gwynchisholm

I get pretty much the same results regardless of viewer, it’s just to be expected running the game at basically max settings in 4k. SL regardless of the viewer just doesn’t utilize the cpu all that well since its engine predates multicore rendering in games being relevant. Firestorm is actually one of the ones that performs better with my GPU from my experience, black dragon for example sees it as an intel igpu and disables a bunch of options outright which is nonsense. Ive yet to find any viewer that can use rebar properly as well, though it doesn’t seem to matter for anything other than dynamic texture memory being limited. It’s not like it won’t use more than 4gb of vram, it just doesn’t use more than 768mb for texture memory cache.

Just SL being the 20 year old game it is, note it’s using 3% of my cpu in the top right of one of those images. I’ve never seen it get above 20% playing SL at all.

Random eye movement, I feel like that should be an addition not a built in feature by default. Also the default AO is just… eh? I know it’s meant to be “eh” but surely LL can afford to throw money at one of the AO creators to buy one and make it a universal default, just something a little more detailed.

Mac DeMarco’s album Salad Days

This 4.88mb image limit is a bit questionable sometimes Other perspective of the first spot, this also looked nice but i couldnt get the lighting to look much better than how the land owner had it set up, and that looks great in any other direction than this direction where it looks like everything across the harbor is in shadow

rolling around fancy looking places trying to get fancy looking pictures, but im using firestorm and textures load weird in this game and sometimes people just use textures from 2003 in some places so this is the best so far meanwhile behind the scenes in the same destination, different spot SL cranked to the max in 4k using 13gb of vram, sending my GPU to 90c and giving me 6fps:

That’s not what I’m trying to say, I am saying the opposite. SL having so many proprietary avatar systems is what drives people away. It’s such a hassle, you can’t just buy an item in the shirt category and have it work as a shirt, it has to be a specific shirt for your specific avatar type. That’s massively confusing for new players. As you said, any other game, your avatar generally fits one specific “base”. You add into that, you can modify the base within reason, and everything is compatible with it inherently. In SL technically everything is compatible with the base default avatar, but since people took the idea of the avatar and turned it into entire different standards, now there’s a bunch of stuff that only works with those specific standards. And since they aren’t inherent mainstream content (by this I mean LL created), they aren’t really filtered or sortable by their avatar type. So people end up struggling to find things that work with their avatar, or an avatar that works with the items they want to wear. Trying to explain avatar bases to new players is difficult, it’s like trying to explain operating systems or phones to the technologically illiterate. Why it’s not just brands, why it’s different. That’s not something all people can grasp onto super quick, the sl avatars are no different. Trying to explain to someone “oh yeah that shirt you like, that only works with this specific avatar type that’s an addition over the stock avatar, well more like an outright replacement”. Don’t even get me started on appliers or items that you have to add textures to yourself. Anything that involves the edit window is an immediate no-go for most casual players of social world games. Even vrchat which tried to make it easy, most of their players just click once on an avatar they like and maybe adjust their size. I don’t think it’s possible to change it at this point, and I don’t like it. But it’s just part of SL now. Maybe others view it differently, I can see some people definitely looking at it like a level of complexity they can choose to involve themselves in or not. But they’re still then presented tons of content they willingly opt out of using, for no reason.

Virtual Dreams by Virtualsoft Home on CD on some fitting hardware, my micron transport xpe from 1997 (because the album art is designed to look like late 90’s Microsoft software) https://pacificplaza.bandcamp.com/album/virtual-dreams

I do not agree with that at all. A monopoly forms not by simply being the best product, but by being the most prevalent and in many cases the only proprietary choice. It’s also an endless cycle of breaking apart and reforming the monopoly on the market, wether by the original source or by outside means. In the case of many of the mainstream, “monopoly” mesh bodies, because it’s become all you see, it’s all people will create for, and since it’s all people will create for, it’s all you see. All it took was a brief bit of time as an easy to use and prevalent platform. “here’s this mesh avatar, and here’s a bunch of clothing that works for it, and we’re encouraging and paying other creators to make items for this avatar” A bunch of people buy the avatar and the items, other creators see the potential and jump on it to make items for that avatar, uses see the popularity and buy the avatar and items as more items are made for it, it’s a feedback loop that creates what we consider a monopoly. But the tactic to get there is always the same regardless of what “it” is that’s forming a monopoly, a virtual avatar in a social world game from 2003, or an entire American telecommunications industry. SL avatars are in a state right now where creators only make items for a select few avatar variants because they’re the most common. And the avatars are the most common because it’s all people create for. Basically nothing fits my DSD avatar, I just have to find things that mostly fit. And since mesh clothing isn’t super adjustable via stretch or deformation methods, I have to adjust my entire body to fit many items. The entire avatar system is the dominant reason why many people don’t stick around in SL. It’s such a pain to fight that system and try to put together an avatar that doesn’t require the same avatar base that everyone else is using that sometimes it’s not even worth trying.

