Crippling lag at big events

I was at a Linden sponsored event last night where there must have been around 40 people and the lag was so bad I couldn't even move. I know this isn't news to anyone. But it made me think that SL needs a place for events that can support more than 10 ppl at a time without turning into a lag fest. I wonder if the Lindens could set that up somewhere, somehow, or if this is just a complete impossibility.

The only concievable thing I could think of that would make this possible, short of a major overhaul of SL's graphics engine, would be a sim in which everyone turned into cubes.

Being a cube for a while might not be so bad. Better than a torus.

Lag is rewarded with Dwelloper Incentives! Don't knock it!

It's the packet loss. Their ISP drops packets or something. I don't think it happens to the Lindens. They need to fly to a different state and login. I get so much PL in crowded places my speed drops to that of a dialup modem. Unless people complain about it, it will always be there. After they say "PL is gone" residents have to be honest and say "no, it's not".

Lot's of folks have complained about packet loss. I've complained a lot about packet loss. Linden Labs just ignores it and moves on.

Where's the complaint box? It was so laggy that I left the event. My friend experienced the same thing. Nothing would rez... we couldn't move... it sucked.

Why do you 'hate on' developer incentives so much Hank. I don't really get it. Is it because you want to receive more developer incentive recognition for your contributions in SL but just don't make the dwell?

Sure call it "dwelloper incentive" - irregardless, this gives people incentive to make things that attract people in SL - it does not matter what the attraction is as it is a fairly objective measure of "entertainment value", and what good would SL be if no one was motivated to make things that were geared towards an audience.

In 1.0, how many things really brought an audience? 2-4a.m at Siggy's Palace, and from 4am-6am at Frankies?

SL is more entertaining for the masses than for the few and the entertainment for the masses is motivated by a want of being listed in popular places which in and of itself equal developer incentive.

You can't denigrate the label "developer incentives" by calling it "dwelloper incentives", you [and you more than others because you gripe so often about it] only seem to refelct a chord of dissoance which chimes of jealousy within yourself.

Bravo Zulu to the "Dwellopers" because they make SL what it is: Porno Clubs, Modelling Halls, Apartment Complexes, Malls, Gambling Spots, Learning Halls, Parties, Private Islands.. Sounds like glorified, maybe even idealized, real life.

Briana 'Dwelloper' Dawson

Briana, I said "Don't knock it! "! Which means, with increased dwell comes more lag, you have to live with lag to get the US$ cash each month. It wasn't some huge protest or denegration of Dwellopers, but a realization that dwell = lag. If I want more dwell, I've got to live with lag too.

Hank "Dwelloper" Ramos

Lag is a part of SL. When I was relegated to my laptop for 3 weeks, my home in Hawthorne suddenly was too laggy for me to even move - I could not go to events with more than 15 or so people, let alone heavy textures.

Upgrade - Upgrade - Upgrade

I was at the NWN Fashion Show and was easily able to hover over people to fly to where i wanted instead of walking through the crowd.

40 people for me does not equal "so much lag it is impossible to move".

It is somewhat unecessary to complain about these issues if your PC box is not optimal for SL. And yes the average person has "such and such speeded goobly-gook computer parts", well, upgrade.

People spend money for Linden in SL faster than 0.29 cheeseburger day at McDonalds. Instead of buying several thousand Linden to purchase a Skin or Land (not saying you do this), people should upgrade their video card and CPU, and then complain lag.

Briana Dawson

Good point Briana! I just found myself complaining about a little lag lastnight and then a few minutes later saying I needed to upgrade our computer. Oddly enough I wasn't thinking about the upgrade when I was buying lindens so I could get a house made of pixels.

Hmm... Think I may just budget my Lindens and save up money for more RAM. Thanks for the idea.

Actually I have a really good video card, but could probably use a bit of an overhaul on some other computer parts. Good reason to upgrade I guess. But I suspect there are probably alot of people who experienced the same thing I did as not everyone has a kick ass computer.

I was there too, I did not have packette loss, my computer is high end, nice video card, I have spiffy cable, and I have seen worse sim fps, and yes the lag was deadly still...

fen-

Good Question.

