Penny Patton

Not much in the way of EEP news at this week's dev meeting. Sounds like we will be getting another EEP preview viewer either in the next couple of days, or maybe Monday. Depending on how long it remains in QA. According to Oz they fixed the brightness issue and a lot of other bugs. Oz said that the remaining bugs mostly effect people running SL at lower graphics settings.

The choice to which you were referring to in caps was pretty clearly the choice between EEP and Windlight. That's not at all the same as the choice between parcel/sim and local sky settings, which is what you seem to be saying now. The latter I'd agree with wholeheartedly. The former? Eh. Either LL gets EEP to work well, or they don't. If they don't, then they shouldn't ship it. If they do get it to work well, then there's no reason to give people a choice between EEP and Windlight. In most videogames, building interiors are their own separate map from the outside environment and/or change the sky settings while you're indoors. That's how they manage to get indoor lighting right. I can't speak for Sansar, but SL users tend to want to put the indoor environments in the same setting as the outdoor environment, using the same sky settings, which is where the lighting problems with windlight come into the equation. Like windlight. People were up in arms about that when windlight was new. It was almost identical to the conversation we're seeing with EEP. Here we are over a decade later and you'd be hard pressed to find an SL user who'd be happy to go back to SL's pre-windlight lighting. I'm not suggesting we blindly accept whatever LL throws our way, I'm just saying that context is important.

I'm not sure this is a fair assessment. It assumes nothing will, or perhaps even can, be fixed as far as EEP's remaining bugs and issues. I'm still pretty excited for EEP, assuming those remaining issues do get fixed. Customizeable sun/moon, skies as inventory, parcel windlight settings that don't rely on your visitors already having a viewer with pre-installed sky settings. These are all things I expect the userbase will eagerly embrace. We should, of course, all remain critical of EEP, keeping the pressure on LL to fix what needs fixing, but it's premature to be outright dismissive of it.

Update from this morning's meeting (which I fell asleep almost immediately after so forgive a bit of fogginess on the details). Custom stars and other neat features LL does not have time to get into EEP may be a part of a second phase of improvements in the future. Increasing the brightness and number of stars would also be a part of these post-EEP improvements, but there is no roadmap for any of this. It's all "Maybe, in the future, possibly." right now. But Oz repeated that he's big on the custom stars thing and that increasing the brightness/number of stars should be trivial. Rider also mentioned that the way they have the assets set up will make it easy to do future improvements. So there's hope yet. It sounds like EEP is inching closer to release as they make progress squashing bugs, but they didn't want to offer any definitive timeline. The big takeaway is that they're not just going to rush it out as-is, which I think most of us would agree is a good thing. Rider encouraged people to post any bugs they find to the Jira. If it's not on the Jira then they're likely not going to know it's something that needs fixing

I've got my fingers crossed. But, in the meantime, I do hope you guys are at least intending to fix it so we can have more and brighter stars. I live in a city now and still see more stars in the sky out my window than I can in EEP.

That reminds me, given the new way skies will work across the mainland it's possible LL will want to come up with multiple defaults for different types of regions. They could give the snow sims snowy, cloud filled skies, and different types of day cycles for other themed regions for example.

@Rider Linden @Oz Linden I wanted to point out something else about the lack of stars in EEP. Beyond not being able to make a proper rural night sky, Second Life is a virtual world. It would be great if we could push it beyond the realistic. Like being able to make the largest stars in the sky even larger and brighter than you would see even in the most remote setting. I mean, why not go crazy with it? Letting people make a night sky that looks like you're standing on a planet in the middle of the Pleiades or something. Just with the star settings. That would be amazing.

I almost never derender anyone or anything unless I'm trying to take a screenshot. Jellydolls, on the other hand, I use extensively. I still think it's a backwards way of dealing with excessively render intensive avatars but it's all LL will give us.

Mass rentals of what? Private skyboxes. Do you think the people offering these rentals expect their tenants to place all their furniture on top of the domes? Maybe you're expecting them to do a bit of skydiving to visit the neighbors?

