Susannah Avonside

Thanks Solar. I did actually try Manajro MATE, but experienced exactly the same issues, so that seems to point it being a bit of a disagreement between MATE and Nvidia. I'm now running on Xubuntu, and whilst things are much better, I still experience system freezes but they are random, and not necessarily related to Second Life/Opensim now. Totally agree with you about the Canonical BS - it often seems to me that since 10.04/10.10 things have very much gone downhill - I remember that 9.10 was a real pain with the way that audio was set up, but at least everything seemed to play nicely with Nvidia drivers. As it happens, I really like Manajro, but when I've tried it in the past I think it was just too new and exhibited some really frustrating traits - such as being absolutely fine on initial install, but then things breaking at the first system update. There were many complaints about this in the early days. I've heard that things have progressed a lot since then. I will try it again, but my most recent experience with the MATE desktop community version didn't exactly wow me. My setup is a little unorthodox in that I have three monitors, one being a pen monitor, and I know that the MATE desktop suits me down to the ground. I'm using XFCE, which I'm finding somewhat frustrating to use. I'm going to be rebuilding this system soon, so I'll be having a bit of a think about what distro I want to use - it might even be the time I go for a full-blown Arch install!

The issue with the 32bit libraries required to run the 32 bi based viewers on 64bit Linux is that they are no longer available. i did find one workaround that worked like magic, but I lost the reference to that tutorial and I can no longer find it and can get no sense on any of the distro forums over the issue, apart from either the same old tried and failed options, or really out of date advice, I haven't tried the nouveau drivers as I really don't like them and as my system is a three monitor set-up I need to use the nvidia proprietary drivers. I'm sure that there are ways of getting three monitors to work under nouveau, but I don't want to faff about, and besides, though nouveau drivers have come on along way, they still don't offer decent 3D acceleration and display some weird behaviour when ALM in implemented in the viewer. I'm using the 430 driver on xubuntu, which though offers better performance and stability in both Second Life and Opensim, now randomly freezes the system, sometimes several times a day, and with no warning and completely unrelated to whether I'm in a virtual world or not. It;'s a serious issue, which isn't doing my temper much good. I feel like echoing Linus Torvalds when he exclaimed "F***ing Nvidia!"

Thanks for the reply Profaitchikenz. No, I'm on a 64bit system, as you would perhaps expect given the hardware specs. The 6GB of video memory is somewhat academic when we consider that the version of OpenGL used by Second Life and Opensim is ancient, not having had any work done on it since about 2006. So no half decent modern graphics card, or indeed any made in the past 10 years is going to break into a sweat on Second Life or Opensim. The issue has been around for a fair while, and it would seem that there is no fix for it thus far. My next step is to discuss this issue on the Opensim and OSGrid IRC channels, and see what comes of that. It could well be that someone will know something about the issue as more seem to run on Linux in Opensim than in Second Life.

I've been experiencing this issue for around the past two years or so since I got the Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB GRAM. I log into SL or Opensim, (the problem is less pronounced in Opensim, but still present) and in the quieter places all is usually fine, but when I go to crowded places, particularly those where there is a lot of mesh content I not only experience a level of lag that is unacceptable, (I assume partially due to a lot of badly optimised mesh objects combined with LL's miserly RAM allocation per simulator) where things rezz at a glacial rate, I soon experience momentary freezes followed by a complete system lock-up necessitating a hard reboot. My system is as follows: AMD Ryzen 3 1300X Quad Core 3.7GHz CPU ASUS Prime A320M-K Motherboard 8GB DDR4 2400MHz RAM Zotac NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB Mini GDDR5 OS: Ubuntu Mate 18.04 I had similar issues when I first started using the graphics card on an older system, running on Ubuntu MATE 16.04: AMD FX-8120 8 Core 3.10GHz Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3 HDMI Motherboard 32GB DDR3 As can be seen, both sets of hardware are more than up to the challenges thrown at them by SL/Opensim. Asking around, it seems that this is a 'known issue' and even Nvidia accept this, though they are backwards in coming forwards in offering any kind of real solution other than referring to bug reports that don'[t seem to offer any solution at all. I at first thought it might be that I had a bad graphics card, but running on Windows 10 proves that the card is fine, however, I am one someone who can use Windows as an everyday driver, as basically I detest that OS. I'v also tried using Manjaro Linuix, but the issue remains. If anyone else experiencing similar issues to me can shed some light on solutions, I'd be very pleased if you could let me know your suggestions. As a general matter of interest I find that I can max out all the viewer settings in Opensim. such as running on Ultra graphics with the draw distance maxed out to 1024m and using full ALM and performance hardly affected at all, and this holds pretty much anywhere on the Opensim metaverse - with the possible exception where the region owner is running it on the proverbial redundant laptop. Certainly I find that on my one home hosted region, with an equivalent land area of 16 sims, and some 100,000 prims and around 2000 scripts taking up about 2.5 GB or RAM things remain pretty much lag free. Obviously multiple avatars teleporting in simultaneously impacts this somewhat until all their inventories have downloaded, but once things have settled down the region runs pretty well with up to 40 avatars. In comparison, Second Life might be much glitzier in many ways, but is seriously compromised by much poorer basic functionality.

