We have the power to make SL a "big thing" again (really) and tip the ongoing narrative, let's do this! c= let's do our part (for our sake)

[Sid Nagy]

I think at times what the heck with it too. The texture 'experience'  (read chaos) in Bellisseria makes me very grumpy lately.
The houses there are pretty much useless with the constant adjusting textures.
I have the feeling I'm pretty close to a longer (maybe even a real long) break away from SL.

[Sid Nagy]

3 minutes ago, animats said:

Yes, it's fixable.

You forgot ..... but....

[Janet Voxel]

12 minutes ago, animats said:

"I feel quite strongly that more hardware is not a viable path forward. In my experience a significant percentage of participants in SL do so on a shoestring RL budget. Their computers / graphics cards hobble along at the lowest of settings (Atmospheric shaders, longer draw distances, etc. are use selectively and cautiously if at all), their internet connections are slow, even intermittent, they have free accounts and what money they have in SL comes from some kind of job there. In short expecting these people and the many others who stretched their RL budgets for somewhat better hardware for a better SL to spend money on fancy sensors and trackers is naive at best." - Comment on Philip Rosedale speech in 2014.

This is a good point. Since then, it's become worse. Graphics price/performance has decreased in recent years. The average Steam user has an NVidia 1060, which is a pretty good graphics card. Original retail price, in 2016, was $249. Today, it costs $549, used. NVidia's current entry level video card costs around US$330. The reasons for this include the move to thin laptops with cooling problems, the backlog at TSMC,  the cryptocurrency mining community buying up a big fraction of graphics cards, 5nm fabs costing $20 billion each, and NVidia discovering that gamers would pay over US$1000 for a GPU card.

Most people are using laptops, and they have to take whatever GPU the laptop manufacturer gives them. Unless you buy a "gamer laptop", something that starts around US$1350, you get a rather modest GPU. Compare that with typical US$200-$500 laptops.

The effect is that the average consumer PC just does not have enough graphics power to run SL well.

So, the mass-market virtual worlds look rather cartoony at the moment. See Facebook Horizons, Roblox, Minecraft, etc.

Eh, he said that in back in 2014 though. Second life wasn't built with cell phones and laptops in mind, its from a time when errrrrbody was using a Dell desktop, in black if you were fancy. Roblox can be played on console, and that's primarily how its played, a market LL hasn't even attempted. Minecraft can be both CPU and GPU intensive, especially with all the mods people use and very few people are playing vanilla Minecraft. A modern day smartphone probably has just as much processing power and graphics capability as a desktop PC from 2014. I'm not so sure how scientific the low end user statement is, but its taken as gospel and it's pretty questionable, especially now.

I'm not going to be in other people's pockets, but you can buy a decent PC or laptop with a decent graphics card still. Heck I have a decent PC and I still turn my draw distance down and use graphics settings a notch lower than ultra.

I'm not sure we should keep going down the "We can't upgrade SL because most users are using potato PCs!" for much longer. I'm not sure how true that is anymore.

[Silent Mistwalker]

For some of us it is still very true. It's not getting better. If anything, it is getting worse as prices rise out of our reach.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

14 minutes ago, Janet Voxel said:

I'm not sure we should keep going down the "We can't upgrade SL because most users are using potato PCs!" for much longer.

I'm not even sure that's appropriate to the sort of problems mentioned through this topic: Most of the issue that are giving me headaches come from the SL (AWS) servers. I could be running on a state of the art gaming PC but I'd still be looking at 37% scripts running, three to four Keyframe movements failing for no reason each day, TP-crashes, ...

Maybe I should put this another way: If SL were better-performing, I might feel inclined to squander some of my setaside for a better PC, but right now, I don't see it as worth the expense. The machines I have go around some of the other (outside SL) places without a hitch, I don't see grey textures or get TP-failures there, it's only SL that' become rather annoying over the past few months.

Edited June 1, 2021 by Profaitchikenz Haiku

[Janet Voxel]

7 minutes ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

I'm not even sure that's appropriate to the sort of problems mentioned through this topic: Most of the issue that are giving me headaches come from the SL (AWS) servers. I could be running on a state of the art gaming PC but I'd still be looking at 37% scripts running, three to four Keyframe movements failing for no reason each day, TP-crashes, ...

