[Does Linden Labs Not Care About Secondlife?]

1 hour ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

Mobile's got a different demographic anyway, really, so who knows how they'll react to something like SL.

Excellent point. I'm curious to see how that plays out.

[Does Linden Labs Not Care About Secondlife?]

I think we're seeing a cultural difference here.

People who buy games are rather intolerant of bugs. Read some game reviews. New games only get one chance to succeed, and if they make a bad first impression, they die an early death.

Metaverses start slowly and grow over time. Not  just SL; look at Roblox's user history. Roblox is almost as old as SL, and it grew very slowly. It just didn't stop growing.

SL is getting more users from the gamer community. They're applying game quality standards to SL. This leads to angry postings here, and a huge number of new users who just give up. Linden Lab is used to having a very patient user base, tolerant of bugs. But they've already acquired the user base who will put up with the immersion-breaking bugs and the lag. Users with game experience expect those problems to be fixed before release.

A typical pro reviewer comment on Cyberpunk 2077's initial release, from Gamerant:

It is fair to say that Cyberpunk 2077 promised much, and it was sadly unable to deliver on all of those promises. ... Amidst the problematic graphics, game-breaking glitches, and occasionally unreliable gameplay, Cyberpunk 2077 lost the goodwill of a lot of fans. The launch was considered so disastrous by some that Sony even pulled the PlayStation version from its stores and offered full refunds for unhappy customers shortly after Cyberpunk 2077's launch - although it has since returned. CD Projekt Red certainly had a lot of work to do to ensure that the game was up to scratch, but in fairness to the studio, it has been willing to put in the time and effort to deliver the kind of game fans were expecting in the first place.

From Polygon:

The game landed with a dull thud, the stark reality of which could be blamed on any number of factors called out by reviewers and players: plodding cyberpunk gameplay, the general emptiness of the world, and a lack of compelling narrative. Over all of this loomed a series of technical problems that quickly transformed Cyberpunk 2077 into a generator of glitchy memes and exposed a rushed game produced under distressing crunch conditions. Substantial performance errors prompted its removal from Sony’s PlayStation Store, and the intervening months have been a slow crawl of CD Projekt fixing, adding, and tweaking the game in incremental updates — an extensive bid to bring it in line with its marketing promises.

That's what it's like in the cold, hard world of game reviews. When SL launches on mobile, Linden Lab will start hearing from a community like that. Loudly. This will be a learning experience for Linden Lab management.

 

[Club viewer overload]

11 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

Either their mesh body cannot be downloaded (corrupted/missing file on a CDN server ?), in which case the viewer should log it as a warning, or they are simply not truly wearing the mesh (like I explained about people TPing away before their outfit has fully loaded and their avatar has fully baked).

Not sure. Server User Group is cancelled this week, so I wasn't able to bring it up there.

Keep trying to figure out what's wrong. Right now it's too vague to file a JIRA.

I suspect that debugging this properly would require LL to send a hundred well-dressed bots to a region on the beta grid for load testing. Still, that's the price of success. At last, SL is getting crowds, and they almost work. This is a major win for SL.

[Big world impostor test, 128m.]

35 minutes ago, OptimoMaximo said:

They intend to extend Nanite to many levels of the DAG.

And to flexible/rigged mesh, says one source.

I should try it out. I don't use UE; I just installed it once and ran some of the demos to see what it was like. I really like their vehicle system.

[#THAPLUG Is Looking For Realtors 🔌]

Note that REALTOR® is a trademark. Best to use a generic term, such as real estate agent.

[Let me ask it this way…]

On 8/6/2023 at 2:01 PM, bigmoe Whitfield said:

Do you think 16 gigs of Ram is good?

After watching memory usage pass 17GB in a club with 90 avatars, it looks like in this new era where SL has crowds, you need 32GB to go to the busy places.

[Club viewer overload]

12 hours ago, Rachel1206 said:

1. Arrive as first or among the first in a busy club/site.

All arriving will rezz correctly, at a busy site this of course can take longer.

