Move to client based

[Mistergeaunique]

Can we just move SL to Steam or since SL already has servers, just make us clients and we run off your Servers, this way it would not really matter what computer set up ones has it, just a connection to the cloud of SL, the lag on these sims today is so crazy, can build a house, a club, however can not really party, Synch all home media so I can host a movie night and we all watching the same thing, at the same time. Come on SL, yall been around for a long time, these new 3d 4d game platforms are killing, lets upgrade please. More are going to leave,

Next thing allow your avatars to give away or sell old stuff, like a  yard sale, the creators of some of my old stuff, do not even rock with SL anymore, however, there are things just sitting in my inventory, I know there are avis that can use it. Set up a SL fea market. Yall already have free sims to shop at, how can one give away stuff

[Resi Pfeffer]

3 hours ago, Mistergeaunique said:

just a connection to the cloud of SL

Thats how it works right now already

[Qie Niangao]

I'd guess that the "client" / "cloud" architecture the OP envisioned would use server-side rendering, so anything capable of video could see everything in full detail (but of course the round-trip lag with that architecture is always intense, and rendering is not cheap).

The "yard sale" of old stuff would be obvious IP infringement—at least if one appreciates that all this user-generated content we buy consists of licenses, nothing more, so under the terms of those licenses there's literally nothing to sell without Transfer permission.

The synchronous "movie night" is commonly done already, but with live-streamed media. It would be possible to set up a business that turned any media content into a live stream, multiplexed to as many recipients as are willing to pay for the service. That probably exists, but I can't imagine it's very popular, at least not in SL.

[Solar Legion]

Nearly everything already is on a 'cloud' server. You are asking for Linden Lab to do everything and simply make the client a purely Streaming type (remote PC connection).

How about ... No.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

LL is already on AWS,  that's not cheap, if they add in this rendering side for people on their aws stack,  it will not be cheap nor free for us to use.

[animats]

3 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

The synchronous "movie night" is commonly done already, but with live-streamed media. It would be possible to set up a business that turned any media content into a live stream, multiplexed to as many recipients as are willing to pay for the service. That probably exists, but I can't imagine it's very popular, at least not in SL.

That's how Nuvid works in SL.

1 hour ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

if they add in this rendering side for people on their AWS stack,  it will not be cheap nor free for us to use.

Yes. I looked into doing this as a Sharpview demo. There's a "cloud gaming" industry. It's quite possible to do this. It's not cheap.

• The big player is NVidia's GeForce Live. Technically, it can do the job. You're renting a rack-mounted gamer PC. They'd be running the SL client on their server. The user is basically watching streaming video. After the introductory rate runs out, it's $10 a month; $20 for a better GPU. You get kicked off after 6-8 hours. There's a free tier, with ads, but it's often too busy to get in. On top of that, NVidia demands that logins and payments go through their system and they take a cut. (Also, they wanted US$10,000 up front just to talk to me.)
• There's Shadow PC. Anybody can use that. It's a full general purpose PC with a good GPU in a data center. It's $30-$50 a month after the introductory rate. It's quite possible to run SL on Shadow right now. Then you can play SL on tablets, TVs, etc. Anything with a web browser. Anyone tried that?
• There's Boosteroid. They're about EUR 10 to EUR 18. They were in Ukraine and have a lot of problems due to operating from a war zone. Apparently they have units in Romania and Texas now. Don't know too much about them.
• The offerings from Amazon and Sony are designed for their library of low-end games, and are not suitable for Second Life.
• Google shut down Stadia.

There used to be more cloud gaming companies, but most of them went bust. See Wikipedia for the history.

That's the cloud gaming industry. It does work, but the monthly payments add up.

