The Lag

[Adamburp Adamczyk]

One thing about these threads griping about "SL Lag" is that nobody makes mention of the old time and trusted methods of rebooting your modem, and your PC to clear any issues at "your" end oO

[Silent Mistwalker]

Oddly enough that very information is on the page I linked.

[Coffee Pancake]

On 2/16/2022 at 8:06 PM, Drayke Newall said:

Whilst I agree that modern computers and engines can render more and SL n.................

You should also be well aware that the SL asset process render pipeline makes any talk of poly counts academic.

The lag is in another castle.

[Drayke Newall]

5 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

You should also be well aware that the SL asset process render pipeline makes any talk of poly counts academic.

The lag is in another castle.

If that was the case then there would be no reason for any optimisations at all for mesh.

Basically what you are saying is that LL's efforts in reducing polygons through the mesh upload process, LOD, ARC, occlusion, etc, etc is pointless as 'who cares what the polygon count is as a PC's can render it no problem at all' so dont blame the creator. This all despite evidence of users experience with high poly or large amounts of unoptimised mesh reducing FPS saying otherwise.

Whilst yes there is some lag caused by the render pipeline as well as the badly made cache, lack of hardware support, multithread, etc, that does not excuse creators of not optimising their creations as it does have an impact just like multiple textures can have an impact rather than minimal textures.

The excuse you have made does not explain how an optimised mesh build on a sim can have hardly any effect on a users FPS whereas an unoptimised mesh build reduces FPS to in cases single digits even if it is all in the cache and loaded.

It also does not explain how a single high poly small object, at a specific point on the sim, can reduce FPS when a person looks at it and increase FPS when a person doesn't look at it even if it is all in the cache and loaded.

The only explanation for such things is due to content creator's bad optimisation of their builds.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

1 hour ago, Drayke Newall said:

Whilst yes there is some lag caused by the render pipeline as well as the badly made cache, lack of hardware support, multithread, etc, that does not excuse creators of not optimising their creations as it does have an impact just like multiple textures can have an impact rather than minimal textures.

The excuse you have made does not explain how an optimised mesh build on a sim can have hardly any effect on a users FPS whereas an unoptimised mesh build reduces FPS to in cases single digits even if it is all in the cache and loaded.

To mediate a little bit, I think Coffee's point is that if the rendering process was different, those hi-tri objects wouldn't be anywhere near as big of an issue.

Basically, you both acknowledge that both aspects contribute, you just disagree about which one is worse.

[Drayke Newall]

1 hour ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

To mediate a little bit, I think Coffee's point is that if the rendering process was different, those hi-tri objects wouldn't be anywhere near as big of an issue.

Basically, you both acknowledge that both aspects contribute, you just disagree about which one is worse.

The problem isn't that we disagree which one is worse. The problem is that of late Coffee has been suggesting not that both are to blame but giving the opinion to content creators that not optimising their content is perfectly fine. That to me is a not a good thing especially when such words come from a TPV creator. Words such as this:

"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."

That entire statement is false as it is affecting performance and users enjoyment. That is all in this thread I have argued against.

I have not in this thread or any other thread suggested that either one doesn't matter or that LL don't share a lot of the blame. On the contrary, people here by now should know where I stand with LL and their lack there of. That said Coffee's suggestion that content creation optimisation is merely a trope I do have a problem with.

Let's not forget that whilst yes, the rendering process does cause lag, optimisation of content is the only fix we have at the moment and by optimisation of content it makes that rendering process run quicker and smoother. But the mere suggestion that polycount is arbitrary or not important is absurd no matter which way you look at it.

The latest beta viewer is on its way to fix a lot of that rendering process lag, but even then I can guarantee that there will still be lag and the usual 20-50fps drops we have now from poorly made content.

I'll just therefore finish with I agree to disagree.

Edited February 18, 2022 by Drayke Newall

[Coffee Pancake]

2 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

The problem isn't that we disagree which one is worse. The problem is that of late Coffee has been suggesting not that both are to blame but giving the opinion to content creators that not optimising their content is perfectly fine. That to me is a not a good thing especially when such words come from a TPV creator.

