Lag

[ChinRey]

1 minute ago, Solar Legion said:

The most they should be doing is offering pointers or suggestions.

They don't do that either. But no, that is the least they can do, not the most. The "do as I say, not as I do" principle never really works. If you don't lead by example, you don't lead at all.

[Solar Legion]

1 minute ago, ChinRey said:

They don't do that either. But no, that is the least they can do, not the most. The "do as I say, not as I do" principle never really works. If you don't lead by example, you don't lead at all.

Note I said should, not could.

Just as they should not impose the sort of hard limits some like to bandy about. If that is the direction people seriously think they should take, see an earlier post of mine wherein the needed changes were outlined.

Sorry - the way I see it, you either allow everyone the chance to create content (while giving tips to those who are more serious about it as opposed to casual users) or you only allow serious Content Creators the ability to actually create. No in between.

[WereBeast Alpha]

The linden homes are always laggy, a friend of mine got one through her membership she can't stay for long without crashing and lagging so we stick to my homestead I guess its from textures being a bit laggy I know I can't load into my linden home and I am on a MacBook Pro 2015 SL always has lag when it comes to lots of objects being in a sim. My homestead a steady 25-30 fps while a linden membership home 5-10 fps. Even on my old desktop it was laggy at linden homes. Thus its a linden home texture issue is what I think.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

2 hours ago, TDD123 said:

Only once I had a valid reason : on a standalone sim ( no other sims around ) and with a starry sky holding  a diameter of 1024. The sight was awesome and the framerate never dropped significantly. 

Of course I always forgot back then to set back DD when teleporting away from there , resulting in almost a complete standstill when ending up anywhere else.

 

Going from my home sim at 1024, to lusk,  omg, lol.  everything and their brother loads when hitting mainland.   eesh.

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, Solar Legion said:

Just as they should not impose the sort of hard limits some like to bandy about.

Yes, I'm absolutely with you there. Second Life should welcome everybody who want to build no matter their skill levels and not force anybody out.

But Linden Lab should do everything they can to encourage, inform, guide and advice and they don't do that.

Showing a good example for others to follow as best as they can is an important part of this and they've totally failed there. If Bellisseria isn't bad enough look at Meauxle Bureaux. Yes, I know that's not a Mole build but that pile of garbage was still bought and approved by LL. Even worse, they have the audacity to say in the Destination Guide that it was " lovingly crafted by resident experts" and is " the ultimate in shared creative spaces". This is a gross insult to everybody who ever tried to make half decent mesh for Second Life and it shows they don't even have the qualifications to tell quality from garbage.

It wasn't always that way. The early content Lindens and Moles were excellent prim builders, Eric Linden may well be the best one we've ever seen, and they were very concious about setting a good standard and helping users learn and improve. But then mesh came along and they lost the plot completely.

Edited October 3, 2021 by ChinRey
Typos

[animats]

Chin Rey and I argue about this now and then. Rey builds very well, and pays attention to lower levels of detail. So her content has low LI and looks good at distance. I have some of her chairs and furniture.

The trouble is, SL has all that existing content. Much of it looks good, but is inefficient to render. There are hundreds of thousands,  perhaps millions, of work hours in that content. Re-working it by hand would take many years.

So I take the position that the system has to cope with what we have - overly complex high LODs, and poor quality lower LODs. It just needs to do a better job.

Until recently, actually getting LL to do anything about this seemed hopeless. But there are now faint indications that the new VP of Engineering, Mojo Linden, is serious about pushing on performance. At the last creator user group, we heard that performance measurement tools are being used on the viewer's main render loop, and things that don't absolutely have to be done in that loop, holding up the render, are being moved to other threads. This is a step forward. Previously, efforts in that area were considered "too hard".

There's quite a lot that can be done. I've mentioned occasionally that I'm working on an experimental SL viewer not based on LL code. (Don't expect this to be usable soon. It's an attempt to push the technology of large metaverse-type systems and find out how fast you can make them go. Right now I can log in and cam; that's it. Message me if you're interested in technical discussions.)

One of the things I'm doing is loading textures in the order of how much screen space they take up. This is a big win. Everything right in front of you loads in a second or two. No more waiting for signs, vendors, and artwork you're looking right at to load. The overall effect is that the world seems to be much higher rez. I've been amazed at how much detail shops in New Babbage have. This also makes shopping events much more pleasant. You can actually see the displays as you approach them.

