What are your hopes and fears for Second Life Mobile?

[Aiyumei]

9 hours ago, gwynchisholm said:

an i9 11900K, 64gb of ram and a 16gb arc A770 running firestorm in 4k at max settings minus render distance depending on locale

After quick search and benchmark comparisons your graphics card is the bottle neck of your PC which would explain why you struggle rendering everything. SL is very hungry for GPU utilization and doesn't care what other parameters the machine has due to it's old architecture. I have GeForce RTX 3060 TI and like I already mentioned, I have zero issues.

I don't think the mobile version will operate any better on crowded places unless they seriously mutilate the graphics bringing it back to before mesh days. While mobile devices' specifications have improved so much over the years to a point of being able to compare to PCs, they are still fairly limited to what you can put inside due to their size. The way I see is that the mobile app will probably be an improved version of SpeedLight which already offers pretty much everything you need except for inworld movement and interaction. 

[gwynchisholm]

25 minutes ago, Aiyumei said:

After quick search and benchmark comparisons your graphics card is the bottle neck of your PC which would explain why you struggle rendering everything. SL is very hungry for GPU utilization and doesn't care what other parameters the machine has due to it's old architecture. I have GeForce RTX 3060 TI and like I already mentioned, I have zero issues.

I don't think the mobile version will operate any better on crowded places unless they seriously mutilate the graphics bringing it back to before mesh days. While mobile devices' specifications have improved so much over the years to a point of being able to compare to PCs, they are still fairly limited to what you can put inside due to their size. The way I see is that the mobile app will probably be an improved version of SpeedLight which already offers pretty much everything you need except for inworld movement and interaction. 

The hardware I am using is on such a level of technological disparity to the age of the game that I am honestly surprised that SecondLife works at all, much like trying to play Unreal Tournament or the original Sims on a current pc where the game has no idea what hardware you’re using and won’t work without compatibility layers.

Which is somewhat the scenario with the A770 as SL has no idea what the A770 is and doesn’t use it properly despite being current gen tech that’s more than capable. SL does not require current gen high end to run at its potential best, this game plays perfectly fine on a 15 year old quadcore and a $90 vega 56:

A side note, the even crazier part here with that is you can go even lower and see almost no changes, swap the vega 56 for a 750ti, vram becomes a limiting factor but with a 4gb 750ti it’s nearly tbe same, and that was on the garbage tier Linux firestorm viewer which usually halves my framerate on modern hardware

This is an ancient game, it is not technically or graphically impressive in the slightest. Something of this visual complexity can be recreated in Unity by your average high school game development class and perform ten times better.
Except wait, that’s VRchat that I just described there and they’re smoking SL for that exact deal of getting a social world game to run on on a toaster, let alone somehow getting a virtual reality game to run as well as it does.

That’s what LL needs to work on, and that’s what I hope mobile will do to this game. What’s the point of making a mobile viewer if it’s unplayable and terrible? The average person who’s gonna download SL on their iPad isn’t going to keep it on their device for more than 5 minutes when it fails to load anything quickly and consistently leaves them at single digit framerates because god forbid someone left too many 8K UHD textured chairs in one location at the same time.

 

Edited September 4, 2023 by gwynchisholm

[Candide LeMay]

3 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

The predominant fear is that they will make it a Premium feature. They set a precedent by doing so with Speedlight and it makes sense from a perspective of it being a good way to make money on their investment.

Requiring premium account would be a good way to keep the minors out too (at least in theory).

[AmeliaJ08]

15 hours ago, gwynchisholm said:

The fact that firestorms bandwidth slider says “may cause issues” for 3000kbps+ in an age where I have 2 gigabit fibre internet is a joke. Where their page tells you to not use Microsoft edge because “it has problems downloading firestorm” or whatever despite that’s not how any of that works at all.

That slider needs to be removed, it serves no purpose. It's certainly nothing to do with the downstream speed of texture/model downloads, it's just confusingly named.

