secondlife goes seamless world

[Arielle Popstar]

4 hours ago, animats said:

Larger regions are, of course, available in the Other Simulator We Can't Talk About Here. But those big regions tend to be rather sparse. The total LI before things slow down is independent of region size. And even in the Other Simulator, you can't mix region sizes for regions that touch. So you can't have giant water regions with few objects adjoining busy land regions, which would be useful.

Giant regions are useful, but somewhat special purpose. There are some giant regions for flying around. There are big deserts and forests. There are big regions where there's a little town or mall near the center, and sparsely furnished outlying areas. There's an overall low-detail feel to large regions.  There's not the sense of detail you get in much of SL.

I've not experienced that as a limitation and in fact have run different sized Varregions adjoining each other without issue for years. Having said that, one larger grid owner did mention she has seen some physics engine trouble server side with certain configurations. Possibly using different physics modules whereas I run the same one on my own grid. Her fix was to use water regions between those varied Var regions to buffer the effect but still allow them to be connected. Her grid has about 3200 connected standard regions mostly made up of 3x3 and 6x6 Varregions.

Is it actually less detail or simply less clutter like SL Mainland where the areas are ground to ceiling filled with varying skyboxes? On Varregions I have no problem extending my draw distance to 500 or even 1024 meters without issue. Something to be said for that.

[Ardy Lay]

3 hours ago, Jaylinbridges said:

Well maybe because each region Detail has the region listed as Region/Estate in a tab, you can say that one region is an estate.  However the conventional terminology for an estate is more than one region.  At least that is how the SL Wiki defines it:

An Estate is a collection of Regions that can be managed as a set.

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Estates#:~:text=An Estate is a collection,be managed as a set.

Regions plural, not one region. Then it is called a private region. If you own more than one region you can refer to them as part of your estate.  And there was a time when the Lindens called regions, sims,  too. 

As one of the writers of that publication, I thank you for pointing out that error.  I fixed it for you.

There is no configuration difference between a Second Life Estate with one region in membership and one with more than one region in membership.

Second Life Estates are not required to be geographic in nature, but they certainly do tend to have adjacent members.

Regions belonging to different Second Life Estates can and do get placed adjacent to each other by mutual consent of the owners of the Second Life Estates in which they are members.

 

Edited June 15, 2023 by Ardy Lay

[Rowan Amore]

Other important notes about estates:

A Resident can own many estates.

An estate can never have less than one region.

All regions in the same estate share the same owner; ownership (and who pays for the region maintenance) is always determined by the estate a region is in.

 

[MadameGloom Ravenwood]

On 6/8/2023 at 8:16 PM, Rowan Amore said:

If SL were actually built by programs as games are, sure it could be seamless but that's not what SL.is or was ever meant to be.  Region crossing ARE much better than they used to be when I started.

Damn right, I don't always notice a region crossing now. At one time we used to get knocked into the middle of next week!

[AmeliaJ08]

SL does seem enormously janky when it comes to region crossings and I have wondered if the existing system could be improved but it seems that it either isn't a priority or it isn't possible to do much about.

I think a lot of the jank we're used to is very legacy though and there's an unwillingness to meddle too much for fear of breaking 19 years of everything.

Layman showerthoughts below, feel free to destroy me:

I have long thought that some sort of prediction by the server is needed though, if a client is expected to move into a new region why not start pre-calculating its arrival before it happens? it feels like the reason the jank happens is because all of a sudden a new region has a new client entering which needs to have all of its various scripts spun up etc and there's a delay. When teleporting this isn't an issue obviously but when crossing regions on foot/vehicle it's very obvious and the client even stops receiving position information, why not start that process before a client enters so it's all ready and running when it happens?

 

 

Edited June 16, 2023 by AmeliaJ08

[AmeliaJ08]

On 6/9/2023 at 4:40 AM, gwynchisholm said:

I never thought the region crossing thing was that big of a deal, most of the time I don’t even go between regions without teleporting anyway and when I do it’s not exactly a major holdup.

It’s a big outlier for most social games to even have connected spaces like this, even if there is a transition, very few other games have anything like that.

