performance I think we should, collectively, be somewhat embarassed.

[Coffee Pancake]

I don't think existing / upcoming virtual worlds are going to be much of a competitor .. as much as we like to think of SL as being the same class of product, it's not and the similarities are only superficial.

SL isn't a successful virtual world, it's a virtual world that got accidentally infested with people. The magic that sets SL apart from the fallen competition and current crop of hopefuls isn't some special combination of technical nuggets, it's that people are able to look at what's on offer and not only see themselves in that picture, but see a potential.

The huge early growth spurt was built entirely by users evangelizing and bringing people here, taking the vision that LL & Philip provided and then running with it and getting excited. The hang over from those days still bites us in form of depressing press coverage wondering why we're not all dead yet.

The modern competition are not really the same at all, they offer a similar base proposition, build stuff, make money, have an avatar, do stuff .. and .. no one cares.

Second Life is a social phenomenon and that can and does happen elsewhere, and if we can't keep the platform moving forward and presenting something reasonably modern we lose ground we can't ever hope to make back.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

10 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

SL isn't a successful virtual world, it's a virtual world that got accidentally infested with people.

You could say the same about the planet earth. (It wasn't created by them or specifically for them, they just happen to be there and to the best of our knowledge, nowhere else.)

Re-arranging slightly to get rid of the pejoratives, one could say

"The earth/SL allowed life/avatars to thrive and flourish and so became established places where life/avatars can be found."

[Coffee Pancake]

7 hours ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

You could say the same about the planet earth. (It wasn't created by them or specifically for them, they just happen to be there and to the best of our knowledge, nowhere else.)

Re-arranging slightly to get rid of the pejoratives, one could say

"The earth/SL allowed life/avatars to thrive and flourish and so became established places where life/avatars can be found."

You can't really apply the anthropic principal. When SL started, there were many alternative worlds and they all got traction to some degree. 

As one example, There.com was very popular and provided a more responsive experience including vehicles and pets that we still can't match today. They had their own currency that could be exchanged (T$), voice chat, huge parties, limited UGC and so on. Most of the other worlds, old and new, have far more common heritage with There.com than they do with SL.

SL was the poor mans alternative that had building and virtual land but looked and ran like crap, it was never expected to be the one that survived and won .. and in a way .. it didn't. SL was the last man standing, as the other worlds imploded and the money ran out, they got shut down and people looking for something similar found SL was the only place left.

The early SL adopters, builders and visionaries and land speculators, were not sufficient to make this platform a success. It took the social exiles from other worlds to come here and view the offering though the lens of the past experience, see past the horrific jank (that we still frikin have) and come to the conclusion we had one extra magic ingredient.

Hope.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

It took the social exiles from other worlds to come here and view the offering though the lens of the past experience, see past the horrific jank (that we still frikin have) and come to the conclusion we had one extra magic ingredient.

So we are the descendants  of the Virtual Pilgrim Fathers?

 

/me goes in search of the Wreck of the Mayflower.

[Flea Yatsenko]

SL is still successful because you can find pretty much anything you want on it. A lot of it is out dated, has performance issues, etc. But SL is successful because it has this content, and poor content is better than no content. Consider all these technical problems with SL, yet tens of thousands of people show up every day. They do it for the content and they just deal with all the other problems.

I also disagree with SL just growing because of chance, they were the most hands off virtual world at the time, they really only tried to step in and shape the world when they were under pressure from legal or media. There.com is still alive, you pay $10 a month. If they have user content for sale it's not nearly as featured as the Marketplace link on the secondlife.com home page.

You'll see VRChat was successful too, because they had a huge hands off approach to content. And after they added Easy Anti-Cheat people were mad because they had their content (mods) taken away when it was falsely classified as cheating. Walled gardens just aren't successful, it's why all these "METAVERSE MILLIONS OF USERS!" articles all have "we consider roblox, minecraft, and fortnite part of the metaverse" asterisks.

