Why doesn’t LL limit creators more?

[FairreLilette]

30 minutes ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

The netbook thing? Totally serious. The minimum system requirements are easily met by probably every netbook ever made.  Go look at the minium requirements, then come back and tell me where I'm wrong. I am not exaggerating one bit there.

Hardware that's actually capable of running Second Life. Hardware that has Windows 10 drivers and supports all the shaders SL uses. That would be at the very least Nvidia 8000 series, AMD HD 5000 series or Intel HD4000.

Oh yes, I see.  I forgot there was recommended as well as minimum.  As far as the minimum, yes a netbook supposedly could run SL.  

Sorry, I had the recommended in my mind.  

I agree, the minimum would give me a lousy SL.  I have a desktop pc and a craptop (to use your word)...my craptop is for music only with headphones and I watch concerts occasionally.  

My laptop cannot run SL very well.  I tried it.  It's so slow it would not be worth using SL to me.  I do, however, have the viewer in there to use - I had already tried it a few times.  But, I came here to build first as a hobby.  For me, I need a large screen and a desktop PC to do that...as well as to fully enjoy the scenery...I want a large screen only.

Edited March 2, 2020 by FairreLilette

[Coffee Pancake]

4 hours ago, Tonk Tomcat said:

1. LL have to limit the allowed polys per upload.

Upload more than one mesh and then link them together ... this would actually allow more high rez textures per finished object. This workaround works flawlessly for rezzed and worn objects.

This increases the burden on your end with additional meta data, processing, and overall poly count (as the objects, especially worn would require duplicate geometry).

4 hours ago, Tonk Tomcat said:

2. To prevent the "smart" creators: Limit the polys per linked object (so the smart guys can't upload 100 single objects and put them together again)

'over the limit' attachments will now use multiple points and rezzed items will come packaged as separate parts inside a rezzor (like buildings with separate doors, etc have done forever).

You loose attachment points. Rezzed objects are now higher Li.

4 hours ago, Tonk Tomcat said:

3: Limit the total allowed polys per avatar. So the users would try to find more low poly items by themself too to be able to wear more stuff as an outfit (would be equal to low land impact items to have more stuff in your place) .

Depending on where the line is drawn, you loose hundreds .. thousands of real $ worth of purchased assets, simply because it's impractical to wear a hair and shoes.

We all loose because LL are now fending off lawsuits rather than everything else.

ARC attempts to solve this by letting you set complexity limits to your own tastes. Nothing anyone can do about FOMO.

4 hours ago, Tonk Tomcat said:

4: For texture memory: Maybe have a limit of the total allowed texture memory per avatar.

Or, and this might be a bit too cunning, buy a video card with more VRAM and use a viewer that grants access more than 512mb of it (this limit exists in the Linden client as some graphics adapters will outright lie about how much they  have, and trying to use what doesn't exist ends badly).

4 hours ago, Tonk Tomcat said:

I know, that are many limits and i bet most of the "creators" will scream that they can't create stuff anymore. But thats how it should be done.

Ppl will and have to learn how to create game optimized content.

This will not result in any changes whatsoever. Uppty fancy hat creators will continue to be aloof and create fancy hats, that people will buy, and then scream about how the viewer is broken. Third party viewers will then undo these client side limits and everyone will live happily ever after. Just like they did with sculpts that did have hard limits, till evil creators figured out how to push the format.

Game optimized content is actually harder due to the current limitations. Adding good LOD models to objects increases complexity. This increases the rezzed cost. So in order to meet customer demands for low Li content, creators are too aggressive when using the uploader. Only a minority of creators go to the trouble of hand making good LOD models. This is the exact circular mess we had with sculpts, the solution to which resulted in kneecapping the viewers built in LOD system and lowering everyone's frame rate.

[Solar Legion]

The specifications listed under System Requirements for Recommended barely qualify as proper Minimum requirements. This needs to be fixed/updated.

Coffee has already well handled the suggestions with regard to "improvements" and restrictions.

I'll simply remind those reading and posting to this thread that Second Life was not intended - on the creation side - to be limited to "professional" content creators of any stripe. it was built and aimed at the absolute Amateur. No, I really don't care what your personal definition for that is, it's not what Linden Lab was aiming for and all one has to do is look at the built in creation tools to understand this.