[BriannaLovey]

9 hours ago, Mistergeaunique said:

Can we just move SL to Steam or since SL already has servers, just make us clients and we run off your Servers, this way it would not really matter what computer set up ones has it, just a connection to the cloud of SL, the lag on these sims today is so crazy, can build a house, a club, however can not really party, Synch all home media so I can host a movie night and we all watching the same thing, at the same time. Come on SL, yall been around for a long time, these new 3d 4d game platforms are killing, lets upgrade please. More are going to leave,

Next thing allow your avatars to give away or sell old stuff, like a  yard sale, the creators of some of my old stuff, do not even rock with SL anymore, however, there are things just sitting in my inventory, I know there are avis that can use it. Set up a SL fea market. Yall already have free sims to shop at, how can one give away stuff

The technological illiteracy epidemic caused by Apple, Google, and now even Microsoft dumbing down their systems to cater to the lowest common denominator is a major problem with consequences we have yet to truly experience.

[Istelathis]

10 hours ago, Mistergeaunique said:

Synch all home media so I can host a movie night and we all watching the same thing, at the same time. Come on SL, yall been around for a long time, these new 3d 4d game platforms are killing, lets upgrade please. More are going to leave,

I don't know if this is an approach you would be interested in taking, or have even considered it, but you can stream from your own PC, I haven't done this in a while, but I did manage to share media using Kosmi, it is a service that some of the TVs sold in Second Life use to share media in such a way. 

Here is a link to the discussion.

I had given instructions to the original poster of how to set it up, although it has been over a year so things may have changed since then.  When I experimented with it, this was a free service, I imagine it may still be.

[MarissaOrloff]

21 hours ago, BriannaLovey said:

The technological illiteracy epidemic caused by Apple, Google, and now even Microsoft dumbing down their systems to cater to the lowest common denominator is a major problem with consequences we have yet to truly experience.

The above powers that be are looking backwards in time when dumb (VT-100 like) terminals are connected to mainframes as the path to the future. Local computing power is just not as important as it used to be for day to day use.

[BriannaLovey]

1 hour ago, MarissaOrloff said:

The above powers that be are looking backwards in time when dumb (VT-100 like) terminals are connected to mainframes as the path to the future. Local computing power is just not as important as it used to be for day to day use.

I know :c

They just want pastures for their cyber-cattle to graze in without having to worry about how any of it works.

[Love Zhaoying]

18 minutes ago, BriannaLovey said:

I know :c

They just want pastures for their cyber-cattle to graze in without having to worry about how any of it works.

It would be cool if you could use cyber-manure from the cyber-cattle as cyber-fertilizer!

[animats]

Some notes on lag, from the perspective of a viewer developer:

The SL servers are rarely overloaded by much.  London City has 60 avatars right now and the server is running around 90% scripts run.

Avatar entrance performance is a huge headache. There's a huge load on a server when an avatar enters a region. This seems to be able to freeze things for as long as a second. I'm watching London City, and when the Main Agents number changes, Sim FPS drops from around 45 to 6 for about a second.

ACCESS, the shopping event, has 55 avatars right now, and shows similar problems. You're walking along and suddenly stop and even move backwards. Bring up the Statistics bar in a busy area and watch the server stats. It's transient loads - everything is going fine, then the Main Agents count changes and Sim FPS drops from 45 to 4 or so. It's worse than London City because ACCESS has very well-dressed avatars.

Avatars not appearing fully remains a big problem. This seems to be servers not delivering the proper updates to viewers. This is why clubs have unwanted naked avatars, and why some get stuck in pink cloud mode. (Viewers show a pink cloud until some basic body parts have been delivered. Unfortunately, that basic body part list is from the pre-mesh avatar era.) It's not clear why this is the case. The sim servers have very little to do with avatar appearance. That's mostly between the viewers and the asset servers. The asset servers are completely independent of the sim servers and have been for years now. Attachments don't have physics, so the server doesn't need to read attachment meshes at all. It does have to read the meshes of non-attachment objects to get the collision geometry. Some of that may be legacy code from the days when the servers did more of the asset work.