I do agree though, there is some ludicrously old fashioned/incorrect 'advice' that still seems to infect the thinking of many involved in SL

 

Edited September 4, 2023 by AmeliaJ08

[AmeliaJ08]

6 hours ago, Solar Legion said:

Hope: It ends up being just a secondary way to log in to do things when one is not at or able to get to their primary setup/PC.

Unfortunately due to the numbers involved I can't see this happening, if anything it would quickly become the primary way of viewing SL if it takes off.

That said, I'm not sure there's the demand that would result in this. Maybe I'm just way out of the loop though, I see people mentioning Roblox and its popularity but this is aimed at children, SL clearly can not be. That said... how do LL get their app on app stores etc with the adult content of SL? there's going to need to be some pretty stringent age verification stuff introduced and even then it's a minefield.

 

[Katherine Heartsong]

23 hours ago, gwynchisholm said:

an i9 11900K, 64gb of ram and a 16gb arc A770 running firestorm in 4k at max settings minus render distance depending on locale

Something is weird then. I'm a Mac person who can barely figure out my gaming PC rig. Some sort of i7 10700 chip and a 3070 video card with 32GB RAM I do know. Never change my draw distance (128m), ultra high graphics settings on a ultra HD 4K screen, only shadows off. Last night at Tag with 20+ avatars in my sight, all in tuxes and formal gowns and glitter, I was steady about 30+fps. Granted, I'm on a wicked fast Net connection but still ... How do we vary that much?

To the OP ... bring in more users, best case, who then migrate to the "full" experience. I personally won't use it on mobile, I barely use my phone for anything except phone stuff (calls and important texts, checking email, maps and connecting music to my car), never gaming.

And yes, Apple will take one look at it if it's the full experience, see some of the graphic stuff available in SL, and either tell LL to restrict some of the content accessible, or not allow it in the store. I hope they'd allow M-rated, but Apple's prudish-enough (and powerful enough) brand wise to demand G-rated only.

Edited September 4, 2023 by Katherine Heartsong

[Zalificent Corvinus]

17 hours ago, gwynchisholm said:

an i9 11900K, 64gb of ram and a 16gb arc A770 running firestorm in 4k at max settings minus render distance depending on locale

[snip]

The fact that firestorms bandwidth slider says “may cause issues” for 3000kbps+ in an age where I have 2 gigabit fibre internet is a joke.

With that rig, if you are getting single digit fps with 8 avatars, then either you have some serious hardware/config issues with the machine it's self or, you basically made a mess of your Viewer settings. Running with everything on MAX? Including draw distance? In 4K resolution? No wonder it's tanked.

The "bandwidth" slider is absolutely NOTHING to do with how fast your internet connection i, nor with how fast you can download textures and meshes via http from the Content Delivery Network.

It is PURELY a handshaking throttle for Client/Server UDP packets. if you have it et over 1500 , you're doing it wrong.

That "I am a Leet Gamer and know EVERYTHING about performance in games, so why does my SL tank when I ignore the recommendations from the Devs" thing is so overdone.

 

For somebody complaining about "lack of technical knowledge" in SSL, you are not doing a good job displaying yours.

[AmeliaJ08]

2 hours ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

Something is weird then. I'm a Mac person who can barely figure out my gaming PC rig. Some sort of i7 10700 chip and a 3070 video card with 32GB RAM I do know. Never change my draw distance (128m), ultra high graphics settings on a ultra HD 4K screen, only shadows off. Last night at Tag with 20+ avatars in my sight, all in tuxes and formal gowns and glitter, I was steady about 30+fps. Granted, I'm on a wicked fast Net connection but still ... How do we vary that much?

To the OP ... bring in more users, best case, who then migrate to the "full" experience. I personally won't use it on mobile, I barely use my phone for anything except phone stuff (calls and important texts, checking email, maps and connecting music to my car), never gaming.

