Drayke Newall

Sure maybe when (if) the new cache gets implemented but for now we are stuck with the current cache so saying things like this is pointless and just contributing to the whole mess. Point of the matter is, that when someone uses a texture like Penny posted for one part of the same mesh then uses another texture using the left upper corner for a different texture face on the same mesh object, your gpu, cpu, viewer, everything has to process twice the amount of textures. If the entire one texture contains all the texture for the whole object it's processed once and is only one texture within the cache not 2 taking up less room. You can even use the same texture for 2 objects with each objects texture using a different area of the texture. This is done all the time in any other game or gaming engine. That is the main problem. Using textures smartly will solve quite a lot of the issues. I don't think there was a time when loading into second life when I had a sim designed by myself and another game creator friend, that I saw a texture actually load unless I have been sim hopping, filling up my cache. This was with the entire sim being fully material mapped and using lighting properly (using light textures rather than just ticking light). But then, he made the mesh and textures like you would in a game and I designed it like a game area. The design of the sim we came up with used object barriers (rooms) that gradually moved you to larger open areas giving the viewer time to load everything before you got there. Additionally assets were recycled as were textures. The comments we received all the time was saying the sim didn't reduce FPS, lag and loaded insanely quick. You could have your draw distance set to 32 and because the textures were recycled or used in multiple areas, they were already processed and therefore "popped" in instantly. I'm sorry, that's just a poor excuse for laziness. Download the addon, just like most people have to do with any 3D creation software.

This is supposed to be the case but for some reason doesn't work like this. Also once again it comes down to user editing as well in some cases. For example, you can remove the script sometimes from an object that has the script already performing its function. i.e. texture movement will continue even with the script removed, just don't then copy it. I would be very surprised if the script is still recognised as running if the script is removed. When I did this all indications were that the script load is reduced, though this was a few years ago when I had sim so maybe something has changed. The other issue is the fad now to have a script in every object. How many people that landscape a sim remove the season texture change script from the plant? Instead they keep it in there despite never using it. Sure if you have 2 trees on your sim and you change those its manageable, but when it is 50+ tress the scripts are pointless and would be easier and less time consuming just to replace the tree entirely with the seasonal type. This has already been looked into to some degree. They did release code that makes it so that you render first anything that is in front of you. That said it could definitely use improvements especially to as you mentioned the LOD system which is just to easy for users to ignore or abuse. Once again, a lot falls to the user as they have, upon mesh upload, the option to specify the LOD. This should be done automatically through algorithms by the viewer based on the complexity of the object. The only time is should be user is if they upload a separate set of LOD meshes, but like usual even this will be abused. Also LL should just remove the ability to "rendervolumelodfactor" out of the debug settings. I remember long ago when it was recommended (for some reason) to bump this up to max, but this was when sculpts were only a thing. Now with mesh it is not needed yet users still bump it to max, then complain its reducing performance. Once again whilst a fix in the LOD would be great, at the moment this falls on the user to know how to do this based on LOD levels. The problem we have at the moment is a person can upload a complicated mesh object and give it no to very little LOD. How many people who upload mesh actually go to the trouble of making a separate physics shape? Instead we get mesh that is uploaded where people then find the physics doesn't work properly and so just tack on invisi prims to solve the problem. Look at a sphere. There are 2 ways of making it look circular. You either upload a complicated and high poly mesh and just use that - impacting performance, or you generate the texture on a high poly mesh use smoothing, then upload a lower poly mesh and apply the texture to the low poly object. Both results look perfectly fine. Game creators, use the later texture option, which do you think is more common in SL? People seem to blame the viewer for everything. Cache, sure that's bad at the moment, LOD, sure that can be tweaked. But not everything is viewer based. If I create a game in unreal engine using the same methods some use uploading content to SL, that game will be just as crippling as SL.

