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Tyro Gutter

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Everything posted by Tyro Gutter

  1. I like this, thanks for picking my name a week from now!
  2. Yeah totally. So what typically hampers decent framerates on most sims is no reusing of textures, people using multiple 1024x1024 textures everywhere (more crap for you to download from the sim and render), not using small textures (64x64, 256x256, 512x512, etc.), not regulating the render cost / amount of textures on avatars, and not being aware how object occlusion works; which is basically blocking your line of sight so that the viewer renders fewer things behind an object. There's also other things, but in my experience, those seem to be the most common issues. The reason you may have also gotten such high framerate on the zombie sim is because the zombies probably were utilizing the same texture, so your viewer didn't have to render anything new. Keeping frames high by making sure people are using avatars that aren't render-heavy is a task, but part of that in my specific community is partially managed by militaries having uniform regulation. The RP-aspect of being in uniform accidentally makes it so that someone fighting a military only has to worry about how many extra and unique attachments each fighter has rather than worrying about an entire avatar. Just to give you an idea of how bad this problem can get, it's not an uncommon sight for us to go to an RP sim and see one avatar with more unique textures on their avatar than our entire sim. You'd think this would make our sim ugly or low-res, but the situation is quite the opposite. You also have some other rather weird things that affect framerate. For instance, try having multiple IM windows and UI elements open. You may see a notable impact on clientside FPS.
  3. I do actually enjoy your feedback and responding to what you say until you just devolve into acting more toxic than you accused me and mine of acting. I wasn't lying, I said you can achieve the numbers I was providing with below state of the art hardware. If we're going to guarantee those numbers for everyone on every platform, I think we're going to have to lower our expectations. I appreciate your insight on more of the statistic menu and I'll be sure to review the documentation on it so that I can have a better grasp on what I'm talking about. If you wish to end the conversation, then you have the option to stop conversing.
  4. Do you always pre-empt a potential response by going on a tirade that has nothing to do with the actual response? I am exaggerating about 40FPS and 40 people, but I am not far off. What I'm getting at is you can have a playable FPS, have the sim look very good, and have a substantial number of people on a well-made sim. I do not use a lag-meter to test it, that would be silly. I utilize inferior hardware to benchmark a sim. In regards to physical prims, physics lag is caused by different things than clientside lag or even script run / script-time. All of it is different, and we've made great strides in making all of them playable. What I am talking about is clientside lag; most people making combat sims are not good about reusing textures, tiling things, using object occlusion, or any number of other things to actually reduce clientside lag. I'd be foolish to say I can guarantee 15+ FPS on a ten-year-old rig, but I can say people in my community are capable of making an enjoyable combat experience that doesn't look like a slideshow for large groups of people on relatively dated hardware. In regards to actual Sim Physics FPS and script run, most groups are capable of engaging others without Physics dipping below 35 or 40, and script run sticking to 95%. This doesn't sound especially impressive for most sims, but it is if you have dozens of avatars simultaneously firing weapons with multiple rez nodes each, throwing explosives, rezzing kill-prims, and sending messages to each other. And yes, when I talk about those specifics, I am talking about the diagnostics built into the viewer, not scripted systems liable to make lag worse. I'm not an expert, but I have some knowledge in this topic, and I think you're severely underestimating how well we're capable of maintaining sim performance when a full battle is going on and how well our own equipment functions when the sim cannot perform well enough. Even homesteads perform relatively well under duress when groups with well made equipment are fighting, and homesteads can't perform nearly as well as full sims in combat. We take a lot of this into consideration- when we make a system, usually we'll intentionally utilize an extreme amount of the system to see if the sim lags too much or not. If it does, we change it to be less laggy. Then when it works well, we intentionally cause whatever lag we need to cause to push its functionality to its limit, and if it breaks we either build redundancies or change how it works. Then we do it all again until we're satisfied.
  5. Yes, you can. You don't have to change a single thing with Second Life to make it happen. We've done it before; I've never said that we haven't, I'm saying the projects aren't typically sustainable. SL can give you above 40 FPS, in a sim with 40 people, on ultra settings, if you make the sim correctly. I can pedantically explain why, but I don't have a lot of motivation to engage with you when you insult me when I never intended to come off as condescending or insulting to anyone here. I never suggested making a fundamental change to the viewer or the grid, and I've conceded that there's no reason to have a combat forum unless there are enough people talking about topics that would need to be contained there. Please do not accuse me of poor reading comprehension when you strawman me.
