Flea Yatsenko

Just slapping multi-thread on an old engine isn't going to work. You need to make major changes instead of just making some parts of it multi-threaded. Otherwise you just keep profiling and chasing the next single thread bottleneck. Multi-thread has a lot of potential to make SL faster, but it's not like you can just make parts of existing SL multi-threaded and have it be some sort of cure all magic performance boost. Think of it this way. the SL client is a huge amount of single threaded code. So you look at the slowest parts you can find and multi-thread them. But everything else is still single threaded. So maybe you'll speed up a few specific things but everything you didn't touch will stay the same. Meanwhile, you've just re-written a bunch of code that worked fine and risked adding a ton of bugs with new code that's much more complex. Which leads to situations like, "performance increased up to 15%" and people mad things that worked fine were broken. But SL's greatest strength is also it's biggest weakness. There is near endless content on SL for anyone, more than any other virtual world by far. But some of that content has been around for a very long time, and deprecating it can cause problems. Realistically though, people are upset over losing something they probably spent a dollar or two in real world money on. If there is demand for a deprecated product someone will fill in the supply void to meet the new demand. If LL was to do something with the client, they'd need to do a full engine rebuild from the ground up. I've always been a fan of splitting clients into a simplified, high performance "regular user" client that doesn't allow building, but still lets you customize your AV, and a "content creator" client which is basically exactly what SL is now. But when I've mentioned it before people got quite bothered by it. I don't know why, it's a chance to rebuild a new client that's much easier on new users that runs a lot better. 100% everything new users need to stay in SL. And when you want to build you just fire up the content creator client and have all the tools and features you always had. I'd wager the vast majority of people in SL only need an interface to teleport around and change their avatar.

I've been noticing problems with other websites that use AWS (just like SL uses) lately, including sites just flat out not loading. A few days ago honda.com wouldn't even load for me, the connection was getting lost in AWS. It's fixed now though. I don't know what's been going on but the entire internet has been acting oddly for me for the last few weeks. Not trying to defend SL, usually this time of year is lower traffic because of the weather and things run smoother than normal. My sales (and a friend's) have been well below average for this time of year as well, I think it has a lot to do with people having slow loading textures on demo items when they rez and them just losing interest and moving on. I would have thought things would be going well with a large portion of SL's users being in the USA and most of USA opening back up after lockdowns, with people rushing to go outside. Basically less users on the internet and SL should mean less problems like this. But it's clearly not happening. I've been having problems with other websites as well as SL lately. I have no idea what's going on but I think it's larger than SL.

A lot of US COVID restrictions are being lifted and a lot of people are going outside for the first time in a while. Last Summer we were all pretty much locked down, but a lot of states are either almost completely unlocked or are very close. It's not just SL traffic that's been down, my RL internet stuff is way down too, but it's slowly recovering. I think all these cyber-attacks have been affecting things negatively too.

I think understand why this is happening, it's because "sage" and "mellow" are both common terms used all over. It makes sense. Normally when you have this problem you can put your search in quotes, so instead of Sage Mellow being searched you do "Sage Mellow" (with the quotes). But it had no effect. But looking at the results on my end, it looks like it's just searching for "sage" and "mellow" and merging the results for the two instead of finding everything that matches sage AND mellow. I don't know if that makes sense, but it's not looking for results and saying "This contains 'sage' and 'mellow', rank it higher", it's just taking everything that matches "sage" and everything that matches "mellow" it's like it's searching for Sage OR Mellow instead of Sage AND Mellow. I'm assuming the same thing is happening with "Ravenglass Rentals", instead of searching for things with ravenglass and rentals it's searching for ravenglass and searching for rentals then merging the results, so things that just match "rentals" are thrown into the results. I don't know what software LL is using for this, I use ElasticSearch and have experience with it and this kind of thing is usually a really simple mistake. I've been lurking here because search functioning properly has a huge effect on everyone, especially merchants who are trying to get their relevant products to people who are looking for them.

That bug has been around far longer than single sign on. I keep my dashboard as a pinned tab and every once and a while it just heads into a redirect error.