And yes, Apple will take one look at it if it's the full experience, see some of the graphics stuff available in SL, and either tell LL to restrict some of the content accessible, or not allow it in the store. I hope they'd allow M-rated, but Apple's prudish-enough (and powerful enough) brand wise to demand G-rated only.

It's the Arc 770. It's not a bad GPU by any means but its old-fashioned OpenGL support is a mere afterthought just as with many AMD cards and SL is famously bad at utilising resources available anyway. Arc is particularly bad at this type of legacy support, it will do it but just as people are finding older DirectX games perform badly it should be no surprise that something as ancient as SL does too, fast OpenGL really isn't a feature of Arc cards and I doubt Intel have put a whole lot of effort into it since it simply isn't a requirement of most users/gamers in the current era.

Intel are also currently working on drivers which have shown some progress in improving performance in legacy titles (pre DirectX 11) but still, that silicon was not developed with any sort of mind paid to legacy applications and OpenGL support is there because it needs to be, not because they want it to be and not because anyone has paid any particular attention to making it perform well.

You can't really judge GPUs on their performance in SL, it will bring even the latest and greatest to their knees given enough scene complexity because of how unoptimised and amateurish a lot of the content in SL is. Nvidia do still hold the crown for best performing GPUs in SL though, that's for sure. It's not really a fair test though.

 

 

Edited September 4, 2023 by AmeliaJ08

[Fionalein]

3 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

That slider needs to be removed, it serves no purpose. It's certainly nothing to do with the downstream speed of texture/model downloads, it's just confusingly named.

I do agree though, there is some ludicrously old fashioned/incorrect 'advice' that still seems to infect the thinking of many involved in SL

 

I think that slider does some weird stuff and might affect how fast SL tosses stuff at you. Some stuff - not all of it. I'd really like to know what it regulates so I can set it right.

[AmeliaJ08]

Just now, Fionalein said:

I think that slider does some weird stuff and might affect how fast SL tosses stuff at you. Some stuff - not all of it. I'd really like to know what it regulates so I can set it right.

I believe it has something to do with the signalling UDP packets? not really sure, there's a lot of client-server communication going on though and I assume this is where that slider comes into it.

What people perceive as lag/slowness in SL is usually the asset fetching though which I know has nothing to do with that slider and while LL's asset servers can be a little sluggish sometimes and do handle a lot of very tiny files which isn't ideal as far as maxing out your internet bandwidth it does seem they're normally capable of delivering assets as fast as you're able to download them.

 

[Fionalein]

5 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

I believe it has something to do with the signalling UDP packets? not really sure, there's a lot of client-server communication going on though and I assume this is where that slider comes into it.

I suspect it to do that, and if it does, setting it too high would lead to package loss.

[Flea Yatsenko]

16 hours ago, Jaylinbridges said:

When Brad O was first interviewed one of the key growth strategies was to get the youngest crowd in SL now (16 and over I guess), and let them migrate as they age into the full adult SL with of course desktop computers.  I think most that stay in SL have or will have desktop setups.  The smart phone is just to always be in touch so they don't miss any rumors or parties.  Mobile phone video sex is rather common now, as was phone sex before the internet.  Once the mobile crowd finds out what is going on in SL I think they will be assimilated.  The DD regions should have record growth.  

 

I don't think people realize how bad that demographic is with computers. A lot of them only grew up with touch screen devices. I can't find the pictures or stories now, but there's plenty of content of college students using touch screen keyboards to code, not understanding how folders and files work, taking screenshots with their phones, etc. Current Second Life is completely inaccessible to that crowd, because they don't have the technical skills required to figure it out and they probably don't have a compatible device that runs Windows or Linux since they're probably on Android or iOS. Some of that generation are fantastic with stuff and some are absolutely clueless beyond Android or iOS.

LL is going to have to meet Play Store and App Store rules, the mobile client you download from those stores is going to be neutered based on what content it can access. I am hoping they have a direct download on the website that doesn't have to comply with the regulations on app stores.