2. Use low graphic setting as i.e. default and start with low draw distance like 16 meters.

Now that makes sense if it's an interest list startup problem. If you're there first, or you gradually increase your draw distance, that seems to be something the interest list system can handle. It's that sudden jump on arrival that breaks the interest list.

8 hours ago, Ardy Lay said:

"Best-Effort" traffic is pretty much the first to be discarded when a queue's capacity is exceeded, and that happens constantly on the very "bursty" Internet.

This doesn't look like a UDP overload or packet drop problem. It's too repeatable. The same avatars show up broken on successive logins.

I don't normally get any lost packets from SL. I have gigabit fiber from Sonic, which is far more bandwidth than SL needs. Even if UDP packets are lost, the important ones are supposed to be re-transmitted unless the server gets way behind.

Child prims not appearing on the interest list is a known bug. I've demonstrated that at Hyperion a few times. There's one big building which is a huge linkset. Parts of it frequently fail to appear. The same parts.

[Bellisseria and the Land Ban List]

On 8/6/2023 at 7:30 AM, Abnor Mole said:

On a side note, in the years since the launch of Bellisseria and the security orb policy there my own personal experience when traveling across mainland has been with a notable reduction in the number of security orbs I encounter that teleport people home with no warning.

I've noticed that, too. I can usually fly over Satori, Zindra, and Corsica. Central Sansara, the oldest part of Second Life, remains a security orb headache. Especially on waterways.

[Road Trips]

That's a good map.

If you haven't driven much in SL, I recommend Robin Loop for practice. There are several car dealers towards the southeast end of Robin Loop, in Burns and Neumogen. They all have free demo rezzers. Rez something and drive around Robin Loop. (Avoid the track cars and drift cars; they're tuned all wrong for Linden roads.) Once you've mastered Robin Loop, you can go anywhere.

[AWS to start charging for IPv4 addresses.]

7 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

Inevitable or not, popular or not, it is, for now, impossible to migrate to an IPv6 only service for any public facing Internet service: the end users are just not yet all able to deal with IPv6, and it would cause the said service to loose an enormous amount of users... Things will change when, say, 95% of end users will be able to do IPv6 (then the pressure on the remaining 5% will be so high that they won't have another choice than to migrate their hardware to IPv6).

Note that, in the mean time, and to avoid AWS IPv4 fees, LL could perfectly route all the AWS servers IPv6 traffic via their own, in-house router with IPv4 public facing interface. Then they could manage their own IPv4 block at lower costs.

Of course, it means adding a bottleneck for the sims traffic, but since the latter got lower over years (with migration to CDN servers for textures, meshes and inventory assets, which was a Good(TM) move, unlike the AWS one), this might not be too much of an issue... To mitigate this bottleneck, LL could also add IPv6 support to the viewer, and then users able to do IPv6 would directly connect to the AWS servers, while the rest would go through LL's ”private” IPv4 router.

What complicates this is how region servers tell the viewer about adjacent regions. At login, the login server tells the viewer the IPv4 address and port number of the initial region over an HTTP connection. After that, whatever region you're in tells the viewer about nearby regions. That's done by sending an IPv4 address and a 2-byte port number. The viewer then connects and starts talking.

LL seems to have done some prep work for conversion to IPv6. Some of the UDP messages still have 4-byte IP addresses in them.  Search that file for "IPADDR". But almost all the messages with an IPADDR do not go out to the viewer, or were listed as "deprecated" or "blacklisted" long ago. The main messages that still have an IPADDR are SimulatorPresentAtLocation and KickUser. That's low-bandwidth data and could be moved to the HTTP event poll channel and sent in LSL, which allows variable length binary fields. It looks like about six years ago someone started on IPv6 conversion, but the job wasn't finished.

[SL Estates are gone]

How much money are we talking about? If it's less than a few hundred dollars, it's probably not worth bothering.