Who spent much of last year with her head in a profiler whilst we tried to find ways to claw back the 20% performance hit from eep.

2 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

Words such as this:

"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."

That entire statement is false as it is affecting performance and users enjoyment. That is all in this thread I have argued against.

The vast bulk of SL content is FINE.

The very worst SL content is worn mesh.

But it's not the high poly stuff, it's the stuff that's made from dozens of meshes to get around face count limitations.

So much of the viewers time is spent working on content to be rendered that it actually doesn't matter what's being rendered. If the viewer was only rendering, then sure, it matters, but that's the last thing it's actually doing.

If this was a regular game, and it isn't, this wouldn't be the case at all.

 

Get a modern GPU and SL can't tax it. We just can't do it. The poor thing is bored silly. We can actually run SL side by side with a real game and not notice any drop in performance, and every year this gap widens.

 

So, as far as SL goes .. it's really not content creators making bad content. The problem is systemic, and until that problem is addressed (and never ever seems pretty realistic), maybe we should stop pointing fingers at each other and demand better from the people who make the systems.

 

2 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

That said Coffee's suggestion that content creation optimisation is merely a trope I do have a problem with.

It is a trope.

My SL is bad because .. <find another resident group to point the finger at> .. is how we have approached every single problem in SL since the start.

 

2 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

Let's not forget that whilst yes, the rendering process does cause lag, optimisation of content is the only fix we have at the moment and by optimisation of content it makes that rendering process run quicker and smoother. But the mere suggestion that polycount is arbitrary or not important is absurd no matter which way you look at it.

 

Over poly content is a small pile of tinder next to a lot of perfect fine wood. SL's render pipeline is a lit match. SL's CPU processing over head is pure O2.

But sure, lets have a class war between creators and consumers rather than ask the landlord to fix it.

 

 

[Kathlen Onyx]

On 2/17/2022 at 10:17 AM, ROSE0005 said:

close the thread ASAP

and miss the 56 pages of responses that are sure to follow? Not a chance.

Edited February 18, 2022 by Sam1 Bellisserian

[Sid Nagy]

18 minutes ago, Sam1 Bellisserian said:

and miss the 56 page of responses that are sure to follow? Not a chance.

In what time do you live?  Ten years ago: Yes easily.
Nowadays 10 pages = wow  and 20 pages = incredible.
More pages = a vanity thread like showing of your avatar.

Edited February 18, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Kathlen Onyx]

39 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

In what time do you live?  Ten years ago: Yes easily.
Nowadays 10 pages = wow  and 20 pages = incredible.
More pages = a vanity thread like showing of your avatar.

It's called being factious.

[Rowan Amore]

And that all depends on whether there are cat pics involved.

 

[Drayke Newall]

9 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Who spent much of last year with her head in a profiler whilst we tried to find ways to claw back the 20% performance hit from eep.

Did I say that there isn't lag from other areas? No. Of course there is going to be lag from the old code or improvements than can be made to the engine systems to reduce lag. I do not disagree with you, but stating that content optimisation is not the main issue is just silly.

9 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

But it's not the high poly stuff, it's the stuff that's made from dozens of meshes to get around face count limitations.

So, as far as SL goes .. it's really not content creators making bad content. The problem is systemic, and until that problem is addressed (and never ever seems pretty realistic), maybe we should stop pointing fingers at each other and demand better from the people who make the systems.

Yes SL isn't a game... but, it still has a render engine though and whilst yes that render engine is limited such as users needing creative ways to overcome some of those issues like for instance darkness in a tunnel, there is no difference as far as content is concerned or the restrictions to a game.

Even in AAA games, content is made based on the render engine and its limitations. If the render engine can't do x, then they ensure to optimise content to do it.

Have you ever looked at the assets of a AAA game? Do you think a AAA game maker uses more than a few texture faces per object? Most games even modern dont exceed 8 faces per mesh and even then 80% of content uses 1 texture face across the entire object unless that object exceeds a certain size. That content over a certain size such as a house is made from multiple meshes just like SL content. i.e. outer shell, inner shell, roof and interior details such as fireplace or objects.