[Bagnu]

5 hours ago, WereBeast Alpha said:

My hope is that the app won't deter people to pretend to be an adult like the imvu mobile app. It brought in so many minors on there that lie about their real life age and causes major problems. My biggest fear is SL turning into something like IMVU where there is no protection for legal adults against minors. imvu doesn't have a club on how big an issue that is. Parents these days use phones and the internet as a babysitter instead of being a parent and looking after children's devices to see what is going on with their kids. I don't want to interact with minors at all period. 

I don't want to interact with any  minors at all either, period. All we can do is assume that people are over 18, since SL requires that for signup. It's policy. I don't see why the signup would be any different on mobile than on a PC.

 

[Arielle Popstar]

58 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

LL is going to have to meet Play Store and App Store rules, the mobile client you download from those stores is going to be neutered based on what content it can access. I am hoping they have a direct download on the website that doesn't have to comply with the regulations on app stores.

I don't get why people are concerned about the Mobile viewers not passing requirements for content as there have already been SL mobile viewers in past that were advertised and available on those platforms. The Lab's Mobile offering when it comes, won't be the first to show the content in SL.

[gwynchisholm]

4 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

I do agree though, there is some ludicrously old fashioned/incorrect 'advice' that still seems to infect the thinking of many involved in SL

The hardware recommendations are what get me most, it’s hilarious, people saying you gotta put your SL game cache on an nvme ssd or even a ram virtual drive? I’m not sure if they’re aware of exactly how absurdly fast a ram drive is and how absurdly dumb using that for game cache is. It’s complete overkill, a regular old sata ssd would be more than fast enough for anything like that. Nvme tech has exceeded casual use requirements by a lot, you’d really only see noticeable performance changes with anything more than a decent sata ssd if you’re doing some video editing involving massive files.

Theres a lot of odd recommendations I see like that, which are the most overkill methods to brute force acceptable performance, rather than just wanting the game to be updated to perform better.

1 hour ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

It's the Arc 770. It's not a bad GPU by any means but its old-fashioned OpenGL support is a mere afterthought just as with many AMD cards and SL is famously bad at utilising resources available anyway. Arc is particularly bad at this type of legacy support, it will do it but just as people are finding older DirectX games perform badly it should be no surprise that something as ancient as SL does too, fast OpenGL really isn't a feature of Arc cards and I doubt Intel have put a whole lot of effort into it since it simply isn't a requirement of most users/gamers in the current era.

It reads it as a 1gb card but then will use as much vram as it wants, I just imagine seeing it as a 1gb card is potentially causing issues with the texture memory buffer but I’m not 100% certain. It performs very similarly to how my 3070ti did although on average a bit slower. It just has other weird bugs related to simply being a weird gpu. I kinda expected that though.

There are 16 and 24gb video cards in play these days and SL not really utilizing them well is not great. Where the standard LL viewer I think still caps dynamic texture memory at 512mb? I have gotten firestorm to use 12gb+ of vram before, it’s not hard to do. Black dragon does this a lot better but it also has no idea what the A770 is and presumed it’s intel igpu. 
 

2 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

For somebody complaining about "lack of technical knowledge" in SSL, you are not doing a good job displaying yours.

You’re parroting the same nonsense the rest of the tech illiterate nerds here do and blaming the user for their poor experience rather than questioning why the game performs poorly in the first place. You are the exact example of what I was talking about how I cannot wait for a wave of new users to silence your baseless defense of the poor state of this game and demand positive changes.

1 hour ago, Fionalein said:

I think that slider does some weird stuff and might affect how fast SL tosses stuff at you. Some stuff - not all of it. I'd really like to know what it regulates so I can set it right.

I’ve personally yet to see that slider so much of anything unless you set it too low, like sub 200kbps, at which point it starts loading stuff mildly slower and joining a new location can be slightly slower. Pretty much anything over 1mbps is identical, even setting it to be unlimited with the debug settings. “May cause issues”. Never saw one. It would be better to know exactly what it did and what it affects, and where this idea originally came from that setting it higher is worse. But I suspect that has a similar origin as a lot of other unfounded views on the technical side of sl, someone had a problem, and nobody could figure out the answer, so something else was blamed.

