What do you think "LL will 'never' Change or Fix"?

[Drayke Newall]

4 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

The main asset database is in the USA, but content is delivered by the CDN "Content Delivery Network", which is a series of REGIONAL web caches around the world.

So when you tp into aome place, and your viewer needs to stream the data for "the really unpopular body almost nobody wears" so it can render that, it streams it from a CDN cache located near YOU, not one in Oregon, UNLESS, nobody near you has requested that recently enough for it to be in the very large cache, when it grabs it from the main data base.

In fact, content was on the CDN long BEFORE Project Downlift, the move to Cloudcrap Oregon.

It's how SL does it, and has done it for quite a few years now. Also, if memory serves, the CDN is run by Akami, not AWS.

Don't take my word for it, why not ask @Beq Janus to explain it to you, or even @animats.

Hey, dont shoot the messenger. Oz and Ebbe mentioned the hosting asset servers on AWS in specific regions. If Oz was wrong so be it however he most definitely mentioned it with Ebbe confirming it in an interview for press when Oz was right next to him.

Maybe it was a case of transferring from Akami to AWS, but as far as I am aware Oz and Ebbe both saw such a move as necessary for SL to improve. So much so they announced it in marketing interviews and what not. Perhaps he was lying or wrong, who knows.

I do know Ebbe and Oz also did mentioned that they MAY be able to also have the regions hosted somehow in different zones (like @Arielle Popstar mentioned) however not as a complicated method but based on simply who uses that region more. For example if the majority of users using a region are located in England then the region is hosted in England. Just like how discord allows you to choose which voice server you are located on, the same is applied to SL regions. This doesn't stop people from US going to the region, however gives priority latency to the users that use the region more. Such a thing is simple to implement and would be a case of having the user select the world zone upon requesting a new region.

Here is the quote from ebbe/oz mentioning such a system:

"Today we are located in the US, which means that people from Australia or Asia or Europe have to travel quite a ways, which is hundreds of extra milliseconds of latency. So if you want to have a very dedicated community in Australia or somewhere, we could maybe start to distribute our server infrastructure to be closer to where the actual customers of those regions are, which would make things more performant."

ETA:

To add to the thread rather than derail it further, one thing LL will never change is the way in which textures are created i.e. create textures in world using shapes like most modern user generated systems use.

Edited October 22, 2023 by Drayke Newall

[bigmoe Whitfield]

5 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Just curious why?

because we have a close nice ecosystem here and tons of us trust just LL to do the hosting and hold onto our assets.

[AmeliaJ08]

57 minutes ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

because we have a close nice ecosystem here and tons of us trust just LL to do the hosting and hold onto our assets.

Asset server and simulator can be different things though, it would be possible to keep assets protected while allowing self hosting... well, if they wanted to.

[animats]

8 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

 the CDN is run by Akami, not AWS.

Akamai server map. Each of those locations has a big cache.

Viewers usually run out of JPEG 2000 decoding compute capacity or local network bandwidth before they hit the limits of the asset server network.

Long avatar rezzing delays, especially after teleports, are a bug. LL has been working on that, and there have been test runs after Tuesday's Server User Group meetings where everyone present teleported to a test region running new simulator code. There, nobody stayed in pink/white cloud mode for more than 2-3 seconds. Things not appearing at all is also a bug. Those are called "interest list" problems. Monty Linden is working on some fixes to the networking level which may help there.

These are not network traffic problems. If you watch network traffic, these bugs show as low traffic levels, not high ones.

LL seems to be working hard on this. The motivator seems to have been a new emphasis on the WelcomeHub and new user retention from Linden Lab management. The WelcomeHub has enough traffic, especially when Motown has an event, to bring out most of those bugs. If new users encounter serious bugs in their first hour, SL looks broken and loses business.

After years of waiting for fixes in this area, there is progress.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

44 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Asset server and simulator can be different things though, it would be possible to keep assets protected while allowing self hosting... well, if they wanted to.

Only way this will work is if the simulator server image that can be self hosted is locked/encrypted at a hard set level to stop any and all tampering, then it's viable, otherwise,  nope, not going for it at all.

[animats]

9 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

Only way this will work is if the simulator server image that can be self hosted is locked/encrypted at a hard set level to stop any and all tampering, then it's viable, otherwise,  nope, not going for it at all.

There's some work in that area over on the Other Simulator, involving "perceptual hashes", a way to determine if one mesh is very much like another. SL Marketplace could use something like that.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

2 minutes ago, animats said:

There's some work in that area over on the Other Simulator, involving "perceptual hashes", a way to determine if one mesh is very much like another. SL Marketplace could use something like that.

that would be one step in the right direction,  see I like reading about such things from you.