You could sue the landlord. If necessary, you can get the court to issue a subpoena on Linden Lab to force them to disclose the identity of the other party.

California self-help guide for this: https://selfhelp.courts.ca.gov/small-claims/trial/supoenas

An interesting question is whether you can sue them in California regardless of where they are. The landlord is a "business", and since they use Second Life, which is a California operation, they could be said to be operating in California. Talk to a lawyer. There are free phone legal advice services.

[Club viewer overload]

I agree that there's a viewer-out-of-sync condition, but I'm not clear on why. This isn't a long-term network overload problem - that scene settles down into low network traffic while looking wrong.

Second Life is supposed to be what's called eventually consistent. That is, if server and viewer are out of sync, they're supposed to get back in sync eventually, or something has broken. Unfortunately, the theory of eventually consistent systems wasn't well worked out until the mid-2000s, and Second Life pre-dates that. (Look up "Merkel tree" for the theory.)

There are a few known holes in this. First, there are "reliable" and "unreliable" UDP messages. "Reliable" ones are re-sent if lost. But they are only re-sent a limited number of times before the sender gives up. Second, even if the actual network isn't losing any packets, both sender and receiver will deliberately drop UDP packets under overload, trusting in the retransmission system to send them again. Packets may be dropped on the receive side because updating is using too much of the frame cycle and the frame rate is dropping. This is why you can see a nonzero packet loss rate even on gigabit fiber. It's a desperation measure in single-thread viewers. So it's possible to lose even "reliable" messages.

Unclear if that's happening here. I suspect not, because it happens to the same avatars on repeated logins. This class of problem is very timing dependent.

Quote

It's an extension of the SAME problem that has buildings and objects not rendering when you log in or TP some place, sometimes for several mins, sometimes never, the whole "interest list transmission failure" thing.

The interest list being out of sync after login/TP is a different problem, unrelated to networking. When you first connect to a region, the viewer tells the server where it thinks the camera is. Then the server overrides that, moving the avatar based on last position, landing points, ban lines, land elevation, and solid objects. There's a brief period during which the server is sending object updates based on the original camera position. Then it switches to the actual position, and sends object updates from there. That sudden lurch seems to mess up interest list generation. I've seen this in both Firestorm and in my own Sharpview viewer, for the same objects.  In Sharpview, I put in a 2 second delay after login before requesting object updates, which seemed to work around that problem. I've mentioned this on the forums and discussed it at Server User Group. It's a recognized problem, but apparently hard to fix. Groans from the Lindens when interest list issues are mentioned.

Now that might be it. When you log in at "Last" position, the viewer has no idea where "Last" is. The server knows, and puts you there. The viewer's first guess for the location is arbitrary, probably the center of the region.

Interest list issues of this type tend to be repeatable. The same objects fail to show up on repeated logins. That's what's happening here with the missing heads.

In Sharpview, I put in a 2 second delay, after login, before sending the RegionHandshakeReply message, which starts object updates. That seemed to work around that problem. Someone working on one of the C++ viewers might want to try that. It's a hack, not a fix. If changing that timing affects avatar damage in crowded regions, that tells us what the problem is.

[Club viewer overload]

It's great that the sim side can now handle 90-100 avatars in a club. At last, we have crowds.

Avatar rendering, though, breaks down. I'm at a club with about 90 people. Firestorm is at 50-90 FPS in "Ultra". Memory usage 22GB system, 7.3GB in GPU.

Some avatars load without clothes, eyes, or hair. They never load properly, even after minutes. Network traffic drops to almost nothing. Somewhere, important updates got lost. Doesn't seem to be a BOM baking delay - tatoo layers show up, but eyes are missing. Some heads are on backwards.

Firestorm 6.6.8. We have a problem.

It's not Firestorm. This is the LL viewer 7.0.0.581125, Windows 64-bit, running under Wine on Linux. The same avatars are broken.

 

 

 

[Big world impostor test, 128m.]

