A low bandwidth SL?

I haven't gotten into SL yet (if you're a good detective, you might already know why by now) but I've heard what are, to me, horror stories of SL. I've heard that SL can be fairly laggy even WITH broadband, and heard -- and experienced -- that using SL on dialup is impossible, period.

So, I'm thinking, "hey, why isn't there any support for this? I'm forced to use dialup because I can't really get anything that doesn't cost me an arm and a leg!" It didn't take me long to come up with a few ideas to solve this, though. These would be completely optional to the user

1. Disable loading of textures, use a common color instead.

2. Reduce quality of incoming textures and other such things

3. limiting what the user's client sees going on within a small range, only loading what's nearby to save some bandwidth

4. Disable non-critical Second Life features that take up your bandwidth but don't do much (for example, any eye candy)

I understand that some of these would be hard to implement, and others would just be difficult to use and still have SL work properly, and that I haven't made every possible suggestion, but I believe that those of us trapped with no way to go from dialup should at least be able to walk around within SL, if nothing else. Just my two cents.

I don't think it's going to be much fun for the user to see a handicapped version of the metaverse. The user will probably leave SL after 5 minutes of exploring, thinking that this was the best SL has to offer...

As I said, these things would be optional, and definitely off by default. if a dialup or other slow internet service user wanted to experience the world and not be effectively paralyzed by lag, then those options would be there for the user to experiment with to see if it would improve performance even enough to do anything. I know that as a dialup user, you can be waiting several minutes for something to work properly. Anything that would allow us to even try SL is welcome, since there are other services like SL out there that certainly aren't pretty, but they work. SL has the potential to work with bad connections and still look good.

Just making the cacsh better would help most of the dialup users, you can tell who they are by the amount of time they spend standing around.

Why does it have to reload all the textures each time I log in?

In the end though, even high speed cable modems don't help since SL itself can't reliably deliver the data faster than 400kbps

I'm hopeing that with HTML on a prim I can set my prims textures to my high bandwith web site. Then the only question is if the cacsh will store it properly or will it re-download the same URL for each face?

SL just needs to have it's networking code and caching completely re-worked, period. Havok 2 and whatever other new features aren't going to make much of a difference until we can get faster transfers of various data. As I understand it SL sends a large amount of redundant information which could be cached, not just textures but also objects and other things. I don't know if there's any kind of compression used for things like object data and such, but it couldn't hurt to do that as well.

Even the order in which SL loads things still seems weird. If occlussion culling were used to determine which objects to load first then we could have much less connection lag, other things can be loaded in the background once visible ones are done, or loaded quicker if the camera is moved so they are visible. That way instead of loading practically the entire sim, you just load the bits you see.

The only thing that I would say about this is that in Snow Crash, the novel by Neal Stephenson that the whole Metaverse concept stems from, it does refer to users who have poor connections showing up in the Metaverse as black-and-white, lo-fi avatars:

A sprinkling of black-and-white people -- persons who are accessing the Metaverse through cheap public terminals, and who are rendered in jerky, grainy black and white... There's one black-and-white who stands out because he's taller than the rest. The Street protocol states that your avatar can't be any taller than you are. This is to prevent people from walking around a mile high. Besides, if this guy's using a pay terminal -- which he must be, to judge from the image quality -- it can't jazz up his avatar. It just shows him the way he is, except not as well. Talking to a black-and-white on the Street is like talking to a person who has his face stuck in a xerox machine, repeatedly pounding the copy button, while you stand by the output tray pulling the sheets out one at a time and looking at them.

Maybe some sort of lo-fi access could be devised at some point to open up access th the Metaverse to more people. We'll just have to wait and see.

P2

Bandwidth and latency are two separate issues. Problem with dial-up is it suffers from low bandwidth and high latency. It would be really easy to modify SL so it never downloads textures or sounds and you roam around in a grey silent world, but the problem is any actions will still be delayed due to high latency. There's not much that can be done about this no matter how low bandwidth SL is, it's just the nature of online gaming.

I think it would be really useful to turn off a lot more than is turn-off-able at the moment... there are times where there is extreme lag, and the visual side is not actually that useful (not compared to actually *being* there). Say, for instance, a meeting with a few dozen people in it, all with attachments and so on.

The question is what would actually save bandwidth and client time. It's not always as obvious as it might appear.

It would be much better, though, if caching etc were improved. I was listening to the podcast with Philip a while back, and he was saying that the original idea was that you wouldn't even *notice* loading times, everything would load and render within 0.15s IIRC. The fact that I'm using a fairly up-to-date graphics card and computer and still have to have draw set to 64m and loads of options turned down - but I can run UT just fine - rather indicates to me that there's something basically wrong with priorities.

I seem to recall advertising blurbs with a phrase "the world is there when you get to it" or something similar to it on the secondlife.com website when I started.

The world's there, it's just grey and bits of it are missing....

Sounds like some people's minds.

P2