There have been intermittent problems for the last week or so, but it's really bad right now. Sales have been well below average year over year and far below expectations. I'm sure they know everything is down. This costs LL and merchants a lot of money when everything is broken like this, especially with LL shifting revenue from land tier to marketplace and L$ transactions. If the websites are down there are no transactions and no one makes any money. I keep checking to see if there's any info from LL about what's going on but they're awfully quiet. My RL work is taking a huge nose dive because of the way the economy is going and I really need LL to pull through here and provide a reliable ecommerce platform that everyone can depend on.

Why isn't this places thing a bigger deal? It's very helpful and a great way to tell people about your land/store/etc. I really like it, honestly it's one of the nicer things I've seen with LL website based stuff. On topic, there are some good use cases for this. My in world store and SLMP demo rezzing depends on opening up a web page. It would be amazing to be able to automatically open up that page, or something other than a dialog box requesting to open the page in a browser. But I understand a lot of concerns in this thread. In fact I think the dialog isn't that good for my situation already because it has been abused. I open up a dialog to request to open a web page because it's essential functionality for my store. But most people use dialogs to spam people when they enter their land to join groups and all sorts of stuff. It's pretty obvious to me, in my position, that opening up a web page would be the same idea. And of course if it's any web page malicious people will be storing IPs, it would be trivial to have a script open up a URL with the AV's name and key as URL parameters then have the server get the IP address. LL would have to run their browser through a proxy server kind of like cloudflare does to hide the IP of the user.

I don't want to see marketplace rebooted and have to see everything relisted. I have a lot of products and there's people who have way, way more than me. I also see the value in old products, I've tried to clean things up personally and I've had people message me requesting things I thought were too old to be useful but they really wanted them. But the reason why SLMP has so many technical problems is because it's so big. When you make a listing on market place, that number at the end of the URL is the ID. Assuming it works like most database ids, it started at a low number and increments by one every time a new row (listing) is added. Looking at a listing I made a few days ago that number is around 22 million. Obviously it's only an estimate and maybe LL did something like start the number high. But my point is there's very likely 10s of millions of things on SLMP LL has to maintain to keep the SLMP website functioning. It's a pretty huge burden honestly. Granted the size of SLMP and the issues the size causes I think LL is very generous on what it takes to start up a store and start creating listings.

This is a lot easier for LL to do now that they are in the cloud. I've seen it discussed here several times that sizes besides 256x256 would be possible and welcomed. You also have a benefit of having smaller ones too. It would make it easier to expand, instead of managing a 256x256 sim you could get a 128x128 and when you need more prims just pay for more and have your sim expanded instead of paying for a full size sim and trying to sublet it. But I think this is one of their lower priority issues. Seeing LL's latest blog posts they are concerned with improving performance and getting new users to stay in SL. More people in SL means more income for LL (and merchants) which means more growth. But it's a lot easier for LL to do this now they are in the cloud and not tied to fixed hardware with fixed specs. I think it will come but it's not going to be a huge priority for them. They have stuff to fix and I'd rather see them fix it as much as I would love my own 128x256 private sim I could expand as my business grows.

Metal and DX12 are all based on Vulkan. Sadly I think we are heading into a future of fragmentation, Vulkan should be supported on all major platforms, even if it requires some third party libraries to go from Vulkan to Metal or Vulkan to DX12. It just depends if Intel, Nvidia, and AMD are going to support Vulkan properly going into the future or not. I hope they do, having different APIs for OSX, Windows, and Linux is going to make a huge mess of things and distract from features like having a proper Android and iOS client. OpenGL was never a first choice for graphics, it's focused on accuracy, not speed. But it was chosen by many projects because it's easy to get it running on multiple platforms. These new APIs will allow SL to use more than one core effectively, but it's going to take a lot of work, they'll be better off starting from nothing then trying to get it working in the current engine. They did a really good job with Sansar though, I know they can handle it fine.