If SL needs anything, it needs more features like experiences to create games inside of SL to play. Look at Roblox, it's all user generated games you can play.

[Persephone Emerald]

On 7/29/2022 at 9:29 AM, Coffee Pancake said:

 

The early SL adopters, builders and visionaries and land speculators, were not sufficient to make this platform a success. It took the social exiles from other worlds to come here and view the offering though the lens of the past experience, see past the horrific jank (that we still frikin have) and come to the conclusion we had one extra magic ingredient.

Hope.

The United States, Canada, and Australia were all built by the most part by a bunch of social exiles, and we done pretty well.

[Suzanna Soyinka]

Just to tap back on this thread I've created the latest dev branch beta viewer code is showing some IMMENSE promise.

It has quite obviously properly implemented object/object occlusion and texture render scaling by distance.

The overall differential in performance is extremely massive, I've had reports of individuals on lower end hardware using GTX990's going from 7 to 50FPS so this is some very interesting headway. 

[Jackson Redstar]

I been using Linden performance viewer beta, FS beta and the latest BD viewer and from my expirence so far, all 3 have made the topic of this thread a moot point. and with modern CPUs and graphic card, I think the days of griping about the never ending lag may be coming to an end....

[Suzanna Soyinka]

Heres to hoping that this is simply the beginning of a large set of forward steps. A little bird told me there is quite a gang forming up on certain systems and that Phillip wasn't just blowing hot air in his interviews.

50 minutes ago, Jackson Redstar said:

I been using Linden performance viewer beta, FS beta and the latest BD viewer and from my expirence so far, all 3 have made the topic of this thread a moot point. and with modern CPUs and graphic card, I think the days of griping about the never ending lag may be coming to an end....

 

[Jackson Redstar]

14 hours ago, Suzanna Soyinka said:

Heres to hoping that this is simply the beginning of a large set of forward steps. A little bird told me there is quite a gang forming up on certain systems and that Phillip wasn't just blowing hot air in his interviews.

 

This is the step foward Linden really needs - they keep coming out with stuff nobody really asked for and really doesn't address the core issue with SL - the lag primarly in heavily populated areas. I think with this new viewer code it can start to become a game changer, Residents who have been here for years can enjoy SL will all the "pretty" turned on even in crowded areas and more importantly new residents won;t be going 'what is with all this lag in this stupid game' Now onto a new book series called SL for Dummies that explains clearly how to do some core things in SL that are not intuitive at all for newer residents or even old times who never really got under the hood

 

[Zidaya Zenovka]

While I'm really glad some progress is being made I find it disheartening how many people are willing to see legacy content disappear in favor of shiny new graphics. Just because something looks pretty doesn't make it good. I'm all for improving performance but there are still quite a lot of people out there who are running older systems. Especially given the fact a lot of SL's userbase has been hit hard by Covid, economic downturns, war, and people hogging all the available cheap video cards. 

By all means ask about improvements but if it ends up being something only the wealthy percentage of its community can play it's going to go against the spirit of accessibility that built the grid in the first place. As it is mesh has caused a not insignificant number of would-be creators to feel the learning curve has turned into a closed and locked gate. 

[Coffee Pancake]

3 minutes ago, Zidaya Zenovka said:

While I'm really glad some progress is being made I find it disheartening how many people are willing to see legacy content disappear in favor of shiny new graphics.

legacy content doesn't block newer graphics

some legacy systems block new systems, and replacing those systems would make content that depends on them to cease functioning if provisioning some backwards compatibility couldn't be accomplished.

A good example would be physics. What we have right now is lukewarm garbage, but there is a huge amount of content that depends on physics working a certain way (even if that way is actually broken).

Replacing the physics system with something clientside would allow for far more responsiveness in everything we do in SL, it would be literally game changing, enabling a lot of highly interactive content and experiences.