There is already a reduction if you load a 2048 image in I think, it reduces it automatically to 1024. As to the texture resize in SL this wont work as it will then rely on the ability to edit the textures. With the "its no-mod cause its my artwork and you have no right to destroy it" craze it just wont happen. Additionally most things are meshed externally now and therefore should be UV mapped properly meaning such a feature would be to much than its worth. On a 1024 texture you should be able to have the entire texture of a full avatar on it with very little blank space. It is about educating the users more-so. Why people still make a ring with a 1024 texture for the band and then each individual gem is beyond me.

When I built my sim, only time I experienced lag was when I tried using multiple moving grass textures. Though that said, prims in themselves have far more polygons than what can be uploaded with mesh. A mesh cube uploaded can have 2 polygons per side and stretch to a maximum size of 64m without any difference in texture sharpness. Whereas a normal prim cube stretched to 64m will have multiple polygons. So I suppose it comes down to how optimised is optimised.

Agree to disagree. Lag is anything that causes a delay between the server and the player. You are using lag in the sense of a typical game of which SL is not. All textures are downloaded from the servers to your computer causing a delay. A normal FPS, MMO etc. wont do this as all assets are on your computer hence the lag seen is solely positional, similar to how there is a lag in SL crossing a region, though this is server side as well as client. The way you talk about slow loading textures is as if they are already on your machine. If they were already on your machine I would agree a slow loading texture in this case isn't lag just your computer not having the memory. But when a high res texture has to transfer to your machine of which it can only then process it, that is lag (the server saying "texture a needs to go in this position, your computer then has to download that texture and position it to that location). The delay in time between your computer and the server is lag. EDIT: This is also what they are currently trying to solve as far as cloud gaming goes. In a Multiplayer scenario for a light client similar to SL the user would have to download everything live. This causes issues as a person closer to the servers can download it faster and therefore process the textures, video, positioning everything quicker than someone a long way away giving them the advantage. It is also why currently only single player games have worked well with cloud gaming or where all data is downloaded first prior to accessing the cloud game. Defeating the purpose of it. Conversely the time it takes for the server to process and send you the image may mean that by the time the image is sent through and rendered you are already dead, not based of positioning or input lag, but purely because the rendered image didn't render in time on your pc from the server and therefore you didn't see the enemy. As far as your issue with 1 gig goes, never had that issue even on the default viewer when it was 512 limit. Once a texture was loaded from my cache it stayed sharp always and never went shifting between blurriness unless there was texture thrashing or my cache size wasn't large enough to keep the textures in there. But then I also didn't have my draw distance at 256 the equivalent of 3 sim loading if standing in the corner of all at the junction piont.

Not really any software can just keep updating. Just gets more complicated code wise finding all the issues to fix. Considering the latest game that uses havoc is Rage 2 and Wolfenstein: Youngbloods released this year alone, meaning 19 years worth of use, I will say its going just fine and not going anywhere. Edit: This is the main thing and is so true. Relying on multiple assets from different creators will just hinder performance. Building an entire sim from scratch creating everything yourself is the easiest way to boost performance anywhere as you can uv map textures properly and reuse textures throughout the design wisely and do certain tricks to help it all.

No, I fully agree. Its why people have asked for SL2 for a decade. But you will be surprised how far an engine can be pushed. For example you say that Bethesda made a new engine. They didn't they simply forked the Gamebryo engine pushing it further by enhancing its graphics system. I've made many a mod for Morowind, Oblivion and Skyrim. Trust me its the same creation engine they have been using for close to 20 years. Its also why I am not going to buy TES VI as they have stated they are still using the same engine.

