Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't SL used to work a lot better?

I think that's extremely unlikely, coco, given LL's motivations.

Seperating the grid into unlinked 'shards' (like WoW or Everquest does it) completely goes against the concept of a Metaverse that Phillip is trying so hard to create.

Private-hosted grids that can all communicate with one another? Sure, that's possible someday, if it still fits within the Metaverse model.

Well, I hate to say it, and y'all know that I'm not technologically gifted or anything, but -

- despite what Torley said, I really do think better or more machines would help things a lot.

coco

Because performance is more likely to be affected by too many people, I'm including that as well as my response to stability.

I started in early 2004.

FPS: Originally? I was lucky to get 20fps, the avg jumped about a lot, now, I get 40fps to 60fps, depending. (of course, I upgraded my system since too, so that factors in.)

CTDs: Originally? few crash-to-desktop. Mid-2005, hourly ctds (even on my newer computer), annoying enough to make me go play elsewhere for a while. Now? *very* few ctds, haven't seen 2 in the same week for a long time.

STUCKs: Having to relog due to teleport errors, or other reason. Happened this morning. First time in, phsaw, a very long time. (My own fault, I was setting up a sit-target that ended up trying to put me in a bad place). 2004 and 2005? I'd have to re-log daily on average.

LAG: I tend to keep my draw distance at 96 when building. I notice when it's 128 or higher and I approach some dense or very script intensive areas I might see a little stutter/slowing. Through 2005, I would just avoid Friday & weekends, the lag was so much worse than late weeknights it drove me nuts. The peak hours performance is far better than I remember it being.

SIM crashs: first, recovery from sim crashes seems blazingly fast compared to 2004/2005. I still manage to crash a sim from time to time, usually tinkering with physical objects. Frequency seems about the same, but this is more due to me I think than LL.

LOGIN speed: was fine, was sucky, is somewhere in the middle now.

EXPLORE speed: wandering into new areas and seeing things for the first time. Waiting for things to rez in 2004 was no problem, but I think this may be due to builds being more 'simple' back then. 2005, things got bad. The rez order was weird, prims would 'pop' individually and non-sensically, and everything seemed to take ages to bake. Now, the big-first/small-last rez order seems faster/better. (I think folks were going crazy with too many 1024x1024 textures in 2005.)

CACHE: re-drawing recently seen objects when you come back in range. I'm conflicted. In 2004, cache clean-up seemed more passive. Late 2005, I think, we started seeing objects "forgotten" much more promptly when you step out of range. Obviously there's been some tuning done, it's not as annoying to me now... but it's still not as nice as I thought it was originally.

LOCAL LIGHT: 2004 tolerable fps, awful bleaching out of surfaces,
2005 intolerable fps, introduction of full bright as replacement,
2006, vastly improved appearance, control and fps.

GENERAL RENDERING: Water, avatars, reflections, all look so much better now I don't even want to think back.

CAPACITY: 30-40 people in a sim now vs 2004 or 2005? FAR more tolerable. 20 people nearby in 2004 and I was in "slide show" mode. A few physical objects bumping around in a sim used to generate enough sim-lag that I would hunt them down and blast them out if I couldn't return them. Now? I hardly notice them and don't care.

Anyway. Just my excessive 2 bits.

haha

1.6 and 1.7 were pretty stable except for a few problems with texture rendering. I joined in 1.5 back when we had avatar ghosting all over the place. It was a lot more stable back then except for that problem.

I have not been here back into prehistory like some of you people, so am not aware of some of these updates.

I can safely say that performance now is no worse than when I started, if a little more processor-intensive, and the features available have certainly increased.

What I can say which does worry me is that there seem to be more random bugs creeping into updates, issues which are the result of unconnected changes producing unexpected results and which need to be fixed with patches. In my experience this is the sign of a disorganised codebase which has grown beyond any one person, or group of people, no matter how smart they are (and I don't think that there's any suggestion here that LL do not employ very smart people). In addition to this we get "undocumented changes" which do not appear on release notes.

I have seen this before and the only solution is sitting down, fully documenting everything, consolidating the code that is there and having it make consistent sense. This may result in a number of updates which don't appear to do anything. They are still very necessary. Otherwise you end up carrying on, fixing bugs as they come up, always being a little behind, and the system gets more and more complex and less and less understood until you reach stasis, where all development time is used up fixing bugs that resulted from the last change.

I *hope* that this will never be the case, and I get hints that LL are acting on this issue. On the other hand I did have a conversation with somebody who was talking about a statement that SL was developing "organically". "'Organic' means 'nobody knows what it does'" was my comment.

I thought you were Prok's alt?

Not long enough, and I didn't call anyone a Bolshevik.

Was that a yes I am then?

No, I'm Amy Weebler's alt.

vagtastic.

In response to the OP. My own personal observation has been that does seem to go in waves of good and bad. With more "funky badness" around the time of major upgrades, that then seems to improve. But I'll say that I think alot more people are building/scripting alot more tricked out stuff in world now that we didn't see when I started back in early '04. I can't help but believe that that has had some impact on the experience in-world.

Some good comments there, Jopsy.

I, too, would like a number of updates that don't really seem to do anything, Ordinal, because they are fixing things. And I also got the distinct impression (from the SLCC video and things) that fixing bugs and cleaning up some of the code is getting priority that it didn't get before.

I'm also willing to go along with the cyclical thing, because I have seen some things get fixed SO well (and without too much time), like recently, when the time dilation and FPS was all over the place and all of a sudden that got a lot better.

I will probably cling, though, to my theory that there are just too many people and not enough machines supporting them all, until I hear a good technological explanation why this can't possibly be the case.

It's kind of a rotten theory to have, cause then you look upon getting more members and higher population with dread.

coco

[Looks up from his building project to spy lots of plywood prims going up at the far edge of his sim.]
Aww crap! More neigbors...damnit....
[Puts on a 'V' mask and reaches for the the Sim Clearing Doomsday Scripts]

*Note: In reality we are actually fortunate to have great neighbors In-World.

its not any one puter lmao its sl i bought new puter got 700 of memory have a g force game a card that cost me 0ver 100 dollars lmao an got cable..... it was great before last dl so lets cross fingers on next wed lol

Are you using a cable modem? Maybe your neighbors are sucking up your shared bandwidth slurping down porn.

fixed.

Remember remember, v1.5 in November... ?

lol. Aye, I think that was the most jarring one to me as I had only started 8 or so months before. I guess I'm jaded now. Of course I don't have as much time to spend in SL as I once did either so I guess I don't notice the big disaster upgrades these days.

Yep. We like to call this problem, "gross inability to scale."

I'm looking forward to the next big virtual world project, at this point.