Most other social worlds use a room or space system where you only go to the one location and navigate to other locations with a menu. So SecondLifes transitions between regions is pretty advanced above that.

 

It's a big deal because vehicles are a thing in SL and having a giant grid is a big draw for them, it lends immersion to the world if you can move seamlessly between regions especially on vehicle.

 

[Katherine Heartsong]

1 hour ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

I have long thought that some sort of prediction by the server is needed though, if a client is expected to move into a new region why not start pre-calculating its arrival before it happens? it feels like the reason the jank happens is because all of a sudden a new region has a new client entering which needs to have all of its various scripts spun up etc and there's a delay. When teleporting this isn't an issue obviously but when crossing regions on foot/vehicle it's very obvious and the client even stops receiving position information, why not start that process before a client enters so it's all ready and running when it happens?

I've long thought the same thing, since we've been doing this with pagination for large amounts of tabular data for forever on the web. I may not be able to fetch and arrange a million records efficiently, but I can load the first 100 then the second hundred knowing you'l most like start paging to the next 100 records. When you click to page 2, these appear "instantly" and I also load 201–300, and keep 1–100 cached so whatever direction you page in (back or forwards) the data is ready to load. Why not start loading the data once a simple pathfinding algorithm senses I'm moving in a direction where a new sim will most likely need to be loaded?

[Love Zhaoying]

Similar to a "prediction", I can see a lot of ways to make "server handoff" more seamless. Have both servers communicate about servers "near the border" so they can be ready for the handoff without starting from scratch.  

Too bad that the "handoff" of packing up / transferring / unpacking and "setting state" for all the avatar's running scripts, etc. is such a nasty business. (Yes, I use bad words. Too bad. Bad. Bad words are bad.)

 

 

[Katherine Heartsong]

36 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Similar to a "prediction", I can see a lot of ways to make "server handoff" more seamless. Have both servers communicate about servers "near the border" so they can be ready for the handoff without starting from scratch.  

Too bad that the "handoff" of packing up / transferring / unpacking and "setting state" for all the avatar's running scripts, etc. is such a nasty business. (Yes, I use bad words. Too bad. Bad. Bad words are bad.)

Right! I keep forgetting that as avatars (objects in the world) we are also loaded down with sometimes a lot of scripts and hidden objects like different (but invisible) states of hair style, resizing scripts, etc.

Edited June 16, 2023 by Katherine Heartsong

[Love Zhaoying]

9 minutes ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

45 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Similar to a "prediction", I can see a lot of ways to make "server handoff" more seamless. Have both servers communicate about servers "near the border" so they can be ready for the handoff without starting from scratch.  

Too bad that the "handoff" of packing up / transferring / unpacking and "setting state" for all the avatar's running scripts, etc. is such a nasty business. (Yes, I use bad words. Too bad. Bad. Bad words are bad.)

Right! I keep forgetting that as avatars (objects in the world) we are also loaded down with sometimes a lot of scripts and hidden objects like different (but invisible) states of hair style, resizing scripts, etc.

Oops, I meant "avatars" near the border. 🙂

[Paul Hexem]

15 hours ago, animats said:

That's the business model of Sansar, High Fidelity, and SineSpace. All of which, on a good day, have a user count in 2 digits. Sinespace might hit 3 digits.

Those are called "game level loaders". You build a level map offline and put it on a server. User logs in, picks a region, there's a long wait while it downloads, and then it runs. This works fine, but it's a completely different kind of system. If you like that sort of thing, it's well supported in Unity.

Which brings up a thought.

For regions that have assets and settings that don't change often (or ever, like the Blake Sea) wouldn't it be possible to have them downloaded more permanently, with regular updates, instead of just cached every instance?

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

Quote

secondlife goes seamless world

No, it doesn't. Clickbait title.

But I get the idea. The fallacy is that you're comparing, on the one hand, SL that is filled with not so optimized, user-created content, and, on the other AAA games, the worlds of which are filled with highly optimized content made by experienced pros. Also, SL content needs to be streamed from the internet. Contrary, most AAA games load their content directly off your local SSD as you go.

[Love Zhaoying]

23 minutes ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Quote

secondlife goes seamless world

No, it doesn't. Clickbait title.