The difference in SL is, that content is created by amateurs that think that there is no issue in uploading highpoly content (like you do) such as the phone example mentioned earlier in the thread and use 1024 textures on it. In a AAA game that phone will have 12 polygons (triangles) and a 128x128 (if that) texture and a normal map to take care of the finer details. Conversely in SL that phone will have 11000 polygons and a 1024x1024 texture to all 6 sides because the mesh allows that many textures and their is no poly count to size ratio restriction. LL gave such freedoms to the detriment of performance.

Sure having more texture faces will be good for large objects but it is still a catch 22. At the moment 8 texture faces limits the amount of individual textures on an object. It is a restriction that is there to ensure that texture use is limited. It is designed to force UV mapped textures and even now people abuse that amount of texture faces and that isn't my words it is Oz's. 

Do you really think LL adding more faces to a mesh is going to stop people making high poly and unoptimised content? All that is going to happen is people are going to create the same high poly content and use more textures to make the item look 'even better' and because they can. Thinking other wise is naive. You are thinking only in terms of the avatar body and how more texture faces will improve that. In SL such thinking is bad as it leaves open unforeseen consequences in other content creation areas.

9 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

My SL is bad because .. <find another resident group to point the finger at> .. is how we have approached every single problem in SL since the start.

Over poly content is a small pile of tinder next to a lot of perfect fine wood. SL's render pipeline is a lit match. SL's CPU processing over head is pure O2.

But sure, lets have a class war between creators and consumers rather than ask the landlord to fix it.

I think Oz Linden says it all in this quote of his:

"What kind of challenges are there in second life that prevent it from having the high end graphics and speed of other modern games like shadow of the Tomb Raider and others. Well the real answer is that it’s they don’t have the same challenges we do; we have user-generated content when you’re looking at a at a triple-a game the developers have built a rendering engine for that game.

... And they’ll give the artists who are creating the content who are you know building out the dungeon, or whatever it is that’s in the game, they’ll give them very strict rules; ‘you can only have so many triangles in a scene period’. You have a budget. You can only use transparency or for translucency on you know X percent of the scene. You are not allowed to have anything transparent in front of anything else that’s transparent. That kind of thing. And the results is that they can then get extremely good performance.

... We don’t have that luxury because all of the residents are creating the world and we want them to have as much flexibility as we can afford. But the result is that they do things like having partially transparent lab gab things floating up in the middle of the sky above the presenter, and translucent windows that are looking out onto the things outside… I’m just I’m marvelling at and I do this every single day. I marvel at what people build I mean it’s just incredible - it’s beautiful but, it’s not predictable and it’s often not very well optimized. …. it gets used and it gets used in ways that we didn’t think could even work but it do work and it’s just fun to watch but it’s a challenge to build something Optimal…

Will we improve graphics performance over time? Absolutely we will. We have in the last year hired a couple of really good graphics people and they’re doing that’s what they’re spending time on and I expect good results. Will we get to the level of performance of a triple-a game? Definitely not. It is just not possible; not and have the creative scope that we that we want our residents to have."

–Oz Linden, Second Life’s Lab Gab Episode 20, 4/3/2020 emphasis mine.

Even Oz agrees that content is the issue in why performance isn't equal to AAA games per the OP.

There has to be restrictions and those restrictions in place even now, according to Oz are not enough to help as they want creative freedom for residents but are trying to balance that freedom with optimisation. Sure they can optimise the engine and the rendering pipeline which Oz stated they are, but in Oz's own words "Will we get to the level of performance of a triple-a game? Definitely not. It is just not possible".

It isn't possible because users do not optimise their content, they do not think about how an alpha over alpha reduces performance, how multiple textures drain FPS, etc.

Sure SL is different as everything is user created and LL want flexibility in design but thinking that Lag or performance issues are not related to content creation is ridiculous and thankfully Linden Lab dont agree with you!

Edited February 19, 2022 by Drayke Newall

[Silent Mistwalker]

Anyone remember this gesture?

All you ever do is lag, lag, lag!