If you haven't already, turn of "Local Lighting", or maybe it's called 'Local Lights', i forget which, It makes a WORLD of difference.

Ha! Do you think lag is as bad as it gets?

How about not being able to get to your own land because of full sims around it?

Nuba is the only telehub available in order to get to my properties in Maui and Ainu and to get to either there is no choice but to fly through Jarawa. On several ocassions including tonight, I was unable to get to my land because a sim on the way there was full. I also had to cancel an event because nobody could get to it because of surrounding sims.

And I agree, lag is a pain. A fact of life and maybe even acceptable if you are at the event, but aggravating when you are simply going across the sim on your way somewhere else.

I don't know what the solution could be, but it seems to me someone might want to look into it.

Well, I am off to search for an alternate route to the islands. I hope Columbus was right and the earth is not flat.

-tito

I think we gotta test the limits to expand them. I'm fervently of the belief that yeah, there'll growing pains due to technical difficulties and technological shortcomings and all that, but hey... as for NWNFE04, that was a good pain for me. Hehe.

I hope things will be getting better, getting better all the time

Frame rate, at least on my end has never been a problem. My system can handle the game just fine. My connection can handle the game just fine. It's when the SIM can't handle the game just fine that it gets annoying. When the FPS on my end exceed that of the place I'm at, something is wrong.

Some quick ways to fix this might be devoting more processing power. I have noticed Isere, for instance, only receives .5 CPU, whereas some places receive 1.0 and I believe the void sims get .25.

I've seen some discussion on city sims and I do like city archetecture. One way of making areas less laggy (if YOUR system can already handle it) would be to devote more resources to it. Simply put, a 2.0 CPU would go a long way toward allowing 40 people to wander around a sim without it choking.

And as to this 'developer incentive'. It's just a bad name for it. I 'develop' things, but I don't own the land. The person who does, doesn't build anything. He's not a developer. It's just a word. A stupid meaningless word when assigned to award people who have little to no connection with the actual development process beyond owning the land. But it is indeed the word being used. I'm sure some of you do actually develop your own content and cheers to you for that, but the award is not connected to the content, just the land it's on. *shrug*.

This is a misnomer.

The new "Void" sims run at ~0.25 CPU, because its 1 server spread among four sims (I think, this hasn't been verified.)

The older sims run at 1.00 CPU.

However, if the sim you're in reports 0.50 CPU, that actually means your on one of the fantastic new hyper-threaded servers. Linux often does weird things will cycles to max out the performance. So even though its says 0.50 CPU, you're actually on the most powerful servers Linden Lab currently has in rotation.

Also, when the grid comes up, sims don't always stay on the same server. Its been changed so that the servers are rotated with the grid (I think I heard that from a Linden... but don't have details).

I hope this helps clarify some of the issues.

Regards,

-Flip

edited: to clarify

Here's my personal guidelines for before I go into a sim that I know will be laggy:

Turn off local lighting, shadows, rippling water, etc.
Turn off particle effects.
Turn draw distance down to 64m.
(Basically set graphics settings to the lowest possible)
Don't wear 200 prim attachments or scripted objects.

Overall frame rate is still lower than normal cuz of server lag, but at least I'm not contributing to it as much myself. Usually when I make these changes, I can still pull a barely acceptable 6-15fps with my ATI Radeon 9600pro card and 3mbit cable connection.

Arti

Game??? what game?? :: looks at Siro ::

This is not a misnomer. A sim right adjacent to Isere is at 1.0, one next to that is also 1.0. Some of the new sims are .5, some are 1.0. I see no rhyme or reason to it. What would makes sense, however, is that if the CPU says .5, it is at .5. Nor does this detract from anything I said about adding CPU to currently heavily loaded sims. If you can spread 4 sims onto one server, why not 1 sim on 4 servers?

Do you think hotkeys for switching between sets of settings would be a good idea? Or more settings for automatic adjustment? For example, "far clip" can be set to be enabled when FPS drops below a certain amount. That way, you won't have to run in each time and check on/off boxes when you attend a party.