[animats]

6 minutes ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

that would be one step in the right direction

There's an initial implementation for the Other Simulator. Haven't tried it. It was at one time associated with an NFT scheme of some kind, back when NFTs were a thing. It's one of those things where you look up the subject and get interesting theory papers, but not success stories.

[Prokofy Neva]

I've been keeping a list I intended to blog about called "all the little annoyances" that LL has never changed or fixed over the years, despite that grand trajectory from "avatar foot shadows" (the phrase we came to use for LL's exoticisms in the face of common dysfunction unfixed) and now "PBR" which isn't a beer brand but a shiny.

Yes, I'm aware some of these things could be caused by "my computer" or "my Internet connection" (wireless). Except even when I temporarily ditch the wireless and plug in directly to the Internet cable, it doesn't seem to change. I have gotten various different computers over the years -- they don't change.

I don't mean Group Chat lag -- that's got a simple fix called "Discord". I mean things for which there are no workarounds.

Web Site
- Every time you try to log in or change accounts, you get the 502 "Bad Gateway" message

Log-out
- Task Manager has to be used to end SL sessions as log-out simply jams and never works. (This was recently acknowledge and fixed; it has been fixed in the past and breaks).

Groups
- You cannot search by pasting in a name from a transaction or chat; you can only type the first few letters, and often you have to figure out the system name for that, pawing past people's names with strange characters.

- When you shift tier around, the groups do not update immediately, lag out, and sometimes never update. So you think you have tier when you don't. It shows the tier of another group in the window of the next group. You try "save"; you try "clear group cache" -- you relog. It may or may not finally kick in.

Map
- Infohubs has been removed from search. Yes, it has. Go and look. This is ridiculous, and it's not even to drive traffic to the Lindens' new shiny welcome areas in Bellisseria, because some of those don't appear, either.

Infohubs
- You can no longer set home to many infohubs, though the error message when you attempt this says you can "only set home on Linden infohubs on the Mainland" -- and it doesn't work although you're standing on one (must be confusing to newbies). Some infohubs do work (Ambat); others don't (Ross).

Objects
- There's always a 5-second lag when you click on "edit" mode, you have to click and wait to edit. No, I do not have packet loss.
- The edit menu opens OVER the object you are trying to modify, blocking your view. While you can tear off this "toast" and push it to the side, it won't stay put even during one log-on session. I once directly asked a Linden responsible for UI stuff about this in person at a meet-up and he literally laughed in my face, which baffled me, but perhaps he thought it was completely outlandish and certainly for him it was "not on my machine."

Debug
- When you raise to 4.00 or higher the option for RenderVolumeLOD, it won't save -- there isn't a way to save it as before, like many text options on the viewer, it does not just saved automatically.

Land Menu
- Group members cannot see the list of names of prim owners with the prim count or land impact. This seems strange.
- Donate tier with deeding of land has dropped out often; you keep refreshing, trying again, it doesn't push through.

- On homesteads, when you reset the telehub and also click to make a landing on the parcel where the telehub is, it doesn't change the *map*. If you search and teleport via the map, you land at 128/128/0. 

Teleporting
- Often after a teleport, you cannot make a landmark. You have to walk around for some minutes away from the landing before you can finally make an LM. The system is still seeing your previous location.

- When you land on a sim, the red beacon taking you to the landing point or SLURL stays on, presumably in the belief that you need to walk the rest of the way and hone in on the target. Yes, you can click a button to hide it, but it should go away after 60 seconds and not make you do it, because most of the time you don't need it.

Chat
- When objects or other activities (like teleporting) chat out something, they keep blinking on the task bar. They should chat once, blink, and shut up. 

Search

I've spoken about this many times, it has only somewhat improved after intensive gyrations on it, but basically on the regular viewer it has two fatal flaws: 1) only 5 returns on the visible screen with a big, soggy, space interface; 2) including the names of sims in the search which you don't need, as you are not teleporting to a sim but a place; if you want just a sim  you can use map search; 3) you must page dozens of pages to find even an exact term in closed quotes; 4) exact term searches even in closed quotes have parts of the name showing up on other location with parts of the same name. "Rentals" is particularly arbitrarily. This obviates the point of paying 30L per parcel per week to be in search/places because...you aren't.