I assumed they were just bad at English and meant something like, "Second Life should have Seamless Regions".

Clues: "secondlife" (not a thing whether or not you capitalize it), "seamless world" (we don't usually talk about "Second Life" as a "world"..do we? But this one supports the "click bait" theory).

Great observation!

[AmeliaJ08]

4 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Similar to a "prediction", I can see a lot of ways to make "server handoff" more seamless. Have both servers communicate about servers "near the border" so they can be ready for the handoff without starting from scratch.  

Too bad that the "handoff" of packing up / transferring / unpacking and "setting state" for all the avatar's running scripts, etc. is such a nasty business. (Yes, I use bad words. Too bad. Bad. Bad words are bad.)

 

 

Yep, a border inside each regions border where there's cross communication about the people within it, sharing of their scripts etc so that effectively a phantom person 'exists' in a region they're not yet in which can be made real the moment that person crosses into an adjoining region with a communication to all other regions that they can stand down.

I would think there might still be a jump if position information changes (say the persons direction vector changes unexpectedly) but something like this could surely make a crossing a little smoother if everything about that person already exists in the new region.

 

[Coffee Pancake]

5 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Similar to a "prediction", I can see a lot of ways to make "server handoff" more seamless. Have both servers communicate about servers "near the border" so they can be ready for the handoff without starting from scratch.

Which opens the door to race conditions and sneaky ways to duplicate content.

[Arielle Popstar]

26 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Which opens the door to race conditions and sneaky ways to duplicate content.

Aren't "child avatars" a thing anyway on neighbouring regions to the one someone is on? I know a neighbouring region is aware of my avatar as I can see from typical Opensim console messages.

[Coffee Pancake]

4 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Aren't "child avatars" a thing anyway on neighbouring regions to the one someone is on? I know a neighbouring region is aware of my avatar as I can see from typical Opensim console messages.

Child avatar just means the region knows to send you object updates and chat messages.

It doesn't have your avatar.

[Wilma Philbin]

I find region crossings so much better than they used to be, I have stopped considering it a problem. I ride a horse in SL sometimes and I am impressed with how smooth it is crossing into a new region if I just adapt my speed a bit. I do need to stay aware of where the crossings are and avoid four sim crossings when I fly a plane, but other than that it's a nice experience as well. Maybe it's silly but I rather enjoy the fact that with some experience, we learn how to sneak into a region with many visitors without crashing.

I imagine if you want to have a car race, you might have to coordinate the regions it passes through. And maybe set bounderies for how many scripted objects an avatar has active while racing.

[Anna Nova]

6 hours ago, Wilma Philbin said:

I find region crossings so much better than they used to be, I have stopped considering it a problem. I ride a horse in SL sometimes and I am impressed with how smooth it is crossing into a new region if I just adapt my speed a bit. I do need to stay aware of where the crossings are and avoid four sim crossings when I fly a plane, but other than that it's a nice experience as well. Maybe it's silly but I rather enjoy the fact that with some experience, we learn how to sneak into a region with many visitors without crashing.

I imagine if you want to have a car race, you might have to coordinate the regions it passes through. And maybe set bounderies for how many scripted objects an avatar has active while racing.

Yes, horses go through many region crossings well, walking is also usually good.  Then, unaccountably, about one in 25 or so, you get a bad one and have to relog.  Flying, or Sailing, the rate falls to one every 5 or so, possibly related to the speed, and the time between crossings.  I never cross near a corner at even a slow realistic boat speed.  My theory is that the region you are now in hasn't gotten everything filed right before the next crossing.  It IS related to scripted objects, but a plane or boat has to save some scripts or it's not vaguely realistic.

I'm glad it's a minority sport, I too don't have any issues when I just stand in the dance AO and listen to the same old tracks....

Edited June 17, 2023 by Anna Nova

[xDancingStarx]

On 6/8/2023 at 8:31 PM, randakong said:

don't need cross-regions

Which MMO has a seamless world (where they don't need to create instances/layers for subsets of users) for 40k users? I'd just like to get an idea of what is possible, because, I'm not aware of such.

