WTF!?!?! Logged out because inventory isn't available??

That's really a good thing. I have run across some nice support people for various things and have always appreciated it - by the time one seeks support one is usually quite upset by whatever the problem is.

Yay. *yawns* When you support 400,000 sims and 80 k users online, call me.

I think the point being made here is one of scalability.

*yawns* When LL supports 400,000 sims and 80k users, call ME.

Rock

I see no way to compare currently since the poster only bragged about 18 sims running. Not a single word about avatars in those sims. If his home system can support, say, even 5 avatars per sim, then we can talk scalability.

As the poster's home system is almost certainly an opensim-type clone of SL, I don't doubt it can support 5 avatars per sim (providing his ISP upload speed can handle it).

However, the point is not about this poster's scalability, it is about SL's scalability, which has been disastrous since day 1.

Here is a quick recap:

http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2008/08/11/linden-hires-former-aol-exec-to-improve-scalability/index.html

The per-region support of avatars in SL is a joke. 20-30 at best (but still wading in mud) and expect to crash out at around 40 and above. If you want to compare, then compare that to Blue Mars, where you can have thousands of avatars per region, and no lag.

Rock

I will believe that when I see it.

Wait, your inventory was unavailable and you got logged out... and couldn't get back in for a little while.

Your rant sounds like a user I knew at my last job, they had a corrupt session to the citrix server and ranted like get all because I killed the bad session and had to disable their login to clear up the mess. No other users had to be logged out, just them becuase of the bad session.


As for bugs taking awhile to fix...

That is a given for many bugs, hell microsoft has bugs that never got fixed because all the fixes for said bugs resulted in worse problems.

There is a point in software where keeping a bug is better than putting in a fix that breaks more than it fixes.

Blue mars will never have the content I believe SL will... no built in tools to create = needing hundreds of dollars to get started... it's going to be mostly chat rooms I would say.

Nice dodge

Linden Lab's customer support is pretty lousy in some respects, you'll get no argument from me there. I've got my own list of complaints to be sure. But the fact remains that you really don't know what you are talking about when it comes to running a massively complex system like Second Life, and an eighteen-region 'grid' simply cannot compare.


.

Indeed, telling a person how to open a zip file when you are only supposed to handle connection issues per a binder script would hardly compare to supporting the various issues involved with running something as simple as a citrix farm.

A grid sitting on a single computer has none of the complexity of the real grid. Where there are multiple physical locations (a pita for basic networking over a vpn much less the SL grid), separate servers handling tasks (could be you were one of many assigned to a server and till they logged you out they couldn't fix the flaky server), etc...

There are limits to scaling up things. A kid who can manage a two word line of text: "Bob runs." does not really have the knowledge or experience to talk about writing novels as if they were a cake walk. And said kid gets treated like a foolish kid for thinking he or she does.

Wow, you really are behind the times, aren't you?

Read this article from 2006 -

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2006/06/06/second-life-and-the-scalability-of-online-games/

“Second Life” currently runs on 2,579 servers that use the dual-core Opteron chip produced by AMD. Each server is responsible for an individual “sim,” or 16 acres of virtual “Second Life” land. At peak usage that means that each server is handling about three users. “Most (massively multiplayer online games) have hundreds to thousands of players per server machine,” said Michael Sellers, who runs Online Alchemy, a provider of artificial-intelligence tools for online games. “Is there a way they can achieve (significant) elements of scale? I haven’t seen that.”

"....When a server fails in WoW or Everquest, one realm goes offline. When the Second Life grid fails, the entire game is unavailable."

Blue Mars runs on the CryEngine2, one of the foremost MMOG engines, that does support 000s of players on a single server (and believe it or not, things have moved on somewhat since 2006). Try telling the folks on the Crysis or Far Cry forums that you doubt 000s of players on a single server, they could do with a good hoot.

All the industry doubt is on the SL backend. Everyone else has moved on.

I'll 'believe it when I see it' when SL can support 100 avatars on a single region, with no lag, and without crashing, (you have to set your goals somewhat lower when discussing SL capabilities). Currently, you can get more students into a London taxi than you can get into a SL region. But, I'll grant you, the experience is about the same

Rock

Of course you do realize crysis and far cry both have fixed data that is stored on the player's hard drive. Where every SL sim can contain thousands of textures, prims, etc... that have to be drawn and downloaded because of the user based content?