[Coffee Pancake]

3 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

Did I say that there isn't lag from other areas? No. Of course there is going to be lag from the old code or improvements than can be made to the engine systems to reduce lag. I do not disagree with you, but stating that content optimisation is not the main issue is just silly.

It's really not the main issue.

It's a small part of a much larger problem, the larger part of the problem is so large, a little over detailed content is pretty much irrelevant.

3 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

Do you really think LL adding more faces to a mesh is going to stop people making high poly and unoptimised content?

Adding significantly more faces to a mesh would allow mesh bodies featuring hud selectable sections to be created with a single mesh, rather than dozens and dozens of meshes.

This alone would would have a massive impact on your FPS, something on the order of 2-6 fps per avatar on screen (hardware dependent of course) and would scale linearly. 

3 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

I think Oz Linden says it all in this quote of his:

Oz, who famously never changed his avatar, didn't own an AO, didn't use SL socially beyond a little golf and user groups, did his level best to make sure all platform advancement was off the table for the entire duration of his tenure, was openly hostile to TPV projects and requests, and retired after uplift before LL's new owners took over. 

Given any system of UGC, some people will make actual garbage, but most wont. The vast majority of content in SL is actually fine. Avatars and clothing is on par with hero models in AAA titles (and they should be, your avatar is the hero of your SL). 

The biggest sin is multiple meshes to create a single body because of the need to work around face limitations. Animating meshes scales linearly, which is pretty brutal for a social platform. 5 .. 10 .. 20% more polys than might be strictly needed, yeah, not a big deal next to that. You can cut those polys but if you don't cut the number of meshes to be animated each frame, you wont notice any perf boost.

This isn't the result of conjecture, this is the result of significant time spent profiling performance in dozens of situations with almost all of the main mesh bodies. Our testing was focused on general rendering, Beq has spent significantly more time looking at avatars specifically and written it all up on her excellent blog. http://beqsother.blogspot.com/

[Sammy Huntsman]

5 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

Did I say that there isn't lag from other areas? No. Of course there is going to be lag from the old code or improvements than can be made to the engine systems to reduce lag. I do not disagree with you, but stating that content optimisation is not the main issue is just silly.

Yes SL isn't a game... but, it still has a render engine though and whilst yes that render engine is limited such as users needing creative ways to overcome some of those issues like for instance darkness in a tunnel, there is no difference as far as content is concerned or the restrictions to a game.

Even in AAA games, content is made based on the render engine and its limitations. If the render engine can't do x, then they ensure to optimise content to do it.

Have you ever looked at the assets of a AAA game? Do you think a AAA game maker uses more than a few texture faces per object? Most games even modern dont exceed 8 faces per mesh and even then 80% of content uses 1 texture face across the entire object unless that object exceeds a certain size. That content over a certain size such as a house is made from multiple meshes just like SL content. i.e. outer shell, inner shell, roof and interior details such as fireplace or objects.

The difference in SL is, that content is created by amateurs that think that there is no issue in uploading highpoly content (like you do) such as the phone example mentioned earlier in the thread and use 1024 textures on it. In a AAA game that phone will have 12 polygons (triangles) and a 128x128 (if that) texture and a normal map to take care of the finer details. Conversely in SL that phone will have 11000 polygons and a 1024x1024 texture to all 6 sides because the mesh allows that many textures and their is no poly count to size ratio restriction. LL gave such freedoms to the detriment of performance.

Sure having more texture faces will be good for large objects but it is still a catch 22. At the moment 8 texture faces limits the amount of individual textures on an object. It is a restriction that is there to ensure that texture use is limited. It is designed to force UV mapped textures and even now people abuse that amount of texture faces and that isn't my words it is Oz's. 

Do you really think LL adding more faces to a mesh is going to stop people making high poly and unoptimised content? All that is going to happen is people are going to create the same high poly content and use more textures to make the item look 'even better' and because they can. Thinking other wise is naive. You are thinking only in terms of the avatar body and how more texture faces will improve that. In SL such thinking is bad as it leaves open unforeseen consequences in other content creation areas.