Quote

Nanite, on the other hand, is a per pixel analysis, and it's not good for everything. Basically what it does is to see whether a triangle is smaller than 1 pixel on screen and, if it is, collapses it.

I tried using Nanite, but after installing Unreal Engine 5 on Linux, UE5 complained I needed an NVidia graphics driver version that didn't work yet to use Nanite. That was last year; I should try again, now that NVidia driver version 535 is finally working.

There's a hour long SIGGRAPH presentation on Nanite. That's useful. You're right, though. Hierarchical instancing isn't in Nanite yet. They do have "tiny instances", but, as the designer says at 40:45 into the video, instances of instances of instances are not implemented yet.

Quote

Nanite is only good for environment nature objects like rocks and cliffs

Most of the Nanite demos are like that, but it also seems to work for repetitive building faces, as seen in the "Matrix Awakens" demo. At some point I should upgrade a computer to 64GB and see how they do that.

Nanite probably wouldn't help Second Life much, except for terrain. And I've previously pointed out the stupidly clever trick that can hide repetition in terrain. So you can have high-detail grass and dirt without big areas looking tiled. That's a shader trick; the GPU does all the work. Some of the graphics Lindens like that trick. Simple, will work on ordinary textures, and more appropriate to SL.

Now that I've bored everyone who isn't a graphics programmer, I will shut up for now.

[Introducing Senra Avatars... what do you think?]

10 hours ago, diamond Marchant said:

I am discovering that Senra Jamie ...  with the free Lelutka Raven head

Oh, so the Senra avatars work with other heads? Is that correct? A new user asked me that and I didn't know.

[Big world impostor test, 128m.]

5 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

But there is also the problem of lighting... Building impostors would have to look differently between night and day (and sunset and sunrise), and the lighting would have to match the environment settings chosen by the end user

Yes. GTA V cheats.

GTA V, incorrectly using a full night impostor image behind a scene lit at dusk. Did you notice that they cheated?

Everything beyond the bridge that goes from left to right is from a background image that's for full night. Notice all the lights. The rendered parts of the scene don't show bright lights, because they are sunlit and it's not full dark yet. This is a graphics cheat. Even critics of GTA V graphics, of which there are many, don't seem to notice this.

I'd be tempted to make background images for noon, sunset, midnight, and sunrise. That covers most of the cases. Maybe do a slow cross-fade between two of those textures as the day progresses. Have them updated once a week or so by a bot that flies around taking pictures. Like the SL map, the distant backgrounds will sometimes be a little out of date. Only mainland and estates bigger than four regions need coverage. Private sims have no visible distant neighbors, so they never need a bot visit. This is a relatively easy cheat, and there's a big payoff.

(Yes, it's not perfect. We cannot yet have Hollywood-level rendering for SL. That's not technically impossible for games. Look up the Unreal Engine V "Matrix Awakens" demo. This is the current upper limit of game rendering. It  takes a lot of preprocessing. Hours of crunching. If you have a big enough computer, you can download Unreal Engine, build Unreal Engine, download the Matrix Awakens demo, build the demo, and run it. This requires a computer with 64 GB RAM, about 1.5 terabytes of free disk space (preferably SSD), and a graphics card in the thousand dollar range. Building requires hours of compile time. Then you see a 4km x 4km city with fine detail, which you can explore. The basic trick is that not only are there many copies of the same thing, those copies contain sub-copies. All those copies are merged, so only one copy is in memory.  If you see a building with many windows, each window shares the same triangles with other windows. This is called Nanite. It's very clever, and it's all based on carefully hand-optimized and preprocessed scenes. We don't have that option in SL, of course.)

What we can do is get SL to look like 10 year old game technology, which is where GTA V (2013) is. LL's conversion to PBR is a good first step. Vulkan will help even more. I have both in Sharpview now. I'm experimenting here with further steps.  This is all about being able to see something in the distance that gives you a sense of place in the world. Right now, you can see the end of the rendered world in SL. Big-world games got past that over a decade ago. So SL looks broken to gamers. Read some game reviews. Reviewers are brutal on graphics errors.