That is kinda funny because it is labeled otherwise, i used my linden home for this example beacuse it should be the most basic terrain possible. Set to 1, by its description this should be more compressed: Set to 24, by its description this should be less compressed: Theyre flipped the other way around, the setting is described wrong in firestorm. Now thats definitely better and i appreciate your own testing here because it exposed why the terrain looked so bad to me. Though the default terrain in many ways i still dont think looks that great. Like its ok, even now without compression it looks much better but it still doesnt really look like legit terrain imo.

Very open or very dense, nothing Inbetween. And I’m really not a fan of urban spaces because they just lag too much imo. Either a nice wooded coastline or low beach, or a tightly packed room of any theme, those are the best types of spaces imo.

Example I dont even know if this is intentional, or a bug. But i see other people have a similar look at the stock terrain so its like... why?

The mentions of bots in this thread are interesting. I never really see or notice them myself. But I know they’re there. Ages ago Smallworlds (now dead) had these built in bots you could buy and program, usually just referred to as NPC’s. I know there’s a few people who remember smallworlds here who probably know what I’m talking about. You could dress them up and name them like players but they have yellow chat bubbles to indicate they’re a bot. They could be programmed as basic as parrots or could realistically and without too much effort, play mini games, chat with people or each other, use items, etc. So they were handled on the games end like a player. I could really see SL benefitting from something like that. People used those NPCs in Missions (user made quests) to give them a bit more character. Or as additions to spaces like bartenders for example. Depending on how much time you worked on them to feed them conversational trees, which was pretty easy just not automated like AI is now, you could get them to be pretty visually smart. The game had their own NPCs in a few places but Lucy in the Infohub was some developers passion project I presume because Lucy you could hold full on legitimate feeling conversations with, just because they spent so much time on their interactions. SL should have something like that, something that bridges the gap between player and item, like an official bot, within the realms of linden labs control to make them less demanding on the server than players, but still offering the utility of bots. And now with decent AI services out there it wouldn’t be that hard to get them mostly automated to do what you want even more novice users. As far as what I want to see removed from SL, I’m also up there with low resolution grass textures. It just looks bad and most importantly looks dated, I think replacing all the stock terrain materials with higher resolution versions across the game would make everything in general look much nicer. You got these super nice high resolution lawn chairs and avatars that rival the complexity of AAA game character design standing on the grass from duke nukem 3D.

i will never be free from this critic

Doing a very similar thing right now, with immense criticism over my lack foresight on the matter, kinda ran out of items i can add before i finished all the rooms finally bought premium after ages of on again/off again playing, figured i might as well commit, and i got a smaller linden home than i could because i wanted the land options for potentially buying something else separate, and in hindsight i shouldve just gotten the 2048m home so shes kinda just sittin in the corner laughing at me and my other empty rooms

@Extrude Ragu that is a fantastic example, and I have a little bit of insight into that which is related to the games age. So I keep doing this but bear with me: Roblox. Also a relatively ancient game, they had the same issue years ago where the user created content was a bit difficult to try on, same with the hats. You had to go specific places to try the items on for free and then decide if you wanted to buy them, going back to the website to buy it. Note there was no official way to do this, users do it exclusively, it was not mandatory in any way so many items just didn’t have any option to try them on. So what did they do? They used their avatar profile picture as a way to try on the items. The way avatar profile pictures in Roblox work (in context to the time, in this case 2006 to 2011 or so) is they’re a render of your avatar and everything you are currently wearing, presented as a jpeg. So all they did was make your rendered avatar wear the item, and send the page a new jpeg. This worked great, and you can actually still use the profiles in 2D mode like that today. Fast forward some years and they have 3D profiles now, where the profile picture is actually a 3D model of your avatar and everything you’re wearing rendered in openGL for the browser. So trying on items is exactly the same where it updates your avatar in 3D and sends the page a new model to display. They now use this as the entire avatar creation page where you live update the 3D model of your avatar with your items. Secondlife could theoretically do the same thing, where you have a visual representation of your avatar at the time, ingame or not, sent to the web browser which you could modify and add or remove items from. Or show it on the marketplace and try items on by applying them to your avatar, potentially allowing for basic adjustment. But the whole thing I’m trying to add here is that it’s a hybrid solution of both styles of implementing a process like that. Where it’s a single issue and attribute that was done separate of everything else, but is also beneficial and used by multiple facets of the game. Instead of having the whole team rework avatars and the shop experience as a whole, a small team figured out how to use an existing small feature for something else, and other teams added onto it, until it became a core attribute of the games design. SL can look at similar problems in the same way, maybe a whole redesign is worth pursuing for the whole development team, but maybe a small team changing up one part of the game will find itself useful to other teams working on other parts, passively involving the whole team.

