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Why doesn’t LL limit creators more?


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3 minutes ago, Tolya Ugajin said:

Or perhaps region owners could better monitor the junk on their land?

This is not the problem.

The problem is that region owners like to build large contiguous spaces rather than a series of discrete contained separate locations.

For example. When building a RP village .. don't put the insides of the buildings inside the buildings, have exp teleport doorways to blink people between physical locations. Games do this all the time for this exact reason.

When building a vendor based event - don't just have one floor with everything on, have 4 copies of the same 'whole' event 1000m apart, have the avatars land in a separate entrance area and then exp teleport them to the least busy level when they arrive. 

There are many ways to do similar tricks and work around SL's weaknesses which are for the most part network related or client side processing. Lag is a very general term and often has multiple components, breaking things up even just a little can have a huge impact on end user experience.

"region owners could better monitor the junk" implies there are specific single objects or people that cause all the problems, like a couple of high poly items or that one script or Fancypants Resident, and that 'low hanging fruit' approach has been exactly what people have been trying to do for years .. and here we are. The problems are systemic and build based mitigation's must also be systemic.

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2 hours ago, FairreLilette said:

We tinies can view 80+ avatars and make Machinemas with 80+ avatars...what about the high polygon mesh human biggies?  How many can be filmed in a Machinema?

   That's not really a good measure - there are plenty of tinies that are poorly optimized, and plenty of human avatars that are well optimized. I've got screen captures caught with 20 human avatars from forum breakfast that runs smooth as whisky. 

   ... Dancing to the Benny Hill theme ...

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48 minutes ago, Orwar said:

   That's not really a good measure - there are plenty of tinies that are poorly optimized, and plenty of human avatars that are well optimized. I've got screen captures caught with 20 human avatars from forum breakfast that runs smooth as whisky. 

   ... Dancing to the Benny Hill theme ...

Oh, that's cool and sounds funny.

Hmmmmmmmmmm...I'd still like to see any Machinemas with lots of Mesh Head and Body avi's if anyone has any to show as I've never seen one until I became a "tiny" where we've had 80+ in several.

So many variables to this question of optimization of content creation and having a chance to enjoy SL for those who are social and like the busy places like me.  I did not really care for having to de-render stuff.  I came to SL to see Avatars, not de-render them.   

I hate de-rendering.  I just don't want to live that SL anymore.  

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1 hour ago, CoffeeDujour said:

This is not the problem.

The problem is that region owners like to build large contiguous spaces rather than a series of discrete contained separate locations.

For example. When building a RP village .. don't put the insides of the buildings inside the buildings, have exp teleport doorways to blink people between physical locations. Games do this all the time for this exact reason.

When building a vendor based event - don't just have one floor with everything on, have 4 copies of the same 'whole' event 1000m apart, have the avatars land in a separate entrance area and then exp teleport them to the least busy level when they arrive. 

There are many ways to do similar tricks and work around SL's weaknesses which are for the most part network related or client side processing. Lag is a very general term and often has multiple components, breaking things up even just a little can have a huge impact on end user experience.

"region owners could better monitor the junk" implies there are specific single objects or people that cause all the problems, like a couple of high poly items or that one script or Fancypants Resident, and that 'low hanging fruit' approach has been exactly what people have been trying to do for years .. and here we are. The problems are systemic and build based mitigation's must also be systemic.

How does "region owners could better monitor the junk" in any way, shape or form imply "single objects or people" cause all the problems?  That's one heck of a leap.  Are you Evel Knievel reincarnated?

The OP asks a question, "why doesn’t the lab construct a way to limit and refine the way creators can upload creations so it doesn’t bog down the grid." and suggests restrictions on content creation would help.  I am pointing out that "bog down" is caused by the "junk" on the sim - namely, every item therein.  The OP wants LL to somehow force creators to optimize content?  Sim owners select what content goes on their sims (or rent the space and allows tenants to do so on their individual parcels) - they surely can choose items with optimized textures, polys, etc. as well as lower scripts.   As well as how they lay out their RP villages, vendor based events, etc.

You start by saying "this is not the problem" and then set about listing two specific examples of exactly the problem I pointed out - sim owners not monitoring the junk on their land.