I think Oz Linden says it all in this quote of his:

"What kind of challenges are there in second life that prevent it from having the high end graphics and speed of other modern games like shadow of the Tomb Raider and others. Well the real answer is that it’s they don’t have the same challenges we do; we have user-generated content when you’re looking at a at a triple-a game the developers have built a rendering engine for that game.

... And they’ll give the artists who are creating the content who are you know building out the dungeon, or whatever it is that’s in the game, they’ll give them very strict rules; ‘you can only have so many triangles in a scene period’. You have a budget. You can only use transparency or for translucency on you know X percent of the scene. You are not allowed to have anything transparent in front of anything else that’s transparent. That kind of thing. And the results is that they can then get extremely good performance.

... We don’t have that luxury because all of the residents are creating the world and we want them to have as much flexibility as we can afford. But the result is that they do things like having partially transparent lab gab things floating up in the middle of the sky above the presenter, and translucent windows that are looking out onto the things outside… I’m just I’m marvelling at and I do this every single day. I marvel at what people build I mean it’s just incredible - it’s beautiful but, it’s not predictable and it’s often not very well optimized. …. it gets used and it gets used in ways that we didn’t think could even work but it do work and it’s just fun to watch but it’s a challenge to build something Optimal…

Will we improve graphics performance over time? Absolutely we will. We have in the last year hired a couple of really good graphics people and they’re doing that’s what they’re spending time on and I expect good results. Will we get to the level of performance of a triple-a game? Definitely not. It is just not possible; not and have the creative scope that we that we want our residents to have."

–Oz Linden, Second Life’s Lab Gab Episode 20, 4/3/2020 emphasis mine.

Even Oz agrees that content is the issue in why performance isn't equal to AAA games per the OP.

There has to be restrictions and those restrictions in place even now, according to Oz are not enough to help as they want creative freedom for residents but are trying to balance that freedom with optimisation. Sure they can optimise the engine and the rendering pipeline which Oz stated they are, but in Oz's own words "Will we get to the level of performance of a triple-a game? Definitely not. It is just not possible".

It isn't possible because users do not optimise their content, they do not think about how an alpha over alpha reduces performance, how multiple textures drain FPS, etc.

Sure SL is different as everything is user created and LL want flexibility in design but thinking that Lag or performance issues are not related to content creation is ridiculous and thankfully Linden Lab dont agree with you!

We need to fix the render engine and hold LL accountable to do that. But we also need to hold creators accountable to optimize their mesh and textures. That's my thought pattern. SLs render engine clearly can't handle the high poly objects that creators put out. So yeah we need to hold both accountable.

[Sammy Huntsman]

Ngl, the modding comnunity does a better job with optimization and staying within the constraints of a render engine, than SL creators. And most mod creators are self taught too. Maybe SL creators need to take a page from mod creators.

[Drayke Newall]

2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Adding significantly more faces to a mesh would allow mesh bodies featuring hud selectable sections to be created with a single mesh, rather than dozens and dozens of meshes.

Please quote me where I said that adding more faces to a mesh was not a good thing? In fact I even said it would be a good thing for larger mesh or more complex mesh. The problem is that whilst yes avatars are a huge dynamic in the performance side of things the avatar body themselves isn't the only mesh component and hence why creator optimisation is equally if not more important.

Even if avatar mesh bodies where to have only one mesh layer allowing the alpha to work on just the one layer it is still a small fraction of the fix to the problem as far as optimisation and performance goes when avatars are additive in nature. You will fix the body with the additional faces but when people add on highly complex unoptimised clothing, hair, jewellery, glow, shine etc then the problem isn't fixed. Add onto this people wanting even more attachment points and even more animesh attachment points for premium plus and it all adds up making the improvement on the body being null and void when content that doesn't require additional faces are unoptimised and added to the avatar.

I have a mesh hair piece that reduces my fps by 30 frames. How is your body mesh fix going to improve on that mesh hair? Your gain of 5 frames from your mesh body improvement is negligible in comparison.

2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

This alone would would have a massive impact on your FPS, something on the order of 2-6 fps per avatar on screen (hardware dependent of course) and would scale linearly. 