"Max file size: 4.88mb" Curse you 4k display Imgur compression it is:

Nah I’m not running off of usb, what I’m saying is installing from usb on this system is a pain. Bad phrasing basically you gotta sit here: and wait and wait and I just don’t have time for that, usually what I do for older systems to install an os, is I have a few older but not ancient laptops where I can install Linux or windows 10 on them, load them up with drivers, and then swap the ssds over. Specifically to avoid installing from usb on older boards because they’re just awful at it and are really picky. But I don’t have a spare ssd configured like that currently, the one that would work for that has I think MX AHS 23 on it currently and it’s being used for much newer hardware so it’s configured for optimizations with rebar, thunderbolt, etc and that would just be bloat for a core2 era build, so I’d have to reinstall something a bit more appropriate anyway

Iris Xe is surprisingly good, I have a thinkpad x1 nano which uses that alongside an 11th gen mobile i7, and it does fantastic for sl. It is a little odd the N100 doesn’t come with a better igpu, but considering its intended purpose, I guess I kinda see what intel was going for. I don’t think most people with an N100 are playing any games to begin with since the vast majority of N100 machines are just mini pcs. Mine is on an Asrock N100m micro atx motherboard, so I’ve been playing around with it including various gpus. Its cpu performance is similar to an i5 4570, which is impressive for being 6 watts and getting the performance of an ok older Quad-Core. But that means it pairs well with older midrange to higher tier gpus, intel could’ve done a lot more with it on the gpu side. I kinda wonder how it would be with one of the mobile Arc chips embedded on it, because I’ve paired it with everything from an 8800 GT (about equivalent to its igpu, or HD620 oddly enough) to an rtx 3070ti (complete overkill to remove any potential bottleneck). I have three sticks I use for windows 10, a regular windows 10 pro 32/64 made with the media creation tool, one that’s just a 64 bit iso from I think last year via Rufus, and one that’s an older version of enterprise ltsc. The issue is the usb speeds on the board I’m using, usually I’d be swapping ssds around but I wanted a clean install of 10 for this instead of Linux, and the p458d “memorylover” tends to be a consistent pain in my butt when it comes to booting from usb. I can try and do this again later and I’ll probably just default to Linux. Ive had mixed experiences with Linux performance vs windows depending on hardware, and it’s not always all nvidia vs amd vs intel. Sometimes Linux is a huge performance boost, sometimes it’s a huge performance detriment, mostly due to gpu drivers. Old nvidia works amazingly well, slightly newer nvidia not always, but without a consistent pattern is my experience. You don’t have to take my word for it, you can try and prove otherwise. But there’s a reason I have like 40 video cards and a bunch of different motherboards, and a bunch more less presentable ones in storage, and a shelf coated in laptops, and it’s not to measure frame rates in second life. It’s to measure overall performance metrics for Solidworks. I have things to do, bench time is finite and right now I can’t uphold the timeframe I gave to get SL metrics, I can try again in the future when I have time to do so, but that’s not now. the memorylover is back on the shelf, because most of its purpose is to test ddr2 and ddr3 kits anyway Yeah in normal games, SL is not a normal game, most of what it’s doing graphically isn’t that hard. Just about anyone with an 8gb gpu or more and a 4k display can test this for themselves, scale your window to 1080, then to 4k, record the nonexistent difference. The difference between SL and many other games is not optimization, it’s utilization. SL barely touches whatever hardware you have. At its core this is a game from 2003, all modern hardware would scoff at its paltry attempts to strain it if the game knew how to even try.

Well I think you’re gonna have to just take my word on this in the short term. I’ve been fighting trying to install windows 10 on a pre uefi system with usb 2.0 for too long and I’m not devoting more of my time to proving some point on the internet. I need my bench back and I have other things to do. this is just being a pain and I don’t want to do it anymore, I’m moving on to other projects ill try and do something with the N100 this week, that one currently has the arc a380 in it but I can try it with and without a more common gpu vs it’s igpu in the near future i stand by that SL runs pretty ok on basically any hardware, because it also runs terrible on all hardware and in the case of resolution, that doesn’t really matter much if your gpu is generally up to the task of displaying that image at all, the only time I’ve ever seen resolution impact frame rate in any substantial way in sl was on gpus that run out of video memory in 4k, stuff under 3gb or so, the 8gb Vega 56 doesn’t budge it’s frame rate more than 1-3fps when resolution changes, but something like a 2gb 750ti will tank immediately when it gets over 2gb if vram ill try this again in the future when I have more time to basically wait for windows to load over usb 2.0, but that legit takes over an hour if it works? And the issue I’ve been presented is, it doesn’t really tell you if it’s working, you just have to stare at the blinking cursor until it does something else. But if it doesn’t work the blinking cursor still just sits there. So you’re effectively gambling an hour of your life waiting to see if it ever gets to the setup screen