However, It's not possible to have two physics systems in place, and stuff designed for the old system would likely need to be rescripted, effectively breaking huge amounts of it. 

Recreating content that has been rendered useless by such a change would be a huge economic uptick for SL.

[Seicher Rae]

I read the OP. I'm totally stupid and clueless on the subject. But I really liked the title of the thread!


Mark this down as equivalent to buying a book for its cover!

[Kathrine Jansma]

17 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Recreating content that has been rendered useless by such a change would be a huge economic uptick for SL.

Stuff like that can work, if your customers/users accept the state of things.

For example look at Apple Inc, when they upgrade their OS X offerings. They are quite liberal in throwing out the old junk and forcing customers to upgrade, developers to do new versions of applications etc.

Even hardware in RL sometimes gets washed away by progress. For example germany forced everyone to move to higher fidelity TV sets some years ago. The old distribution channel was simply cut off and you needed new hardware. Similar to how phone providers force people to move away from older mobile phone standards.

Or it can fail miserably. Have a look at Modern Windows Apps, when Microsoft tried to also do an Appstore.

The important business questions are:

• Would enough designers and developers create better replacements for the old stuff?
• Would people buy into the new stuff and make the creators happy?
• Does it help LLs cash flow and bottom line earnings.

LL is probably in a bit of a torn state, as they get cashflow not just from Marketplace and L$ conversion fees. Those are mostly driven by sales, so new stuff and people consuming is great. But Land and Premium membership fees might be linked to people that get angry about old cherished stuff breaking and leaving over that.

[animats]

23 hours ago, Zidaya Zenovka said:

I find it disheartening how many people are willing to see legacy content disappear in favor of shiny new graphics.

I don't see the need to break old content at all. In my own work, I'm rendering old content with a PBR renderer, and it works fine.

Object complexity overload is limited by land impact, and the triangle counts for objects are not a serious problem on modern hardware. Avatars, though... A dozen well-dressed avatars can choke the viewers. We need automatic clothing LODs.

[ST33LDI9ITAL]

On 8/24/2022 at 8:13 PM, animats said:

I don't see the need to break old content at all. In my own work, I'm rendering old content with a PBR renderer, and it works fine.

Object complexity overload is limited by land impact, and the triangle counts for objects are not a serious problem on modern hardware. Avatars, though... A dozen well-dressed avatars can choke the viewers. We need automatic clothing LODs.

Is that with or without animation?

[Ernst Osterham]

On 8/23/2022 at 8:29 PM, Zidaya Zenovka said:

While I'm really glad some progress is being made I find it disheartening how many people are willing to see legacy content disappear in favor of shiny new graphics.

This worries me too.  I’m old enough in SL to remember pre-mesh building and it has a universal, democratic quality that made user content interesting and in-world building a social experience.  Yes mesh is objectively better looks and (theoretically) resource wise but it also killed off that aspect of SL.

What’s scary now is we have about a decade of mesh content that was made for the current rendering system.  A lot of it is outdated and looks it but loads of it still holds up perfectly and is in constant use all over the grid.  Many things also were made by people who have left SL or stopped creating or produce items very slowly as a hobby.  Having that stuff broken by a change in rendering or physics would be catastrophic.  Yes, new stuff would emerge but it would take another decade of building to replace what is lost (if ever) you’d have a glut of revealing clothes of the club fashions du jour, mesh body and hairs, whatever the normcore furniture and decor trend is and the rest would slowly if ever be replaced.

 

Example:  I’m involved in the SL aviation community as a participant and also a builder.  Of quality, original mesh and scripted aircraft in SL I’d say something like 80% of them were made by people or stores which no longer actively build.  These are things which if broken would Likely never be replaced anytime soon.  There simply isn’t the builder base and market to support recreating it all.  Planes take a lot of time to make and test and you have people using aircraft made in 2013 still on the daily because nothing else better of that type has been made since  nor is it likely to be.