At one point, the average user understood this. Then users expecting AAA quality assets started to come in.

Now don't get me wrong, I love that the overall quality of most items and avatars has risen but you really do have to understand the points above and the points Coffee has made in order to understand what has been happening.

We are at a point now where, no matter how Linden Lab approaches these problems, everyone loses in some way.

[Tonk Tomcat]

95% of all content is not AAA quality. It is content, that NEVER should exist in SL, and it will never exist in any game. A pants with 150k polys, where you see the brand logo made in mesh and every stitch in mesh is no quality, it's just stupid.

In an AAA game, the content is game optimized.

 

And i'm sorry, EVERY amateuer 3d creator, who creates stuff as hobby or for games like sims or so for free has to learn how to retopo and do low poly 3d assets. You only see those highpoly stuff in sl, because they somehow forgot to add an upload limit. That has nothing to do with aiming to amateur ppl. I started as an amateur too, and even my first mesh item ever i made in 2011 for sl is low poly already.

And all the limits i wrote above, are limits that they need to have sl run properly again. You can find any reason why not implemeting those limits. But this is the one and only way to do it.

Everytime LL will tell you they are working on performance improvements are just a laugh. Except if they are secretly working on the next gen super high performance graphics card that's 10 times faster as a 2080 ti, so your machine will handle a 50 million polygone scene with all the stupid highpoly content.

 

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

No matter how you restrict uploads in SL and no matter how optimized LL tries to make things, the amount of detail and corresponding average frame rate will always and naturally reach a certain equilibrium in SL. And with this equilibrium, the frame rate will always be acceptable for some and unacceptable for others. The buck stops with the people who buy, rez and decorate SL.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

17 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

If you built a complex SL scene in an actual game engine it would easily render at several times the frame rate, with more advanced features, look better and make substantially better use of the hardware.

I really doubt this. If you were to fully export a sim (with its avatars) and plop them into, say, Unity and compare the results, I don't think there would be a big difference besides the fact that rendering in Unity can use multiple threads.

17 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

The only real hope we have of performance improvements is a rework of the entire asset render pipeline to a threaded platform like vulkan and get more CPU cores on the table, although realistically we're going to slam into bus and memory bandwith issues long before we can keep a new multicore CPU busy. This is only a possibility with an actual rework though, simply porting the existing system from opengl won't result in anything to get excited about.

First of all, every SL viewer I know of (including Catznip, correct me if I'm wrong) use OpenGL.

When you say "threaded platform," what do you mean exactly? OpenGL (as you brought up) is "threaded" in the sense that it has built-in systems to share data between multiple 'contexts' (OpenGL term) but only one context can be active and making draw calls at any time. However this doesn't mean OpenGL can't be used for multi-threaded rendering. It's just that no viewer does.

Vulkan isn't an inherently better option as we could also develop the viewers in C or Assembly (because they are "faster" languages).

Edited March 2, 2020 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Solar Legion]

In a AAA game, the content is made by "professionals", optimized for that engine and the end user cannot make new content on the fly (I am aware that there are some exceptions to this - that is quite irrelevant).

If you're already able to use the external tools at hand to reduce your polygon count, you are not an amateur - period.

[Orwar]

4 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

In a AAA game, the content is made by "professionals"

[FairreLilette]

9 hours ago, Solar Legion said:

The specifications listed under System Requirements for Recommended barely qualify as proper Minimum requirements. This needs to be fixed/updated.

Perhaps the specs listed under RECOMMENDED are for the Classic avatars provided by LL not the mesh body ones made by others.

I don't know how LL could provide specs for what others are creating or going to create and/or import.   

Edited March 2, 2020 by FairreLilette

[Solar Legion]

@Orwar: Do note the quotes around professionals. Being made by someone for whom such is their line of work does not automatically mean anything in the way of quality. Further, you could have used almost any Bethesda game as an example proving this.

@FairreLilette: The specifications listed are meant to be taken as a general specification - Second Life as a whole. They are so woefully out of date that their Recommended Specification is more akin to a Minimum.

[Tonk Tomcat]

40 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

If you're already able to use the external tools at hand to reduce your polygon count, you are not an amateur - period.

