The Lag

[ROSE0005]

I was super excited to try out this game, I closed all my programs, etc.

I have a really good laptop (I can play any other game with it with no problem) but I am constantly getting so much /lag/ there is no problem with my internet or any other thing everything works perfectly.


Any solution?

 

 

Edited February 16, 2022 by ROSE0005
xyz

[Silent Mistwalker]

This should help: fs_lag_troubleshooting [Phoenix Firestorm Project - Wiki] (firestormviewer.org)

[Rowan Amore]

8 minutes ago, ROSE0005 said:

I was super excited to try out this game, I closed all my programs, etc.

I have a really good laptop (I can play any other game with it with no problem) but I am constantly getting so much /lag/ there is no problem with my internet or any other thing everything works perfectly.


Any solution?

 

 

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/How_to_reduce_lag

[Echelon Alcott]

In addition to the great resources that both Silent and Rowan shared, as a new player, please be aware that Second Life is different from commercial off-the-shelf games, in the sense that all inworld content is user created. The implication is that it is not optimized in the same way when game studios create their products. Which in turn might have an impact on how long it takes for things around your avatar to appear (keeping things simple here, without going into any technical details for the benefit of OP).

Welcome to SL and wish you much fun!

Edited February 16, 2022 by Echelon Alcott

[Orwar]

   In addition to what Echelon said, that also means that place A and place B may be very different from one another in terms of lag, depending on how many textures, meshes, and scripts are present. With a minimalist build it's easy to a very high framerate on an average computer, but step into someone's home where there's a lot of clutter and plants from different creators, and nearby neighbours with their own clutter that gets caught within your rendering distance - it's very easy for the framerate to drop, harshly. 

[Rowan Amore]

Example.  My ground home on mainland with minimal draw distance, I get between 30-75 depending on other graphic preferences.  At 1000m, on a platform, same graphic preferences, I easily double fps since there is nothing but my avatar rendering.

[Coffee Pancake]

2 hours ago, ROSE0005 said:

I was super excited to try out this game, I closed all my programs, etc.

I have a really good laptop (I can play any other game with it with no problem) but I am constantly getting so much /lag/ there is no problem with my internet or any other thing everything works perfectly.


Any solution?

 

 

Patience (and maybe adding the SL cache folder as an exception to your antivirus - it's just images)

SL is a mess of complex systems, and unlike games, all the stuff on your screen needs a fair amount of processing to fetch all the data and make sense of it. Games have everything ready to go so all they need to worry about is rendering the next frame as fast as possible.

Lowering your draw distance will reduce the amount of stuff that needs to be fetched and processed, but it still has to happen, so you still have to be patient.

There is nothing quite like SL, because no one else would ever design it this way on purpose, but the upside is a place unlike any other.

Best advice for a newbie starting out .. chat and read profiles while the world sorts itself out. Sometimes it just wont get there.

[Sammy Huntsman]

I mean you could always tell a creator to optimize their creations. There is one item, a phone accessory. That has 11000 complexity. You don't need a phone with that many vertices. Creators just need to learn to optimize and retopologize their builds. That would help reduce lag, as it would mean things would load faster. It's 2022, you don't need heavily detailed meshes with a high poly count.

[Paulsian]

When I first started around 2004-2005 I thought it was a way to weed out users with no patience. At that time I did not have any patience and was weeded out. Fast forward 9 years later still no patience so was once again weeded out. Fast forward another 4 years I had patience and now I'm trapped here. 

I think there's something wrong with accounts because I can have one account with ton of inventory and runs like a champ and another account with zero in inventory and runs horrible. Same computer, same time, same viewer? 

 

[Orwar]

18 minutes ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

Creators just need to learn to optimize and retopologize their builds. That would help reduce lag, as it would mean things would load faster. It's 2022, you don't need heavily detailed meshes with a high poly count.

   You mean that we should ask creators who spend years flogging poorly made meshes to spend several minutes learning how mesh optimisation is done, and then several more minutes in their creative process to make stuff not break your PC? The audacity! 

[Coffee Pancake]

2 minutes ago, Orwar said:

   You mean that we should ask creators who spend years flogging poorly made meshes to spend several minutes learning how mesh optimisation is done, and then several more minutes in their creative process to make stuff not break your PC? The audacity! 

Not this tired simplistic old trope again ... I get it's easier to blame "creators" than the builders of the systems said creators must work with, but no ones SL is being made worse because some odd bod bit of tat has too many triangles, or because someone pushed the mesh uploader too hard and the thing looks bad.

A 680 (from 10 years ago) can happily render about 9.5 million tris at over 100 fps. If you do ever hit the triangle rendering limit for your GPU, it doesn't get gradually slower, it slams into a wall.

But hey, it's always easier to point the finger at some other group than spend several minutes learning how all this actually works !

[Coffee Pancake]

34 minutes ago, Paulsian said:

I think there's something wrong with accounts because I can have one account with ton of inventory and runs like a champ and another account with zero in inventory and runs horrible. Same computer, same time, same viewer? 

