they are. And I'm quite sure LL won't just break them, like they didn't break even older content before. I'm not an expert or even a builder by any means, but based on how similar rigged mesh bodies/heads/hands etc are, as well as pretty much all rigged mesh clothes I have ever seen, breaking them would actually be the day when LL kills SL and their own business with it.

As for F2P... yeah, right, as if anyone sane would believe to any kinds of advertisement, especially these days when those F2P games and "live services" are ones that require the most amount of money if you intend to use them fully and not settle for the glorified demo version with severe handicaps. No idea where you got the 3rd part, not every single person who ever did look at SL is the bored housewife (or househusband, if that's even a thing) with 20 years old machine. And don't exaggerate, even 24/7 crypto mining doesn't "melt" GPUs that easily, hardcore gaming doesn't either, SL which is limited by CPU is far down the list of threats for any mid-range GPUs, since those are never maxed anyway. With a few exceptions of things like prim/mesh grass filled with very large amount of alpha textures, that stuff is really bad, but not related to cheating or any kinds of bugs I think.

And by my idea of "fix", at least for already existing content, I simply meant that they should rework jellydolls to actually work and all that cheated mesh to show real (and probably very high) complexity numbers. So those who don't (or can't) want to see avis with millions of complexity wouldn't see/render them anymore and ones who don't care (like myself) would just continue to use SL as usual. So yeah, no idea where you got that I wanted LL to remove jellydolls either. Fix and make them do what they should do - yes, otherwise they are useless.

As for the rest of your "reality checks" I disagree on pretty much everything. You, of course, free to have own opinion on what belongs and where, as well on what is crap and what is not, but so do I. And for me, high resolution meshes and textures are very much belong to SL. I remember checking SL back into 2007-2008, it was such awful looking thing so I lost any desire to even check what is behind all that (well, other problems like awful viewer's UI also did contribute to it). I came back to check it once again in 2012 and found it more tolerable and more to my liking. And these days with those "awful high resolution meshes", bento, upcoming animesh and more, it even more appealing. So for me SL in 2018 is leagues better than old style SL, even if it did perform better back then.

I won't even bother to reply to the last part of your post, never had time to deal with that kind of behaviour.

 

3 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

That statement couldn't be further from the truth. Computer specification has no coloration to the amount of L$ a person buys or to that accounts value to the SL ecosystem as a whole.

Membership has always been tied to land ownership. The vast numbers of people owning or renting land on private estates where membership is explicitly not required, and the very existence of that market should make it obvious that membership status is a meaningless measurement.

I'm pretty sure I didn't said "premium user" anywhere, did I? I'm not a "premium" either, never was and until LL will add a name change to the list of premium only things, I'm not planning to. Thankfully it doesn't stop me from having a private island and buying L$. Hope it does clarify what I meant.

If not, then simple version: I strongly believe that someone who doesn't have a few hundreds of $ to invest in somewhat modern machine (Which is fine, don't get me wrong, I fully understand that there's a few difficult RL situations and not all fortunate enough to have some free cash for such things), also won't really invest any (or almost any) money into SL ecosystem. Also, while SL is not your typical F2P mmorpg or even worse, a mobile F2P game, they all strongly cater to whales, where a few hundreds of such whales are more important for company's business than many thousands of F2P/low spenders. Of course, they still do things to maintain free users for a bit too, as whales prefer to not be on their own, but usually it's very minimal efforts, just enough to not lose all F2P users.

Edited August 23, 2018 by steeljane42

[ChinRey]

21 minutes ago, steeljane42 said:

I'm pretty sure I didn't said "premium user" anywhere, did I?

You didn't but the best estimate is that there are about 60,000 premium members which means premium stipends adds 2.5 million fresh Lindens to the economy every day and the Lab's income from premium fees are somewhere between 4 and 5 million US dollars a year. That is a significant part of Second Life's economy any way you look at it.