  6. Combat is interesting in SL for the same reason everything else becomes more interesting: user-generated content and virtually limitless* possibilities. Shooters MMOs do not have a great track record lately and one would be significantly more expensive to develop and maintain. Plenty of people in SL are into things that would make other people in SL scratch their heads.
  7. If you're using an intel graphics card, Control+Alt+F1 is one of the hotkeys that will prioritize itself over Second Life's hotkeys. You will need to go and change the hotkeys under the intel graphics utility, I haven't done it since 2014 so I'm not sure how to navigate it or where you may have to go. If not, then it's more than likely Ctrl+Alt+F1 is being used as a system hotkey for some other utility on your computers and Second Life is not overriding it. I would check what programs you have installed (like the intel settings I mentioned) that may be using hotkeys. I realize this may be a bit of necro, but this question never seemed to have a sufficient answer and I wanted to make sure anyone googling this issue in the future may come across this potential solution.
  8. tl;dr I don't know why zombie killing and VICE sims aren't in the destination guide. I believe in order to make an attempt to get a linden combat sim into it would call for a sim, owned by a military or not, to actually feature a well-made tutorial for LLCS , provide equipment just below or equivalent to the basic essentials of most of the military groups on the grid, and have an environment you can't experience clientside lag in. That sim currently does not exist. It might in the future. - I can't speak for zombie combat sims or VICE sims, but I know our LLCS community is very, uh, obtuse to learn because it's so involved just to get started and there's been no sim that really "holds your hand" so to speak. There's no combat developers or refs or GMs that have a directory where you can seek them out for help like RP sims with complex meters do, so learning the ropes is reliant on someone going out of their way to ask, but most of the people asked aren't interested in helping unless those people are willing to get involved with the military aspect of LLCS, which might at a glance seem to be the community in of itself but the idea of picking up a gun and shooting someone on damage land is distinct from an organized body training and equipping people for combat. Just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about, to successfully fight on one of these LLCS sims you need to join a "spawn" group, set your home on a spawn parcel (where you probably did not teleport into,) read their rules to determine which guns, movement enhancers, etc. are allowed, find a gun that is allowed, and then most of these militaries will not fight on equal terms with you because most do not provide equivalent gear in their spawn hubs to their own. And then you need to join a different spawn group, set your home again, and read the rules of each and every different military sim you go to. Even VICE has a respawn system of some sort. LLCS is unintuitive, even the process of setting your home and joining 5+ spawn groups turns people off of the entire practice. Which is also why many people involved in LLCS turn to just being in a military. Aspects of roleplay aside, a military gives you the knowledge you need to operate in the play space, a team to play on, times and places to fight, and (usually) legal equipment to fight with. I do intend to make a well-made "how to get yourself set up" tutorial series for fighting in military-owned sims, I just haven't bothered to do so just yet. There are also efforts by groups to attempt to turn their hubs into mini-tutorials, but nothing has been made that doesn't involve a ton of reading or busy-work that turns off people who just want to arrive to the sim, shoot people, and leave. The kinds of people who do that end up getting banned from most places because they are misconstrued as griefers when they're just unaware that flying around the sim with a very powerful marketplace gun isn't acceptable gameplay. People like me also do not enjoy fighting 1-2 people who are relatively inexperienced; I'm part of a military group because I enjoy team-based combat, so I'm helping contribute to the problem of driving off newer people because we typically do not respond well to them sticking around for an hour or two. Which kind of gets at the core of what is "wrong" with LLCS and the military communities in general. We haven't made a decent sim to get into the destination guide. Every attempt to form some sort of neutral, well represented and fun combat sim fails. People putting money into those projects want to serve their own factions, as is their right, but you have feuds going all the way back to the teen grid and beyond that hamper that level of coordination. Not only that, but many of these people are more into the politics of the community rather than considering how they can make a fun game that not only runs well and is fun to play but is usable at an acceptable framerate (consistent 40+ FPS) for up to 40+ people at a time on hardware that isn't state of the art. So, egos and incompetence is what's stopping the creation of a neutral competitive space that sticks around longer than a couple months. That said, that's me talking about my own sphere. You do have communities that have combative aspects that boil down to going into mouselook and fighting other people, but very often these systems are tied into roleplay sims or something else ... so combat isn't necessarily the first classification they'd prefer under the guide.