Wrong. I learned 3D for second life. 12 years ago. And i learned using the tools and reducing the polygon count. And when i started to learn, i was an amateur, but still my stuff does not look like the stuff today, because they all want to do it fast and don't want to waste the time in doing it right (of course there is a small amount of ppl who really want to learn and improve, but most other creators i talk to and told them they are doing to high poly count and have to retopo just told me that takes too much time, so yeah. lol)

[Lyssa Greymoon]

42 minutes ago, FairreLilette said:

Perhaps the specs listed under RECOMMENDED are for the Classic avatars provided by LL not the mesh body ones made by others.

I don't know how LL could provide specs for what others are creating or going to create and/or import.   

The recommended hardware list dates back to May 2010, so Linden Lab has literally every piece of mesh ever uploaded for reference. Basing system recommendations on what SL was like a decade ago is really doing users a disservice. I don't think it's even that. I think whoever updated them last cribbed from Tom's Hardware's best video cards for the money list and called it a day.

[Seicher Rae]

I'd like to think that I'm a bit more informed than the average user of SL. I'm not sure that is true, but I'd like to think so. I read Forums and blogs. Do you know how many people I've run into in the past month who have never heard of Bellissaria? (Probably 50% of the new (to me) people I've spoken to, and these were far from newbies.) LL keeps coming out with new things, Bento, BOM, soon there will be new environments... I still haven't learned about experiences! I come into SL to play, relax, enjoy, and take pictures. I do not come into SL to get a Master's in SL/LL. I think I'm pretty average in that. I'm not techno phobic but I'm not fluent either. I'm not a creator. I understand a bit about polygon counts. But honestly? I'll buy a doodad to set out on my houseboat because it looks pretty. I look at LI numbers as they get told to me by my viewer. I understand that some things are made more complicated than they should be, and that it causes lag. But, again, honestly? If I were to check every item and brutally take down everything that didn't live up to snuff? That would take even MORE time away from my enjoyment of SL. I'm sooooooo sick of fussing with my avatar all of the time, and adjusting furniture and accessories to fit. I already feel like I spend half of my allotted time doing technical fixing.

So the reason I typed all of that is to say,: Yeah, ok, the end user has some of the blame by purchasing high impact items. But don't make them (me) the villain. There's a little more too it than just being too lazy to be arsed. And while ignorance is not an excuse, it sometimes kinda is.

[Solar Legion]

Yeah, no.

1. In 2008, Mesh (as Second Life knows it) had not yet been introduced into Second Life. You are thinking about Sculpted Prims.
2. We get it, you learned how to use the tools at hand to improve upon your content - that is rather irrelevant to what the intention behind Second Life and allowing everyone to upload/create content was/is.
3. The current state of affairs with regard to content has little to do with the lack of limitations imposed upon creators and quite a fair bit to do - by your own admission - with some (at best) not willing to put in the work needed to optimize their content.
   1. Forcing content creators to put in that work will not solve the problem, as @CoffeeDujour already noted earlier. She already noted why as well - your opinion regarding that reality is rather irrelevant.
4. Mesh content looks the way it does primarily due to the consumer. This was true in the Prim Only era, it was true in the Sculpty Era and it is true now.
   1. Outside of educating (where you can) the general user base concerning low impact content or forcing them to purchase/use such content (the latter causing quite a great deal of strife), you're not going to even begin to solve anything.
   2. You might be able to begin tackling the problem if you could convince the general user base to wait on properly optimized content to be produced/released and to make compromises concerning "beauty" and "aesthetic" of said content. Good luck with that.

I'm not here to debate this with you or anyone else. I really don't care about your opinion on the matter. I am stating/clarifying the reality.

I watched as content within Second Life evolved. Watched as consumers pushed for better looking content while each new way to make it came out. Watched as the market itself created what we see today.

I watched as people complained about the limits that were in place at varied times. Watched as concessions were made to appease the general consumer (such as the increased LI limits) and I cringe every time something like ArcTan is mentioned or touted as being part of (if not the) solution.

Second Life went from a user base that appreciated the content an amateur puts out to demanding the sort of eye candy they were used to from big name games and studios and content creators have obliged. Linden Lab's responses have been largely to appease that crowd - a crowd that really needs to reevaluate their expectations.

Second Life does not contain premade assets that were optimized by a development team explicitly for the program - each asset is made by another end user who may or may not know how to optimize said asset. Further an asset looking nice is not as relevant as to how it performs - I've left quite a few avatars to rot in my inventory over this one and avoid spending too much time in places that look good but perform like drek despite looking nice. For some tings, I've had to compromise one way or the other.