Maybe I should put this another way: If SL were better-performing, I might feel inclined to squander some of my setaside for a better PC, but right now, I don't see it as worth the expense. The machines I have go around some of the other laces without a hitch, I don't see grey textures or get TP-failures there, (where?) there, it's only SL that' become rather annoying over the past few months.

I agree; SL has been running like crap lately. For me it goes in cycles where it runs great, everything loads quickly to I have a hard time loading my own house. Right now I'm in the cycle of I can't load my own house.

I think it is relevant, because whenever someone has this discussion, someone inevitably brings up "most people are on potato pcs" in the mix. Most people I know are trying to run SL on ultra, if you look at the technical discussions forum half the threads on the first page start off "I have a RTX 10000, how can I improve my framerate?" or someone is always bragging about how they're running SL on ultra offhandedly in the general forum. I just don't think the majority of people on SL are on potato PCs anymore.

[Lyssa Greymoon]

52 minutes ago, Janet Voxel said:

I think it is relevant, because whenever someone has this discussion, someone inevitably brings up "most people are on potato pcs" in the mix. Most people I know are trying to run SL on ultra, if you look at the technical discussions forum half the threads on the first page start off "I have a RTX 10000, how can I improve my framerate?" or someone is always bragging about how they're running SL on ultra offhandedly in the general forum. I just don't think the majority of people on SL are on potato PCs anymore.

And the other half of the questions are is this Best Buy deal of the day laptop good enough for SL. 

What do people consider a "potato PC"? 

[Sid Nagy]

The ones you can bake with a chopped onion and some garlic?

 

 

I couldn't resist.

Edited June 1, 2021 by Sid Nagy
I show myself out.

[Janet Voxel]

9 minutes ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

And the other half of the questions are is this Best Buy deal of the day laptop good enough for SL. 

What do people consider a "potato PC"? 

Yes! And they usually are....

Good question. Because I'm pretty sure a lot of people that say they're on a potato pc, aren't. Just because you're on a GTX 1050, doesn't necessarily mean your PC is a potato. But some people say they are, even though its perfectly adequate to run SL. I mean, you're not going to load everything at SupaSEXXI event '21 on opening day in 30 seconds, but it'll run SL at high graphics settings.

I would consider a PC running integrated graphics, no graphics card and 4 gb of ram somewhere in the potato category.

[Silent Mistwalker]

21 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

The ones you can bake with a chopped onion and some garlic?

 

 

I couldn't resist.

Curse you! Now my mouth is watering.

Payback. 😋

[Rob Huntsman]

Only way I can see SL improving at this point is building up more of a Community by joining a Launcher. For example, it could be epic games, or Steam. Linden Labs just needs to pick one for more advertisement.

[Solar Legion]

They did that in the past. it did not go well.

No - they need to stay far away from such systems.

Want it to be launched by Steam (or another Launcher), add it yourself.

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

10 minutes ago, Rob Huntsman said:

Only way I can see SL improving at this point is building up more of a Community by joining a Launcher. For example, it could be epic games, or Steam. Linden Labs just needs to pick one for more advertisement.

Epic is one of the worst game companies. I think the Lab did use Steam for SL. Not sure if that's still active.

[Solar Legion]

11 minutes ago, Kimmi Zehetbauer said:

Epic is one of the worst game companies. I think the Lab did use Steam for SL. Not sure if that's still active.

Briefly. Then they went out and acquired Desura when that fell through. That also went ... poorly.

[Ardy Lay]

8 hours ago, Finite said:

spawning (venus) poofers

SL gets more Mars poofers than Venus poofers, but they do both happen.  (Sorry, just trying for a giggle.)

[Ardy Lay]

Some computers are self-baking potatoes when trying to "run" Second Life Viewer.

I am pretty sure SL Viewer and probably 3rd party viewers for Second Life are reporting a bit of data about their execution environment to Linden Lab.

[Coffee Pancake]

4 hours ago, Sid Nagy said:

I think at times what the heck with it too. The texture 'experience'  (read chaos) in Bellisseria makes me very grumpy lately.
The houses there are pretty much useless with the constant adjusting textures.
I have the feeling I'm pretty close to a longer (maybe even a real long) break away from SL.

