Sugestion to fix lag.

Haven't seen this sugested yet and not sure if it has been already. I am new to SL myself, but so far from what I seen the client is set up more as a viewer and everything is ran from server side. You should add a feature where you can enable downloading of world files when you visit islands. This would increase load times and decrease lag tremendously. I personally have little lag playing games such as LOTRO and such with high end graghics, but SL so far has had poor gameplay in my opinion. It takes me sometimes 20 minues for a world to load up and I am on a cable connection.

Also on a side note. From what I see this game isn't very noob friendly in terms of being able to earn money. So far the only options I found are camping, whoring yourself, or flat out buying cash from the store. Most if not all players won't hire unless your 90 days old or better. Where are the options to earn ingame currency at for noobs? No npc quests or jobs or anything? Design wise I think this game is half decent, but over all gameplay and earning your way in the SL world flat out sucks.

On the downside of having everything on your HD. It won't be big enough.
On earning money.. Think real-world hard work. That means, learning to do the things that make money in SL.
Sorry to stomp on it.

Awesome, you really know what you are talking about.

Yep, unlike the majority of MMO's out there everything is serverside.
You press forward on your keyboard >> your client tells the server that you did >> the server does all the fancy physics calculations and whatever else >> then it reports back to your client everything that changeds new state.

Unfortunatly.... SL already DOES download and store content on your computer. However objects in world are not static! Anything can change at anytime becuase everything is created by the users! There is no actual game content, the whole world is dynamic and changable with the click of a mouse. This is why a truely persistent cache of world data on your computer is not posible.

As for money, well, this is not really a game.

People runs buisnesses here, they expect payment of real world value for there products and services.
You can't "earn" money here becuase it would loose value. In the real world you can't go running around the woods looking for monsters that drop gold and cool loot.

Wow mabye it's just me, but sensing some hostility. lol No one said anything about running around and killing monsters, but damn who the bloody hell wants sit on thier behind for 90 days waiting for someone to hire you for a ingame job? For a game that is supose to simulate RL I have not seen much of that really. Now market wise sure it's got a sweet set up there. All I am saying is there should be alternative to earning money ingame for those of us who don't want to be a lazy ass and just buy it out right. Its more of an issue of wanting something to do in the game besides shop like an old woman.

On the lag issue. I was not talking about cache. Cache don't mean jack. I am talkng about adding the ability to download actual game files to your game folder to save load times. So what if there are consitent changes to the things added in the game. You download a new file when something new is added it's not something impossible to setup. Very easy in fact. At best your downloading 4 gigs worth of files to save lag. At worst 20 gigs depending on how many islands you visit. Take the Star Wars islands for example most of what I seen in those have already been in other games I played. Items alone depending on the game file type use in this game no larger then 2 gigs at best.

And yes I do know what I am talking about considering I have been gaming for the last 10 years and have modded and codded many of games in the past. My sugestion was not an unrealistic one on the lag issue. In any case it was mearly a sugestion since I have read alot of complaints out lag in these forums. I did say make it an optional thing anyway so people had a choice on if they wanted to it or not. Personally I could care less given if I can't find anything more interesting to do with my time here outside of site seeing, checking out peoples designs, and watching movies I doubt I'd be playing for much longer. lol

Actually, with SL, you are very off base. The cache is the downloaded object data. And even though I have my cache file set to 200 gb, I often have to download new data into the cache. Take a simple image of a stop sign. Person A uploads it, it gets a UUID, and when I look at it, I have to download that image first. Now, Person B takes the exact same image and uploads it, it will get a brand new UUID, and in the eyes of SL, the SL client, and my cache, be a brand new download.

When I am island hopping my data downloaded can easily exceed 20 GB a night, that being about 4 hours.

Also, the lag in SL can actually be one of, or a combination of 4 to 5 items.

1) Server side - script/processor load on the Sim you are in
2) Server side - network load on that sim, and the backbone entirely. The more people in a sim, the more data the sim has to send to everyone, the more loaded that network connection is.
3) Client side - graphics rendering. Depending on your graphics setting, what you are looking at, and how often the item is changing, it can slow down the GPU drastically
4) Client side - network and processor. They have to be able to keep up also.
5) Client side - hard drive access. SL has to check to see if the image is in cache before requesting it, which if your drive access time is slow due to slow drive, other items accessing the drive, or fragmentation, you get lag as well.

As far as jobs go, SL is not a simulation of life, it is rather a Second Life - no relation at all to your First Life. It is 100% up to you what you do in your Second Life. Work, eat, shop, climb rainbows.. you have pretty much a blank slate with no assurances anything will work, or not work, day to day.

Welcome, and enjoy!

I'm sorry, I don't see any hostility in my posts. I even complimented you on knowing so much. Hope you find something more to your tastes

Edit: I have to say, what you are suggesting is already implimented, and it IS the cache. Object data, textures, sounds everything is in there.
You may think it is not true becuase of how much is downloaded each time you log on... But this is becuase changes are more frequent then you think... hundreds of asset updates per sim a minute, so yeah, by the next time you log on there is a lot of new stuff (even if it is just updated old stuff) to download.

With the type of platforms you are used to, there is a high degree of predictability. Buildings don't change from the designers concepts, all interactivity is also pre-programmed, users avatars and clothing, again predictable. So downloading worlds is done in an encapsulated form and pre-raytraced. The only real dynamics are the avatars themselves, your movements, although predictable by created routes, it is always the human choice which way to go.

Consider SL to be like the Internet itself. No two webpages are identical, no graphics are indentical (well, not that matter in the grand scheme of things) so every website you visit, is unpredictable and you have to download content on every site/page. Given that SL is expanding at a dynamic rate, new 'worlds' are coming online by the hour and content changes by the second, textures and prims are user created and uploaded, there is little point giving you any 'predictable' content in advance as there isnt any. So your cache works much the same way as your web browser.

Also consider the avatar, is has thousands of permutations for size of meshes to every part of the body, clothing is user created, not stock choices, skins, hair and accessories etc (no premade weapons or armour here). The platform is also OpenGL and not DirectX so does not take much advantage of the many upgrades to recent Graphic Cards/Drivers.

Hopefully, this gives you a clearer understanding of what you are dealing with.

I started out camping, making just a few bucks in way too much time. Between camping sanboxes were my home, where I learned how to build and texture. My first texture upload costed me a whole 10 L$, so I damned well made sure that the texture would look okay in-world. With that texture, the library textures and my learned building knowledge I made my first product. It sold within a week. With that money I uploaded more textures and made more products.

Now I have a very succesfull furniture business on a sim of my own. Just hard work and the dedication to do your utmost.

Sorry Dante I misinterpeted your post mate. My fault that's on me. Do want to thank everyone I am starting to have a better understanding of things with this game. Still not sure what to make of it, but it does have afew aspects in it I like. On some ends I like it better then most mmos I messed around with because you can be abit more on the creative side. On the other side there are days I have logged in and seems like I am in a giant virtual mall. lol It wasn't exactly what I thought it would be, but it's not entirely bad either. I definately find the technical side of how it's set up interesting. Just from that stand point alone the game sets itself apart from the compitition. My experiances with the people here over all have been good so no complaints there. Only real complaint outside of what I though the game was compared to what it turned out to be is that just like in RL the job market is crappy. So really I should feel right at home. lol Thanks again for all the imput everyone I have found it most enlightening.

There are a lot of opertunities to get involved in the development of second life. If what you like is the technical side of it, more then the actual usage of it, then that is fine as well :3 The client is open source and there is a huge community around it, patches are accepted by LL.