Enough on rendering theory for one day. Go play around in SL and enjoy.

[Big world impostor test, 128m.]

29 minutes ago, CandyCole said:

I wish I could say that I understood what an 'impostor' is, but I have no idea. I was lost at the title.

An impostor, in this context, is a simplified object that, at distance, looks like the real thing, but takes less computer work to draw.

Here's an image from Grand Theft Auto V.

https://www.kitguru.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/GTA-V-PC-2-e1427483637185.jpg

Nice house. A good SL creator could make a house like that in Second Life. SL can handle that kind of detail. What it can't handle are those long vistas in the background.

There's a trick here. You're seeing a 3D model of a house against a background picture. If you look carefully, you can see the transition, behind the house. The background is softer and a bit blurry, and dims into haze. Only a small part of the world is shown in full 3D.

It takes more than that to do a big world well.

GTA V tourism. No violence, just a long quiet drive. This gives you a chance to watch the graphics system at work. Watch what's happening out at the limits of how far you can see.

Things to notice:

• You'll see those softened, slightly blurred images in the distance everywhere. Some places, you can see to the horizon, but it's hazy far away.
• As you get closer, there will be a transition from a background image to 3D. The transition takes about a second, so it's not  jarring and you rarely notice. During the transition, the object coming into range gets shadows and shinyness. SL does not have this feature.
• As objects get closer, more detail appears. SL has this, but it's up to creators to create good levels of detail. SL supports four levels of detail, but only in a few places, such as New Babbage and Crack Den, will you see that feature consistently used properly. (That's because New Babbage, SL's steampunk city, has building inspection.) Also, GTA V, like most games, makes level of detail transitions as slow fades, not sharp cuts, which makes them less noticeable.
• Other cars appear and disappear in the distance, about 250m out. The 3D world is not that big. SL does this in pretty much the same way
• Much artistic effort went into making everything look good in GTA. There were art directors to pull it all together. There are many carefully placed impostor images in GTA. We don't have art directors for SL, and have to do it automatically. It helps that it's rare for complex objects to cross region boundaries in SL. So placing impostor images at region boundaries is a reasonable compromise. There will be places where that won't look quite right, but it's better than having the world just tail off into empty space or water.

To summarize, SL could potentially look almost that good. This technical discussion is about part of how to do that. Impostors are part of it. Levels of detail are part of it. Smooth transitions are part of it.

There's been considerable improvement over the last few years. Linden Lab started hiring more video game developers who've done this sort of thing. GTA V is a decade old, and this stuff is well understood. Getting SL up to the GTA V level is quite possible.

I do technology demos to push on what's possible, despite the limitations of SL content and servers.

[Big world impostor test, 128m.]

One of my ongoing projects  for Sharpview - automatically generated sim surrounds for distant regions. This is a simple test. The goal is to create the illusion of infinite draw distance.

Looking into the next region, ultra mode. This is in Morris on the beta grid, looking into Bonifacio. Firestorm. 128m from region edge.

Faking it in Sharpview. Those buildings in the distance are just a flat picture of the next region. 128m away.

The picture is on a big prim I set up at the edge of Morris on the beta grid. This is in Sharpview, and the distant mountains in the background are a surround I have built into the viewer for now. This is just a proof of concept image.

The concept here is that the viewer would draw the nearest four regions only. So you're always at least 128m from the edge of the world. More distant regions are just flat surrounds. The idea is to have a database of surrounds, like map tiles, updated once a week or so. (No need to do this for anything smaller than four regions, of course.) This is a test to see what that would look like.

The radio tower looks better in the flat picture. No holes in the right hand building in the flat picture. This deals well with bad lower LODs. The parallax is slightly off, though. Here, that's not noticeable. But this trick would not look as good if you were in a city such as Bay City and on a diagonal road. It's not a perfect solution.