Kitty and I have brought up the low VRAM in the stock SL client many times at the TPV developer meetings, 512 MB has been insufficient since the advent of mesh and it's basically normal that some locations in SL are inaccessible on the official client.

It took us a long time to overcome resistance to the idea that parts of SL were effectively off limits and get a Linden to stand in front of kitty's house for an afternoon (fairly recently in fact).

 

ALL third party viewers have found ways to allow the viewer to use more VRAM (it's one of the fundamental TPV differences). ... ok that sounds really clever and optimistic, 'found ways' needs about 7% yolo.

(Note, it's bad for any singular application to try and use all the VRAM, OS, browsers, etc will all need some for themselves. So even if you have ALLLL the gigabytes, TPV's wont allow the SL viewer to selfishly claim it all).

LL have refused to do this in their own viewer, often citing the lack of a clear cut 'right way', that would work correctly under all circumstances and on all the weird hardware people use to access SL. The answer we were given was that some hardware actively lies about how much VRAM it has. If the viewer tries to use more than the actual amount, bad things a plenty can happen (this is true).

 

On the issue of Bellisseria, while it's fair to say it was designed, built and tested using the official client, it's not fair to say it was designed and tested for the official client. All bets are off once we move in and fill the houses full of random junk. I'm sure there are plenty of houses that would give even a TPV with all the VRAM a workout.

 

tl;dr - In the absence of an actual fix or way to increase the accessible VRAM in the official client, the only course of action is to lower the raw distance (less stuff, fewer textures, lower vram demands). Remove unused HUDS (especially those for mesh body parts). Simplify your own avatar (onion skinned mesh body bad, etc etc). Disable advanced lighting, clutch fewer straws ... etc.

tl;dr2 - Request more VRAM from LL and use a Third Party Viewer while you wait.

[FairreLilette]

5 hours ago, Sid Nagy said:

I think at times what the heck with it too. The texture 'experience'  (read chaos) in Bellisseria makes me very grumpy lately.
The houses there are pretty much useless with the constant adjusting textures.
I have the feeling I'm pretty close to a longer (maybe even a real long) break away from SL.

I can't run the EEP viewers well plus EEP is not convenient with names such as 'George's light party' or something that is a no-name name and most of the EEP's I bought are no modify so can't change the name.  I did finally write the EEP names down on a notecard but I cannot remember what I named the notecard so I cannot even use the EEP environments I bought without a bunch of hassle 'cause I can't find the notecard.  The EEP is dropping FPS and reeking mayhem on my textures too.  So, I contact LL about it and they told me to get a new graphics card.   So, I have been taking a break from SL myself.  I cannot deal with the texture problems either.  Plus, with windlight ,the windlights were all just a click and a slider away to adjust into something amazing.

As far as me wanting to go to bat for SL and EEP, my heart is not in that aspect of it because of EEP.  

People taking breaks and/or giving up is pretty bad.   

[Rowan Amore]

1 hour ago, FairreLilette said:

I can't run the EEP viewers well plus EEP is not convenient with names such as 'George's light party' or something that is a no-name name and most of the EEP's I bought are no modify so can't change the name.  I did finally write the EEP names down on a notecard but I cannot remember what I named the notecard so I cannot even use the EEP environments I bought without a bunch of hassle 'cause I can't find the notecard.  The EEP is dropping FPS and reeking mayhem on my textures too.  So, I contact LL about it and they told me to get a new graphics card.   So, I have been taking a break from SL myself.  I cannot deal with the texture problems either.  Plus, with windlight ,the windlights were all just a click and a slider away to adjust into something amazing.

As far as me wanting to go to bat for SL and EEP, my heart is not in that aspect of it because of EEP.  

People taking breaks and/or giving up is pretty bad.   

You can get the old firestorm windlights settings to use on an EEP viewer for free.

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Firestorm-Default-Sky-Windlights-for-EEP/20088838

ETA.   They're also all in your library folder, environments for EEP versions and should still be in the drop down menu in quick preferences for personal lighting.