  9. We do actually have our own boards, but nothing involving VICE, Gor, DCS2, those guys with the mechs, etc. The problem with the LLCS community is, as you can see here, you have these guys who at best meme-lord about things that make them look cringy or, at worse, bring up internal drama like Parx and Wyatt, so most attempts to create a neutral space on our own in the past have failed. I understand why people on SL would say "Well sounds like a you problem~!" and it is, but I believe Parx is aware of that and it's why he attempted to make a point about a combat forum involving other communities ... and then only proceeded to showcase our community, because he isn't very smart. But as I tried to explain before, most communities integrate combat with something else, so it wouldn't necessarily occur to any of them to showcase their combat in livestreams and videos like we do sometimes. By the same token, we could create a forum for all the combat communities, sure, it's an idea that may have some merit. It actually isn't that hard to set up a nice looking forum, I've helped do it before. We actually have had two forums within our own community that had a registration API where you could only register new accounts by clicking on a box inworld (one still active.) I can't really give you a good reason why no one has not attempted to reach out to people of similar interests beyond Linden combat to involve the other communities in discussions that might be of interest to them. All of that said, I have really nothing else to argue about everything else you said. If you're open to reading about topics of interest to our community, then I'm open to making threads about it and I would implore others to whenever something comes up. If enough threads are made about the topic and there is a positive or negative reception on it, some in the forums may wish for a containment board; like I've already mentioned. I suspect it may be irritating at times to decide whether a specific topic of discussion should be "General", "Roleplay", or "Games."
  10. tl;dr Roleplay sims have combat, but people who remain in SL for combat aren't the same audience most roleplay sims appeal to. Combat subforum might have more merit than you think. Hi I'm the military RP larper who made some of the videos Parx posted attempting to make a bad point. I'm not going to argue that combat play doesn't sometimes intersect with RP, I am going to argue that the topics of discussion and communities attracted to both communities are different. A long time ago, you had many RP communities basically dependent on their desired combat meter of choice, ie DCS2. You still have many communities that are very active that don't make a distinction between combat and RP, such as the Goreans and some of the remaining DCS2-based RP sims; that's where I think some of the questions of redundancy here are coming from. After people argued for approaches to resolving combat in some of these roleplay sims that didn't involve your ability to fight within a meter and the people exclusively on RP sims for the combat on them waned, you had a divergence. Like I said, not every community did this, but I know the ones I gravitated towards definitely did. This was years and years ago. The audience for the multitude of combat communities in Second Life is fundamentally different from Roleplay sims and they're all more complex than games within SL. In many of these communities, you have people starting discussions about rules, balance, technology, groups, etc. I'm not an active participant in the SL forums (this is my first post,) but what kind of reception would I get in the roleplay forum if I began talking about the way my combat group wants to implement shields within ship-to-ship combat in LLCS in the roleplay forum? It's not exactly an appropriate scripting topic either, it's a game balancing discussion. It isn't a game in of itself, it's a discussion revolving around a specific aspect of a "game" in Second Life, so the games forum doesn't seem appropriate either. You might believe that it would only be relevant to the LLCS community, but a combat community using spaceships or one developing vehicles for use in their combat meter may also have something to contribute to that discussion. Same for a discussion regarding rules for movement enhancing devices. Even the combat enthusiasts within GOR would find merit to discussions such as that if there was a topic started about close combat weapons. Any posts would directly benefit the Gorean combat system and how people develop for it and consider its balance. This isn't an interesting topic of discussion for roleplayers, they care about the story, not the combat system they utilize to resolve and explore their story. Things like this are interesting to people like me who remain on SL for its combat. It's a shame Parx only posted videos of people within the SLMC doing combat because you do have very active communities practicing combat daily that I think would cross-pollinate well with one another and with us, but like I mentioned they confuse combat and RP. It isn't a bad thing, because most of these sims are built upon them basically meaning the same thing, but your hardcore RPer who works hard on a character is not the same person as someone on the same sim who knows the ins and outs of the combat meter and has set macros via their gestures to utilize the meter to its fullest potential and earned a reputation on that sim by being a fearsome combatant. That said, you might be thinking I would also want a combat subforum to benefit my own community. The answer to that is yes, that would completely be in my self-interest because I enjoy combat on SL. I don't think that's necessarily valid considering most communities would want a discussion board having to do with their niche in the community to raise awareness about themselves. I also believe highlighting the more positive aspects of the combat communities would add another thing to bring people to SL or bring them back, but I think that's a bit of a longshot at this point in its lifespan. Edit: That said, it has occurred to me that the best way to perhaps highlight the need and desire for what I'm talking about may be to actually incentivize our own guys to proactively make posts discussing what we would like to discuss in potential forums. Maybe people will want to "contain" it.
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