The Lag

[Odaks]

56 minutes ago, Paulsian said:

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

You are being flippant, surely?

[Paulsian]

On 2/16/2022 at 7:06 PM, Drayke Newall said:

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.

The upload mesh screen needs to be seriously overhauled with links to resources explaining the differences between mesh that is optimized and mesh that is not.

I remember my first mesh hat. I clearly had no idea what I was doing in blender and my goal was to get it from blender to SL. The first time I tried I would get errors. I kept tweaking my model until sl calculation was less than 3 minutes to tell me okay.... we can upload this....It should have said: But should we upload this? The current scale is 500 times larger than a normal hat would be. The wire frame of an optimized hat looks like this, yours looks like this, noticed there are so many lines you can't see any? That is not good, it is going to make your customers and anyone who interacts with them very unhappy. 

People want to upload the noobish items at the lowest possible LOD to pay less upload fees. That should be changed one of the the tips would be if you would like to pay a lower fee go back and optimize your product and then try again.

There is zero guidance when it comes to uploading mesh using the mesh upload tool. It errors out and provides no reason that is comprehendible to any normal person. And people think as long as I don't get an error but takes 5 minutes for SL to process it is great.. 

Easy to mitigate this trend. Provide guidance. 

[Arielle Popstar]

50 minutes ago, Paulsian said:

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

Think they been doing that for quite a few years at various meetings listed here: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:User_Groups

[Paulsian]

9 minutes ago, Odaks said:

1 hour ago, Paulsian said:

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

You are being flippant, surely?

 

[Paulsian]

3 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

55 minutes ago, Paulsian said:

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

Think they been doing that for quite a few years at various meetings listed here: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:User_Groups

wonder if they look like this:

 

[Paulsian]

I would suggest to LL to make the following priority to mitigate future problems:

Overhaul the upload menu, build tools menu, and object profile to include:

Maturity Rating:

All products within Second Life will be required to have a maturity rating either set by the builder of the product or LL for the products in world currently. Going forward all uploads will be prompted to add a maturity rating for upload. The object maturity rating would look like the following: And every object uploaded will be reviewed by LL to ensure quality assurance. 

Creator: Paulsian LOD:4 Maturity Rating: G

Owner: Insert Name Maturity Rating: A

A objects may not be in M or G zones. Those wearing those objects simply would not have access to those areas. Or wishing to Rez A objects in G areas will not do so. 

Level of Detail Rating:

All products uploaded will have a LOD Rating from Optimized to Poor. 

Builders should no longer be allowed to upload content at the lowest quality, provide demos and displays with higher quality and sell low quality content at premium prices. It's not fair to the customers and reflects poorly on Linden Lab. 

Buyers should be aware of the quality of the product they are purchasing. I'm seeing a lot of Linden Home Additions from up close they are pretty, from across the street they are triangle mess that no body should have to pay to live next to, the solution to move? They are everywhere there is no where to move to and is not a solution. 

 

 

[Paulsian]

I spent 3 years in California, in the heart of silicon valley. LL does not want outsiders regulating their product. They should be the leader because they are the most experienced and they should show the regulators what the right way to do it would be so they could at least have a template that would require the horrible monster corporations out there to comply with.

LL is in the position to set the industry standards and prove they are not obsolete. They are in a position to benefit this industry and that would be their legacy. 

 

[Rolig Loon]

14 minutes ago, Paulsian said:

And every object uploaded will be reviewed by LL to ensure quality assurance. 

Do you have even the faintest idea of the immense amount of QA work that would require, how much it would cost, and how much it would slow down the creation and upload process?

[CaithLynnSayes]

1 minute ago, Paulsian said:

LL is in the position to set the industry standards and prove they are not obsolete. They are in a position to benefit this industry and that would be their legacy. 

LL is absolutely NOT in the position to set any standard on this my sweet sweet naive friend. SL is old, outdated and LL calls fixing something, reducing functionality. Group chat would be a fantastic example. I could go on, but LL is particularly touchie when criticized so i won't say too much  

[Nick0678]

11 minutes ago, Paulsian said:

LL is in the position to set the industry standards and prove they are not obsolete. They are in a position to benefit this industry and that would be their legacy. 

Actually with only ~40.000 currently logged in users( plus bots&alts) 'Worldwide' they are in no position to set anything about anything, other than make some money while they still can..

[Solar Legion]

Group chat is a horrid example as the proper solution is not one others seem to want ...