It would be better to draw 9 regions for real - the one you're in, and its 8 neighbors. Then you're never closer than 256m to the flat picture. At that range, this illusion holds up really well, and that's about where GTA V switches to a flat background image. It takes a lot of resources in the viewer to draw 9 regions at a good level of detail, though.

The idea is also to have pictures from above, so if you're high above the ground to see ground in the next region, you see the top view, or something like my slippy map of SL.

This is just to show that it could be possible to see a long, long way in SL. Nowhere near implementation.

The goal of all this is to make SL mainland feel big, like modern open-world games.

 

[How to allow rezzers on land]

5 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

What seems as if it should work but won't is to define different group roles for customers and the owner of the rezzer, where that rezzer owner has the "Always allow 'Create Objects'" ability. That will work while that rezzer owner is in the region, but after they leave for a while, the region forgets they have that ability, and will stop rezzing until they come back. (This can be pretty confusing unless you know to expect it.)

Yes. Ran into trouble with that at Lexicolo. There's a neat system there which loads and unloads crates from trains. I saw it failing to rez crates, and contacted the owner. It worked fine while they were watching, but broke when they were out of the region. Took a while to figure that out.

[AWS to start charging for IPv4 addresses.]

AWS to start charging for IPv4 addresses.

Each SL region needs its own IP address. SL does not support IPv6 yet.

27722 regions at US$43.8/year = US$1,214,223/yr.

 

 

[Aditi down?]

Try 1: Logged into Morris on the beta grid with Firestorm 6.6.8 OK. Walked to the welcome plaza where Morris, Dore, Ahern, and Bonifacio meet. Walked around the central planter. Lower body disappeared after the first crossing. Stalled at second crossing. Forced logout "You have been disconnected from the region you were in".

Try 2: Logged into Morris as above. Walked to the welcome plaza again. Walked from Morris into Ahern. Success. Walked around Ahern for a while. No problems.

Walked from Ahern into Dore. Lost body but kept mesh clothing. Kept head and hands. (Avatar is Roth.) Able to move OK.

Tried Avatar Health options. Refresh Attachments did nothing. Force Appearance Rebake caused all BOM and jacket to disappear, leaving only boots and hair. Reset Default Male Avatar did not work. Under "Outfits", "Wear" button grey and inoperable. Busy icon rotating at top right. Still able to move OK.  Attempted to walk back into Morris. Stuck at crossing. Forced logout, "Disconnected from region you were in" again.

Try 3: Started at Morris again. Walked towards central plaza again. Saw Dore disappear and redraw. Three times. Did not enter Dore. Walked into Bonifacio. OK. Crossed a few times between Morris and Bonifacio without problems. Crossed into Dore. Legs disappeared, forced logout, "Disconnected from region" again.

Try 4: Tried logging into Dore. Login stuck at "Requesting region capabilities".

One does not simply walk into Dore.

[Introducing Senra Avatars... what do you think?]

1 minute ago, ItHadToComeToThis said:

Are we supposed to make our own alpha layers?

What, LL made new avatars and clothing for them, and they're not fitmesh? That's kind of lame. Those new avatars should Just Work.

[Introducing Senra Avatars... what do you think?]

3 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

The Free Dove is amazingly there. 

I thought they closed. Did someone take it over?

[Looking For DFS Worker on Big Farm]

Can you apply for the job of being the overseer with the bullwhip?

[Introducing Senra Avatars... what do you think?]

20 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

THIS IS REALLY GOOD. It does mimic the process of character customization that a lot of platforms and games use.

Exactly. LL got that right. It's about the right level of customization new users need. Enough that they have a unique look, instead of being stuck with "70s Disco Guy with Radio" or "Woman with big hat and small dog".

One thing LL should fix: automatically save the initial outfit in Outfits. The video tells new users to do that, but new users won't have seen that video. That's the single most useful piece of advice I give new users - once you have an outfit that works, save it, so that you can go back to it in case of wardrobe malfunctions. Then you can try clothes safely. That alone eliminates most new-user clothing problem panics.