I thought the major reason for moving to the cloud was that LL's bandwidth from their servers wasn't that great. It also means LL doesn't have to maintain the server hardware, and AWS is a lot more resilient if something goes wrong (like a hard drive dies). Uplift was never going to be a cure all. But I think it helped with a few things.

Multithreading and Vulkan has been brought up a lot before. IIRC there is a problem where network fetching or something causes a single thread bottleneck. It was something unique to SL having to fetch things off the network. It's in this thread, specifically this post: LL would basically have to re-write the engine, but they'd still be held back by the existing content, like using normal and specularity instead of PBR, not including massively unoptimized content that people have created. And the content on SL is the most valuable part of the platform, we've seen lots of technically superior versions of SL come and go, because they don't have the content and stuff to buy that SL has. I feel like a lot of people take for granted you can go to the marketplace and buy pretty much anything you want. It's there. It's amazing. LL built a fantastic ecosystem. But it takes a long time to build such a good ecosystem and the server and viewer software show its age. It would be a very huge undertaking to make SL multi-threaded. But x86 CPUs are done getting much faster per core and are just adding more cores. A large part of optimization with SL comes from not being able to prepare the world. In a regular game, everything is set in stone and it's optimized assuming nothing will change. So you can take short cuts and make it run better. SL is all off the network, and it's always changing.

I don't know what made me search for "Vulkan" in the forums, but I found this active thread, and I think you're right on the money with this. Vulkan can multi-thread rendering a lot better than regular OpenGL. I kind of went down a rabbit hole, but I found this regarding performance http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Culling. The edit history is quite old, I don't know how much is actually relevant. Some of it may be outdated, but the Performance section has draw calls being a bottleneck, and the wiki considers adding more triangles to draw calls. But OpenGL's draw call performance is much lower than Vulkan, I've seen benchmarks with Vulkan being 2 to almost 4 times faster when benchmarking draw calls, with reduced CPU usage. I wonder what the draw call bottleneck looks like for SL. It's dynamically loading content from the web, so mesh is slowly trickling in, but I don't know if it would make a difference. I don't know enough about this stuff. I'd think it has a lot of potential to increase performance. It'd be good to get the SL viewers more multi-thread friendly, especially when phones usually have 8 very weak CPU cores to use, as a long term goal.

I filed a ticket, but just in case some Lindens are around and investigating, I dumped the network requests when trying to log in and it's just stuck redirecting to https://secondlife.com/auth/oid_end.php?redirect=https%3A%2F%2Fsecondlife.com%2Findex.php&janrain_nonce=2020-12-21T21%3A37%3A35ZJr4mMF&openid.mode=cancel&openid.ns=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0 over and over again, until the browser gives up.

It took a while to dig through this, I would say it happened sometime in the beginning of 2018 going through my older builds. Looking at my builds, it seems in early 2018 I started to get objects named "Object" a lot more and by mid-2018 everything was just called "Object"

It used to do it, because I wrote a blender plugin that would export an LSL script that could match textures to object names and face numbers as well as construct linksets that didn't import as one object. But it doesn't work anymore because everything is just called "Object" It would be a really big help with materials too, because I could easily adapt it to apply base color + normal + spec.

A while ago, mesh uploads of multi-object meshes got changed from maintaining their Blender names and instead were renamed "Object". Having the mesh names was very helpful for me with import and export scripts. Is there a feature or something I'm missing? That was actually super useful for me and it's gone all of a sudden. Just to be clear, I export cube.001 and cube.002 in one dae. If I open up the DAE file, the object names are still there. But when I upload to SL, some of the names are changed to "Object." Is there a way to turn this off so it maintains their names? It would be an absolutely HUGE help to me. Thanks

I think this could be a problem to look into. There are probably things the viewer could handle on the main grid because the servers were slow enough to not flood the client. But cloud seems a lot faster, like it could flood a client and cause it to choke and stall.