Some (most?) of the problems with teleports and region crossings also stem from avatar entrance problems. We've observed for years that the vehicle always makes it through a region crossing; it's the avatars on board that have problems.

Simulator to viewer bandwidth is not the problem here. When you're stuck, the simulator isn't sending the viewer much.

"Cloud gaming" would not help any of this. Intensive attention from LL to bugs in this area would.

[BriannaLovey]

36 minutes ago, animats said:

Some notes on lag, from the perspective of a viewer developer:

The SL servers are rarely overloaded by much.  London City has 60 avatars right now and the server is running around 90% scripts run.

Avatar entrance performance is a huge headache. There's a huge load on a server when an avatar enters a region. This seems to be able to freeze things for as long as a second. I'm watching London City, and when the Main Agents number changes, Sim FPS drops from around 45 to 6 for about a second.

ACCESS, the shopping event, has 55 avatars right now, and shows similar problems. You're walking along and suddenly stop and even move backwards. Bring up the Statistics bar in a busy area and watch the server stats. It's transient loads - everything is going fine, then the Main Agents count changes and Sim FPS drops from 45 to 4 or so. It's worse than London City because ACCESS has very well-dressed avatars.

Avatars not appearing fully remains a big problem. This seems to be servers not delivering the proper updates to viewers. This is why clubs have unwanted naked avatars, and why some get stuck in pink cloud mode. (Viewers show a pink cloud until some basic body parts have been delivered. Unfortunately, that basic body part list is from the pre-mesh avatar era.) It's not clear why this is the case. The sim servers have very little to do with avatar appearance. That's mostly between the viewers and the asset servers. The asset servers are completely independent of the sim servers and have been for years now. Attachments don't have physics, so the server doesn't need to read attachment meshes at all. It does have to read the meshes of non-attachment objects to get the collision geometry. Some of that may be legacy code from the days when the servers did more of the asset work.

Some (most?) of the problems with teleports and region crossings also stem from avatar entrance problems. We've observed for years that the vehicle always makes it through a region crossing; it's the avatars on board that have problems.

Simulator to viewer bandwidth is not the problem here. When you're stuck, the simulator isn't sending the viewer much.

"Cloud gaming" would not help any of this. Intensive attention from LL to bugs in this area would.

If you have tested it, is it also a problem on OpenSim?

[animats]

1 minute ago, BriannaLovey said:

If you have tested it, is it also a problem on OpenSim?

Good question. The Other Simulator has some big events where they go into overload. Have to check out one of those. The code base is totally different, with different bugs. For one thing, avatars are not physical in the Other Simulator.

[Kayla Woodrunner]

On 8/14/2024 at 2:08 AM, Mistergeaunique said:

Next thing allow your avatars to give away or sell old stuff, like a  yard sale, the creators of some of my old stuff, do not even rock with SL anymore, however, there are things just sitting in my inventory, I know there are avis that can use it. Set up a SL fea market. Yall already have free sims to shop at, how can one give away stuff

You can give away or sell some of your stuff. Right click on whatever you want to give away or sell, if it has "transfer" clicked that means you can give it away or sell it. If it has "copy" also clicked, you will be giving away a copy and keeping the original. If it does not have "copy" clicked, you will be giving away the original and will no longer have a copy in your inventory.

You sound a little new so the permissions an object can have is "modify", " copy" and "transfer". That affects what can happen to it once it leaves the creators' hands.

The whole gacha economy was based on the "transfer", "no copy" properties of items. Gachas are called various other things now because gachas became illegal. Now you have to know what you are buying in the gacha machine so the surprise (illegal) element is gone. But people still give away gacha items to their friends and some of them are nice. People still sell gachas all the time. There are places catering to the "yard sale" of gachas. There are also freebie places where people put out freebie stuff for new folks. The freebie places can range from old-school prim stuff that have been given away for decades to new stuff but new stuff is rare.