You are missing the point entirely I am making as you are fixated on avatars and nothing else. As I mentioned an unoptimised mesh built sim can reduce your FPS by 30 frames over an optimised mesh sim (including textures).

For example, how does fps per avatar have anything to do with a person going to Belli and lagging around despite them being the only avatar in view or even on the region? It doesn't help those people at all and the only thing that will help is content creation optimisation. How you are missing this point I am unsure.

I get over 100fps (draw distance 100 and no shadows) whether I have my Jake body (one of the worst offenders atm) on or not. If however I go to an unoptimised sim full of crap content with no avatars around my fps plummets to under 50. But as you say fix the avatar bodies or add more texture faces as that is going to solve everything...🙄 A increase of 5fps you are talking about is not massive at all when a sim can reduce your fps by 30-50fps.

1 hour ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

We need to fix the render engine and hold LL accountable to do that. But we also need to hold creators accountable to optimize their mesh and textures. That's my thought pattern. SLs render engine clearly can't handle the high poly objects that creators put out. So yeah we need to hold both accountable.

I agree 100% with you, but it irks me when people say 'fix the avatars and it will fix lag' or 'content optimisation plays no role in lag'.

I mean this is just basic stuff that a lot can be fixed by simply having LL give tutorials on their wiki site or in viewer expandable hover tips.

The issue doesn't just stop with avatars or content optimisation or even the render engine. Sure as Coffee said you can gain 5fps by having extra faces on mesh, or you can improve fps by updating the render engine, but all that pales in terms of viewer fps loss.

Go to options in firestorm, add the fps counter to firestorm and see how many frames each of your viewer windows take up. In no AAA game does inbuilt menu's or chat screens that are part of the interface reduce FPS when they are opened. It is unheard of in final released versions. Here in SL though they do. Open the chat window, loss of 5-10fps, open the Inventory window, loss of 5-10fps, open the Outfit window, loss of 5-10fps. The same fps loss is also shown by fraps so it isn't a inbuilt fps counter issue.

Edited February 19, 2022 by Drayke Newall

[Sid Nagy]

I think that LL is the final one responsible for what merchants can and can't upload as well as all the lag they produce themselves by not properly keep the system up to par, like with the  problems Coffee is addressing.

In the end it is their show. They hold all the cards.

Merchants will sell what is allowed to sell.
And with the peanut revenues most merchants make, it mostly attracts amateur content creators who don't have the time, means or skills to create like pro designers in the game market would.
We want it for 60L$ or less and we want it perfect at the same time with blinding textures, tons of details and animations and looking awesome with low lag and low LI.
Yeah right.

More of these needed:

 

Edited February 19, 2022 by Sid Nagy
Improvements.

[Silent Mistwalker]

6 hours ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

Ngl, the modding comnunity does a better job with optimization and staying within the constraints of a render engine, than SL creators. And most mod creators are self taught too. Maybe SL creators need to take a page from mod creators.

Good point. It's also why I keep a sharp eye out for things I know were made for The Sims (2, 3 & 4). So, if you are not the original artist and you upload someone's Sims creations to SL, I will report it to the OA so they can file a DMCA.

Before anyone goes ballistic, I know there are those creators in SL who also create for The Sims and other games. They have nothing to worry about because I do contact the OAs and ask if they are in SL and explain why I ask. None of the good creators would allow anyone to upload to SL and sell without the OAs permission and they don't give permission for other people to make money off their hard work! Why would they allow you to make money off things they don't sell? And yes, I have even contacted EA/Maxis when I have found objects in SL that I know without doubt came from one of the Sims games. 

 

Edited February 19, 2022 by Silent Mistwalker

[Nick0678]

7 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

I agree 100% with you, but it irks me when people say 'fix the avatars and it will fix lag' or 'content optimisation plays no role in lag'.

I mean this is just basic stuff that a lot can be fixed by simply having LL give tutorials on their wiki site or in viewer expandable hover tips.