Of course that's the best way, but we got Sansar instead lol. But whilst it is old it can do what it needs to if done correctly. That said no one uses the Havok engine in SL to its full potential anyway due to other scripting limitations I suppose. When was the last time you kicked a ball in second life that had physics turned on. As far as the other side of physics goes, once again its a user issue not optimising their content. For example, for some reason many people still don't realise that you can set a "none" physics to every single plant on the ground, only having the root prim that can be under the ground as having physics. Doing this helps the sims performance when there are lots of people hitting into the object etc. Instead we still have people that use a special script to turn a single prim in a linkset phantom because its impossible to set a single prim phantom in a linkset it has to be the entire object. Same with mesh, not every mesh needs to be set to Prim, most can be set to convex hull or in some cases none (ie water) reducing the impact.

Which is Penny's point. People need to optimise the content they bring into Second Life. Sure Second Life's engine is old but if things are done right it can look in some cases pretty good in comparison to other modern Triple A games.

I'm sorry, I must say it is a pet peeve of mine that people think FPS is the same as Lag. Its not. Any drop in FPS is solely due to your PC nothing more nothing less. If you don't have a good enough PC to handle game settings then don't run everything on high. This includes shadows and max number of imposters. Now I will say one could argue that the SL graphics aren't well optimised but that will only reduce your FPS. Yes, large textures like 4k will drop your FPS and that is one reason to not use them in SL. Even high end gaming systems cant handle 4k texture graphics for everything even in modern games. Lag on the other hand, in SL's case, is the speed in which the data is transferred over the internet. So @kiramanell I respectively disagree with you. High res Textures do cause lag as does high poly meshes, multiple textures etc. as these are all needing to transfer to your computer from LL's servers. In the case of Second Life, lag would be purely defined as what you say it isn't, blurry textures. If your in a large populated area it can be both FPS and Lag causing the issue. Lag due to the sims slowing down due to the heavy load, including having to download multiple people etc to your home and FPS due to your computer having to render all of those people, objects, scripts etc. As to @JupiterFlambay post, second life is completely different to your GTA 5 game. GTA 5 and all the other games have all the textures on your system ready to go. It's why when you download the game you have a 40gb download if not more now. Second life on the other hand is like an internet browser. You use it to view the content and it downloads all the content each time you visit a new sim (in the internet browser analogy a sim would be a page). This then gets stored in a cache on your system by which each time you revisit the sim (or page) it fetches the relevant data from the cache. This only speeds up the area somewhat. The sim (or page) will still take time to load. /rant

Yeah, though having 2 separate caches like I mentioned would still be good as it will help reduce the disk space usage so 4 gig for the favourite destinations and 2 for the once in a blue moon cache or whatever. Very few will go buying new HHD's just for a second life cache. If Lab just do it as one big cache with now larger textures its not going to be any better than we have now as people will still have a set cache size that will constantly reload. It will just end up as another Linden Lab meme of having no foresight.

This is good news, though wish they would go further with this and make it so that you can click a tick box in the about land or something to save just those decompressed textures for just that sim or avatar textures for just those on your friends list. This would mean that irrespective of whether you run out of your defined cache memory in settings, those sims and avatars are always decompressed and instantly load like any other game, with other sims that you visit once in a blue moon being part of the cache that gets reloaded. In essence 2 caches. One for a favourite content that is always decompressed and the other for content that doesn't have the tick box selected. If this isn't done with the amount of tping people do in a day to different regions, even storing decompressed textures the way you describe Linden Lab as looking into will be no different to what we have now just instead of reloading every day you might get it every two days. Edit: Also to add further to this and to stop somewhat the amount of blurry textures on loading into a new zone, I don't think people would mind if the teleport screen stays on a little longer, sort of like a load screen. This would certainly help in reducing the break in immersion when tping to a new zone. Could also have it so that each region could have its own little loading screen while it loads that is part of the region settings. Far better than a black screen with a load bar.

👍 As does the Salvation Army, Good Will and pretty much every non-profit company. Of course a non-profit companies can make money.