There's some talk from the Lindens of putting that in their viewer.

So that's just one thing that's possible and works. There are many other things.

Here's a short list of possible speedups:

• Large impostors for distant areas. Pictures of entire sims, taken every few days from multiple angles, by something like the SL map maker. That's what you'd see beyond draw distance. This is how games such as GTA V do it. When you're looking at mountains clear across San Andreas, you're looking at pre-rendered flat pictures of the distance. This is tricky to do well, so that the seams don't show, but routinely done by games today. The difference for SL is that you have to rebuild those pictures occasionally. If you want to see for kilometers, this is the only way to make it work. (An annoying problem with this is seeing all the junk in the sky from far away. Probably ignore everything more than about 128m above ground level when impostoring to avoid seeing all those skyboxes and build platforms.)
• Vulkan. There are more efficient rendering systems than OpenGL. With Vulkan, the GPU does more of the work. I'm using it. LL has looked at it.

All this stuff is more or less standard game dev technology, modified for SL.

SL lacks an important step in the asset pipeline. In game development, artists and modelers create models. Those don't go directly into the game. They go to people  who use tools to simplify them and make them more efficient, working on both meshes and textures at the same time. SL has a strong separation between meshes and textures.  You can mix and match after uploading. So some basic optimizations used in game development are unavailable.

And then came Bakes on Mesh. At the moment you change your avatar's clothes, all the textures come together for the first time. They go out to a baking server, get composited down to a few textures, and become assets ready to use. That was a big win. I'd like to see that extended to baking the meshes themselves, along with the textures, down into something like a one-piece game character. Like BOM, this would happen when clothing was changed. This is the moment when all the pieces of an avatar come together, and that's an optimization opportunity. This is a complex subject and I'm doing some experiments in Blender to see if this can work. Roblox is doing something like this, which is what gave me the idea. They're adding a SL-type clothing system, and they had to do something so that multiple clothing layers would not choke their system. Ready Player Me also seems to have something similar; you dress your avatar on their site and an optimized model comes out.

So, when someone says it can't be done, point them at the people who are already doing it.

[Chris Corvinus]

8 hours ago, ChinRey said:

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-11700K @ 3.60GHz

Theres your problem.

[Paul Hexem]

Whenever a thread like this comes up, someone inevitably has to argue that "SL is supposed to be a terrible experience, benchmarks and getting more than 10 FPS is unfair for creators!"

Which tells me they probably are among the ones that game their land impact with bad or no LODs.

These days I just keep hoping LL will port some of the stuff @animatshas been working on into the viewer.

[animats]

16 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

These days I just keep hoping LL will port some of the stuff @animatshas been working on into the viewer.

This isn't rocket science. It's basically modern game dev from a few years back, plus some less common stuff such as a Rend3->WGPU->Vulkan->Rust pipeline and many threads. Some of the stuff Unreal and Roblox are working on goes way beyond this.

The most useful new idea here is that SL lacks a crucial step in the asset pipeline, as mentioned above. We all know that. But that doesn't mean, skip the step. It means, find some other place to do it. Like BOM bake time, or daily, or when the pathfinding mesh updates, or something like that. This is where SL, Open Simulator, and metaverse systems have to part company with the classic game asset pipeline to get anywhere. SL does not have the building full of overworked junior artists optimizing content of an AAA project.

 

[ChinRey]

4 hours ago, Chris Nova said:

Theres your problem.

I suppose that was a joke, the i7-11700K is one of the fastest cpus on the market, only beaten by the Intel i9-11700K and a few of the strongest ones from AMD's Ryzen 9 series.

But your post made me notice something. I bought and paid for a computer with an Intel i9-11700K cpu, not an i7-11700K. I suppose I'll have to have some strong words with the store.

[ChinRey]

5 hours ago, animats said:

The trouble is, SL has all that existing content. Much of it looks good, but is inefficient to render. There are hundreds of thousands,  perhaps millions, of work hours in that content. Re-working it by hand would take many years.

So I take the position that the system has to cope with what we have - overly complex high LODs, and poor quality lower LODs. It just needs to do a better job.

Yes, it's probably too late to do anything about it and I notice that LL seems to have given up on the ARCTan project.

 

5 hours ago, animats said:

And then came Bakes on Mesh. At the moment you change your avatar's clothes, all the textures come together for the first time. They go out to a baking server, get composited down to a few textures, and become assets ready to use.