 

Edited June 2, 2021 by Rowan Amore

[Drayke Newall]

5 hours ago, Janet Voxel said:

Most people I know are trying to run SL on ultra, if you look at the technical discussions forum half the threads on the first page start off "I have a RTX 10000, how can I improve my framerate?" or someone is always bragging about how they're running SL on ultra offhandedly in the general forum. I just don't think the majority of people on SL are on potato PCs anymore.

This is once again the fault of Linden Lab in not updating their recommended specs on the website. Current recommended specs show hardware that has had support officially stopped on it, companies that haven't existing in over a decade and was manufactured in 2008. So they come in and say I have a pc with the lowest ancient gcard and expect good results because that is what LL tell them.

Additionally, as far as second life is concerned I believe it would be better for Linden Lab to forgo the minimum and recommended specs and break it down to a graphics standard based on the graphics slider in SL Viewer. It needs to be something that actually shows what a person can expect. So Fair, Good, Best, Ultra.

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

All bets are off once we move in and fill the houses full of random junk. I'm sure there are plenty of houses that would give even a TPV with all the VRAM a workout.

This is why I believe (and have even suggested) LL should introduce (no LI) prim based occlusion planes to the creation tools. This would allow creators of houses to place within the voids of the walls of buildings occlusion planes so that anything behind that plane doesn't get rendered. That is until you are either within 'x' distance of it (like 1m) or behind the plane. This would stop all of the lag issues in highly built up sims as well as texture flickering etc and even reduce cache load. The current system of occlusion based on priority just does not work at all as it overloads the vram allocation and cache.

When I mentioned it to a Linden they said it was to hard to do so nothing came of it.

Then again, I also think the cache needs an overhaul with the ability to favourite a region making the textures etc remain in cache and not get replaced. But of course that is wishful thinking.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

6 hours ago, Janet Voxel said:

I think it is relevant, because whenever someone has this discussion, someone inevitably brings up "most people are on potato pcs" in the mix. Most people I know are trying to run SL on ultra, if you look at the technical discussions forum half the threads on the first page start off "I have a RTX 10000, how can I improve my framerate?" or someone is always bragging about how they're running SL on ultra offhandedly in the general forum. I just don't think the majority of people on SL are on potato PCs anymore.

The people posting here on the forum, and the people we collectively know are a small (and biased) subset of SL's userbase. For every person I've seen wondering why their high-performance machine doesn't work, I've seen at least one person who lives in SL with <20 FPS without even questioning it. LL has a much bigger picture on what kind of hardware people use to access SL, and they've made some decisions not to do things because it would negatively affect too many people with lesser hardware.

And on the topic of minimum requirements, it's really arbitrary for SL. You can't really make any good decisions about where to draw the line because SL, unlike other games, are almost unlimited in how heavy the scenery can become so the "minimum requirements" for new users are basically unknowable.

You could run SL on a AA-battery powered potato and get usable FPS if you weren't on a sim with hundreds of 1024 textures in your view, and millions of triangles to draw every frame just to display your own avatar (let alone other people or the rest of the environment). But in other places it doesn't matter how powerful your hardware is, SL just won't run well.

[FairreLilette]

5 hours ago, Janet Voxel said:

Yes! And they usually are....

Good question. Because I'm pretty sure a lot of people that say they're on a potato pc, aren't. Just because you're on a GTX 1050, doesn't necessarily mean your PC is a potato. But some people say they are, even though its perfectly adequate to run SL. I mean, you're not going to load everything at SupaSEXXI event '21 on opening day in 30 seconds, but it'll run SL at high graphics settings.

I would consider a PC running integrated graphics, no graphics card and 4 gb of ram somewhere in the potato category.

Even though mine might be a potato to you it ran fine pre-EEP.  Plus, I see posts all the time of people with jelly dolls and using 'show friends only' and they have the best of machines.  So, pre-EEP and then with the cloud my machine ran great.  Then EEP and SL is pretty much dead for me now.  It's got too many problems for my machine with EEP.  Textures, as Sid mentioned which I never had before pre-EEP as I've been on the forums quite awhile and I have zero posts of problems pre-EEP other than crowded events but after the cloud crowded events were no longer a problem...but again, along came EEP and ruined all that for me.  

 

1 hour ago, Rowan Amore said:

You can get the old firestorm windlights settings to use on an EEP viewer for free.