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1 hour ago, JPG0809 said:

True, but aren’t the region owners putting the heavy objects into the grid in the first place?

Actual genuinely "heavy" objects are the exception rather than the rule. SL makes it rather hard to create heavy stuff (which is why there are no bit coin mining scripts etc).

It's more like death by a thousand cuts, put all the death in one location, then invite 40 people to come look at the death without giving a single thought to how SL's infrastructure client and server side works, then get upset about performance and try and find the one thing, person, or trend who's fault it 'must be'.

The current trend is to blame LL for not putting in easily circumvented limitations ... again, without wanting to know how any of this works and why certain situations are guaranteed to result in a s-show. The previous trend was avatar scripts, the solution to which created a revolving door effect that crippled the region by making it do the most expensive linear operation over and over.

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1 hour ago, JPG0809 said:

True, but aren’t the region owners putting the heavy objects into the grid in the first place?

Yes but that's the point.  Actually, there are a couple:

1:  It's not impacting "the grid".  I can make my sim so laggy that the Kray 89,000 superduper computer on a dedicated T42 line won't run it well - it won't impact any place but MY sim.

2:  As someone pointed out in an earlier reply to me, it's not just the objects that are the problem.  Even setting aside all the issues with the user's computer, ISP, etc., it's the totality of the objects and scripts on my sim - as well as how the sim itself is set up - that matters.  If my sim has 30,000 one prim simple boxes all different colors and sizes and random effects, all right on top of each others and each loaded with scripts, it's gonna suck to be there.  Whereas I can have quite a few "heavy objects" on it and mitigate the effects by designing the sim correctly.  What I put on there, and how, is my choice.  Rather than limiting my choices by limiting what creators can do.  If people don't like the operation of my sim, they are free to choose to go elsewhere. 

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10 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

For example. When building a RP village .. don't put the insides of the buildings inside the buildings, have exp teleport doorways to blink people between physical locations. Games do this all the time for this exact reason.

I visited a merchant who did this, and an art gallery.  They drove me insane.  I never knew where the heck I was.

10 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

When building a vendor based event - don't just have one floor with everything on, have 4 copies of the same 'whole' event 1000m apart, have the avatars land in a separate entrance area and then exp teleport them to the least busy level when they arrive. 

LL does this with the Welcome and Social Islands.  It's all fine until you want to go somewhere with a few friends...and you go to Event Copy A, while your friends are scattered between Event Copies B, C, and D.

I'm not saying these ideas are BAD...only that they may have Unintended Consequences.

 

Uh, OK.  They're bad.  Just sayin'.

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On 2/29/2020 at 8:14 AM, JPG0809 said:

So a lot of lag issues has to with creators not properly optimizing their content when it comes to textures, polys, etc.

If this is the case, why doesn’t the lab construct a way to limit and refine the way creators can upload creations so it doesn’t bog down the grid.

Im not saying get rid of the heavy content already inworld, just refine it.

There is no real solution to bad content that LL can implement/enforce. Bad content will always find a way to be bad. It doesn't matter if a mesh can only have 16384 vertices instead of 65536, or 2 textures instead of 8, or 128px instead of 1024px resolution. You can always get around these limitations by just uploading your final product in smaller and smaller pieces.

Real change must come from within.

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8 hours ago, Lindal Kidd said:

I visited a merchant who did this, and an art gallery.  They drove me insane.  I never knew where the heck I was.

LL does this with the Welcome and Social Islands.  It's all fine until you want to go somewhere with a few friends...and you go to Event Copy A, while your friends are scattered between Event Copies B, C, and D.

I'm not saying these ideas are BAD...only that they may have Unintended Consequences.

 

Uh, OK.  They're bad.  Just sayin'.

Because we we don't have the tools to make SL work seamlessly this way in social situations. There is no way for an automated system to know it should keep a party together in the same copy ... or even which avatars might be a party, or to designate one space as being contained by or contiguous with another.

Layering techniques are standard in the gaming industry to spread server and client side load, it's a tried and tested solution that SL just doesn't have any infrastructure for. It's the old 80/20 rule, we can do 80% of whats required easily, but the last 20% make the difference between the experience being as socially seamless and friendly as possible. It can't ever be perfect, but it can be better than we can accomplish now. In any case, we either work out how to do this, or stop complaining about unspecified lag.