Blue mars if it gets half the content creators that SL has will face the same problem...

User created content that has to be downloaded to a viewer = lag on the viewer end even if the servers run fine.

So the engine used in SL is havok and that is also used in other games, that support plenty of folks. But they use static content not the dynamic content that SL has.


edit: and I doubt a biased quote holds much water...

I can agree with this but it does become tiring after 5 years... did SL really ever leave beta, other than just saying it did?

Blue Mars already has more content than SL. That is because it uses industry standard tools, not proprietory tools. Any 3D object in the Google 3D Warehouse, for example, can be imported into Blue Mars (you can't do that with SL).

And SL only has built-in tools for the creation of prims and scripts. No tools whatsoever for creating textures, sounds, animations (all of which cost to upload into SL). Those tools can also cost 100s of dollars (Photoshop, Poser, etc), but can also be free (Gimp, Qavimator). In the case of Blue Mars, 3DS Max and Maya can cost 100s of dollars, but there are free 3D modelling tools, Blender for example.

The objects can thus be moved from Blue Mars to other virtual worlds and mmogs, and vice versa. You cannot do that with SL objects (except for SL clones).

Rock

This is actually the real hoot. You do realize that SL has evolved just a teeny weeny bit since 2006...? Last number off the top of my hat is from that convention video from May 2008 with Philip where he states that "currently" (already this is one year ago) the grid runs on 20,000 servers. I also seem to recall that each server hosts four sims, but am not entirely sure.




Comparing one server and the whole structure is apples and oranges. If one SL server fails (given it is not the asset server, and even then it will not affect all residents but only those hosted on this server), four sims go offline.



You don't seem to have a grip on what you're talking about. I, for one, wasn't talking about games where content is predefined and only minimal data has to be transferred. I was talking about Blue Mars, who claims to have the same user created content and more than SL has. Incidentally, I can see no claim on the site that one city can support thousands of players, just a remark about "massive concurrent user support".

Yes, I will only believe this to be the next best thing since Tuesday if I see they can follow up their big claims. We'll talk about that again once it's in beta, right, dear?

oh man..

You do realize Blue Mars will be killed faster than you can imagine... simply because of a catch 22..

Either they prevent content theft from all the sources by having corporate oversight over what is uploaded to the grids, else they face lawsuits from some very big names over facilitating and profiting from content theft.

Both will kill it or render it a small niche product that dies off.

I quoted the 2006 article not to show primarily where SL was at that time (3 users per server), but to show that you doubting that Blue Mars could host 1000s of users per region was in error (as back in 2006 MMORGs were hosting that number back then, and Blue Mars is based on a games engine that has made great strides since 2006).



Again, you missed the point. WoW does not have a single, centralised asset server. SL does. And that makes it SL's achilles heel.



With regards to content, it is not a claim, it is a fact that there is more 3D content from the industry standard tools (3DS max, Maya, Blender, Sketchup etc) than there is in SL. All of this content can be uploaded into BM.

With regards to the number of players per city (region), see the answer to question 6, when I interviewed Jim Sink of Avatar-Reality recently.

http://rock-vacirca.blogspot.com/2009/04/interview-with-jim-sink-of-avatar.html




There is nothing 'big' about their claims. The numbers have already been around since the CryEngine 2 first came out. BM have only been quoting the numbers that the Crysis and Far Cry communities and reviewers have already reported.

Rock

rock: those numbers are based on content stored on the local hard drive in regards to performance.

Blue mars would have the same bottleneck issue that SL has with user created content: It all has to be downloaded to a cache that gets cleared as needed meaning there will be massive lag in a sim/city with user created content uploaded.

Crysis and Far Cry multiplier does not have that issues since everything in there is made using primarily the resources stored on the hard drive of the player's computer and doesn't need to be downloaded. Any thing not in there has to be downloaded and stored, taking up hard drive space untill removed (not cached like SL)

That means all the server handles is the location map of items, references to where it is... and then updates on positions and the like. there is no constant stream of content having to be send and recieved. There is no set of asset servers handling inventories in the thousands as well per user.