Kinda like the whole AMD graphics card thing. 
 

1 hour ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

LL is going to have to meet Play Store and App Store rules, the mobile client you download from those stores is going to be neutered based on what content it can access. I am hoping they have a direct download on the website that doesn't have to comply with the regulations on app stores.

They’ll likely do the same thing that some social media apps do where you have content filtering settings that can only be toggled on from the website and not the mobile app. Out of the box it’ll be general content only to comply with apples guidelines but provided the more mature content is behind a lock you can’t unlock on the phone, it’s compliant.

[AmeliaJ08]

15 minutes ago, gwynchisholm said:

It reads it as a 1gb card but then will use as much vram as it wants, I just imagine seeing it as a 1gb card is potentially causing issues with the texture memory buffer but I’m not 100% certain. It performs very similarly to how my 3070ti did although on average a bit slower. It just has other weird bugs related to simply being a weird gpu. I kinda expected that though.

There are 16 and 24gb video cards in play these days and SL not really utilizing them well is not great. Where the standard LL viewer I think still caps dynamic texture memory at 512mb? I have gotten firestorm to use 12gb+ of vram before, it’s not hard to do. Black dragon does this a lot better but it also has no idea what the A770 is and presumed it’s intel igpu. 

The Arc GPUs are definitely promising and I'm keeping an eye on them, as you say some teething problems should be expected. I think the reported memory thing is down to it using resizable BAR?

As you say though, SL is just not utilising anything even remotely enough to consider it a fair test of any hardware. We can only hope that there's a re-write sometime that takes into account the fact it's 2023!

 

[Bagnu]

5 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I don't get why people are concerned about the Mobile viewers not passing requirements for content as there have already been SL mobile viewers in past that were advertised and available on those platforms. The Lab's Mobile offering when it comes, won't be the first to show the content in SL.

I see your point.  Having a browser is similar. We can access all kinds of porn on our phones from Chrome or Safari. Sl isn't a porn site, but rather a type of "experience browser". People choose what they want to do. The question is, will Apple and Google see it this way?

[AmeliaJ08]

23 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I don't get why people are concerned about the Mobile viewers not passing requirements for content as there have already been SL mobile viewers in past that were advertised and available on those platforms. The Lab's Mobile offering when it comes, won't be the first to show the content in SL.

Don't Apple have a very specific policy of no adult content apps in the app store? Google I'm not so sure about.

If Google do have an issue then I *think* LL could offer a client for side-loading that doesn't have restrictions but... maybe not, I really don't know enough about the policies at play here. Obviously not an option on IOS though, as far as I know they have that locked down so hard you're not running anything Apple don't want you to.

 

Edited September 4, 2023 by AmeliaJ08

[gwynchisholm]

4 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

The Arc GPUs are definitely promising and I'm keeping an eye on them, as you say some teething problems should be expected. I think the reported memory thing is down to it using resizable BAR?

As you say though, SL is just not utilising anything even remotely enough to consider it a fair test of any hardware. We can only hope that there's a re-write sometime that takes into account the fact it's 2023!

 

If that’s the case that should be reading 4gb. Kinda why speccy does the same thing with any gpu over 4gb, or a lot of old games setting the A770 as a 4gb gpu. SL for some reason sees it as 1gb. Don’t know exactly why.

The only other game I have that does that is GTA IV, which is a poorly done console port and requires DXVK and a special configuration to run respectably at all, where I can force it to see 4gb of vram but it also won’t use the extended memory addressing using resizable bar. Otherwise without dxvk it sees 1gb.

Im not sure if SL and GTA IV are related in that regard or if it’s coincidence but those are the only games that see it as 1gb.

3 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Don't Apple have a very specific policy of no adult content apps in the app store? Google I'm not so sure about.