SL is built around the expectation of a contiguous shared space, and that places a hard cap on how complex a place can be and how many people can be there at the same time .. only we can't see the cap till we've blasted past it and are desperately scratching around for what's to blame.

The only other option isn't socially acceptable for SL. Force location based avatars with exp tools; Visit a busy event .. get a generic low detail temporary avie for the duration. But again, more support from LL is needed for this to actually work (avatar slots) - temp location avies must entirely replace the user avie on arrival, and entirely go away when the user leaves restoring them exactly as they were before hand.

As an aside avatar slots would also be great for gaming, enter a specific game location, you becomes whatever the game needs, leave and back to normal.

 

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2 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

As an aside avatar slots would also be great for gaming, enter a specific game location, you becomes whatever the game needs, leave and back to normal.

That one sounds pretty cool.  Go play as a Cleric or an Elf or whatever and actually BE that character, instantly.

Of course, that too has a downside, when I think about it.  If I want to do, say, Western roleplay now, I have to go shop for an outfit, and a gun, and a horse, etc.  This makes the merchants very happy.  Your system would eliminate that...darn it.

(I'm sorry to be sounding so negative, Coffee...and it's not intended to be aimed at you personally.  Please keep coming up with ideas!  I guess I'm just in a gloomy sort of place right now.)

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43 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Of course, that too has a downside, when I think about it.  If I want to do, say, Western roleplay now, I have to go shop for an outfit, and a gun, and a horse, etc.  This makes the merchants very happy.  Your system would eliminate that...darn it.

I don't think it would, the only way SL works as a whole is because we all bring little bits of the pie to the table, the people who make things will almost always be different people than those who make uses for things. BYOA (bring your own avatar) roleplay is a very different use case.

 

(also hugs and hugs and more hugs and chocolate)

 

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16 hours ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

Or they could fix the system requirements page so people don’t think their 💩box that lags out on Minesweeper can run Second Life.

Which is no solution. As the issues that need to be fixed will be a problem with any system is not checked. As hardware advances, and people continue to load in bad content, bad content will always outpace the hardware.

Better to fix the bad pipeline than expect users to buy a $3000 machine every 6-12 months.

There's a big difference between telling people to have a moderately good system every 3-5 years, and telling them that even the top end system right now will only perform half as good (if that) in SL, as it will in the latest high end FPS video game...

 

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4 minutes ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

Which is no solution. As the issues that need to be fixed will be a problem with any system is not checked. As hardware advances, and people continue to load in bad content, bad content will always outpace the hardware.

Better to fix the bad pipeline than expect users to buy a $3000 machine every 6-12 months.

There's a big difference between telling people to have a moderately good system every 3-5 years, and telling them that even the top end system right now will only perform half as good (if that) in SL, as it will in the latest high end FPS video game...

 

That's not the fault of "bad content" ... SL performance is directly linked to its base architecture.  All the stuff SL is built to do that you to do that you just can't do in anything else, is crippling. This is why Sansar worked very differently, they designed it not to fall into all the traps that plague SL. Sansar was SL2 and was objectively better in every technical sense.

SL is not built like a game, doesn't work like a game, just happens to be able to use and render game like assets.

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.

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.

SL does not uniformly scale, not on the server and certainly not on the client.

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Just now, CoffeeDujour said:

That's not the fault of "bad content" ...

It IS the fault of bad content.

"creators" in SL regularly upload content with polygon counts that are only meant for 3D art and high end animation, not real time graphics. Other things are uploaded with the 'triangles' all in bad locations for animation, resulting in heavier system load when the system tries to calculate said animation.

Bad content is rampant in SL.

 

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1 minute ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

Other things are uploaded with the 'triangles' all in bad locations for animation, resulting in heavier system load when the system tries to calculate said animation.

Um .. no. Math is math. Even if it looks ugly, it's the same math.

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1 hour ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

There's a big difference between telling people to have a moderately good system every 3-5 years, and telling them that even the top end system right now will only perform half as good (if that) in SL, as it will in the latest high end FPS video game...