The games are far simpler than a grid system... it's like comparing SL to the multiplayer games using the havok engine... it's just apples to oranges.

Rock, I am sorry I am not able to buy propaganda unseen and jump with joy about the arrival of the new messiah.

If they do a better job than SL, very good, I for one won't complain if there is some honest-to-god competition around, might give LL a little incentive to listen to their users. But until I see more than website talk and "interviews", I will not trust the promises.

Oh, and concerning the great idea of "industry standard" developer tools than can be had so much cheaper than in SL... you do realise that Blue Mars charges money for the developer accounts? That only end user accounts are free?

Of course, a virtual world built on a games engine is groundbreaking, and this is one of the very areas that I need to get a good feel for when the BM grid goes beta. BM have informed us that advances in caching mean that the absolute minimum needs to be streamed to the client. For example, the BM download currently is 1.4Gb, and most of that is pre-cached textures and anims.

I also notice that the sample cities in the Blue Mars SDK take no longer to load, or create any measureable lag, when fully loaded with user-created content. I do not know how user-created content, uploaded to the Blue Mars servers, will be downloaded to a user, (the Blue Mars engineers say they have this problem cracked, as do the engineers at Entropia, who have also switched to the CryEngine 2, but whatever the experience when I can fully test it, in the June beta, will be reported back.

Rock

Rock...

SL is built on the Havok engine.

So BM is not breaking any ground by using a game engine.

How much on the SDK is user created content Rock? I would say very little, with most being in that 1.4gigs of default stuff downloaded onto your hard drive.

You go to a basic sim with only a few things on it, and it's lag free... Same as if it was a few things here and there created by users in a sim where everything else was already an asset on your computer.

Rock, is the Beta Kit delivered now and are you creating in world @ Blue Mars?

Hi Argus,

Several people, including myself, received the Blue Mars Software Development Kit, before it was pulled to fixed some showstopping bug (which I have not come across, although I did have an earlier issue with the Recent Documents folder in Windows XP).

Included in the SDK is the Blue Mars Editor, where you can open several of the included Blue Mars cities, and where you can import 3D objects. The Editor also includes a fully functional terrain generator (similar to Terramaker, L3DT, Terragen, etc, but much more user friendly, and a range of terrain hand-tools, and terrain texture painting tools.

There are no in-world creation tools in Blue Mars (apart from terrain). All creation is done outside first, then uploaded. I have had a go at using Blender to take existing 3D objects (from the Google 3D warehouse) and practice modifying the objects, then uploading them into my Blue Mars Editor (which is a wysiwyg Editor, or sandbox).

My main area though has not been object creation, there are other developers who are deeply into that. My area has been terrain creation. I love the fact that you can create terrain inworld, including caves and tunnels IN and THROUGH the terrain, cliff overhangs, etc, things that are just not possible in SL. The ability to paint every terrain pixel (on three levels, surface type, eg metal; texture; and colour) is also amazing, leading to incredibly realistic terrains being possible.

Of the few developers who did get the SDK I do not know of anyone who has explored the avatar generation tools (perhaps this is where the current bug is, as avatar generation is one of the major customizations of the CryMod Sandbox 2, on which the BM Editor is based), or the scripting language (Lua).

However, this is NOT the Blue Mars beta, that starts in June, and only then will we be able to connect to Blue Mars and see what the real experience is like.

A few of the developers hang out here: http://life-on-mars.proboards.com/ and there is a post on that site about the irc channel we use too.

Rock

Well, fancy that. Boils down to pretty much what I've been saying...

Um....that doesn't really look all that great.....of course I'm sitting here at a 24" moniter, scrutinizing the avatars and other details in the pics....whoopdee do.....The reality is.....SL is just the beginning.....we're on the very first leg of the virtual journey. So....while I feel for those that have so many isses.....I'm pretty relieved that I don't. And if I'm still around and capable....I'll check out the next cool virtual world when it becomes available.

But lets face it.....LL probably bit off way more then they can chew (not realizing it at the onset I'm sure) and someone else WILL come along and do it better. For now....if we choose to remain in SL.....then I guess we also choose to DEAL with it.

Milla, honestly now, you can look at screenshots like these and really say they don't 'look all that great'?

http://life-on-mars.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=gallery&action=display&thread=8

Rock