[Nalates Urriah]

On 8/22/2018 at 1:26 PM, CoffeeDujour said:

You shouldn't need to care. Which puts the ball squarely in the hands of content creators and they will only respond to hard limits.

We have hard limits for land in the form of Li. We should have those for avatars too ... getting more would be a decent premium perk too.

Oh Coffee, there is so much wrong with that. Going the "not my responsibility, it is their problem" route is just wrong. 

The idea that dev's don't respond to customer pressure is demonstrably wrong. The short history of ARC/ACI has shown significant impact on the market place. As proof consider that discussion is ACI/ARC is broken and pushing dev's in bad directions as evidenced by their use of loopholes. One can't argue dev's take advantage of the ACI/ARC loop holes and that it has no effect on dev's.

Adding more hard limits is taking away creative freedom. While it is popular and propaganda conditions people think having some authority make it better by passing a law is good, history shows how bad an idea it actually is.

[OptimoMaximo]

I won't bother myself to reply to the pile of absurdities in the rest of your post, but this can't go without.

1 hour ago, steeljane42 said:

And for me, high resolution meshes and textures are very much belong to SL.

Just because there has been a leap from around 7K triangles of the classic avatar to the possible million triangles, this doesn't mean that ALL the possible million triangles should go on EACH single avatar. Avatars that are light years better than the default can be achieved with far less triangles, and the same goes with clothing. And still good looking. But no, each single muscle fiber MUST be modeled to look good, it's not that textures can work out the fine details that ignorant people like you pushed to have them modeled. Because SL must work like in a movie. The saddest thing is that the average "pro creator" just jumped on the opportunity to simplify the job, not being able to offer any better. As i said already, anyone can learn to model all details to the finer grain, but bringing that detail in a more optimized manner without losing quality slows down the milking rate of the illiterate morons you represent, so who cares. People like you have to cam 1 millimeter from the avatar nose and complain because a few edges are still visible instead of being nicely smoothed and rounded.

1 hour ago, steeljane42 said:

And these days with those "awful high resolution meshes", bento, upcoming animesh and more, it even more appealing.

Too bad that the upcoming animesh is getting an hard limit.

1 hour ago, steeljane42 said:

And don't exaggerate, even 24/7 crypto mining doesn't "melt" GPUs that easily, hardcore gaming doesn't either,

yes, go tell the GPU that goes to stable 80+ celsius when running SL. Hardcore gaming is not comparable because the game environment is controlled and limited

edit: and the GPU type i'm talking about is not a low end GPU

Edited August 23, 2018 by OptimoMaximo

[Penny Patton]

I'm also going to end up in the naughty corner, because I've been advocating limits on avatar resource use for over a decade. HOWEVER, at the risk of repeating what other people may have already said, I do not believe LL should suddenly drop a restrictive Avatar resource cap on people overnight. There is a process LL should patiently follow to work this in without completely infuriating everyone by forcing them to trash much of the content they've paid for and still use regularly.