The issue doesn't just stop with avatars or content optimisation or even the render engine. Sure as Coffee said you can gain 5fps by having extra faces on mesh, or you can improve fps by updating the render engine, but all that pales in terms of viewer fps loss.

You need to give it a couple more decades for troubleshooting/optimizations to take place and everything will be smooth as butter.

When it comes to performance issues and why your PC runs SL horribly but it's ultra smooth with AAA games its best to think of something like you migrating from the U.S to North Korea and taking your Tesla car together. If you expected to find Tesla supercharging stations there.. well.. nope.

[Coffee Pancake]

8 hours ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

Ngl, the modding comnunity does a better job with optimization and staying within the constraints of a render engine, than SL creators. And most mod creators are self taught too. Maybe SL creators need to take a page from mod creators.

I would like LL work to remove what limitations do exist, most of the actually bad content is people working around arbitrary limitations set by LL. Number of faces per mesh, KB Size of scripts, max size of textures, etc etc. One bigger is always much better than many smaller, and for some things we're forced to make more smaller all the time.

Given that this is UGC, some people will make absolute trash. There will always be that one hat or pair of shoes that's just insane. There always has been content like that in SL and it's not really a problem in the grand scheme of things. Stupid content tends to be self limiting in it's appeal .. with the exception of onion skinned mesh bodies with huds, which in working around a limitation really caused a problem.

A problems that could have been rapidly mitigated by LL if they had their finger on the pulse in SL and were more invested in the user experience rather than the paycheck. But here we are. Years later and nothing has fundamentally changed.

 

The biggest problem is that we put the company that makes the platform on a pedestal and rush to defend it when perhaps we shouldn't. Individual Linden's are awesome and invested and passionate. Higher level decision making, marketing, platform feature development funding (!!!) is a trash fire that works in opposition to needs of the people who use the platform.

 

I've been here since the start. The problems that caused me to abandon my first account a few hours after creating it still exist and LL are still trying the same "minimum effort maximum hype" approach to fixing it, and we're here blaming each other for the crappy experience.

[Paulsian]

Second Life is a platform for builders to build and as long as it does what it's supposed to do without making builders angry I suppose there's nothing to fix and is why it's not a priority to be like every other boring AAA high performance game. When I go into world to work I have my preferences to render avatar slider to minimum and render imposters to 1. and water transparency disabled. It's fast. I do not linger in world, it is extremely addicting to stand around and stare at yourself and dwell on everything that could be better, and I don't think that is healthy for me. 

If I was trying to render the complexity of 40-320 uniquely built avatars in blender it would be impossible, impossible. But it's possible in sl. SL is a lot more powerful than people give them credit for. 

In public spaces or private spaces users sometimes purposefully enjoy making other users lag.   

I think SL would be a living nightmare if it had more power. I don't think users would be mentally ready for that. It would amplify everything that is wrong. 

[Paulsian]

37 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Given that this is UGC, some people will make absolute trash. There will always be that one hat or pair of shoes that's just insane. There always has been content like that in SL and it's not really a problem in the grand scheme of things. Stupid content tends to be self limiting in it's appeal .. with the exception of onion skinned mesh bodies with huds, which in working around a limitation really caused a problem.

Maybe they can figure out how to optimize lower quality mesh retroactively to increase performance, especially if that object has been transferred and copied multiple times. A post upload optimizer? 

[Paulsian]

40 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

I would like LL work to remove what limitations do exist, most of the actually bad content is people working around arbitrary limitations set by LL. Number of faces per mesh, KB Size of scripts, max size of textures, etc etc. One bigger is always much better than many smaller, and for some things we're forced to make more smaller all the time.

A formal builder committee to discuss ways of improving the build tools would not hurt. 

[Nick0678]

9 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

In no AAA game does inbuilt menu's or chat screens that are part of the interface reduce FPS when they are opened. It is unheard of in final released versions. Here in SL though they do. Open the chat window, loss of 5-10fps, open the Inventory window, loss of 5-10fps, open the Outfit window, loss of 5-10fps.

The way SL works is kind of cute actually... or maybe i am just nostalgic and thinking of the way things were done in the 90's, idk...