Or maybe ... the amount of inventory you have has nothing at all to do with performance.

[Arielle Popstar]

3 hours ago, ROSE0005 said:

I was super excited to try out this game, I closed all my programs, etc.

I have a really good laptop (I can play any other game with it with no problem) but I am constantly getting so much /lag/ there is no problem with my internet or any other thing everything works perfectly.


Any solution?

Along with the other suggestions also posted, another thing to try is a traceroute which is a command line utility that checks the network hops between you and the secondlife servers to see if there is a problem along the path that might be dropping packets. I experienced that a few years back where for 6 months or so a network router was wonky and I experienced slow loading and high lag. It was eventually fixed and then S/L played much better without me tearing my hair out trying to sort out potential problems locally with my viewer settings and local network. Here is a video that gives some overview of how to use it and explanations of the various results:

 

Edited February 16, 2022 by Arielle Popstar
spelling

[Marigold Devin]

3 hours ago, ROSE0005 said:

I was super excited to try out this game, I closed all my programs, etc.

I have a really good laptop (I can play any other game with it with no problem) but I am constantly getting so much /lag/ there is no problem with my internet or any other thing everything works perfectly.


Any solution?

 

 

Welcome to the Second Life forums.

Make sure your computers drivers (graphics) are up-to-date. Check the system specifications for compatibility, and maybe try a different client to log in with. If you use Second Life's official viewer, maybe try one of the approved third party viewers. I haven't got the highest of spec computers, but run fairly lag-free unless on a particularly busy region and prefer to use Firestorm, although I have my graphics set only to mid unless I want to attempt to take a better quality photo.

If you are on wireless, try and be hard wired, and be aware that perhaps you will have a slower internet connection at times when more people are online in your area (in my area this is between 7pm and 10pm). 

[Lyssa Greymoon]

In addition to what the la tutorials suggest, in the advanced graphics settings change water reflections to none (opaque). This is a new option I didn't see mentioned in the tutorials and can make a significant difference even if there's no water visible to you. I think texture compression should probably be on unless you're using a really old computer.

If your laptop is a Mac, uncheck enable support for HiDPI displays.

You may also want to give the Performance Improvements project viewer a try: https://releasenotes.secondlife.com/viewer.html?_gl=1*z9ejih*_ga*MjQ3NjkyODYzLjE2NDUwMzY4MjY.*_ga_T7G7P6DCEC*MTY0NTAzNjgyNS4xLjAuMTY0NTAzNjgyNS42MA..

[CaithLynnSayes]

4 hours ago, ROSE0005 said:

I was super excited to try out this game

Game... Dwight disagrees with you on that...

 

[CaithLynnSayes]

4 hours ago, ROSE0005 said:

I have a really good laptop

I have a really fast car. It beats a Bugatti Chiron Super Sport just for the heck of it. But i'm in a traffic jam...

 

See where i'm getting at?  

[Orwar]

2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

I get it's easier to blame "creators" than the builders of the systems said creators must work with, but no ones SL is being made worse because some odd bod bit of tat has too many triangles, or because someone pushed the mesh uploader too hard and the thing looks bad.

   I guess it's easier to blame the system creators than the content creators who can't draw within the lines of the system they're on. But yeah, gilded, cursive engravings on the edges of teacup saucers really must be 3D-modelled in microscopic detail (with 'HD' textures on their own faces, of course!), and then let's stack 150 objects with the same design philosophy in a 6 x 8 room, and then let's do that in all 15 rooms in a house designed with the same philosophy - if that doesn't work, it's totally the system's fault.

   Can't put square pegs in round holes either - there must be something wrong with the universe's system! 

[Coffee Pancake]

Just now, Orwar said:

   I guess it's easier to blame the system creators than the content creators who can't draw within the lines of the system they're on. But yeah, gilded, cursive engravings on the edges of teacup saucers really must be 3D-modelled in microscopic detail (with 'HD' textures on their own faces, of course!), and then let's stack 150 objects with the same design philosophy in a 6 x 8 room, and then let's do that in all 15 rooms in a house designed with the same philosophy - if that doesn't work, it's totally the system's fault.

   Can't put square pegs in round holes either - there must be something wrong with the universe's system! 

Over detailed models are bad .. but not for your frame rate. This isn't a game. It doesn't run anything like a game.

In the grand scheme of SL things, it's not the problem and it never will be the problem. It's just easy to point at and hurr hurr hurr creators bad.

This is trying to min max your horse by worrying about the curl on the horse's eyelashes and how it affects wind resistance.

[Paul Hexem]

2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Over detailed models are bad .. but not for your frame rate. This isn't a game. It doesn't run anything like a game.

In the grand scheme of SL things, it's not the problem and it never will be the problem. It's just easy to point at and hurr hurr hurr creators bad.

This is trying to min max your horse by worrying about the curl on the horse's eyelashes and how it affects wind resistance.

I've said before and I'll say again that the clients not taking advantage of modern hardware is an issue, but let's not pretend that poorly made content doesn't contribute.