It has to be behind some kind of content wall and can’t be the core focus of the application. Same way you can use Twitter or bluesky or whatever and see adult content, it’s not toggled on by default.

[Persephone Emerald]

31 minutes ago, Bagnu said:

I don't want to interact with any  minors at all either, period. All we can do is assume that people are over 18, since SL requires that for signup. It's policy. I don't see why the signup would be any different on mobile than on a PC.

The age required to join SL is 16. You should assume youngins will also lie about their age to use SL or access Mature areas of the grid. If people are coming from IMVU, they're more likely to be young, though not necessarily minors. Another thing to understand is that the legal age of consent in many parts of the world is 16, rather than 18, and that even in the US people under 18 can be married. 18 is just not a clear line as to what is considered an adult, though I wouldn't want to be interacting sexually with any teen myself. 

[Ayashe Ninetails]

1 minute ago, Persephone Emerald said:

The age required to join SL is 16.

Unless it changed (which is possible), I thought it was 13 - with heavy restrictions and sponsorship by an educational institution. You're correct about 16+ for General maturity access, though.

Either way, there are already a bunch of teens running around on the grid. My friend's been complaining about that for a while now, though me being a hermit these days, I never notice these things.

As for the mobile viewer, I'm sure the SL TikTok memes will be popping off. The ones on there now are years old and even back then, people were asking if SL had a mobile app and how to gain access. A lot of people confuse it with IMVU and The Sims, which is amusing, but yeah, there's definitely potential to draw in an audience with mobile.

I assume it'll attract all ages. No hopes or fears on my part. I have no need for an app and having one around won't affect my SL one bit.

[Bagnu]

5 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

The age required to join SL is 16. You should assume youngins will also lie about their age to use SL or access Mature areas of the grid. If people are coming from IMVU, they're more likely to be young, though not necessarily minors. Another thing to understand is that the legal age of consent in many parts of the world is 16, rather than 18, and that even in the US people under 18 can be married. 18 is just not a clear line as to what is considered an adult, though I wouldn't want to be interacting sexually with any teen myself. 

Sorry, my error, I thought it had been raised to 18. In Canada, the legal age of consent is 16. But it's murky. A 12 year old can legally consent to sex with someone within 12 to 14. Also, we can have sex at that age, but not look at it.

In Hungary, which is my background by heritage, the legal age of consent is 14.

I agree with you, I wouldn't want sex with any teen. I'll take my ladies 30 and older, thank you very much !!!

[Arielle Popstar]

54 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Don't Apple have a very specific policy of no adult content apps in the app store? Google I'm not so sure about.

If Google do have an issue then I *think* LL could offer a client for side-loading that doesn't have restrictions but... maybe not, I really don't know enough about the policies at play here. Obviously not an option on IOS though, as far as I know they have that locked down so hard you're not running anything Apple don't want you to.

 

Speedlight is already at the Apple store and Google Play and though the avatars are somewhat rudimentary as yet, they are in development to be more realistic. The Lumiya mobile viewer showed complete avatars when it was current and was distributed through Google Play for years. 

[WereBeast Alpha]

59 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

The age required to join SL is 16. You should assume youngins will also lie about their age to use SL or access Mature areas of the grid. If people are coming from IMVU, they're more likely to be young, though not necessarily minors. Another thing to understand is that the legal age of consent in many parts of the world is 16, rather than 18, and that even in the US people under 18 can be married. 18 is just not a clear line as to what is considered an adult, though I wouldn't want to be interacting sexually with any teen myself. 

Big problem with teens lying about their ages on Imvu I fear SL will have to be more proactive when it comes to that issue even with adult regions. 

[Rowan Amore]

22 minutes ago, WereBeast Alpha said:

Big problem with teens lying about their ages on Imvu I fear SL will have to be more proactive when it comes to that issue even with adult regions. 

LL tried implementing age verification for a short time.  Didn't go well so I highly doubt just because they release a mobile viewer, they're going to try it again.