And it always will be the case, even if content would be better/more optimized. You simply can't compare games made by professional developers with multimillions budgets that went through some (or lots in some cases) QA to stuff people made at their PC for fun after work. And if someone does compare... it's their own problem. You can also expect a budget car to be as good as a business class one would be, but it won't make it true.

Besides SL works okay on pretty old systems as long as they are "decent". Before the upgrade my internet/SL machine had Intel 2500k@5.2GHZ (9 years old quad core by now), 16GB DDR3 RAM and GTX1070 for a long time and can't say I had any complaints of how SL works on it. Obviously it was worse than on my main PC, but even at my own region which is pretty loaded with heavy mesh I had >70fps on the ground level without shadows, ~45 with.

Restricting creators and (like in your suggestions) viewers/users to adjust setting based on hardware is a terrible idea. If someone with netbook from mid 2010s, that has no dedicated GPU and CPU that is only good enough for videos and web games will connect 4k screen to it and expect it to perform well (in games or SL)... it's also their problem. You can't and shouldn't hold their hand by "restricting" settings.

Also, as Coffee already mentioned, LL should rewrite viewer first to actually use modern hardware. Something that modern games do, but SL does not.

But yeah, same story as with script hysteria that I did seen in a plenty of places. "Oh noes, you have whole 20 scripts, it's bad for the region!" kind.

Edited by steeljane42
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1 hour ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

Better to fix the bad pipeline than expect users to buy a $3000 machine every 6-12 months.

Because telling people Second Life won't really run on their cell phone grade netbook is the same as telling them they need to spend $3,000 a year on gaming PCs.

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14 minutes ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

Because telling people Second Life won't really run on their cell phone grade netbook is the same as telling them they need to spend $3,000 a year on gaming PCs.

With the recent discussions about the mobile app not having a full fat 3d experience I doubt the vast majority have even the slightest inkling of how those devices might differ, let alone impart specific limitations based on design specifications ... or even what a operating spec might be  ... or care to find out, only get angry when differences beyond the superficial are pointed out.

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31 minutes ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

Because telling people Second Life won't really run on their cell phone grade netbook is the same as telling them they need to spend $3,000 a year on gaming PCs.

...

Rizen 2700, nVidia 2080 RTX, 32gb of ram, and a 500mbps internet connection.

I'm not using a cellphone here.

 

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15 minutes ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

Rizen 2700, nVidia 2080 RTX, 32gb of ram, and a 500mbps internet connection.

I'm not using a cellphone here.

No, but people who are running cell phone grade netbooks will look at the system requirements and think their craptops are capable of running SL and then see threads like this and think their SL runs like garbage on their garbage computers because Linden Lab won't restrict content to 16x16 textures and jellydoll everyone.

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Showing the item stats will not solving the problem, because most ppl don't care about it. It would help if the worn polycount/texture memory could be read by a script, so sim owner could have an eject from sim script if polycount/textures are too high (same as in early days when there was the script limit eject thing).

The only real solution would be:

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

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)

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) .

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

 

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.

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2 hours ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

Because telling people Second Life won't really run on their cell phone grade netbook is the same as telling them they need to spend $3,000 a year on gaming PCs.

Yeah but you're exaggerating... as first you mentioned in this thread "Grandma's 1994 e-Machine" which is a total exaggeration, and then you go on to netbooks which I hardly think many are using for SL.   I don't think 1994 e-Machines and netbooks are very much used in SL.  

And, you first said in this thread it's because LL won't raise the minimum requirements 'but' you think the minimum requirements are what 1994 e-machines and netbooks contain?

Lyssa, why don't you just say what you really want to say instead of using exaggerations.  Say it in real terms.  So, what do you think the minimum requirements should be?

 

Edited by FairreLilette
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3 hours ago, FairreLilette said:

And, you first said in this thread it's because LL won't raise the minimum requirements 'but' you think the minimum requirements are what 1994 e-machines and netbooks contain?

Yes grandma's 1994 e-machine was hyperbole, mocking what seems to be the belief that SL would run on practically anything if only Linden Lab would crack down on those dastardly content creators. 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.

3 hours ago, FairreLilette said:

So, what do you think the minimum requirements should be?

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.

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