Second Life has actually had server side baking for system avatars since 2013. What's new is that they now have implemented it for some meshes too.

 

5 hours ago, animats said:

One of the things I'm doing is loading textures in the order of how much screen space they take up.

That feature too was supposed to have been implemented in 2013 through Project Interesting but it doesn't seem to work. I'm not sure what happened there but Project Interesting went off on a bad start even by Six Dark Years Era LL standards so it's possible they just quietly scrapped the whole thing.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

Just to chime in here about the issues with user-created content: This isn't unique to SL.

Auran Trainz has faced this problem twice now (TS2009/10 then TaNE) and their solution to being unable to upgrade because of the masses of old user content was

 

Break it

 

Now, this isn't quite so awful as it sounds because, you can run different versions of Tarinz, You can run the old TC3 or TRS2004 to see legacy stuff you made or bought, or you can run TS2012/Tane/TS2019 to see the new stuff with things like physics-baked rendering or nostril-hairs in the train drivers.

As of yet I can't see an obvious path for LL to have a legacy and shiny-new pair of programs since it would involve a repeat of San-san-san let's not go there.

[Echelon Alcott]

In the topic of rendering optimization, for avatars, we can configure the viewer to display avatar complexity. I use it when purchasing new products and accessories for my avatar, in order to manage its complexity.

Is there an equivalent for other products that we don't wear? For instance, when shopping for a house or plants, is there any way to determine how well built an object is? For instance, @animats shared that @ChinRey is a good creator and that "builds very well, and pays attention to lower levels of detail. So her content has low LI and looks good at distance." When purchasing products, I believe we all check LI, but is it possible to get a score for objects, indicating how well built they are, similarly to what we get in terms of avatar complexity? If it does exist, please forgive my ignorance and I'll appreciate being educated in this matter.

Edited October 3, 2021 by Echelon Alcott

[Lindal Kidd]

@Echelon Alcott: No, but that sounds like an interesting idea. How about proposing it in JIRA as a new feature request?

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

20 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

I love long distance views though. We should be able to see at least as far as 20 regions.

We will need for Nvidia to come up with a GeForce 9090TI Special Gold Edition to handle up to 16 regions! 🤣

[LittleMe Jewell]

18 hours ago, xxVi3perxx said:

The linden homes are always laggy, a friend of mine got one through her membership she can't stay for long without crashing and lagging so we stick to my homestead I guess its from textures being a bit laggy I know I can't load into my linden home and I am on a MacBook Pro 2015 SL always has lag when it comes to lots of objects being in a sim. My homestead a steady 25-30 fps while a linden membership home 5-10 fps. Even on my old desktop it was laggy at linden homes. Thus its a linden home texture issue is what I think.

It's actually a combination of some very badly built mesh by many creators, an extreme overuse of large textures, and the Mole mesh which is intentionally designed to be seen from very far away with an LOD setting of 1.0.

At my Linden Houseboat, which is in a region with only 11 total houseboats and no other Linden Homes, and with my draw distance set to 128, I will consistently get FPS of 60-80.

 

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, Echelon Alcott said:

Is there an equivalent for other products that we don't wear? For instance, when shopping for a house or plants, is there any way to determine how well built an object is?

Yes but it's not quite as straight forward as it should have been.

If you select an object to edit, you can click on the "More Info" link in the edit palette and check the weights. The "Display weight" is the same as ARC is for avatars.

Then there's wireframe view of course. It's usually easy to see if the creator has wasted tris and vertices there. Some meshes are so dense they actually look solid in wireframe. Content as extremely poor as that is definitely something to avoid buying.

In Firestorm you also have two other good indicatiors. In the edit palette you can see the triangle count for each LoD model and also switch between them to examine each. What you get there is data for asingle mesh, not for a linkset but it can still be useful.

The "inspect item" option in Firestorm gives you a lot of data for the high LoD models (but not for the others).

The main problem is to determine what is a reasonable amount of tris, pixels and LoD reduction for a specific item. I wrote a post about plants a while ago and I think that's a goodguide for those but it doesn't apply to any other kinds of objects of course.

 

[Luna Bliss]

1 hour ago, Kimmi Zehetbauer said:

22 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

I love long distance views though. We should be able to see at least as far as 20 regions.