• LL needs to begin by providing documentation, explaining to content creators in no uncertain terms why they need to optimize. Why it's important. What to look for when creating content, and how best to create high quality content that doesn't kill people's framerates just as effectively as a griefer tool.
• LL needs to provide tools to content creators that allow them to more easily optimize their work. Tools that show people how much VRAM and how many triangles their content is. Tools in the form of dynamic tips that remind users about why the content their attempting to upload may not be suitable and suggestions on how to fix it. Etcetera.
• LL needs to provide a better jelly doll system that works on VRAM and triangles rather than ARC calculations. When people increase the cap or disable this feature they should get a short popup explaining the performance hit they will take as a result, so they know why the feature exists in the first place.
• LL needs to provide all users better tools to manage their resource use. It should be easy to inspect any object and see it's texture use and triangle count. It should be easy to inspect your own avatar and quickly identify content that is resource intensive, in terms of VRAM use, polygons AND script use. Being able to see this information easily will help people make more informed decisions.
• LL needs to make it so you can examine an object and see every LOD, both in numbers and visually. So people can avoid content that falls apart due to poorly set up LOD.
• LL needs to fix LI calculations so that people aren't punished for properly utilizing LOD.
• LL needs to communicate the importance of optimization to the SL userbase at large. Login screens, teleport screens, etcetera can all be used to provide people with useful information on a regular basis.
• LL needs to overhaul the marketplace, providing sections to list an item's VRAM use, triangle count, see various LOD levels, and LL needs to incentivize sellers to utilize these features, so that their customers can make better purchasing decisions.
• LL needs to work with content creators, telling them these caps are coming but also showing them how to reduce the cost of the content they've already made, and all future content. A lot of, maybe even most, existing SL content can be greatly reduced in resource cost through relatively simple fixes, LL needs to make content creators aware of that. Maybe a part of the marketplace overhaul could be the addition of redelivery and update delivery features, so when creators update existing content, their customers can get those updates easily.
• LL needs to announce any sort of Avatar resource caps well ahead of their actual enforcement. I'm talking at least a year! Maybe even two years, and this is AFTER LL has done all of the above which will probably take them a couple of years to get through. When they announce this they should also point out that the tools they've been providing all this time show people how much of the coming caps objects use. LL should also display the new caps at this time, even if they're not enforced, so people can see if they are over. Again, the tools LL should be providing by this time should help people identify problem items. However, if LL has done all of the above first, most people should be relieved to find they are already under the coming caps, without having to have done anything themselves beyond replacing old items with updates as they're released, and simply buying new content as they normally would.

If LL takes the long view on this, they can introduce limitations on avatar resource use without wholly disrupting the SL community, or inciting any riots. There will still be grumbling, to be sure, but LL can mitigate the worst of it through patience and planning.

[Penny Patton]

1 hour ago, Nalates Urriah said:

Adding more hard limits is taking away creative freedom.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and you'll find all creative people who want to take their skills to the fullest have learned to embrace certain types of limits. You wouldn't accuse artists who have worked hard to build their skills and creativity to a point where they can succeed in the gaming industry of being less creative because of the limits they understand enough to work with, would you? Or any other artistic profession, for that matter? Of course not!

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, Nalates Urriah said:

Adding more hard limits is taking away creative freedom. 

That's demonstrably not true. The rabbit hole is called "Creative Limitation", it's quite a deep dive covering art, literature, music and psychology.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Creative+limitation

 

[Fionalein]

1 hour ago, OptimoMaximo said:

edit: and the GPU type i'm talking about is not a low end GPU

still: don't crank it to 11 then....

[ChinRey]

5 hours ago, steeljane42 said:

With a few exceptions of things like prim/mesh grass filled with very large amount of alpha textures, that stuff is really bad, but not related to cheating or any kinds of bugs I think.

It isn't related to cheating but it is related to poor craftmanship. Vegetation made by a skilled content creator does not cause that much lag.

And that is something you have to be very aware of. It is not the improved visual quality that causes the lag level we have today, it is all the dead meat. Optimisation is not about reducing the visual quality, it's about getting rid of all those things that lags us all down but don't add anything to the visual appearance at all.

There is a lot of that in SL, both in the software and the content. If we could get rid of some of that, everybody here would have a much smoother and more pleasant experience.

[Anna Nova]

Aren't there enough things in life to worry about without throwing bricks at each other over something we have no control over?

When LL propose a fix, then we can discus it.  Right now it is all hot air.

[Coffee Pancake]

 

1 hour ago, anna2358 said:

Aren't there enough things in life to worry about without throwing bricks at each other over something we have no control over?

When LL propose a fix, then we can discus it.  Right now it is all hot air.

LL are not entirely disconnected from the community and it's thoughts on issues affecting the platform. Such discussions have value.

[Fionalein]

1 hour ago, CoffeeDujour said:

 

LL are not entirely disconnected from the community and it's thoughts on issues affecting the platform. Such discussions have value.