[CaithLynnSayes]

26 minutes ago, Paulsian said:

All products within Second Life will be required to have a maturity rating either set by the builder of the product or LL for the products in world currently

First of all, this would require a crap ton of changes to the simulator and viewer. Fat chance LL will ever do that.

Secondly, You're asking people selling stuff to go back on all their products and set a rating? what about people no longer in SL? You want LL to go over ALL the objects on the asset server? Do you have any idea how massive a task that is? Please think about this rationally for about 7 seconds at least. Everything on the asset server if it isn't a sound, notecard or image is an "object". Prims or Meshes. Who on god's green flat earth is going to do that? LL you say, You're creating jobs, right? Who's going to pay them to do that? That's right, you are, we all are, all kinds of rates are going to go up, and that means prices will go up for the things you buy from creators in SL because as basic economics taught us in class while we were obviously paying attention is.... *drumroll*.... Sellers want to make money, if you tax them more, they will just offset that to their customers... right? Right! So that proposal is not thought out well at all. But what else is new, right?  

34 minutes ago, Paulsian said:

A objects may not be in M or G zones. Those wearing those objects simply would not have access to those areas. Or wishing to Rez A objects in G areas will not do so. 

Not really feasible unless also here a massive overhaul of both simulator and viewer take place. And as an added bonus i guarantee you this will add to lag as now the viewer not only has to check whether you're walking, flying, have voice enabled, what you're wearing, but also what rating it has. This is not realistic.

37 minutes ago, Paulsian said:

All products uploaded will have a LOD Rating from Optimized to Poor. 

Don't they already have that?

38 minutes ago, Paulsian said:

Builders should no longer be allowed to upload content at the lowest quality, provide demos and displays with higher quality and sell low quality content at premium prices. It's not fair to the customers and reflects poorly on Linden Lab. 

I don't fully understand what you mean with this, but you saying poor quality reflects badly on LL, how? It's not LL's fault what a content creator does (poorly).

 

I love your brainfarts, i truly do. I even imagine they make a funny little noise as they happen  

[Paulsian]

Stay with me on this, they are called jobs...

 

[Drayke Newall]

9 hours ago, Nick0678 said:

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.

I know SL can never run at a AAA game level, it is fundamentally different with user generated content, but it should at least try to ensure optimisation takes place since they are not going to rewrite their engine anytime soon. LL focus on one aspect and not the overall picture.

I also get Coffee's point and agree that a lot of the restrictions need to be improved as far as content creation goes, but they have to be done within reason so that it stops the abuse that is bound to happen.

Sure as Coffee says, increase the texture size allowance to 2048 - I agree with that. What I dont agree with is increasing it over all with no extra limitations put in place as all this will do is increase the abuse overall.

A render engine can only do so much without a rewrite. Bethesda found this out with Skyrim when they saw that they could not introduce 2k or 4k textures without causing lag. They saw the effects of this with modders creating content that literally induces lag or crashes the game. This is why they are rewriting their engine all over again for their next elder scrolls release.

SL is the same, you cant arbitrarily put in new higher graphically demanding content systems without affecting performance overall as people will take it to extremes just like they did with the mods in Skyrim.

Impossible as it is, what really needs to be implemented in such a situation is a dynamic scaling texture system. One where if someone uploads a 2048 texture, that texture scales with the size of the object. So if it is small it renders at 128 and if it is large it renders at 2048.

8 hours ago, Nick0678 said:

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...

Well not sure I would call it cute however, there are serious flaws in the viewer fps wise that should have been fixed years ago. You have proven what I said about windows and fps graphically so thank you.

I dont know whether it is because they are running on OpenGL or whether it is something else like HD images for those viewer components but surely LL are aware of the windows taking up fps? That said, looking at the firestorm and SL reduce lag wiki pages they dont talk about closing all viewer windows to increase fps so perhaps they dont.

Even odder is that if the chat window is closed and not on the screen and someone talks, your chat bubble button on the bar blinks. Even this minute little detail reduces fps.

Nice viewer btw.

[Myntz Mysterious]

Lordy! I remember when I first came to SL... What a horrendous experience it was for me... 🥴 

1.  At the time (it was a few years before 2010) my computer was a complete potato for the time. I had one of those super cheap eMachines. 😁
2. My internet was awful!

It took so longs for things to rez for me that I completely gave up. I dont even remember what the account name I used before returning back several years later and making Matilda and giving it a second try.

Speaking of mesh and all, I often wonder how many content creators work in the gaming industry? I know of two from checking out their blogs and have publicly posted the fact. Siyu Suen owner of Illusions went on to work for ArenaNet on Guild Wars 2 . I loved her masks! And if I remember right Kazuhiro Aridian has worked on Warframe.