Some things you shouldn't sell but are ok to give away based on the creator's wishes but that gets hard to figure out once it's several generations past the original. Fapple does a cute dollhouse that you can win items free from letterboards  with transfer/no copy perms but they ask that you don't sell, only give away or trade. Generally speaking (and some people may disagree), if the creator gave it away for free and it's copy/transfer, I wouldn't sell it as is. Giving it away in your turn is usually ok. Some things have notecards stating the creators' conditions.

----------------------

To everyone else, I learned a lot reading some of the replies here. I finally found out the why of the orange cloud. It used to happen to me a lot but not since I got a computer with a nvidia graphics card last year. The card improved a lot of things in general. The better card wouldn't explain server side problems tho.

It would be nice to go straight from orange cloud to fully clothed avatar and skip the naked stage with cyclop eyes on the back of the heads (lel evox heads not being rezzed yet). But since people do have cyclop eyes temporarily, I wonder if that means the classic (bom) clothes on mesh would rez at the same time as the mesh body so they wouldn't be naked on arrival. I don't know a good way to test this tho because if I see clothed people, I assume they arrived before I did.

I also wonder if having jellybean on for other avatars, or having see "friends only" on in a busy sim, makes my avatar impact on entering a sim the same or if a graduated approach helps the server.  I know when I have see "friends only" on, I can dance in a busy club instead of being frozen but I don't know if it helps the sim or only me. Then I can change to see everybody and people start rezzing for me and it's not so bad.

[VenKellie]

On 8/14/2024 at 5:08 AM, Mistergeaunique said:

Can we just move SL to Steam or since SL already has servers, just make us clients and we run off your Servers, this way it would not really matter what computer set up ones has it, just a connection to the cloud of SL, the lag on these sims today is so crazy, can build a house, a club, however can not really party, Synch all home media so I can host a movie night and we all watching the same thing, at the same time. Come on SL, yall been around for a long time, these new 3d 4d game platforms are killing, lets upgrade please. More are going to leave,

Next thing allow your avatars to give away or sell old stuff, like a  yard sale, the creators of some of my old stuff, do not even rock with SL anymore, however, there are things just sitting in my inventory, I know there are avis that can use it. Set up a SL fea market. Yall already have free sims to shop at, how can one give away stuff

uumm maybe you dont get how SL works.
All the mesh, prims, textures and sounds are on the SL servers, that data is sent to your viewer which renders it all and sends that data to your video card so you can see it all.
Linden Research Inc. is working on improving the lag issues and have been trying to do so for a very long time.
If you really have a hard time loading into a region set your bandwidth in your viewer preferences to a good speed, i got mine to the max at 3000 and have no lag issues.

As for Steam. Really? The program to connect to SL is already free and open sourced and getting a account is free so why should they spend $100 USD to put something free on steam?
And yes last checked the fee to put a game on Steam is $100 USD.

Linden Research Inc. already spent alot of money moving SL to AWS's cloud service and have made great improvements to loading times since the days when Philip Linden was coding SL.
Btw Huge hugs to all those working on both the server and viewer code. I tried to learn c++, to confusing for me.

[animats]

11 hours ago, VenKellie said:

why should they spend $100 USD to put something free on steam?

That's not the big cost of distributing through Steam. It's that Steam/Valve insists that all revenue go through them, and they take a 30% cut, which declines to 20% after the first US$50 million. SL is big enough to not need that.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

30 minutes ago, animats said:

That's not the big cost of distributing through Steam. It's that Steam/Valve insists that all revenue go through them , and they take a 30% cut, which declines to 20% after the first US$50 million. SL is big enough to not need that.

they also have this mandate they love to push on developers to use their steam wallet for all purchases.   some companies have pulled back from using steam because of it.   SL was supposed to be on steam at one point, steamdb still shows LL was going to do it.  but I suspect them not wanting to give steam more of their money was the issue.

[VenKellie]

ya im working on a game and NOT going to put it on steam. I'll publish it and distribute it myself. Infact really debating on closing my steam account for good.