It shouldn't happen that you get disconnected during a sim crossing though. I mean it has improved compared to back then by miles where you would cross a sim and start walking for a minute into nothing before you get disconnected. Nowadays a sim crossing is usually just a hiccup for me.

Edited June 17, 2023 by xDancingStarx

[animats]

Since this has turned into a serious discussion of how to organize Second Life and similar worlds, here are some things to think about. As a way to think about it, here's a lesson from Coulter Winn at Disney Imagineering, the theme park design team:

• Detail Level One: You’re in the country, you see over the trees some tall buildings, maybe a church steeple 
• Detail Level Two: You’ve walked into town, now you’re on Main Street.
• Detail Level Three: You’re looking closely at the colors and texture of the buildings.
• Detail Level Four: You’ve gone up to the front door and you’re grabbing the handle, feeling the texture and temperature of the material.

We can use that as a framework for thinking about this subject.

How object-dense should our virtual worlds be?

You can think of the world as being in balance when everything in the world has enough detail that it can be visited and used without feeling like you're in a world of backdrops with nothing behind them. Bellessaria is at that balance point. Every building can be entered, and there's enough LI available to furnish all the rooms, landscape the exterior, and drive, boat, or fly around. There are no empty box filler buildings. Buildings are one or two story. That's Detail Level Three, and in well-furnished houses, approaches Detail Level Four. Detail Level Four, in SL, means that that things you can touch which plausibly should do something actually do it. Like the vending machines that give out cans, the restaurant tables that provide food, and cars where you can open the doors, hood, and trunk and look inside.

The next step down is seen in New Babbage. Most of the buildings have interiors, but many interiors are sparsely furnished, especially above the second floor. Some buildings, but not many, are just empty boxes you can't enter. Most areas are Detail Level Three, with some Detail Level four, but some areas are only Detail Level Two. Detail Level Four is rare - not much stuff actually works.

Next step down that is London City. Many tall buildings, but they're almost all empty boxes above the ground floor. Here, the illusion of their being real is somewhat superficial. London City is mostly Detail Level Two. So is Cocoon, the cyberpunk sim, which looks great, but you can't enter most buildings.

Mopire, which is four regions of a Japanese city, is mostly at Detail Level One. All those tall buildings are mostly empty boxes. It's beautiful and well made, but hollow. There's good Detail Level Two at ground level, Detail Level Three in some areas, and near Detail Level Four in a very few places. There's not enough available land impact capacity to bring a dense city up to a high level of detail. Hangars Liquides has the same problem.

Realistically, what would you do with 20-story office buildings where all the details are there, but the building has no real use? Visit SYZM Tower in NTBI, one of the few high-detail tall buildings in SL. You can rent an office there. The building has all the details. Not just an impressive office building lobby with a security desk, elevators and escalators, but a mailroom, restrooms, emergency stairs, a loading dock, clocks, a food court, an executive dining room, two mini-marts, and underground parking. All underutilized. Go visit, just to see a really good building job.

Over in the Other Simulator, the larger varregions tend to be mostly at Detail Level One, because you can't have enough objects to populate a few square kilometers before the viewer and simulator choke. So there are large deserts and oceans, big areas of terrain with small towns, and such. The overall feel tends to be sparse.

Big-world games tend to channel the user into the areas of more detail. GTA V looks huge and detailed, but try to enter some of the big buildings downtown. That's also true of Cyberpunk 2077. Huge buildings you can't enter. Gameplay doesn't take you there. Sansar had Aech's Garage and a Star Wars prop museum, which were very highly detailed. But you couldn't do anything there but look.

So SL is sized for suburban density, and Bellessaria is well matched to that.

Bigger or smaller regions? Are they necessary?

Most of the interest in larger regions revolves around cost. But that's really tied more to number of objects. Low-density regions do work. It's possible to have low-cost almost-empty regions in Second Life. There are "Openspace Regions"; 1000 LI, 10 avatars max. These tended to be abused, so they're now harder to get. Those might be used more for LL water regions around the edges of continents, if it turns out they're not that expensive to operate.