We will need for Nvidia to come up with a GeForce 9090TI Special Gold Edition to handle up to 16 regions! 🤣

lol

SL will never have everything I want, but it has enough of what I do want....and so I just roll with the changes.  Getting elderly here...not too long before I'll be 20 if I count my original avatar    

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

and the Mole mesh which is intentionally designed to be seen from very far away with an LOD setting of 1.0.

More like LOD setting 0.1 I think.

My meshes are all made for LOD factor 1.0 although I sometimes allow for a little bit of distortion with that factor and they are not nearly as heavy as Mole meshes.

[Chris Corvinus]

13 hours ago, ChinRey said:

I suppose that was a joke, the i7-11700K is one of the fastest cpus on the market, only beaten by the Intel i9-11700K and a few of the strongest ones from AMD's Ryzen 9 series.

But your post made me notice something. I bought and paid for a computer with an Intel i9-11700K cpu, not an i7-11700K. I suppose I'll have to have some strong words with the store.

Yes, it was a joke. From a Ryzen 9 user

[Echelon Alcott]

5 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Yes but it's not quite as straight forward as it should have been.

If you select an object to edit, you can click on the "More Info" link in the edit palette and check the weights. The "Display weight" is the same as ARC is for avatars.

Then there's wireframe view of course. It's usually easy to see if the creator has wasted tris and vertices there. Some meshes are so dense they actually look solid in wireframe. Content as extremely poor as that is definitely something to avoid buying.

In Firestorm you also have two other good indicatiors. In the edit palette you can see the triangle count for each LoD model and also switch between them to examine each. What you get there is data for asingle mesh, not for a linkset but it can still be useful.

The "inspect item" option in Firestorm gives you a lot of data for the high LoD models (but not for the others).

The main problem is to determine what is a reasonable amount of tris, pixels and LoD reduction for a specific item. I wrote a post about plants a while ago and I think that's a goodguide for those but it doesn't apply to any other kinds of objects of course.

 

ChinRey, thanks for the thoughtful and detailed reply. Do you still have a store inworld? I could not find it, only in MP.

Edited October 4, 2021 by Echelon Alcott

[Jennifer Boyle]

Solar Legion

• 

Posted Saturday at 03:33 PM

There is no legitimate reason - ever - to have your Draw Distance set that high. That is the size of four Regions.

That setting should not ever be allowed beyond 512 Meters at most with the average user never needing to go beyond the size of an entire Region.

Yes, there is. When flying, it is very helpful to be able to see the enormous distance of one km ahead. It really helps one to maneuver around obstacles.

(I don't know why the forum quote didn't work.)

Edited October 4, 2021 by Jennifer Boyle

[Elysienne Nebula]

On 10/2/2021 at 6:25 PM, xxVi3perxx said:

The linden homes are always laggy, a friend of mine got one through her membership she can't stay for long without crashing and lagging so we stick to my homestead I guess its from textures being a bit laggy I know I can't load into my linden home and I am on a MacBook Pro 2015 SL always has lag when it comes to lots of objects being in a sim. My homestead a steady 25-30 fps while a linden membership home 5-10 fps. Even on my old desktop it was laggy at linden homes. Thus its a linden home texture issue is what I think.

Yeah. I've only visited my Linden home 3 times. Who would have thought that the pre fabbed Linden home area would end up being the most horribly laggiest part of SL?  

 

[Solar Legion]

6 hours ago, Jennifer Boyle said:

Yes, there is. When flying, it is very helpful to be able to see the enormous distance of one km ahead. It really helps one to maneuver around obstacles.

If you need the equivalent of four entire Regions (linear) for that, there's a problem.

No.

[Qie Niangao]

I think I can imagine wanting to image several regions from above, with more / other features than are shown on region maps. Probably somebody knows the visual angles involved but I'd have to experiment to find the draw depth needed for a given radius of ground imagery. (I guess one could also stitch together multiple single-region images; even for just one region I remember setting a longer-than-usual draw depth, but probably "only" 512m.)

Also the new 360 snapshot images present an occasion for long draw depths. Personally I haven't gone that deep, but I definitely use a longer depth for those than for just bopping around the grid…

… and for that "bopping around" I tend to use only 96 or 128m, even though I have a shiny new machine and fiber-to-the-premises internet and really don't care about framerate. So I surely agree that restraining one's draw depth is a win (in my case because I prefer my SL textures to load and stay loaded).