Thanks for that explanation. Certainly is interesting seeing other countries perspectives on ToS's. I'm not sure what it is like in the EU as a whole, but here in Australia it doesn't necessarily require an individual to take a company to court. The ACCC is a government owned body whereby all a consumer needs to do is report the actions to them. They as the government body will then act if they see issue on behalf of the consumer and take the company to court instead. They can also act on their own as well. I would take it the EU is the same. This is also why Steam now offers refunds. Their 2 hour play refund policy was implemented a few months after a court case with the ACCC whereby they were sued due to their ToS declaring no refunds despite Australian law guaranteeing it a necessity. Whilst the 2 hour refund is relevant for other countries, this wasn't enough for Australia and therefore we have a separate refund policy whereby the 2 hour play doesn't exist, so long as the game doesn't perform as expected a refund must be given. Same with Apple insisting their products have to be repaired by Apple. ACCC over ruled this and here anyone can repair a iPhone or the like if they can do the repairs.

Never that simple. If Linden Lab shuts down Second Life as its main cash cow, the company as it stands now would be in trouble. If Linden Lab were to shut down, as a subsidiary, Tilia may also close due to the ties it has with its parent company Linden Lab. Whilst yes Tilia is a subsidiary and a separate company theoretically, it would also depend on how involved the parent company was involved with the subsidiary, I.E. if they were considered as acting as a Shadow Director or had the same board etc.

Sigh.. I run a RL business and use them all the time. I think I know how they work. 😉 But even if there was one still stand by my point all they needed to say is there was one in place and everyone would have dropped asking questions.

Would have to be the quickest NDA creation in history then, with one being prepared, looked over by lawyers on both sides, argued upon and signed off on all in the space of a week. But maybe it did happen. Doesn't matter, it is not illegal or against the terms of an NDA to say "we are under an NDA and cant tell anything further than what has been said". That mere statement in itself would have probably meant this thread would have ended on page 10. Yes, am aware of SLU being VVO but unfortunately with the change over they lost some of that flair they had.

Actually it would be illegal in Australia too not just in the EU and called anti-consumer. If someone pays for a product based on the assumption of a years or month worth of time as indicated by the yearly/monthly Subscription offered by Linden Lab and cancelled, Linden Lab would be required by law to meet the obligations of all subscription inclusions until the paid for time expires irrespective of whether it is called a downgrade or cancel of renewal. This would also be irrespective of what is included in the ToS which I would dare say, in most countries (I can only speak for Australia), the point about loosing something you paid a year for would be probably considered an illegal term within the ToS due to its anti-consumer nature. To be honest even when I had a subscription I didn't even know that the house gets removed as well upon downgrade. As far as legal matters go, it would be a major issue with Linden Lab if in Australia the ACCC found out about this as they would get a court case and a hefty fine for anti-consumer practises. Just ask Apple and Steam about their multi-million dollar fines for thinking USA law applies to EU and Australia.

Oh how I miss reading SL Universe's forums. As you say even if he didn't post on their forums it would have been a hoot to read the reaction thread on those forums to this one. As to the NDA thing, sure maybe for a TPV but for something like this I highly doubt it.

erm... seriously? All that has been indicated by everyone supporting HL has been that they have homesteads with rentals providing a way to get money to pay for a non-profit sim, which as far as all those asking questions and debating in this thread are suggesting, that to their knowledge, is against the NP TOS. How is that not untoward? If this is indeed the case then all anyone is asking is for evidence of such to allow others to know about a way non-profit sims can be supported by the same means. If on the off chance LL are letting them keep their non-profit discount by offering land for "donations" off the linden exchange or are indeed offering them a behind the scenes discount then it is favouritism. This will not sit well with many users, especially non-profit people that have stuck around despite loosing their sims due to not being able to support them financially because they stayed true to the ToS. It also, as mentioned by Kyrah, sets a precedent within the system that allows for abuse. I can't see lab wanting this as all it will mean is someone finding about the loophole and replicating it. Loosing LL profit and even further diminishing their public image. Additionally the very silence on the issue, not by Lab but by HL, is doing the very opposite that HL representatives believe it is by staying silent. They seem to think that staying silent will protect LL and HL from abuse etc., however as proven in this thread it is only making them look like the bad guys doing behind the door discount deals. I hope the place stays open, have been there and it is very well made. But I also don't like people getting preferential treatment. Edit: Its funny, my post on the first page to this thread was about Mark Kingdon when he was CEO. He had a reputation for removing this and that and also showing favouritism to the select few. In his case, business owners. My post was intended as a joke, but if favouritism is being shown again by Lab then I hope it doesn't turn ugly for Lab like it did then. I suspect it isn't Lab doing all this, but prove me wrong.