[Gwin LeShelle]

I am very sorry that I can not contribute anything to this that would be useful I am just here to say, that everytime I see this threads title in the forums section I automatically read it in grampa Simpsons voice...the laaaag x3 

I will go and yell at some clouds now... 

[Drayke Newall]

6 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Not this tired simplistic old trope again ... I get it's easier to blame "creators" than the builders of the systems said creators must work with, but no ones SL is being made worse because some odd bod bit of tat has too many triangles, or because someone pushed the mesh uploader too hard and the thing looks bad.

A 680 (from 10 years ago) can happily render about 9.5 million tris at over 100 fps. If you do ever hit the triangle rendering limit for your GPU, it doesn't get gradually slower, it slams into a wall.

But hey, it's always easier to point the finger at some other group than spend several minutes learning how all this actually works !

Whilst I agree that modern computers and engines can render more and SL needs to make use of modern hardware, there is no situation in both SL or any modern game that a phone model requires 11000 polygons. Trying to argue otherwise is just ludicrous. Even today most character models in modern games are between 10,000 to 100,000 triangles and nothing more yet, you are saying that a content creator in SL isn't to blame for lag due to wearing on their avatar or having in their home a 11000 tri phone (literally a cube with tiny buttons) more than what some games allow for an entire avatar?

Game modelling is not just about 'x' graphics card can render 'y' polygons therefore complexity can be whatever and therefore content creators dont share blame of fps loss. Any suggestion of such shows an underlying ignorance of game modelling and design especially when it comes to multiplayer games such as Second Life.

Based on what you have said, why don't LL just remove normal maps entirely? Their primary purpose is to allow for low poly models to render as higher poly models, which according to you, creator optimisation doesn't matter and is probably why content creators hardly use normal maps as they dont understand their purpose. Additionally, optimisation isn't always about a computer being able to render 'x' amount of polygons. Optimisation of models both polygon and texture wise is also about reducing the load those models have on the PC systems so that it has computer power left to render other things like shading, terrain, animation, movement, scripting etc or even multi-tasking whilst playing a game like SL.

There is a reason why people in Second Life hardly turn on shadows. Turn on shadows in a fully optimised (model wise) sim and you will loose hardly any fps. Turn it on in a full sim with largely unoptimised content and your fps will plummet due to the PC needing to process everything else as well.

It will also not come to a hard stop as you suggest but slowly reduce your fps incrementally due to loss of computing power for those other process not just rendering of models. That is unless Second Life is different to other games and I highly doubt it is.

There is also the whole dynamic of the less polygon models have the more you can render on screen and in SL's case the more you can decorate your sim environment with.

So suggesting content creators are not to blame for lag or slowing down of the viewer based on their unoptimised content is absurd and not helpful to those of us wanting a smoother SL.

ETA: Also I agree with you that Linden Lab need to add systems to allow for better optimisation (such as like the did with normal maps), however what is the point of them doing that if Content Creators dont use those systems or they feel based on reading things like your post that they dont need to optimise the content as they are not to blame when they are. Its all well and good to shift the blame squarely on Linden Lab (they are to blame for a lot) however Content Creators as far as pure content created lag goes are to blame here far more than LL.

Edited February 17, 2022 by Drayke Newall

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

19 hours ago, ROSE0005 said:

Any solution?

Most likely successful solution: decrease draw distance in your graphics settings.

This 'game' is slower than any other because more than in any other, its users have direct and profound control over what the world is made of.

So, no matter how fast your computer, no matter how fast your internet speed, no matter how minimal your graphics settings, no matter how efficient Linden Lab runs their servers and simulator software: us, the people of SL, build it in such a way that the Second Life world is always going to exist at some equilibrium ranging from anywhere between tolerable to very laggy.

Why? because most people (including me) are amateurs, with, generally, a bad sense of object optimization, an tendency to rez too much junk because Big is Beautiful, and with lack of empathy (and even disdain) towards people with older/slower/cheaper computers.

So, for most people, living in SL will be like the credo of the people of (Old) Zeeland: "Luctor et Emergo, I struggle and emerge (from the sea)."

Footnote: probably the easiest and most practical way for Linden Lab to reduce 'lag' is to revert to the old prim limits of 3000 per Homestead and 15000 per Full Region. This would probably result in an increase of 50 to 100% in everyone's frame rate. But it would also result in a massive resident revolt, so that is never going to happen. So it seems that, unintentionally, but also paradoxically, lag is what the people do not want, but also, lag is what they want over Land Impact/prim limit.

Edited February 17, 2022 by Arduenn Schwartzman
Added 'solution' for LL, since so many people seems to hold them in a large part responsible.

[ROSE0005]

Firstly, I would like to thank all of you for giving your thoughts  to my problem, one of the members from the conservation mentioned "try using different clients", this thing helps me a lot now I am using a different client and now my game runs so smooth and better

close the thread ASAP

[Alwin Alcott]

16 minutes ago, ROSE0005 said:

 

close the thread ASAP

why?

it's not a normal thing here to do that (unless there is a severe reason)

other people might find the answers usefull.

Edited February 17, 2022 by Alwin Alcott