And that is why we cannot let you run loose unopposed

 

Edited August 24, 2018 by Fionalein

[OptimoMaximo]

11 hours ago, Fionalein said:

still: don't crank it to 11 then....

No meaning... what's the value of this intervention?

9 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Optimisation is not about reducing the visual quality, it's about getting rid of all those things that lags us all down but don't add anything to the visual appearance at all.

Couldn't phrase it better

3 hours ago, Fionalein said:

And that is why we cannot let you run loose unopposed

Without such opposition, SL would be MUCH better and MUCH smoother experience for everyone, without renouncing to visual quality.

Edited August 24, 2018 by OptimoMaximo

[Fionalein]

14 minutes ago, OptimoMaximo said:

 No meaning... what's the value of this intervention?

"This one goes all the way to 11" is a quote from Spinal Tap... if your GPU is cooking at 80 degrees you should move those darn sliders down... last time mine was at 70 that was before I installed a fan... and it's a cheapo card...

Or in Simple English (without the neccesity to read between the lines): if your machine cannot handle the graphics you wish for: throttle your graphics instead of protesting for more user limitations!

22 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:

Reality check: the Universe doesn't revolve around you.

This guy sounds wise - listen to him some time

 

Edited August 24, 2018 by Fionalein

[OptimoMaximo]

13 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

"This one goes all the way to 11" is a quote from Spinal Tap... if your GPU is cooking at 80 degrees you should move those darn sliders down... last time mine was at 70 that was before I installed a fan... and it's a cheapo card...

My GPU doesn't "cook" when i'm among content that isn't bad. That is the thing. Between alpha blending abuse and SOME_MESH_BODIES_BRANDS popping into view, THAT is what brings the temperature high. With my GPU i can run games at ultra without getting to 75 celsius, and those rendering environments are far way more complex than SL, except for the unoptimized content that's just thrown in as result of rush and ignorance. In SL where i could observe or do best practices, it doesn't even get to 65-70 celsius at ultra. So it's not me to have to perform best adaptation practices, it's the blamed content that shouldn't be there: unoptimized geometry for a game-like environment, too heavy in their textures, ignorantly alpha managed. If there are two different schools of modeling and content creation in RL, feature-film and game grades, there is a reason.

However, the temperature i mentioned was an example, i got to that point only a few times in places filled of content from the worst creators possible, including famous mesh avatars brands. And these latter might even be less of a problem, if the LoD switching wouldn't suffer from the OP bug. 

And remember that this is an international community, in which your quotations from movies might make no sense at all to other people. Not to mention that it is a serious discussion in which you're dipping something totally unrelated.

21 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

This guy sounds wise - listen to him some time

Indeed very wise. The fact is that if you don't care about your card "cooking", doesn't mean others don't care as well. Since a general audience, wider than you and those with a more powerful card, gets to those "cooking" points because of the content that could be easily avoided without sacrificing visual quality (thing widely demonstrated as definitely possible), who is putting themselves in the center of the Universe? It's a mater of "since i can (fewer), who cares of those that can't (more)".

So yeah, you should listen to the wise guy more than some times.

[Penny Patton]

34 minutes ago, OptimoMaximo said:

Without such opposition, SL would be MUCH better and MUCH smoother experience for everyone, without renouncing to visual quality.

I totally get why people have concerns concerns. I get why someone who never got heavily into game modding, or who never went to school for this sort of thing would hear "caps on avatar attachments" and imagine the worst. Without some sort of background in game art and design, none of what we're discussing here is obvious and I can see how someone hears talk about forcing content creators to "use fewer polygons and less texture memory" and imagine it means uglier content, or forcing them, personally, to give up an outfit they just bought last week. Hell, even as someone with a background in all of this, I'm concerned about how LL might go about implementing the necessary changes because even if they do the right thing for the right reasons, if they do it in the ham-fisted, thoughtless way they've demonstrated in the past (sometimes the very recent past), it could all blow up in our faces.

I get that.