As someone who attempts to use the extensive road network in SL and who is also an experieinced and enthusiastic user of the OpenSimulatior platform I have noticed a somewhat ironic paradox. In SL there are sone truly wonderfully built vehicles that are often really well scripted (though often far too fast and that have steering that is either too sensitive, or not sensitve enough) and that will run smoothly for...256 metres at most before ebcountering a sim crossing where all sorts of nasty things start to happen. At best, it might be a slight glitch as the crossing is made, but all too often it's a complete fail and yuo have to wait whilst the server sorts itself out if you're lucky, or relog and start again if you'te not. As I said, I am also an enthusiastic user of the OpenSimulator platform. as I have my oven server machine that hosts all of my various regions, some of which are configured as megaregions, (which will eventually be upgraded to varrregions) which is a viewrer hack/sever setting that magically does away with region crossings allowing vehicles/boats/planes to pass over without any bad effects - it's great! Sadly., there are not many decent vehicles available in OpenSimulator as yet, and the change to varregions (variable sized regions) has also meant a change of physics engine to BulltetSim from ODE which has in many cases rendered the older vehicle scripts unstable/inoperable, but this will change as things progrress. (I believe that if is possble to tweak scripts to make then work better, but I am no scripter). Megaregons/Varregions are great for vehicle operation, as can be seen in this video made on a 25 region megaregion Obviously things are different in SL in the way that regions are set up into 'continents' but surely it is not beyond the wit of the LL technicians to ensure that region crossings are smotth and uneventful?

Megaregions in SL would be a positive development. It's often struck me as somewhat odd that there are a large number of vehicles available in SL, from cars to aeroplanes that are well scripted for the most par, only to have the whole experience spoiled by poor region crossings for oen thing, and by those selfish people who insist on putting up banlines next to roads and waterways thus causing avoidable issues, (easily solved if they are THAT security conscious - a security orb that gives at least 10 seconds warning). However, megaregions wouldn't solve the problems of mainland road systems, for example the extensive and comprehensive road network on the Corisca continent, which I have driven around frequently, the only traffic I've realy come across for the most part has been tose annoying automatic vehicles that seemingly no-one uses, and just serve to annoy people like me who like to (try) and drive in SL. I noticed that it must have been planned for the continent of Gata V to have an extensive road network, but at some point a decision was taken to cancel development, as ROute 7 becomes a canal at several points along it's route - as evidenced by a section of abandoned road under the sea just off the coast of the Lenimov region on Gata V on the line of Route 7. I would suggest that vehciles might be much more popular in SL if the region crossing issue was solved. I do have some experience of running megaregions on the OpenSim server software, as I am a huge fan of whagt is absically a viewer hack that fools the viewer into regarding a megaregion as the same as one 256X256 m region. It's a limitation imposed by the use of the LL viewer code, which OpenSim used, and as a result OpenSIm has beem limited, (depending on your point of view) as the LL viewer is less than perfect for OpenSim, and a maximum of 25 regions is recommended, though I have experimented with implementations of up to 63 regions running on one instance as a standalone running in my LAN. I am at the moment building a home hosted 25 region megaregion that is located in OS Grid where I plan an area that will mostly consist of islands and water, where I can practice my flying skills At the moment the default physics engine is ODEwhich, by SL standards is pretty crude, though it does does allow vehciles of many more prims than si the case with 'sit-on' vehicles in SL. The physics engine issues should largely be solved with the general adoption of BulletSim physics, which, I am told will support SL vehicle scripts with minor modification, which ODE certainly doesn't. On the one hand we have SL with great physics and vehcile scripts, but lousy sim corssings, and on the other we have OpenSim with megaregions, and Aurora Sim, (a fork of the OpenSim code) with variable regions, but not-so-good vehicle scripts. Megaregions do have other serious limitations, and one widely held criticism is that it's a 'hack' though I don;t of necessity see this as anything negative, as it's how things develop. For some people these issues are deal breakers, but for others they offer an at least partial solution to the region crossing issue. Megaregions don't support parcel media as a default, though Kitely has found a way of implementing this, though this is proprietory to them and as yet have not shared this with the community, though to be fair they have contributed code that allows megaregions to be saved in one file, wheras previously they had to be saved as individual region files - this save a lot of typing in the console! Though I'd still agree that it would nake sense to implement megaregions in SL I don't see this happening any time soon, as the JIRA demonstrates with only 25 votes, it's not something that is well known. It's my guess that LL won't implement anything like megaregions until they have haemorraged residents to OpenSim, and that isn't happening yet,. as SL and OpenSIm seem to attract very different kinds of people, and the kind of social environment desired by most SL residents is still largely lacking in OpenSIm, though many of the RP communities are discovering the advantages that OpenSim offers them. With all the improvements that are coming in OpenSim, (and let's not forget that it's alpha software, and nowhere near productiuon level yet) it could yet trounce SL for those communites that wanr to RP or that are based on sports like sailing or car racing. Personally I think that LL should seriously reconsider it's positon as a 'walled garden' as even though the format is still popular with some, (and especially greedy paranoid creator types who want a captive market and little or no comptition) I think there is a better long term future for 'open' grids, though for me the futire is more likely to be a home-hosted Hypergrid enabled standalone that allows me to teleport to a multitude of likewise connected standalones and grids - just like the World Wide Web. This becomes more and more possible as many of us get the increased bandwidth that fibre-optic allows us, (though it can be done with a decent DSL connection). Increasingly there are options that deploy the server software with no need of technical knowledge or ability, though manual configuration isn't too difficult once the technofear threshold is overcome.

