Helpful suggestions for new patches

I have been playing Second Life for going on three months now, and a lot of bugs are still there. I can handle most of them, but here is a major suggestion for Lindens. For some people who own parts of the sim, or half the sim (like myself) or even islands. to allow the land owner (or group owner if it is group owned lands) to set the sky heights, or show/no show sky in their parcel. it gets quite annoying sitting in a castle going from the ground, to excess of 255m, and have fog/sky roll over the top of you, especially when the rooms are all blocked off from outside. this makes half my castle unusuable because of this. Also, I do not know if you guys do this or not, but it seems that when the new patches come out, that they cause as many bugs as they fix. Can you guys beta test things such as new patches on a seperate server? then when the patch comes out, it will have fewer bugs. On the Issue of Lag/Latency, a lot of it would be solved by either upgrading to faster connections (such as OC-3000 or OC-3072). even with tens of thousands of members being logged on all at once, with an OC-3072 connection that many members would be maybe 10% of the total bandwidth that would be in use. Another way to fix it is to take some of the burned off og the asset servers, and make a selection in the Preference menu to download textures people see. and set a protocol on your data servers that IF <TEXTURENAME> = 1 THEN DOWNLOAD=FALSE where texturename = 1 means the texture has been seen before and is on the users computer. I am sure users would not mind downloading a 100MB program that has no lag, more than they would want to download a game that is 30 megs and loads of lag. If anyone agrees with me (Lindens or other) feel free to respond to SilverPetDragon Sukra on the game and mention this post.

Okay. Uhm.

Where to begin?

Caching is already done. There's a cache on your hard drive of textures you've seen, so that's not much of an issue. I'm not sure how SL determines when to re-download the textures, but there IS caching done. Second, I'm sure Linden Lab is well aware of the speeds of connection available to them and have picked an optimal choice. Most lag in the game is not caused by their internet connection, but rather by internal communication between their servers (asset servers to sims, running scripts, etc.)

Linden Lab CANNOT include textures in the game package. A) with the current update structure, every update would be a long miserable experience (more than now.) Second, Linden Lab does not OWN most textures used in the game, they would not be allowed to send them out with the game package. Finally, once again the issue is not with sending the textures TO the users, but with the servers that store those textures and how they communicate with the rest of the game.

There are three (to my knowledge) test grids that patches are tested on. When put into action on a much larger system in much wider use, however, problems that cannot accurately be simulated on a small-scale grid rear their heads, and while I agree that the "fix two things and break five" trend is frustrating, I'm confident that Linden Lab is doing their best to solve that problem.

Your idea of setting the cloud height, however, is actually spot on. I've had that problem plenty of times, though the option would probably only be open to sim owners.

If LL fixed the existing caching system, things would work a lot better. I have max caching enabled, but when I walk around the sim I live in, by the time I come back to my home I have to wait for it to be reloaded. So either we should be able to make a larger local cache, or it is simply not working.

There have already been proposals to allow for popular textures to be pre-downloaded but with the paranoia about copy bot I cannot see that ever happening. LL are actually talking about not identifying UUID's where they can! Presumably they will assign it some local id so it can still be cached.

In programming, maintenance is often the least popular job. Incompletely understanding other people's code can lead to more bugs, so often the best way is to totally re-write a section of code in a way that makes sense to the coder. This will also bring up more bugs, but at least the later coder can more easily fix these bugs.

So there is lots of scope to make things better.

I think there is a cloud setting on the client.

The both of you inbetween the first post and this post) are quite right. There are some major problems at LL, but some of them true, would be hard to fix. but, like I have asked and asked again for permisions to run the SecondLife program through a converted for PSX-K language for consoles, they still say no. I can completely understand them wanting to keep their own program to themselves. but when someone offers free help to them to convert something that would only help them, and they turn it down (still at no expense to themselves) what does that say? they would much rather pay someone to do the work rather than get someone to do it for free? fine, by all means, if a Linden reads this and takes any note, feel free to contact me. I know there are pages to apply for a job with LL, but I carry on three jobs right now, one of my own (armoursmithing) one managing a hotel, and another doing computer work, plus I am going to college now. Anyways, to get back on subject. they CAN send basic textures to the computer, like they have partially done with the library. but what abotu textures that say, I upload? why should I have to wait for two or three minutes for MY texture to load properly? and with how much LL is making a month (noting the ($USD spent in the past <time> note. even after paying employees around the world, I am quite sure they could afford a $250/mo OC-3072 connection like what I have. I am not even a big business, and I can afford that a month. True it may not be available in all Areas, but I know Great Britian has it, Bend, Oregon has it, NewYork has it, Texas has it in Dallas. and I know Japan is supposed to be getting the technology to do that. So I ask again... what is the problem? Why are the games laggy? why do the patches "fix two things, break five" ? and why could Linden Lab not make patches for optimal performances? like making one update where the user can choose "optimized for Dial-up" or "Optimized for DSL/T1" or "optomized for Cable/T3" or "optimized for Fiber Optic Connections" ? again, comming from my programming background, this would be a relatively easy thing to impliment, why has it not been done?