 

 

 

 

[davidventer]

Loving this thread. Had to chime in with an analogy for those who don’t seem to grasp what’s been happening in the computer/tech industry… 

Think of Second Life as the television industry for a moment… Apple hardware and the Metal API is like a new 60” 8k HD TV. Windows is like an old small box-style CRT monitor/TV. Second Life‘s OpenGL codebase is like a VHS player. Content creators are like film makers. It doesn’t matter how great their films are, they’re limited by the VHS technology. It’ll look okay on old box TV’s but it’ll be a not-so-pretty experience on a big HD TV. You can’t blame the HD TV for poor visuals coming from the VHS, and of course you’ll have a better experience viewing the VHS on an old box TV than you would on a big HD TV. This doesn’t mean that the old box TV is better than the HD TV - it may appear that way but it’s simply not true. You’re misguided due to VHS being your only medium. The optimal solution for future proofing and for providing the best possible experience would be to stop using VHS and switch to Blue Ray or HD Streaming. That’ll also allow the film makers’ productions to truly shine.

Instead, “we” are holding onto the VHS for the few that still have VHS players and old box TV’s in the fear of losing or upsetting that base, meanwhile providing a terrible experience to those who have moved on to watching HD films on Big HD TV’s; those expecting a high quality experience but are disappointed when they hook the VHS player up to their HD TV.  New users with HD TV’s see photoshopped screenshots of “our” awesome “films” and want to watch but then realize they can only do so on VHS, so they maybe try it once and then never again, or they don’t even bother trying at all. No matter how many pixels that TV has, the VHS tape is limited to a tiny resolution, so it’ll always be a sub-par experience on the big HD TV.

But “F*** HD TV owners”, right? They’re “St***d” for buying HD TV’s. They should all stick to small CRT monitors? “We” refuse to stop using VHS! HD TV owners are d_mb! *stubborn grumbly noises and floor tantrums*

If Linden Lab wants to keep SL around for another decade or two, it’s time to shelve the VHS player and start using something that looks better on HD TV’s. it’s only a matter of time before no one has a VHS player or an old CRT Monitor anymore. By serving only those with VHS players, “we” are disregarding the rest of humanity and pretending that the future does not exist. 

My advice for Linden Lab and certain TPV devs that keep bashing Apple and Apple users (driving them away from SL in the process): First of all, stop insulting your own user base, then shelve your shiny bells & whistles projects and put ALL resources and funding into developing a Vulkan-based viewer for Windows and a Metal-based viewer for macOS. Drop OpenGL entirely. Once that is done, then continue with the other cool things that you’re doing. 

You’re making the coolest “films” and it keeps getting better but “VHS” isn’t going to get any better no matter how advanced the “film-making” techniques become. You’ll always be limited by the “VHS”. It’s time to switch to “Blue ray” and “HD streaming.” If you still have an old box TV with a VHS player, it’s time to upgrade if you expect to keep watching modern-day movie productions.

Trash OpenGL. It’s dead. It’s over. It’s history.
 

Switch to Vulkan and Metal. ✌️💛 

 

Edited November 1, 2022 by davidventer

[davidventer]

11 hours ago, davidventer said:

Trash OpenGL. It’s dead. It’s over. It’s history.
 

Switch to Vulkan and Metal. ✌️💛 

Some Apple/Metal dev resources if you need help making the switch:

Migrating OpenGL to Metal:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/metal_sample_code_library/migrating_opengl_code_to_metal

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/10/apple-introduces-ask-apple-for-developers/

Edited November 1, 2022 by davidventer

[animats]

9 minutes ago, davidventer said:

Trash OpenGL. It’s dead. It’s over. It’s history. Switch to Vulkan and Metal

I'm doing that in my experimental viewer. But, according to the Lindens at Creator User Group, about 30% of SL users can't run Vulkan. They have a GPU so old it lacks essential features. SL currently runs on OpenGL 3.0, from 2008. Current OpenGL is 4.6, from 2017.