Poor Autodesk, finally looks to be loosing their monopoly on 3D and animation.

While it is all well and good that you know what is going on and blame others for spreading hate etc., I find it most interesting that we have to personally contact Djehan to find out how they are doing this, when we have the self declared spokesman for HL Lawrence in this thread, which he could easily clear things up by telling us how they are doing this. Not to throw abuse but to see if others can benefit from it. Why are you, Lawrence and others constantly saying it is not your position to say how this is being done. Good grief, surely a way in which other non-profit organizations could benefit from something like this in SL is a good thing. Why is it however, in this thread, it is being treated like a state secret from the cold war that needs to be protected at all cost unless you ask only one person to divulge the info if you have clearance? Edit: damn it Ayela beat me to it. Why isn't reply auto notification working today for me >_>

Good for them, and if this is a loophole or contrary still to the ToS, and Lab still threaten forcing the sims closure I'm sure all those "donors" will be thrilled their money was wasted and went nowhere.

There is no rule for non-profits to not get donations. There is however a rule, irrespective of RL, that in SL you cannot use rental income to pay for sims that have a non-profit discount. The very reason in the first pages of this thread as well as in the NWN blog which, was from an interview with the owner stating that rental income was the reason for the issue (of which suspiciously now doesn't seem to be the case). You can call it what you like, but providing land in SL on a commercial sim to people for payment is income or profit and no matter where it comes from or how its paid (i.e. crowdfunding or linden dollars) you are using the payment for land as a means of supporting your non-profit discount. I take it, seeing as you didn't post any details from Lab saying otherwise, that you don't have any (i.e. approval from labs) and this is the solution you or the owner came up with. When people mentioned crowdfunding in the thread as a means to help payment, I can guarantee they didn't mean keep the non-profit discount and crowdfund for "reward of land". That is just low and a spit in the face to the people that respect the non-profit discount fairly and comply 100% with the ToS. So congrats either labs don't know or they do and you found a loophole, either way just don't come screaming bloody murder and asking again for people to help save HL when labs find out and stop it or the loophole is fixed.

Oh come on, you're going to have to do better than that. You seriously think I posted a question like that without reading all of the posts. You need to either answer the questions specifically or give me a specific post in which you have answered those questions directly. If that is too much to ask, then instead of saying PR gibberish, just say you wont tell. All I can find is you dodging these types of valid and reasonable questions, putting HL in the position of looking shady. For example this is all you have posted: Nothing of which explains how you are circumnavigating Lab's specific rule that obtaining monies for provision of homes (i.e. rental income) shall not be allowed to support non-profit sims. Plain and simply, I cannot see how you can give a parcel of land and state that it is thanks for a donation. That is just cleverly disguised rental payment/income and the very fact you had to place it on a commercial sim points to that very clearly. You are then transferring this "Profit" over to help pay for non-profit discounted sims. Its like the red cross giving preferential treatment for blood to a person that donated the blood or money to them. The very definition of donation is to give WITHOUT reward or expected reward. EDIT: Furthermore, if Labs has specifically provided detail stating that using crowdfunding with reward of the provision of land is not income and complies with their ToS for non-profit discount, can you please post it so as others who are non-profit struggling in SL to keep their sims alive can also benefit from this without threat of closure of their sims etc. from rental income?