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Firestorm-Default-Sky-Windlights-for-EEP/20088838

ETA.   They're also all in your library folder, environments for EEP versions and should still be in the drop down menu in quick preferences for personal lighting.

 

I'm tired so I hope I make sense.  Those you import to your inventory and then I'd have to look up almost 800 windlight names from my inventory.  I would NEVER want to look up almost 800 windlight names from my inventory.  That is a hassle no one needs nor would have time for.  The windlights USED TO be in the viewer where you clicked on them in the viewer NOT in one's inventory.

I am also using the only current older FS viewer but it is similar to EEP in that it has the bump and shiny together like the new EEP viewers which makes things murky for me if the bump and the shiny are together.  

Here is the link to the older FS *below* I am currently using but it's only a few hairs better for my machine than the newer EEP ones.  So, it's pretty crummy all around for me.  (I use the viewer linked below - not much better but it has the windlights in the viewer itself plus the slider which is the magic of it all.  Without that slider to change the windlights, SL lighting and SL have lost their magic to me.)  So once this viewer below goes, I will too.  June actually may be my last month.  I can't see paying for what is lousy for me.  I asked LL to consider putting out an EEP and Non-EEP viewer but they never wrote back to me.

https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/fs_older_downloads

[Coffee Pancake]

58 minutes ago, Drayke Newall said:

When I mentioned it to a Linden they said it was to hard to do so nothing came of it.

All of this is hard to do, not least of all getting the lab to recognize a problem or need exists and is serious enough to warrant some developer time.

 

 

[Rowan Amore]

38 minutes ago, FairreLilette said:

Even though mine might be a potato to you it ran fine pre-EEP.  Plus, I see posts all the time of people with jelly dolls and using 'show friends only' and they have the best of machines.  So, pre-EEP and then with the cloud my machine ran great.  Then EEP and SL is pretty much dead for me now.  It's got too many problems for my machine with EEP.  Textures, as Sid mentioned which I never had before pre-EEP as I've been on the forums quite awhile and I have zero posts of problems pre-EEP other than crowded events but after the cloud crowded events were no longer a problem...but again, along came EEP and ruined all that for me.  

 

I'm tired so I hope I make sense.  Those you import to your inventory and then I'd have to look up almost 800 windlight names from my inventory.  I would NEVER want to look up almost 800 windlight names from my inventory.  That is a hassle no one needs nor would have time for.  The windlights USED TO be in the viewer where you clicked on them in the viewer NOT in one's inventory.

I am also using the only current older FS viewer but it is similar to EEP in that it has the bump and shiny together like the new EEP viewers which makes things murky for me if the bump and the shiny are together.  

Here is the link to the older FS *below* I am currently using but it's only a few hairs better for my machine than the newer EEP ones.  So, it's pretty crummy all around for me.  (I use the viewer linked below - not much better but it has the windlights in the viewer itself plus the slider which is the magic of it all.  Without that slider to change the windlights, SL lighting and SL have lost their magic to me.)  So once this viewer below goes, I will too.  June actually may be my last month.  I can't see paying for what is lousy for me.  I asked LL to consider putting out an EEP and Non-EEP viewer but they never wrote back to me.

https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/fs_older_downloads

They are still in your viewer in quick preferences in the EEP viewer.  You can still move the sun around just like with the slider.  Same thing just a different window to do it in.

ETA.  Not sure which of those older viewers you are currently using but it should be Firestorm 6.3.9 (58205) Release

That is the last pre EEP version and what you would have been using before you updated.  The one you liked.

Edited June 2, 2021 by Rowan Amore

[Lyssa Greymoon]

1 hour ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

And on the topic of minimum requirements, it's really arbitrary for SL. You can't really make any good decisions about where to draw the line because SL, unlike other games, are almost unlimited in how heavy the scenery can become so the "minimum requirements" for new users are basically unknowable.

The minimum requirements won’t even run Windows. Personally I think the minimum should be at least something that supports all of the shaders SL uses. Turning it up to ultra may not run well, but at least it should look right. The minimum video cards, if they’ll even run Windows 8 or 10 (and that should be 8.1, not 8 ) won’t run SL right.