Give me like a week to get this back together, my test bench is occupied with other hardware I’m working through. MSI P458D with the Q8200 and Vega 56 pictured, I’ll have this assembled on a bench probably with Linux and get some metrics in 4k I’ll try to get some other stuff added to aforementioned metrics as well to demonstrate the issue here, or potentially the inclusion of a whole different system for comparison. Probably that N100 on its own to satiate the other objection.

Optional for sure, but I would still recommend lower end gpus as great options for sl, or on a budget just old used gpus in general. The igpu on modern processors and mobile chips is absolutely adequate for sl, to the context I wouldn’t recommend gaming laptops over their less gaming oriented counterparts. But if someone has a desktop already or is doing a custom pc with sl in mind, the low end gpus are plenty for this game. The RX 6400, Arc A380, nvidias nonexistent low end option (the gt 1630 doesn’t count), they’re really good value for things like secondlife, where they’ll give a noticeable improvement in capability more than framerate, being able to push settings higher but not always seeing better frames at lower settings. Right alongside the RX 560 and GTX 750ti on my gpu shelves sits the titan x pascal and r9 fury nano, and so on. And really from my testing there’s barely any purpose behind higher end gpus for sl. The 750ti, a decade old entry/mid tier gpu, gets like 10fps less on average than the much higher end, much newer Vega 56. Imagine in this time scale you’re 3 years down the line after buying your budget $120 750ti, and you see the $399 Vega 56 as a viable option, and then it gets you 10fps. 3 years and a $280 price difference, slot power to dual 8 pins, and you get 10fps more. Outside of use cases where the higher end gpus have better specs, like playing in super high resolution where you can eat large amounts of vram, it’s just not worth it. The same applies today with modern hardware, the difference between a GTX 1060 and rtx 4060 is absolutely there, but is it worth the cost? Questionably.

I think I used the example some months ago where I paired a core2quad q8200 with a cheap used Radeon Vega 56 and had sl running well in 4k. The real performance floor for the cpu is pretty low, and the benefits seen by higher end processors is surprisingly small. I think it’s important as a larger community to recommend hardware with this games real performance in mind. You don’t need the new i7 for this game, you don’t need the i5, on paper you don’t even need the i3, because really their single core performance is very similar and sl doesn’t see that much improvement at all relative to the cost of the hardware. A while ago I got an intel N100, its a 6 watt embedded CPU made of four gracemont cores (the “e cores” on current intel cpus), and its performance equivalent is similar to the 10 year old i5 4570. It plays SL great even with its igpu, add a dedicated video card to it and it performs fine as you would expect. But even just the igpu, an N100 mini pc can be had for under $200 and it’s the lowest end new desktop style hardware you can buy. I look at the “what do I need for sl” and see recommendations for $400 gpus and it’s like… why? The performance uplift just isn’t worth the cost in my eyes, and I throw all kinds of money at stupid stuff. Most people if they knew up front how little they get for that money they wouldn’t even bother, most people have a value oriented mindset by default.

I feel like SL’s performance overall varies too much for this to be relevant. This isn’t like big AAA games where most of it performs the same except for some specific areas, all over SL always performs wildly differently depending on tons of other factors that don’t even include graphical settings. It also won’t matter too much even if there was a benchmark and catalog of hardware performance metrics, since most of the people playing sl aren’t building up a pc or buying a pc for sl. Outside of this community sl is not viewed as demanding, it’s viewed as unoptimized, nobody pays attention to what hardware you use for it. Many of the high end components you see mentioned here are really just brute forcing for better performance of the game, it’s not a necessity to have a current gen high end processor or modern high end gpu. SL performs “adequate” on nearly anything made in the last 10 years and will be functional at least on stuff going back as far as modern operating systems and api compatibility will let you go. Theoretically you can still play this on geforce6 cards and have it not be totally awful. This would still be kind of fun to do, gather metrics on a chosen set standard. But we can do that now as is, we just have to agree on a location and view, and do it solo with a set avatar. Then the only things affecting performance between users would be hardware, network speed/latency, and settings.

aesop rocks newest album comes out tomorrow the CD i pre-ordered came today