This is because a lot of people come to SL wanting their own private little space. Not a full sim, or even a homestead, just a private equivalent to a 1024x1024 parcel, but SL doesn't offer anything like that. So instead people turn to skyboxes. Not only that, but the graphics lag at ground level is so bad that if you want any sort of decent framerates when in your own SL home, then a skybox is an absolute must. I've been building sims that rely heavily on skyboxes for years. You can do some great things with them, and they only really look ugly if you zoom out, turn up your draw distance, just like any gorgeous videogame map is going to look broken and ugly if you zoom outside the boundaries. I get this makes for cluttered skies, not exactly great for flying through, but that's the trade off for LL failing to offer affordable alternatives. And the reason LL won't even consider offering such an alternative? They're afraid that SL users will do exactly what they're already doing right now, just without all of the sky clutter. It is beyond senseless.

LL is apparently looking into ARCtan again, and one of the goals is to figure out a way to get people using reasonable LOD, but not simply gutting LOD and telling customers "crank up object detail and kiss your framerates goodbye to see this content properly!" Some of the ideas bandied about at the last content creation user group meeting included a better LOD generator in the mesh uploader, re-weighting LOD in ARC and LI calculations, as well as trying to communicate better content creation habits to the userbase in the form of a content creation blog.

Because the feature is still being developed and is not yet in a state where it's ready to roll out for everyone. It would make no sense to put it in the standard Linden viewer at this time. When the feature is finished you can be sure it will be included in the standard viewer.

Right, I'm just saying how it should be. And you're right, this diner is far better than some of the mole content I've seen in previous premium gifts. I'm also very pleased to see that it's modifiable. But it always bears repeating that LL has an enormous blind spot when it comes to content creation and how it relates to nearly every aspect of the platform. This is a mistake that has gone without correction for the past 20 or so years and it boggles the mind that LL still doesn't understand why it's such a huge problem for them.

I like diners so I gave it a look. Yeah, that LI is far too much, and when you look at the LOD it's pretty obvious why.For every piece I examined of this diner, the Medium LOD uses the High LOD and the bottom two LOD levels are gutted. This is the type of thing LL should be on the lookout for when working with the moles. There should be someone at the lab who can guide the moles beyond mistakes like this and bring the their skills up to that next level. I like that LL hires SL residents to create content, but it's on LL to bring out the best in those residents.

It's not as abnormal as you think. Videogames avoid using blended alpha because of this and other reasons (such as alpha sorting issues). Your best bet is to make hair textures that look good as masked alpha.

Except you're wrong and that's the point Digit was making. See, this is why LL needs an official content creation blog that explains, in layman's terms, what causes lag and what doesn't.

You need to get outside of the house if you think the pic of your avatar looks more realistic. Seriously, either you are not arguing in good faith or...wow. Just wow. Wow. Seriously.

I believe this is due to an issue where if you give the viewer any more texture memory it becomes unstable. This is something LL is currently working to fix. (Although they've been working on it for at least a year since I heard this, so don't hold your breath waiting for the fix to come.) I think it's not because of what you said so much as how the conversation regarding this topic has played out over the years. There are people in SL who truly believe textures don't impact performance and they should be able to use as much as they like. I saw one guy literally saying textures are never held in VRAM, that your videocard reads them directly off your hard drive to display them.

Qie hit the nail on the head. Dismissing calls for optimization and instead making the unrealistic demand that people simply upgrade their computers is not only short sighted but misses the point. We all win when SL is more successful. We all lose when SL fails to draw in new residents and hold on to the residents it has. An SL that runs better while looking better, an SL where more people can run SL at higher graphics settings, an SL that runs smoothly on tablets and mobile devices is obviously going to be more successful than an SL that doesn't even run all that well on modern gaming hardware. A more successful SL means more successful content creators, higher traffic and more people to meet, as well as more new locations to check out in SL.

That's why I say LL needs to step in. There's a variety of ways they can apply the right motivation to content creators. Give residents tools to know what content is lagging them and how. Make the marketplace listings show more information like VRAM use, polygon counts and LOD. Better, smarter in-client notifications about laggy content and bad habits like setting Object Detail too high. ("Setting Object Detail to this level will result in a severe performance drop.") Give us tools to see what attachments we're wearing may be impacting our performance. Give landowners the tools to quickly identify problem content they have rezzed. An official content creation blog including articles about what does and does not cause performance issues. (SL users believe the craziest things when it comes to this, but maybe if there's an official source they'll believe that more than what they read people posting to the forums.) Begin tying new features to new resource caps for avatars. Want to wear animesh? BoM? That shiny new feature that we here in the past haven't imagined yet? You'll need to adapt to the new, reasonable but not super strict, caps on VRAM and polygon use. (Doing it this way preserves existing content while pushing content creators to optimize new content. Time takes care of the rest.) No matter what LL does there will be grumbling, but if they do it right then said grumbling will be short lived and quickly forgotten as content creators adapt and begin to optimize more.

I'm still using the desktop I bought around 2011 with these specs: Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.4GHz System Memory: 12GB RAM Card name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 (The only part of the computer to get upgraded, back in 2015 or so) Video Memory: 4GB RAM In certain, optimized, locations in SL I get a consistent 30fps (or better) at near Ultra settings. I'm running shadows, DoF, Godrays, all the shiny. And when I say "consistent" I mean I almost never experience the visual "stuttering" or freeze-ups that are so common in SL even on modern gaming hardware. I never see any texture thrashing. And these places are no slouch in the visuals department, either. They look like this: (Yes this top image is filled with animesh. Around a dozen animesh characters between the front and back rooms. I still get a consistent 30fps there.) So, SL can be a lot less demanding than it typically is. If content creators are just a little smarter regarding the content they create.

It could be what your avatar is wearing. A lot of SL avatars are their own worst source of graphics related lag and it's very difficult to pinpoint what one is wearing that is the problem. LL really needs to give us better tools.

Ideally, we would be smarter about our content creation, but the reality is that very few people will do this even if everyone was well aware of why they should. That is why it's on LL to step in and put their foot down. That is the only way any meaningful change will occur. Of course, the trick is figuring out how to do so without upending nearly two decades of user created content and causing the userbase to riot. But there are ways they can achieve that. I like the suggestions people have made regarding information on the marketplace. I've also pushed for LL to create an official "content creation" blog. In terms of "ARC for non-attachments", we have that already. It's called "Land Impact". It's just really poorly implemented (it ignores texture use entirely, for instance).

We'll have to see. It just seems like a whole lot of headaches for no real gain to me. That said, I'm not on the "LL should abandon EEP and just stick with Windlight" bandwagon. I just want them to improve EEP before rolling it out. The stars are still a major sticking point with me. They're too weak and too few. It's painfully obvious that those working on EEP have never seen a true night sky, away from the light pollution of a major city. Faking more stars using clouds is an imperfect solution (stars shouldn't be appearing as dull spots in front of the moon). Using texture replacers for the sun and moon to add the Milky Way to the sky is....alright, though I do wish LL had given us more options to add celestial objects, even if those additional sky elements wouldn't cast light like the sun and moon do. I grew up in a rural area. Not so far from the city that I could clearly see the Milky Way, but far enough that the night sky looks like this: Go further from the city, out to the state park, and the night sky looks more like this: So why the hell is the EEP sky limited to this? This is ridiculous. And I don't see any improvement since the first time I brought this up. @Rider Linden, before you declare EEP done, go on a camping trip. You clearly need to get out of the city and see the night sky for yourself.

A halfway decent laptop should be able to run SL fine. It can't because of the content. Here's an article I wrote comparing the performance of an old desktop and a relatively modern laptop in some decently optimized environments. I have been optimizing contents and environments in SL for over a decade. I get better performance when in those environments than people with much more powerful computers have ever experienced in SL. And I'm able to run SL at higher graphics settings than them to boot. You know how SL freezes up when you turn your camera around? Yeah, that almost never happens to me. You know how things take forever to rez? My environments load lightning fast every time. You know how your computer says you're getting X framerates, but in reality there's lots of stuttering? I solved that years ago. You know texture thrashing? When textures keep going blurry, reloading, then going blurry again over and over? Apparently that happens to most SL users, but I almost never see it. When I do see it, it's generally pretty easy for me to fix it. Your mileage may vary, of course, because there's three main issues with content in SL. Textures. Textures are by far the biggest performance killer in SL right now. You only have so much video memory, and everything you see on screen needs to be held in your video memory, and once the content onscreen exceeds that framerates plummet. Textures are why your computer freezes when you spin your camera around too fast. Too many textures is why texture thrashing occurs. I've seen sims using upwards of 10GB worth of textures. And a lot of these textures are wasteful, full of blank, unused space that is just eating up memory and not contributing at all to how things look on screen. High-poly content. A lot of people are uploading meshes that have no business being rendered realtime. They typically get around the high LI cost such an object should have by gutting the LOD models and telling their customers to go into the SL debug settings and push Object Detail absurdly high. Well made content with proper LOD models will look good even if your Object Detail is set around 3, or even 2. And it's easy to make good LOD models that will get you a smaller LI cost when you import to SL. When you crank Object Detail up higher than 3 you are making SL laggier for yourself. Avatars. The only reason I don't rank avatars higher than textures as far as SL's biggest performance killer is that the problem with avatars is a combination of the above two points, pushed to an extreme. For all intents and purposes, there's no real limits on how much you can plaster onto an avatar. I've seen avatars wearing over a GB of textures and more polygons than the sim they're residing in has rezzed altogether. Worse yet, rigged mesh only ever displays the higher LOD, making avatars even more render intensive. And if your avatar is laggy, everywhere you go you're bringing your own lag with you to share with everyone else. The issue facing LL is that they never hired a content creation TD who understands all this, and can communicate with the viewer and server devs on what is needed to combat it. Or if they have, LL clearly does not listen to them. We only have one tool to manage these problems, jelly dolls, and that doesn't even work very well because it ignores texture use almost entirely. Content creators won't suddenly develop a conscience and change their bad habits all on their own. Most of them have no idea how their content is contributing to the lag because none of the tools SL provides gives them any feedback on that. Third party tools to help people manage texture use have been developed, but third party viewers have been reluctant to adopt them. (According to one TPV dev, they absolutely need a full GB worth of textures on their avatar or they can't make their avatar look good.) So, what can LL do? For one thing they can give us better tools to manage resource use. Make it a standard feature to see how much VRAM our avatars are using, and how much each attachment is using. Make it so VRAM use is displayed on marketplace listings just like the Land Impact. Then incentivize people posting that information by prioritizing those listings that do in search results. Give people the ability to jelly doll avatars based on VRAM use and polygon count. Turn it on by default and when people go to turn it off, give them a message explaining that the avatars they are choosing to render absolutely will hurt their framerates. When someone goes to upload a mesh model with an obscene amount of textures, jack up the upload cost and explain to them why using so many textures will hurt performance. Share tips on how they can reduce the texture use. When someone dresses up their avatar in over 100MB worth of textures, pop up reminders that they are dragging their performance down by doing so. Give them tips on how to reduce VRAM use as well as pointing out attachments that use an excessive amount of textures. When someone is experiencing performance issues because the environment is full of badly made content, tell them why their performance is so bad. You can keep it vague, only telling them there are multiple items in the scene that are dragging their framerates down. But if they own the items, they could get more info, such as specific objects in the scene that are using excessive resources. These are all just ideas off the top of my head, LL of course should put a lot of thought into anything like this. They haven't done anything in the nearly 20 years SL has been around, they can afford to take the time to do it right if they ever do decide to try and tackle this problem.