I consider that SL is about as far from being an anarchist environment as it is possible to be. It does have some superficial similarities, but those who have described it as feudal are probably nearer the mark. If you were seriously looking for an experiment in anarchy, you would have been much better off considering the OpenSim Metaverse. Whilst there are some grids that use the software, most grids, as far as I am aware, are usually autocratically controlled. I have yet to discover a grid that is run along mutualist or anarcho-syndicalist lines, but I also think that there could be a time coming when that may happen. Of course, those who have their OpenSim regions hosted in data centres will have to abide by whatever ToS the hosting company requires, but the beauty of OpenSim is that it is quite feasible to home host one's own regions, if one has sufficient bandwidth. Many do host their own regions, connecting to the wider Metaverse through Hypergird , (inter virtual world teleport). No-one knows how many such grids exist, but it is here that you would probably find those most leaning towards an anarchistic mindset, whether that is acknowledged or not. As as far as the grids that nearest approximate anarchism are concerned, I would suggest that OS Grid is the nearest, but even here there is an element of the 'benign dictator'. There will always be those people who will want the illusion of security that is the 'walled garden' grid, such as SL, Avination etc, but this type of grid will never come even near to approximating anarchy. They will remain autocracies, as people in fear... of griefers,of copybotters, or whatever other bogey is used to scare residents into staying within the walled garden to spend their Lindens... welcome chains. OpenSim is developing fast, and is becoming more and more stable as time goes on at a time when more and more of us are gaining access to fibre-optic broadband which will revolutionise the OpenSim Metaverse. Whilst the widely distributed Metaverse isn't yet quite a reality, it is fast arriving, though any research into a truly anarchist Metaverse would be extremely difficult as individual regions come and go spontaneously, unlike 'walled gardens' owned by cororations. SL is neither anarchist, nor truly a part of the Metaverse, and in my opinion, if you are gpoing to find anarchism in virtual worlds, it is to the OpenSim Metaverse you need to look. I'm not answering your questions are they are irrelevant, and couched in terms that actually have little relationship to anarchism. However, on the issue of controling anti-social elements, SL is notoriously poor, go to any sandbox in SL and you will find them infested with griefers... something that is rarely the case in the OpenSim Metaverse, despite it being apparently wide-open to such a problem (there are some griefing incidents, but it is a rare occurence, and is more likely to be experienced on individual sims in grids rather than in sandboxes). Due to the greater control that can be excercised in OpenSim, individual users can set greater, or lesser security, set whitelists for entire sims and even block access entirely. For individual, Hypergrid enabled standalones security is even greater because you need to advertise your presence in order to attract visitors, or you can choose to remain anonymous. Many such connected regions are only known about by their owners and by maybe a select group of friends. Maybe you should have cast your net a little wider and examined virtual worlds as experiments in anarchy, perhaps comparing and contrasting OpenSim Metaverse grids, (i.e. those 'open' Hypergrid enabled grids/regions) with the closed, or 'walled garden' grids such as SL, Avination and InWorldz?