You've never had this happen before? It happens to me all the time. September cash out is usually much lower than average for me. Lots of people going back to school, work, etc. Normally, "summer" is officially over after Labor Day, but a lot of people didn't really have a summer because of COVID, so my summer sales were well above average year over year. Things are finally starting to loosen up with COVID restrictions in a lot of places, and a lot of people didn't have a summer because of the virus. They want out. I think September is going to be well below average just because of the combination of summer ending, COVID restrictions backing off in a lot of places, and people being stressed out. Think about all the adults who have kids that would normally go on SL, but now their kids are at home all the time because of elearning. Did you really think there wouldn't be a snap back after the huge increase in sales most people saw because of the lock downs? It'll pick back up really quickly when it gets cold again, don't worry. Once flu and cold season starts, everyone who gets a sniffy nose and is heavily invested into the COVID thing is going to think they're going to die. It's going to get a lot worse for most people, but a lot more people will be spending their free time inside in front of a computer. Whenever it happens I drop by the forums to see what's up. Normally there's some sort of problems going on with the grid, but things seem pretty calm right now. Just be patient, fall is coming and LL is starting to get things moved to the cloud. I don't know if you tried the cloud hosted sim yet, but everything loads extremely quickly, it's like a whole different virtual world. Things are going to be huge when we get cloud hosted sims, it's going to be a huge increase in sales because people are going to want to spend a lot more time in SL. You should try it, it's probably one of the biggest game changers for SL since mesh.

You can watch SL status blogs, sales always go down and drop suddenly when there's billing maintenance, especially if it's unscheduled. I seem to notice it more than others because I have a large range of products, and most of them are tailored to people who want to build. People aren't going to spend money and work on their avis or land when SL isn't running right. For me, sales pick back up a day or two after maintenance ends. It's just part of working with computers, it's not an SL thing. LL has a lot more to deal with when they have to keep their ecosystem up and running. Servers, databases, and an ecommerce storefront anyone can sign up and make stuff for.

LL is moving around income sources in order to make land cheaper. It's a good thing, and it's been in the works for a long time. All these empty sims are because there's too much supply and not enough demand at the current price. By lowering the cost of a sim, or land in general, it would, in theory, increase demand for land. Which would actually increase the SL economy and get more users in world. To have land in SL, compared to other games, cost a lot more. LL is trying to fix that. And they could make a lot more money making microtransactions, i.e. marketplace sales, in a successful and more populated grid than relying on a lot of empty sims. But it's going to be a big change, and a lot of people are going to interpret it the wrong way. SL can be ready for a golden age if they handle this right and open SL up to new markets.

Awesome, I'm really excited for Android and iOS. Hopefully it proves popular and can have more features added over time.

That could easily be solved by doing something like increasing land impact of things that are unflagged.

Second Life still depends on the PC and Mac platforms for users. You can't get it on PS4, Xbox, Switch, Android, or iOS. PC and Mac have been in steady decline for the last 10 years as other devices take over. People are always comparing SL to things like Roblox or Fortnite. You can play Roblox or Fortnite on your phone or a console. Same with games like Minecraft. Almost every major game people compared SL to that has had staying power (GW2 did well but died quickly) is on platforms besides PC and Mac. As someone with a store, I think it's really important to grow SL by expanding into new markets. Sansar was sort of the right idea, LL wanted to expand into the VR market with a virtual world. But they left behind all the people and content in SL to try and start anew. They should be trying to bring the good content and good people of SL to new markets instead of trying to find new markets with new products. I'd like to see something like a new continent open up that's specifically more tame for consoles, mobile, etc and to see SL clients for them. SL is declining very slowly. I think it's correlated to the shift away from traditional computers and more towards mobile and consoles, and SL only being available on those platforms. I also don't think SL will die, because it's got a steady user base and a large amount of content, and PCs and Macs aren't going to completely disappear. They'll find a balance soon, you could even argue they already have reached the bottom. Short term SL needs to make SL more reliable and run better on lower spec hardware. SL having reliability issues with 40k users logged in limits growth because the platform obviously couldn't handle something like a surge of 35k in a day.

In one of the threads with Lindens, they hinted that the mobile client would be a bit more than just chatting. No one really knows what to expect right now. Could be a client where you can explore in world, could just be chat and av editor, could be a lot of things.