The problem is Linden Lab themselves. They shouldn't be learning things like this from random users in their forums. They should have people on staff who both know all of this on a professional level, and who also have the experience in Second Life to understand how best to implement that knowledge. And so far they have never, not once, demonstrated this. Instead they've consistently demonstrated the opposite, even bragged about their lack of knowledge in this area, for about 15 years.

 Recently they've been saying things that could indicate that this has changed, and I want to give them the benefit of the doubt on that, but until they actually demonstrate that sort of change with action, I totally get how people expect the worst from them even if they understand that everything we're saying about content and optimization is correct.

 

[Coffee Pancake]

The one simple point everyone needs to remember before having a panic attack.

Games do way better than Second Life with way less geometry and texture detail.

SL isn't a game and like for like wont ever apply, mix and match avatars will always be heavier, but the situation we have now is insane.

It is normal for shoes to be so detailed they can be rendered full screen and consume more resources than your entire character in the afore mentioned games .. and that's just your shoes. Sub pixel geometry is normal. Interior (and entirely invisible) detail is normal.

This is why I say most mesh content in Second Life is not made for Second Life. It's not even made for any real time game engine. We are using content plundered from platforms designed to output a static render at film resolutions, platforms where the time per frame can run into minutes or even hours, and here we are trying to make it work real time and wondering why performance is in the toilet and people are leaving.

It is entirely possible - AND EASY - to make content that does not break the bank, looks visually identical to what you're used to and performs orders of magnitude better.

Good content isn't some magical black art. It's the same content we have now with some basic rules applied. Don't include geometry no one can see (because it's hidden or smaller than a pixel), don't use geometry when a texture will do.

Sadly, as is made clear by the OP, it's easier to hack bad content in than it is to spend minutes in blender and clean things up.

I wonder why that is ... considering the basic skills involved, the only answer is the people uploading the thing didn't made the thing in the first place.

[Fionalein]

Are you three just blind of rage or always as close minded?

You want the Lindens turn unnumbered content items useless because you say so? Do you have any idea what this will cause? People will have content rendered useless they spent hundreds if not thousands of real world Dollars on. Are you realy so naive to think they will they will then just buy BETTERMESH™? No, most won't. In their eyes the Lab will have proven to be an unreliable partner for future investment, most will consider it the last straw, shrug and leave. And even those who would buy better stuff won't have much to buy either. Because even content designers will consider the Lab an unreliable partner and SL an unreliable invenstment after the incident.

SL was a one of a kind. It will not repeat it's success in SL V2 or in Sansar or whatever will be it's next incarnation. Even the Lab slowly recognizes this. However stupid moves can easily kill what is remaining of it and then the Lab will have nothing to convince future investors of theit expertise in virtual worlds.

The Lab can and should enfore a correct calulation. Give those bad mesh items the astronomical ARC and LI they deserve. People will react on their own. But should they listen to your triumphirate of "I know betters" and install hard caps or make existing fitmesh crumble even at close view they will utterly fail. Once they break existing content en masse they will spell their own doom and seal the fate of SL.

And @OptimoMaximo ... you claim you have a background in professional game design... let me put that severly into doubt with all the thoughtless demands you bring forth...

 

[ChinRey]

13 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

Recently they've been saying things that could indicate that this has changed, and I want to give them the benefit of the doubt on that, but until they actually demonstrate that sort of change with action, I totally get how people expect the worst from them even if they understand that everything we're saying about content and optimization is correct.

They are improving. It's a painfully slow process but they are.

Most of the problems SL face today can be traced back to the Six Dark Years, starting with 2008 and ending with 2014. I don't know if anybody really realizes just how bad it was but there is one example that turned up during the original LoD bug thread. The code for calculating render weight needs to store the radius of each LoD view area as a variable. The programmer who wrote the code called that variable "diameter".

Chin Rey pauses to allow the mixture of hysterical laughter and cries of horror to subside. Then she waits a little bit logner to allow the msot sensitive programmers in the audience to recover from fainting. Finally she sonctinues:

For those not familiar with programming, this is the kind of mistake that will get you kicked right out of the Babbage Memorial Childcare Center For Future Programmers.