Someone - in this thread or in one of the many similar over the years - mentioned how the Furry community works with regard to content and content creation. as bad as some content creators in the community can be, it is nowhere near as bad as the general base and overall collective of creators within Second Life are. Take a page out of their book.

[Tonk Tomcat]

I don't think it's the end use fault, because, as you said, you are just a user. And you cannot expect that the user checks everything and has the ability and knowledge to decide what's good and what is bad. It's the fault of LL that it's even possible to bring in all these things. That "creators" just upload things, because they can, is the human nature i guess.

[Solar Legion]

3 minutes ago, Seicher Rae said:

I'd like to think that I'm a bit more informed than the average user of SL. I'm not sure that is true, but I'd like to think so. I read Forums and blogs. Do you know how many people I've run into in the past month who have never heard of Bellissaria? (Probably 50% of the new (to me) people I've spoken to, and these were far from newbies.) LL keeps coming out with new things, Bento, BOM, soon there will be new environments... I still haven't learned about experiences! I come into SL to play, relax, enjoy, and take pictures. I do not come into SL to get a Master's in SL/LL. I think I'm pretty average in that. I'm not techno phobic but I'm not fluent either. I'm not a creator. I understand a bit about polygon counts. But honestly? I'll buy a doodad to set out on my houseboat because it looks pretty. I look at LI numbers as they get told to me by my viewer. I understand that some things are made more complicated than they should be, and that it causes lag. But, again, honestly? If I were to check every item and brutally take down everything that didn't live up to snuff? That would take even MORE time away from my enjoyment of SL. I'm sooooooo sick of fussing with my avatar all of the time, and adjusting furniture and accessories to fit. I already feel like I spend half of my allotted time doing technical fixing.

So the reason I typed all of that is to say,: Yeah, ok, the end user has some of the blame by purchasing high impact items. But don't make them (me) the villain. There's a little more too it than just being too lazy to be arsed. And while ignorance is not an excuse, it sometimes kinda is.

Stating the reality has nothing at all to do with making anyone "the villain" and no one is saying the end user should be checking every item they buy.

[Selene Gregoire]

22 minutes ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

The recommended hardware list dates back to May 2010

You mean they've actually changed it once since 2005? Wow! 

[Seicher Rae]

2 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

Stating the reality has nothing at all to do with making anyone "the villain" and no one is saying the end user should be checking every item they buy.

Actually, a few people have. @Orwar on page one said  "You can easily check items yourself and decide whether it's worth its rendering costs and/or script content, there's no need to limit it. If people are unwilling to educate themselves on how that works, and just blindly throw money on things that appear pretty ... Meh? " Others said similar things. Granted, no one said "villain" that was me be dramatic for dramatic's sake. I can't really argue that some of the blame lands on the end user (me & my average ilk), at least not in a perfect world. It isn't that I'm totally unwilling to educate myself, totally being the operative word, it is just really a lot of work that clearly some people enjoy, as witnessed by all the people posting in this thread knowledgeably show. The knowledgeable, at this level, are in the small minority of people in SL.

[Solar Legion]

5 minutes ago, Seicher Rae said:

Actually, a few people have. @Orwar on page one said  "You can easily check items yourself and decide whether it's worth its rendering costs and/or script content, there's no need to limit it. If people are unwilling to educate themselves on how that works, and just blindly throw money on things that appear pretty ... Meh? " Others said similar things. Granted, no one said "villain" that was me be dramatic for dramatic's sake. I can't really argue that some of the blame lands on the end user (me & my average ilk), at least not in a perfect world. It isn't that I'm totally unwilling to educate myself, totally being the operative word, it is just really a lot of work that clearly some people enjoy, as witnessed by all the people posting in this thread knowledgeably show. The knowledgeable, at this level, are in the small minority of people in SL.

Education is only a single facet and by itself is not much of a solution though, which is why i do not agree with it being presented as such.

The end user needs to be patient and learn to compromise a bit where the visual aesthetic is concerned, reward creators who actually take their time to produce their content and stop harping on/rushing them in general.

It takes time to make content that will look in any way decent while also performing well within Second Life and right now, the bigger names are pressured into churning out content as quickly as they can.