There's an argument for smaller regions, to allow for high-density clubs and events. With event regions, supported by more CPU power, now available, smaller regions might be unnecessary. Let's see how SL20B works out. If it doesn't lag when crowded, that problem has been solved. Maybe all that's needed is the ability to have your private region run on a bigger server on request at, of course, an extra charge.

Of course, this should all be dynamic and self-adjusting. That was Improbable's big pitch. They made it work, but it wasn't cost-effective. Long story I won't go into here.

 

 

[AmeliaJ08]

4 hours ago, Anna Nova said:

Yes, horses go through many region crossings well, walking is also usually good.  Then, unaccountably, about one in 25 or so, you get a bad one and have to relog.  Flying, or Sailing, the rate falls to one every 5 or so, possibly related to the speed, and the time between crossings.  I never cross near a corner at even a slow realistic boat speed.  My theory is that the region you are now in hasn't gotten everything filed right before the next crossing.  It IS related to scripted objects, but a plane or boat has to save some scripts or it's not vaguely realistic.

I'm glad it's a minority sport, I too don't have any issues when I just stand in the dance AO and listen to the same old tracks....

I have discovered that sometimes following a failed region crossing I can't turn left or right or are otherwise bugged (and I'm usually dumped to the bottom of the sea somewhere) I can fix it by using Avatar Health > Rebuild Firestorm LSL Bridge to avoid a relog.

 

[randakong]

On 6/17/2023 at 9:53 PM, AmeliaJ08 said:

I have discovered that sometimes following a failed region crossing I can't turn left or right or are otherwise bugged (and I'm usually dumped to the bottom of the sea somewhere) I can fix it by using Avatar Health > Rebuild Firestorm LSL Bridge to avoid a relog.

 

That is caused my some brands vehicles owner made. Some pros ones don't have that issues.

Edited June 20, 2023 by Quartz Mole

[Love Zhaoying]

14 minutes ago, randakong said:

That is caused my some gay brands vehicles owner made. Some pros ones don't have that issues.

This makes sense because, gay brands can't drive..straight!

 

[randakong]

On 6/15/2023 at 1:42 PM, Coffee Pancake said:

There is so much wild speculation in this thread.

First up SL is not OpenSim, in the same way kraft cheese isn't cheese. Both are indeed yellow and have similar base ingredients, but that is where similarities end.

It is impossible to make SL into an seamless open world experience without major changes.

Remember - SL is 100% server side. The viewer is dumb like a rock.

 

Mega Regions - These are a possibility and LL did do some exploratory work. However, while the base region changes weren't that much work, they found that the region size is baked into so much of the general platform infrastructure as to be impractical to change. It's a million rabbit holes that go literally everywhere from physics to scripting to old content to web content to internal infrastructure to support and on and on. As such it represents a massive amount of work ... for a single region's resources with a variable land foot print.

Keeping the land footprint the same and adjusting the resources is the only option that doesn't come with a need to go over the entire platform with a fine tooth comb. So .. event regions and homesteads.

 

True seamless region crossings - Are impossible outside of explicitly defined test scenarios with very tightly controlled conditions (such as region crossing pile on events). Why? Because your avatar and it's attachments can not exist in more than one location at once. If it could then the door to race conditions is wide open and suddenly we have sneaky ways to duplicate content. Why does being in more than one place matter for seamless crossings? Because without this capability your avatar must be zipped up and passed to the new region, which under real world conditions takes a moment. This leaves the viewer making it up while the transfer happens, and it can't ever get it right, so when the next region says "hi, you're here" the viewer is out of sync and you get a bump.

It could possibly be solved with client side physics that inform the servers of the avatars position, so long as you're not too far away from where you could legitimately be, the server believes you. This is how games tend to do it. It is unlikely we will ever get client side physics, as no one at LL seems to play any games and has no idea just how junk the experience here can be. There would be a moment where server side scripts were wouldn't function, but we could also have client side scripts for controlling vehicles and then the experience would be better in every way.

Cough cough noobs said

 

If 8192 X 8192 regions size ain't slow your clients side it dang can go seamless world. Yo only need 10x 8192 X 8192 regions size to make secondlife a big grid.

Edited February 28 by randakong