Once again, let's not explain this away with "packet loss" -- I don't have it -- or "wireless" -- which I have had or not had over the years and have also gone around with plugging the computer directly in. Over the range of computers and graphic cards I've had for nearly 20 years, I don't think you can explain these things away. 
 

[Prokofy Neva]

On 10/19/2023 at 2:35 PM, KanryDrago said:

I gave up posting after getting a 3 day in game ban for a mild insult to an idiot. All I said was the only difference between him and plankton was he was taller

Speedlight works great. I don't need LL to make a mobile viewer. 

[Perrie Juran]

Linden Lab will never make the Camera Floater resizable in the Official Viewer.

[Lindal Kidd]

It will always rain and snow inside buildings.

[Love Zhaoying]

4 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

It will always rain and snow inside buildings.

Good one! I had a large build with a rooftop pool, that would always leak into the building.

LL will never add proper physics to particles!

[animats]

1 hour ago, Lindal Kidd said:

It will always rain and snow inside buildings.

Hm. I wonder if particles could be made to stop at reflection probe objects. Those sort of indicate "outside world ends here". Something to think about after full PBR deployment.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

On 10/19/2023 at 11:38 PM, Marigold Devin said:

LL will never reduce tier fees.

And mainland tier has been reduced. And you can now buy homesteads without owning a full sim if you're Premium Plus. And you can pay tier with lindens, without selling them on LindeX.

Edited October 25, 2023 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Love Zhaoying]

23 hours ago, animats said:

Hm. I wonder if particles could be made to stop at reflection probe objects. Those sort of indicate "outside world ends here". Something to think about after full PBR deployment.

On a simpler note, why wouldn't particles just stop when colliding with anything that isn't "phantom"?

Particles stop when colliding with ground or avatars currently, correct?

[Love Zhaoying]

2 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Thanks, a couple of us corrected Marigold earlier but didn't give the "deets"!

[Wulfie Reanimator]

3 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Thanks, a couple of us corrected Marigold earlier but didn't give the "deets"!

LL will never give us deets. 😔 (lie)

[Love Zhaoying]

5 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

LL will never give us deets. 😔 (lie)

Exactly, and part of the point with this thread.

About 1/2 the posts are "This will never happen" and it's true.

About 1/2 the posts are "This will never happen" and it's false, because we like to complain.

I think this was my intention with the thread!

[Zalificent Corvinus]

23 hours ago, animats said:

Hm. I wonder if particles could be made to stop at reflection probe objects. Those sort of indicate "outside world ends here". Something to think about after full PBR deployment.

I think, if you actually examine the problem in a logical manner, that the ROOF and WALLS are much better indicators of "Inside and Outside", than the optional reflection probes most people probably won't be using for at least half a decade ( based on how long it took for people to really start using ALM./materials ) after PBR is rolled out as a broken kludgey mess.

 

Just add an option to have particles collide with with the physics model of non phantom objects, it's almost certainly easier than messing with reflection probes.

 

[Love Zhaoying]

43 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Just add an option to have particles collide with with the physics model of non phantom objects, it's almost certainly easier than messing with reflection probes.

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

On a simpler note, why wouldn't particles just stop when colliding with anything that isn't "phantom"?

Make a note! We appeared to agree on something!

 

[Jaylinbridges]

1 hour ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Just add an option to have particles collide with with the physics model of non phantom objects, it's almost certainly easier than messing with reflection probes.

I have falling leaves from trees that already bounce off of any non-phantom object, and cannot pass through any solid non phantom object.  The leaves need to be physical of course.  So this is nothing new.

 

[Love Zhaoying]

2 minutes ago, Jaylinbridges said:

So this is nothing new.

..but they aren't "particles"..(assuming).

[Marigold Devin]

3 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

And mainland tier has been reduced. And you can now buy homesteads without owning a full sim if you're Premium Plus. And you can pay tier with lindens, without selling them on LindeX.

Oh I do stand corrected.

 

[Jaylinbridges]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

.but they aren't "particles"..(assuming).

No, they are physical and temp objects. The leaves only rez and fall once a second, and derez in 1 min. Each leaf is 1 prim.  That's not many snowflakes, so the rez rate would need to be much larger. Assuming the ground already has a snow cover texture, the derezz time could be shorter.

More practical would be to sub divide the building into its own parcel, and set it to no object entry for non group members. Then use a non-group alt for the snow generator owner.  The particles should stop at the parcel boundary around the house.  Of course the roof would never get snow landing on it.  Probably a simpler problem than accurate mirrors though.

Edited October 25, 2023 by Jaylinbridges