This is probably... hopefully... an extreme example but it's not untypical of what the LL developers during the Six Dark Years produced as a substitute for decent work.

I have to add, this was not the programmers' fault. Some of them are still here and doing much better work today so they have proven that they can do. It was all about mismanagement, both at top level and in middle management.

---

In 2014 Linden Lab gave up Second Life.

Yes they did. Officially. Sansar was not a "Second Life 2" by then but LL was absolutely certain everybody would move over once the new world was in place. WHen asked why they couldn't just upgrade Second Life, Ebbe's answer was: "too much spaghetti in the code". They left a skeleton crew lead by Oz to keep SL running until Sansar was in place but they didn't expect it to be more than a temporary solution. I don't think it was until 2016 Ebbe finally started to add "some may never leave" when he was asked about the future of SL when Sansar went life.

---

The skeleton crew faced an impossible task. They were working on a project that was officially outdated and scheduled to be replaced. They were facing a nightmare of code with very little - and often misleading - documentation. They inherited a negative amount of credibiity from the customer base. And perhaps worst of all: they were all trained and indoctrinated in the "work" routines of the old LL. Old habits die hard.

Considering those conditions, the fact that they made any progress at all, is nothing short of a miracle.

The mistakes the made with Quick graphics was to trust the old code and also do the product testing the old careless way. At that time they must have known deep in their hearts. But they must have been in the denial stage, they were not quite ready to face the grimm truth yet. They are now. We still don't know how animesh or Arctan will end up but the developers have certainly taken the time to do proper ground work. It's a gruellingly slow process though and all programmers and managers hate code cleaning.

 

3 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

The problem is Linden Lab themselves. They shouldn't be learning things like this from random users in their forums. They should have people on staff who both know all of this on a professional level, and who also have the experience in Second Life to understand how best to implement that knowledge.

Yes, and that is one field where they are still very much in the denial phase. Patch is going to throw another tantrum if he reads this but he probably isn't, so:

There is no evidence that LL has any qualified SL mesh makers on their staff, neither among the Lindens or among the hired Moles. If they have them, they are not heard when decisions are made. Nor does it seem to be any such people among the "inner circle" of old time content creators with strong connections on the inside (except one, but he doesn't really count here).

Today Linden Lab relies heavily on user feedback instead. It's better than nothing but that feedback is of undetermined quality. And, perhaps even more important, the people who make the effort to give feedback will always have their own agenda. They are promoting their own interests and those those interests will never be exactly the same as tthose of Linden Lab or Second Life as a whole.

User feedback does not reduce the neew for in-house expertise. It increases it because somebody has to evaluate the feedback. This doesn't seem to have dawned on LL yet. I hope it will soon because it is actually getting a li'l bit critical.

[ChinRey]

33 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

Are you three just blind of rage or always as close minded?

Overly optimistic perhaps.

I don't think we should criticize people to harshly for that. The world as a whole needs more, not less, optimism.

 

33 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

You want the Lindens turn unnumbered content items useless because you say so? Do you have any idea what this will cause? People will have content rendered useless they spent hundreds if not thousands of real world Dollars on. Are you realy so naive to think they will they will then just buy BETTERMESH™? No, most won't. In their eyes the Lab will have proven to be an unreliable partner for future investment, most will consider it the last straw, shrug and leave. And even those who would buy better stuff won't have much to buy either. Because even content designers will consider the Lab an unreliable partner and SL an unreliable invenstment after the incident.

That is the problem of course. We can discuss who's fault it is until the cows come home, but the fact is, any effective solution for the LoD bug will trigger an uproar among users. And whether it's fair or not, they will blame Linden Lab. I would be surprised if it wasn't the last straw for many users and merchants.

LL is damned if they do and damned if they don't. I don't envy them.