[Tonk Tomcat]

1 minute ago, Solar Legion said:

the bigger names are pressured into churning out content as quickly as they can.

But why should they be pressured? I'm making my living with sl too. It's possible to do, even if you create optimized content. But if the "bigger names" want to take part on literally all events to just get all the money, they are just greedy and don't want to spend the time it needs.

[Orwar]

6 minutes ago, Seicher Rae said:

The knowledgeable, at this level, are in the small minority of people in SL.

   I like to think of it a bit like RL.

   For example - a bunch of people got their knickers in a bunch about photoshopped ads for cosmetics a few years ago; it's still a 'thing', but I guess media had a dry spell and decided to stir the pot a bit, and some people went absolutely bananas and wanted to make it illegal because twisted beauty ideals and unhealthy expectations for young, impressionable girls.

   Yet, those same companies are still selling cosmetics advertised with photoshopped models with Barbie-esque physiques, and the people who wanted to illegalize it, well, most of them still consume makeup. When my sister wanted to argue about it with me (because me not sharing her zeal ticks her off and she has to 'correct' me - which usually ends up with her crying because I simply don't care to engage), I just told her to vote with her money; it's the basic principle of democracy. If people really are that bothered, they shouldn't perpetuate it by throwing money at them.

   So in SL, same thing goes; if you want to make poor quality products and flog them to the ignorant masses who don't know any better, fine - but I'm not going to be buying those products, personally, because I rather enjoy being able to muddle around in my home without having any lag, and I can easily find better made alternatives that'll look as pretty but cause no issues. If 'the people of SL' want a less laggy SL, well, the 'people of SL' will have to educate themselves - it's not like there's a shortage of resources for learning these things, both in-world, in blogs, the wikis, the forums, vlogs, etc. 

   Unfortunately, people like to scream that LL are incompetent or LL should fix this or that. Just like the painted women who screamed at government to financially ruin the companies that they themselves were throwing money at.

   "It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful."

[Selene Gregoire]

The average consumer, both RL and SL, wants it now, not 6 months from now. Some would call that demand.

Creators feel obligated to keep their customers happy so they churn things out as fast as possible. Some would call that supply.

Well, lookie here. It's supply and demand. Whodathunkit.

[Solar Legion]

1 minute ago, Tonk Tomcat said:

But why should they be pressured? I'm making my living with sl too. It's possible to do, even if you create optimized content. But if the "bigger names" want to take part on literally all events to just get all the money, they are just greedy and don't want to spend the time it needs.

You will have to explain this to both those bigger names and their customers. "Making a living" is only part of it.

In the time since I first started using Second Life, I watched as some content creators bucked against the increasing demands of their user base and became lesser known or dropped off the Grid entirely (Hybrid for example or The Werehouse).

It is a balancing act.

Run a Home & Garden store? You'll need a proper place to Demo your wares - which costs money. Clothing? Avatars? Those can be almost wholly migrated to the Marketplace with Demos obtainable through the existing system (which does need work) and thus cutting costs considerably. If you do well enough, having a storefront in a region could be a viable option but it should remain just that - an option.

It is a bit idealistic to think that such a balance could be achieved, certainly but it does not change that it is needed far more than technical limitations.

[Tonk Tomcat]

Yeah, it's a balancing act, that's right. But imagine if everybody would do it right, or would have to do it right because of limits. The users, or costumers, would learn, that it is just not possible to release new properly made content every week. And if everybody would do so, that would be the new standard in sl. So all this "pressure" just came because the majority is not creating stuff the way it should be and rushing out poorly made content (that actually looks really good, as long as it's just for pictures, but not for a game).

[Solar Legion]

Nice way to twist things around.

The pressure exists because very few can be patient enough to wait for it to be done properly. That will not go away because of imposed technical limits - as has already been explained to you. It has also already been explained to you just how those limits can be circumvented. Wishing it were otherwise does not change anything.

You quite ignored everything except what you could use to further your own agenda with regard to technical limitations being enforced.

What you are advocating for has been proven to be difficult at best, barely serviceable in practice and impossible at worst - as has been rather well proven by Second Life's very history.

But do please go on about how these limits will magically solve anything. Maybe someone will bite and fall for it.

Edited March 2, 2020 by Solar Legion