The average Steam user has an NVidia 1060 (6 GB VRAM), from 2016. That GPU cost about $250 in 2016, and it still costs about $250. Nothing newer from NVidia is cheaper. Price/performance hasn't improved much. You can get great GPUs now, but prices have reached US$1600.

If SL were targeted to Steam users, this would be easier. But then SL would have to perform like an AAA title or be laughed off Steam.

There's another alternative - "Cloud rendering". The SL viewer is running on a dedicated server in a data center somewhere, and it sends video to the viewer. Anything that can run Netflix can then run SL. The problem is cost. You're renting a gamer PC by the hour. Expect to pay $10-$30 per month, although there are promotional rates that go up after a few months, and be limited in hours per day or month. This would be a nice option for SL to offer. It's not for everyone, but it provides ease of use at higher cost.

On 8/31/2022 at 11:14 PM, ST33LDI9ITAL said:

Is that with or without animation?

Currently without, but animation won't slow down the rendering because all changes are made from other threads on other CPUs.

[Coffee Pancake]

8 hours ago, animats said:

according to the Lindens at Creator User Group, about 30% of SL users can't run Vulkan.

and those 30% are more important than platform growth

It's not unreasonable to expect people to upgrade their computers once a decade.

Edited November 1, 2022 by Coffee Pancake

[Henri Beauchamp]

31 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

and those 30% are more important than platform growth

I doubt very much, that once ”those 30%” would have left by lack of proper hardware to run SL, you could grow the remaining user base by 43% to compensate the loss (100 * 30 / (100 - 30)). Come on, we are not in 2006-2007, when SL's growth was skyrocketing.

33 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

It's not unreasonable to expect people to upgrade their computers once a decade.

Well, the current prices that go with ”appropriate” hardware are not exactly cheap (especially in the GPU department)... Not to mention the two digit inflation figures in most countries...

You can bet that many people will save money by prolonging their current computer life, so you can expect even more ”old computers” in the coming years !

 

This said, a dual renderer viewer (OpenGL + Vulkan) would be doable...

[Coffee Pancake]

12 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

Well, the current prices that go with ”appropriate” hardware are not exactly cheap (especially in the GPU department)... Not to mention the two digit inflation figures in most countries...

I have bought multiple vulkan capable laptops from thrift stores for under $50.

Even if we only look at garbage tier integrated intel, you have to go back pretty far to have no vulkan support at all.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005524/graphics.html

 

[davidventer]

11 hours ago, davidventer said:

Some Apple/Metal dev resources if you need help making the switch:

Migrating OpenGL to Metal:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/metal_sample_code_library/migrating_opengl_code_to_metal

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/10/apple-introduces-ask-apple-for-developers/

Edited to add direct link to "Migrating OpenGL Code to Metal" documentation

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/611/

Edited November 1, 2022 by davidventer

[Henri Beauchamp]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Even if we only look at garbage tier integrated intel, you have to go back pretty far to have no vulkan support at all.

But those garbage Intel iGPUs would be incapable of running SL at decent frame rates, be it under OpenGL or Vulkan...

That 30% figure you cite also seems largely exaggerated (or more exactly, skewed) to me, and probably due to the fact that LL relies on a (relatively) new stats info transmitted by the viewer, which is supposed to detect whether the Vulkan driver is installed (and configured) or not... Many of the viewers reporting ”no can do” are probably fooled by the lack of proper driver on an otherwise perfectly Vulkan compatible computer (GPU), not to mention viewers that do not report any such stats.

But even 10% of SLers loss would be devastating for SL, especially among ”old timers”. As I already wrote elsewhere ”we need old timers to stay in SL and newcomers to find a renderer mode in the viewer that works with their computer, even if it is a little too weak for “comfortable SLing””.

I (and LL alike, you can bet) would also rather see SLers spend more money in SL than in buying a new computer just be able to keep SLing !

Edited November 1, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp