Penny Patton

Oh, I'd do a lot of things differently. But the first thing I'd prioritize would be reigning in SL's performance issues. The SL community that has stuck with it over the years tends to be extremely forgiving with how poorly SL runs, but most people just aren't and this pushes away a lot of potential new SL residents. If LL wants to grow their userbase, this is a problem they need to tackle. Now, most of SL's performance woes come from badly made content that ignores the fundamentals of designing content for realtime rendering. LL can't just throw out all of that content, there'd be riots, but there are ways they could promote better made content going forward. First I'd make an official Second Life Content Creation Blog (name subject to change). This blog would: Explain what does and does not impact performance in SL, in a way most users can easily understand. Dispel the myths and misinformation regarding what causes and does not cause lag. (There is a lot of misinformation and downright crazy beliefs out there, and these people aren't going to believe information that contradicts their long held beliefs unless it comes from an official source.) Provide "best practices" guides to help SL content creators create content that is better optimized for SL. Give easy to follow guides for users who want to get the most out of their land in Second Life. Hold regular contests, challenging SL content creators to put all this information to good use, and reward them for doing it. Showcase some of the best content SL has to offer. Make ARC universal, make it take texture use seriously, and link a hard cap on avatar ARC to newer features, like animesh, bakes-on-mesh, and all new features released in the future. This preserves legacy content (simply remove all attachments using the newest features and the cap is removed) while pushing content creators into optimizing their work. Give everyone better tools to manage their ARC. You can't just throw a hard cap on people and expect it to do much good if you don't give people the tools they need to work with that cap. I'd make it easy for people to find problem attachments, and push content creators into listing information like ARC in marketplace listings. It would be as easy to understand as Land Impact. Going over the ARC cap would replace your avatar with a pixel stand-in on other people's viewers. You would be able to still view your avatar in case you wanted to go over the cap to use legacy content in a photo. To be clear, as content creators began optimizing their work, there would be less and less need to do this. Optimized content can still look as good as any of the content you use today. For an analogy, let's say content is a delicious cake. Today's SL cake bakers are using something on the order of an entire truckload of flour to create one cake. Now, they aren't putting that flour into the cake itself, the cake would taste terrible. No, most of that flour is winding up on the floor of the kitchen. Pushing them to only use the flour they need would not hurt the cake, it would just mean they'd have to stop dropping a truckload of flour on the floor in the process of baking that cake. Speaking of Land Impact, I'd make texture use count towards it. I'm not going to go into all the details here, but there would be good building practices that would help people manage this, too. (IE: linking two or more objects that use the same textures would reduce their LI so that the textures aren't counted multiple times. Better still if there was a way to manage it per parcel even without linking but I'm not sure how feasible that is.) I'd try and find a way to link this to new features, too. If there are no new features coming that would make this feasible, I'd link the new LI calculations to something like a LI increase. Choose to accept the new LI calculations on your land and you get some bonus LI to work with. If you're using optimized content on your land that would amount to an overall increase in LI at your disposal. As time went on, more and more content would be optimized making this a win-win for all SL landowners. ----- Now, none of this would fix the performance issues overnight. Second Life's existing userbase would be adopting these changes at their own pace and the benefits would become more obvious over time as newer content slowly phased out the older content. After a two or three years, however, everyone would be experiencing higher FPS, faster load times and less lag. And many more people would be able to use features like shadows without sacrificing too much on the performance front. New users trying SL for the first time would be greeted with a better looking, better running Second Life, drastically increasing the likelihood that they'd stick around. This means a lot more income growth for Linden Lab. Of course, tackling the performance/content problem isn't the only thing I'd do if I were LL. I could write a book on the things I'd do to improve the experience (some of those things having already been suggested by others in this thread) but this is just one of the first things I'd turn my attention towards. It's long overdue.

There are illegal windlight skies?

There's plenty of options for anime avatars. If that's not something that interests you, there's the Orange Nova Nauha avatar. The downside to that is the lack of clothing support, although I imagine you could just use the head with another body, like the kemono. https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Orange-Nova-Human-mesh-Nauha/6443775 Another option is the Avatar 2.0 from Utilizator. https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/UTILIZATOR-Avatar-20-beta/2861916 This one has more clothing options available for it, the down side is that Utilizator apparently hates bouncing breasts, so the chest is not fitmesh. The face nad hands do use bento now though.

I finally got around to installing the EEP viewer and playing around with it. The main thing that stuck out at me, and something I haven't seen anyone else bring up, are the stars. First, I love that they sparkle. That's always been a gripe I've had with the stars in SL. These stars look much nicer. That said, I wish I had more control over them. I've seen some people do fun things with cloud textures to replace the stars, but then you can't use the sun/moon features, because the stars will sit in front of them and that just looks bad. You can adjust the brightness, but they remain tiny and there's not a lot of them. The sky feels empty, or like I'm perpetually in the city, unable to get a good look at the night sky. Maybe we could get a slider that lets us increase/decrease the amount of stars in the sky? Maybe a second cloud layer that sits behind the sun/moon and has glow/brightness controls of its own so we can do more with custom textures? Or perhaps the ability to set minimum and maximum star sizes and the variance between them? Just some thoughts. And, of course, these are just a first impression. Maybe I overlooked something?

Like others have already pointed out, it's largely the unoptimized content people fill SL with that bogs everything down. Unfortunately that makes it very difficult to help someone experiencing performance issues, but there are a few things you can do that help yourself out. Keep your draw weight low. What that means is hard to pin down since the draw weight numbers you see will be different than the ones I see because of the hardware differences. I'm not entirely sure how much it varies from computer to computer, but I try to aim below 50,000. Failing that, I at least keep it under 100,000. Your avatar is front and centre on your screen, if it's a big source of rendering pain, then you're taking your own lag with you wherever you go. Keep your HUD and avatar's texture use reasonable. Get rid of any excess textures, like the enormous store logo textures so many people hide inside the attachments they sell. Try not to wear any HUDs that use a lot of large textures. The HUDs for mesh heads and bodies tend to be real bad about this. Set your own draw weight rendering cap to something reasonable. I keep mine at 100,000, but again your mileage may vary. Keep your draw distance low. I keep mine around 100m for the most part, sometimes higher but rarely higher than 250m. Keep object detail reasonable. I find 2.5 works for me. I'd recommend 3 as the highest anyone should set their object detail if they want to keep their framerates decent. Ultimately, how much any of that helps will depend a lot on where you are and what kind of avatars are around you. Unfortunately, very few locations in SL are what I'd call "optimized". But in the handful of places that are, I run SL at 30-60fps and don't experience issues like texture thrashing very often. That's with shadows and everything else on, with much less horsepower than the OP's. My Specs: Intel i7-2600 @3.40GHz 12GB RAM GTX960 2GB What my SL looks like in optimized sims where I get 30-60fps: Monster Girl World (Sadly closed recently.) Private sci-fi RP city New California (This one is still open. Just a heads up that it is an adult sim.)

Once you make the adjustments I linked to once you don't need to make them again, unless you do a completely fresh install or switch to another viewer. LL had plans to address this problem two years ago with a new camera interface and some improved presets for people to choose from easily, but now no one I've spoken with at LL seems to know what is going on with that. This wouldn't be a problem if extremely over-sized avatars were deliberate outliers. The problem is that the average SL user has no clue how big their avatar is and so the "average height" varies greatly from community to community, making it impossible to create an environment in consistent scale with its visitors. However, it is very possible to create an acceptable illusion of scale it you keep ceilings no lower than 3-4 metres, and rooms no smaller than 10x10m. Doomed Ship, New California, and a host of other SL sims do this and over-sized visitors have no trouble getting around in them, provided they make the previously suggested camera adjustments. There's also building tricks you can apply such as making the ceiling phantom with an invisible bounding box slightly higher, phantom walls above doorways allowing taller avatars to pass through, and experience-based invisible teleporters that only the tallest avatars will bump into, giving them a nearly seamless transition past low-ceiling obstacles. For your train example, you could set it up so it unsits riders near the train door, where those over a certain height would bump a teleporter that would place them outside the train car. Really, though, I wish LL would development an understanding on why basic design principles are important. They're really their own worst enemy when it comes to making SL more successful in terms of user numbers and retention.

I feel like the only reason there are people making content so over-sized is because they don't put any thought into scale at all, and SL's built in tools were developed missing basic features like scale guides, so they're unlikely try and codify their lack of scale into any set percentage over SL's actual built in measurements. As for low ceilings, I highly recommend modifying your camera position. When SL was originally developed, 3D gaming was still in its early days and camera placement and controls for 3D gaming was something developers were still struggling with. The game industry eventually figured it out, but SL is still stuck with its bad old default camera settings and LL's plans to change that have apparently gone AWOL. Luckily, with some pretty simple tweaks you can greatly reduce the "low ceilings" problem while making SL feel much more immersive, but I'd still suggest anyone building (to scale or not) to compromise just a bit to give the camera some breathing room.

Anyone who reads the post you quoted yourself can see that's not true. Maybe you want more details? That's fair enough, but that's not what you replied with. To suggest I'm being presumptuous when you have no idea who I am or what I do is extremely hypocritical, and to suggest one needs to produce a competing product, by themselves, out of pocket, and in their spare time, just to qualify as someone you'd allow to post suggestions on a user forum is insane.

Why have I, a single individual of modest means, with hopes, ambitious, and responsibilities of my own, and without access to any of the resources LL has, not created a better version of SL all on my own? Clearly you've caught me. I am undone. Your logic is flawless.

What needs to change? Well, LL's attitude, primarily. They need to drop the "eh, good enough" approach to SL development, become more interested in the end user experience, and maybe adopt a fresh point of view on what that means. And maybe they already have. They're producing some long overdue improvements to SL right now. They've shifted most of their resources back into SL development and have announced a list of upcoming features that people have been clamouring for for nearly two decades. We'll have to see. SL needs to be easier to use, without sacrificing the freedom it gives us. Give us a graphical interface for adding features people can currently only achieve through scripting. I should not have to ever look at a script to create a teleporter, a chair with a proper sittarget, working doors, simple particle effects, and so on. Scripting should be there, for the people who know how to use it to be able to take advantage of it, but it shouldn't be the only way to do everything. They need to push content creators to optimize their work, and do this without throwing out 17 years of content. Unoptimized content is the root of most of SL's biggest problems. Poor framerates. Excessive lag. Long rez times. Texture thrashing. Alpha sorting glitches. LL will probably need to introduce some resource caps on avatars, and more realistic Land Impact calculations, but they'll have to find a way to do this without forcing people to throw out content they already own. There are ways they could do this effectively and relatively painlessly. The end result would be an SL that both looks better and runs better for everyone. The new user experience, tutorials, content creation tools, social features all need layers of polish that LL has previously scoffed at. Tutorials that interact with the user interface. Social features that make it easier to meet people and engage with groups, like maybe a user calendar that syncs up with events associated with groups you're in, or friends you follow. More tools to organize your contact list, making it easy to choose who can see your online status and feed, who you get login notifications on, etcetera. And we need features that make SL feel more inviting and engaging. That would mostly come from addressing all of the other issues SL has. A new user should be able jump into SL knowing nothing, and have a good time in their first session. They should be able to teleport to an SL city, jump in a car and drive around, and have it feels as good as doing the same in a videogame. They should be able to enter into an experience based sim and not find it all broken because they somehow missed the experience pop-up, or accidentally closed it without accepting. They should be able to buy some clothing for their avatar and not be frustrated to realize half of what they bought doesn't work, because it was made for a specific mesh body, or is pre-fitmesh and won't fit on any avatar unless you change your shape to fit the clothes. They should be able to try new body shapes without changing their face. None of this is unrealistic, but it all really depends on LL recognizing what currently limits SL, what puts people off and drives them away. The LL that said they'd never give us avatar masking, rigged mesh or animesh, the LL that thought up Display Names as a way to avoid allowing people to change their username, the LL shipped 8' tall starter avatars that still used invisiprims long after LL had broke invisiprims, could never achieve this. The LL that still ships starter avatars that are all entirely no-mod and sees absolutely no problem with that can't do any of this. If that's still how LL thinks today, don't hold your breath for anything to really improve. But, just maybe that is finally changing.

I was wondering about that. I always use my own sky settings and haven't noticed any issues. A lot of the user frustration seems to stem from the less than great communication. LL effectively broke region windlight before EEP was ready to roll out to the userbase. There might be a practical or technical reason why they had to do this, but how they handled it could have maybe been done in a better way, from a user satisfaction standpoint. Maybe had a mandatory viewer update, for people using LL's viewer, with the only real change being having everyone quietly switched to override settings rather than region settings in preferences, with an explanation for this on the login screen, and communicating this to TPV devs ahead of time. Of course, without knowing the full picture of what's going on inside LL, all we can do is speculate. This might have been their least worst option as far as things go.

I'm still optimistic on EEP. Rider is good people. Even if he's scared to reply to some of these posts, I'm sure he's listening and taking notes. X3

I can't speak for all of Niran's complaints (I assume some of them have to do with EEP not being quite ready for prime time yet, but will be worked out before LL considers EEP "done") but this screenshot stuck out to me. I have to wonder if the problem here isn't EEP at all, but an alpha sorting issue? It always annoys me that some of those "sim surround terrains" use textures with entirely unnecessary alpha channels. Hi Cube. In an ideal world, you'd be absolutely right that it's up to the creators. We do not live in an ideal world. Most SL content creators don't know the first thing about creating content for realtime 3D rendering. And when I say "most" I mean nearly all of them. Those of us who do understand things like the need to optimize our work are rare exceptions. And this fact by itself is not necessarily a bad thing. SL has always opened up content creation to everyone, it's one of it's biggest selling points. But when a developer decides to do this, they need to account for how their users will misuse this ability if you let them. It is beyond unreasonable to expect SL content creators to optimize their work without an outside influence. Few of them understand why it is necessary, and if you try to explain it they are so set in their ways they will choose to believe the Earth is flat before they'll accept the need for optimization. They'll kick and scream and call you names, call you a Nazi and a jihadist. They'll concoct elaborate conspiracy theories on how a handful of "elitists" are trying to take away their creative freedom, and that high poly, VRAM intensive content has absolutely no effect on performance. And don't expect any moderation from the Lindens. According to at least one Linden moderator, that behaviour is perfectly acceptable. Content optimization is not going to happen. Not without LL stepping in. There's plenty they could do as far as that goes, without disrupting existing content or shackling creativity at all. Hopefully one day they'll realize that.

Once the bugs are worked out, this new sky system is promising to deliver far better skies. I still remember when Windlight was first introduced, SL users were up in arms demanding LL go back to the pre-windlight sky. Since this new system allows people to share their creations easily, a feature windlight lacks, I'm sure there will be more new day cycles than you'll know what to do with in the not so distant future.

NIAAAAAGARA FALLS! Slowly I turned! And step by step! Inch by inch!

The paranoia surrounding this topic has always bothered me. Recently, I've even seen a prominent content creator making a blog post warning avatars with realistic sizes and proportions that they might be in danger of being banned by LL due to being abuse reported by someone believing that avatar to be a "child avatar", and people have been asking me, regarding some of the sims I've built where realistic proportions are encouraged, if they're "safe" going to those locations. I've literally seen avatars with what in real life would easily be D cups fretting about whether or not their avatars were too "flat chested" to be in an adult sim. I understand LL being unwilling, or even unable, to nail down a specific definition for what constitutes a "child avatar" (there really are no objective standards for this) but their moderators have been known to make questionable judgement calls once in a while. I wish LL would take some steps to put all their users, and all of LL's employees, on the same page with regards to avatar sizes. Just a "Hey, we know scale in SL is a confusing mess, but just because an avatar is half your height doesn't mean you should file an AR on them for being a "child avatar" would be nice. A scale reference (say, in the appearance editor) and some properly proportioned starter avatars would probably help, too. Granted, like Arduenn says, a land owner can ban people from their land for any reason, but it would just be nice if people didn't feel they had to be 7' tall and have basketball sized boobs to not live in fear of finding their account suspended one day because someone had an itchy AR finger.

The impression I got from Rider at today's content creation dev meeting is that the importer is not going to be able to 100% accurately convert sky settings from Windlight to EEP, but that this is only a limitation with converting sky types, not a limitation on what we can create in EEP itself. In other words, converting existing sky settings won't be perfect but you'll be able to get results better than what you can do in Windlight when making new skies in EEP itself. Of course, I only have Rider's word on that, I'll have to actually play with the new tools myself to know for sure. Maybe I'll try and do that sometime this weekend.

I'm curious on what LL's thought process is on these changes to how windlight settings are displayed. I doubt that no one in the office noticed that the environments weren't being displayed correctly. Are you guys trying to change how the default settings look by changing how all sky settings are rendered? Or is this an attempt to fix something people might not notice, like were scenes initially too dark because you tried to adjust how the gamma slider was weighted to give us more control over it or what? I mean, it's obvious things were being displayed too dark, and now they're being displayed too washed out, you guys didn't need our feedback to know that. If you're not trying to change something couldn't you just load up SL on two computers and adjust the EEP exporter until the settings looked the same on both computers? What's the game plan here? If we understand where the change is coming from it can help make our feedback more meaningful.

Context is important. Your question is loaded with these assumptions.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. I never said AAA games look bad when standing still. Again, you're applying that zero sum logic, "Well, Penny said optimized games look better in motion, that MUST mean they look worse in still shots." And "optimization" is a technical term used universally across the CG modelling industry and communities. SL being the exception, a bubble community of people whose experience with CG modelling begins and ends with SL. And here again you're falling into that zero sum logic, if content is optimized to render better in a realtime environment, it MUST look worse in still renders/screenshots.

Lot of assumptions here. First, the assumption that since many SL users wish to have a private space for themselves means that these people NEVER, EVER leave those security orb laden skyboxes. Then there is the assumption that SL users represent the entirety of the market for virtual worlds. If someone is not in SL, they must have zero interest in any sort of virtual world. The SL userbase is it. This in turn relies on the assumption that SL is perfect. It has no flaws that push users away, none that another virtual world could avoid. SL has successfully attracted and held on to everyone who holds any interest in virtual worlds. It has never lost a single user beyond those who were never interested in virtual worlds in the first place. I'm not saying SineSpace will be a hit, I have no experience with it. Like Blue Mars and other failed attempts to enter the arena it could have it's own crippling flaws that prevent it from taking off with users. I just don't think it's an aversion to "big worlds" that is the problem.

Ummm, ok? Not sure what you're getting at here. You still seem to be saying that if SL can be made to look better in motion, then the SL Photography community must somehow suffer, without explaining why this must be. It is not a zero sum game.Most SL content can look just as good but without the performance hit. In the extremely rare cases where excessively high-res textures and high poly are needed for photography props, environments, whatever, you could still do that, but I'm saying there should be some sort of discouragement from using that photo-specific content for everyday/non-photo environments/avatars so people aren't using such content where the extra resource use has no benefit and only serves to drag down the experience for everyone.

No, if that were the case I'd have no problem with it. She's using "tail wagging the dog" arguments to say things like this: There is no truth to Theresa's statment. None, whatsoever. She's fallen for the misguided idea that this is somehow a zero sum game when it absolutely is not. Improving SL's content optimization issues would not ruin SL for anyone who enjoys SL now. (Except possibly the content thieves. Anyone want to stick their neck out for them?) Kyrah is hitting the nail on the head here. Theresa would have you believe that optimized content must look worse, therefore it would push those who use SL for Photography away. That is absolutely not the case. The bulk of poor optimization in SL is waste. 1024x1024 textures where over half the texture is empty unused space. Huge textures on tiny objects that you won't even see in those heavily edited Flickr photo albums. High poly models that look no better than a low poly version properly utilizing spec and normal maps. Things that could be fixed easily and the only reason any current content creators might not know how to do it is because they've never seen any need to learn how, but they could pick it up very easily if they needed to.

This is only true if you believe that those who currently enjoy SL would be put off if SL looked better and ran better for them, and at the same time you must also believe an SL that looks and runs great would fare no better in drawing in users. If LL had addressed the content optimization issue at any point in the past, the people Theresa brings up would at worst enjoy SL just as much as they do now. At worst. And on top of them, and the revenue they provide to both SL merchants and Linden Lab, there would be many more users adding to that.

But SL users will only ever be able to appreciate that detail in heavily photoshopped still screenshots on Flickr. The rest of the time they'll be running SL at low quality graphics settings just to maintain double digit framerates. Meanwhile, those triple A games always look better in motion. Content creators aren't going to police themselves, and the average user doesn't have either the tools or the knowledge they would need to tell good content from bad. If there's ever going to be any real improvement in terms of content optimization, it has to be lead by Linden Lab. Specifically, LL needs to provide: Better tools, to nudge people towards better content creation habits. Better education. LL has everything from their blog and wiki, to the login screens every user sees every day, they can use all of these to promote better content creation habits, and make people aware of what sort of content issues drag down performance. Some method of reigning in the use of resource intensive content by pushing content creators to better optimize their work moving forward, without taking away existing content from the userbase. SL has been around for 15 years, and unless LL really manages to screw something up, it will probably be around another 15 years. If LL can get content creators to start making better content now, the issue will resolve itself with time. And LL has plenty of ways to go about doing this. And it goes beyond simply telling people "too many textures eats up all your system's memory" or "SL isn't built to handle that many polygons in a scene". LL needs to be pro-active. Whenever LL does create content, it should be done by people with not just the talent, but also the skill to make content that looks great and doesn't kill your framerates. When LL releases a new monthly Premium Gift it should be a showcase of good content creation habits. They should release a blog post showcasing the item, showing how it was made and why it was made that way. They should do the same whenever they showcase a new Premium Sim, or any other public content, like the SL games they've been producing over the years. LL should regularly be holding contests challenging people to create better content. From avatars, to vehicles, to full sim builds. Rewarding content creators that are employing good habits to build content that both looks amazing and is light on the performance cost. These are all positive ways to approach the issue.