---

I listed the four obvious solutions and "solutions" in an earlier post. In theory there is actually a fifth way that should avoid most of the big problems. It's a very far fetched one though, I'm not at all convinced it's even possible. But for the sake of completeness:

5. A brand new avatar system

One with a good working LoD and load accounting system and so much better than the existing avatar people will want to switch to it. Let us keep our outdated fitted meshes for as long as we want to. That's ok - with SL's short fashion turnaround it shouldn't take too long before the fitmesh problem is reduced to a minimum anyway.

An upgraded system avatar wil not be enough though. We also need an attractive replacement for fitmesh clothing and hair and other attachments.

Edited August 24, 2018 by ChinRey

[Coffee Pancake]

9 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

Are you three just blind of rage or always as close minded?

You want the Lindens turn unnumbered content items useless because you say so? Do you have any idea what this will cause? People will have content rendered useless they spent hundreds if not thousands of real world Dollars on.

All of that money spent is exactly that, spent. You have no ownership of anything in purchased SL in the traditional sense. If SL tanks, you don't get to take your purchases with you .. hell in the bulk of cases you can't even resell your purchases in SL.

At best you have a licence to use it while SL exists within SL ... although with a lot of current content, you probably don't even have that.

9 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

Are you realy so naive to think they will they will then just buy BETTERMESH™? No, most won't. In their eyes the Lab will have proven to be an unreliable partner for future investment, most will consider it the last straw, shrug and leave. And even those who would buy better stuff won't have much to buy either. Because even content designers will consider the Lab an unreliable partner and SL an unreliable invenstment after the incident.

The lab have no control over what's uploaded, where it was bought online, where it was exported from and how much time wasn't spent modelling it from scratch.

SL didn't die when when sculpts were rendered useless. If anything the market got a lot smaller as they were nightmarish to make and texture.

9 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

The Lab can and should enfore a correct calulation. Give those bad mesh items the astronomical ARC and LI they deserve. People will react on their own.

This is exactly what we are saying they should do. There is no difference between correcting the ARC value for items or lowering the ceiling .. the practical end result is a squeeze and an enforced lowering of complexity. 

9 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

But should they listen to your triumphirate of "I know betters" and install hard caps or make existing fitmesh crumble even at close view they will utterly fail. Once they break existing content en masse they will spell their own doom and seal the fate of SL.

If your fit mesh crumbles .. then you should take that up with the store who sold it you.

If they made the original item, then cleaning it up and issuing an update is easy to do.

 

8 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

That is the problem of course. We can discuss who's fault it is until the cows come home, but the fact is, any effective solution for the LoD bug will trigger an uproar among users. And whether it's fair or not, they will blame Linden Lab. I would be surprised if it wasn't the last straw for many users and merchants.

LL is damned if they do and damned if they don't. I don't envy them.

I doubt it to be honest. The SL fashion industry runs on a very fast tick. Bodies and heads will be updated, clothing vendors will release new stuff and all the old stuff will end up in storage next to our prim shoes, flexi hair & skirts. Some wont make it, others will step up and take their place as has happened every time the content paradigm has moved forward.

Some communities will be quicker to adapt that others and change provides just as many opportunities as it takes away.

I've lost count how many times we have gone though this cycle. The world didn't end.

[Fionalein]

7 minutes ago, CoffeeDujour said:

This is exactly what we are saying they should do. There is no difference between correcting the ARC value for items or lowering the ceiling .. the practical end result is a squeeze and an enforced lowering of complexity. 

There is no ceiling to lower right now. You want to instigate one ... Big Difference.

7 minutes ago, CoffeeDujour said:

I doubt it to be honest. The SL fashion industry runs on a very fast tick. Bodies and heads will be updated, clothing vendors will release new stuff and all the old stuff will end up in storage next to our prim shoes, flexi hair & skirts. Some wont make it, others will step up and take their place as has happened every time the content paradigm has moved forward.

With the little difference that we can still wear flexi, we just choose not to - if you folks get your will however, stuff will be lost forever.

Edited August 24, 2018 by Fionalein