[ChinRey]

10 hours ago, Matilda Melune said:

Speaking of mesh and all, I often wonder how many content creators work in the gaming industry?

I know of a few but not many. Some professionals use SL as a break from the stringent lag and style requirements they have to meet for their breadwinning builds. Some do quick and dirty uploads of stuff they have lying about anyway. Some who started the careers in SL stay for old time's sake. And of course, some freelancers take commission jobs for SL as well as for other platforms.

Edited February 20, 2022 by ChinRey

[Nick0678]

10 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

like HD images

All of them are considered low-res. (20*16. 32*32 etc)

 

10 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

Nice viewer btw.

Thnaks.

[Rowan Amore]

Just substitute Log for Lag...

 

[ChinRey]

On 2/18/2022 at 6:00 PM, Coffee Pancake said:

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.

You have a point; there's certainly room for software improvements in SL.

But can you name another virtual world/game engine that can handle better the sheer amount of tris, vertices and pixels we typically see in Second Life? Sansar couldn't, Unity sure can't and I don't know of any other that can either.

[Nick0678]

16 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

Well not sure I would call it cute however, there are serious flaws in the viewer fps wise that should have been fixed years ago.

Yes i suppose Linden Lab should fix those little bugs, after all it is their product not mine or anyone else's and if they make it better then it might attract more "paying customers". But personally those bugs don't bother me, it's an app that anyone can install and play/chat for free so can't have high expectations, especially in regards to 3rd party developers who make no money from it. If it works it works, if it doesn't it doesn't, doesn't cost me anything.

Edited February 20, 2022 by Nick0678

[rasterscan]

Lag ? When it takes 48  seconds to rez a lamp from inv to ground on a ryzen quad core I think maybe its not my fault or pc after all.

Edited February 20, 2022 by rasterscan

[Coffee Pancake]

4 hours ago, ChinRey said:

You have a point; there's certainly room for software improvements in SL.

But can you name another virtual world/game engine that can handle better the sheer amount of tris, vertices and pixels we typically see in Second Life? Sansar couldn't, Unity sure can't and I don't know of any other that can either.

That's kind of apples and chickens.

You could export an entire SL region, stick it any off the shelf game engine at full detail, and it will do a better job and render an order of magnitude faster than SL on the same hardware. But that comes at a high cost, what you end up with isn't SL and can't do all the other things SL does.

(Animats vulkan based prototype SL client kinda worked this way initially, an entire region, all loaded at once, and all running way faster  than the SL client could with like for like content loaded).

Don't underestimate the power of a well crafted game engine to push content around the screen.

Seriously, UE5 can do this on a consumer console (a far more limited platform than a modern gamers PC!), This is why people keep asking why can't we just use a game engine.

 

The SL render engine is dump truck, slow and steady. That comes with a couple of super powers game engines would struggle with, namely the dynamic nature of the content (even though in practice very little is dynamic) and low object repetition (although that's down to lack of support for instancing from LL and our measure of complexity being an accounting and billing system first and foremost).

If LL added instancing support - Shift-drag copies of objects would basically be free to render, so could be free (or a token 1Li per item) regardless of complexity. If we had that, we would see a lot more duplicated content and faster rendering, entire forests of the same 3 trees that render as fast as 3 trees .. but hey .. who cares, right.

SL can be wall to wall random on the fly UGC. The UGC isn't bad in its own right, it's that it exists at all and that isn't a problem we can solve by making more optimized UGC.

 

We're trying to min max fuel efficiency by counting the number of pens in the glove box, and then attacking that one person who brought a whole pack of sharpies.

 

Edited February 20, 2022 by Coffee Pancake

[Finite]

Coffee should start a series. Reminds me of Neil deGrasse Tyson explaining the universe for dummies like me.

Edited February 20, 2022 by Finite

[Persephone Emerald]

On 2/17/2022 at 8:17 AM, ROSE0005 said:

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

Would you deny our esteemed forum rats the opportunity to argue over the multitude of causes for and solutions to lag in SL?

[Setsuki Takeda]

To be fair, for all the creator defenders, things like nomod nocopy stuff with a million texture change and resizing scripts in them you can't remove withoiut breaking the only version of the product you have...

My region runs pretty well, even with some breedables (I have PlantPets, they look nice, and are temp-rez so I can landscape with them and not eat up the normal mainland LI) on it, because I dig into everything I rez and remove all the extra scripts that are eating up sim resources while having absolutely zero use.