Does the mainland suck for everyone?

I spend the majority of my time on a private estate. When I do visit the mainland, it just SUCKS. Big time. Frame rates are abysmal. Packet loss is huge. Things take forever to rez. Movement is very difficult. The whole client slows down so much that I often have to crash out and try again. Is the mainland this bad for everyone? Lord, I hope not. I'd cancel my subscription if I had to put up with that all the time.

It is that bad for me too.

My main computer at home (but not my most powerful) is an AMD 3500+, 2 gig ram, 6600GT video card, SATA150 drives.

I think one of the major reasons for the poor graphical performance is that the game renders objects even when you can't see them.

An example: I was at the bottom of a body of water, facing a static wall (land mass) and could not see anything besides the wall in front of me. You might think the game would render the area with 40+ fps? You'd be wrong. The game was rendering around 12 fps because in the general direction I was facing (several feet higher, and several feet away on the other side of the wall) was a busy area that had a lot of prims.

Not where I live, but in other places...yes.

Hee hee, in Cordova looking anywhere vaguely in the direction of Abbotts used to cut my fps in half.

I am finding that rendering objects is extremely slow. It almost seems like they have tried to fix the gray loading texture problem by slowing the rendering down to match the slow texture loading. (Hopefully that is just a joke).

Rendering objects is so slow I am having trouble shopping because I can't find the store, it's blank where the store should be until you get right on it.

Definately depends where you are. I bought up a bit of extra land around my place recently and most of it's still empty now. In most areas on my plot SL runs sweet, but there's a house next door that drops my FPS dramatically when 'm looking in that general direction and I'm close enough. People just need to learn to not pack so much into such small areas.

Only thing I could suggest that might help a bit is to reduce your view distance. Most of the time you're really not interested in stuff that's further away anyhow so it seems a waste to be displaying it when it often has such a bad impact on speed.

If you have local lighting turned on, ditch it.

I have good fps everywhere (> 10 fps), but not with local lighting. It's been that way for me since 1.7. Before that, local lighting worked great for me.

What are your ususal activities when you do visit the mainland? Are you typically in an area busy either with people or shops?

I own land in two spots. One is better than the other correlating to sim performance statistics. Performance at the better of the two locations is comparable to the islands that I spend a bit of time at.

To a first approximation, yes, it sucks for everyone and has been getting progressively worse.

To add finer grained detail, it sucks for most, most of the time, most places on the grid. There are exceptions that show absolutely no rhyme or reason: some clients work fine all the time, some work fine some of the time, some work lousy some of the time and sucky other times.

I still see some issues with intial texture loading, and if I have local lighting turned on, some areas are terrible, but most of the time it's fine. I have both Anshe land and mainland, and like both for different reasons.

No, I spend 99.9% of my time on the main grid and I'm fine. A few weeks back I had some trouble with grey textures but this week, it's back to normal. I think i just got lucky with my internet connection.

Buying it dinner first paid off.

Same for me. Since I turned off local lighting things have been pretty tolerable.

Same here.

I don't even mess with local lighting, it doesn't change much even when it's on.

Mainland is fine for me, but I've always lived in pretty placid sims. These days I live and work around Gibson, though, so that's not exactly the most representative view of the mainland I could have.

I spend 95% of my time on the mainland and the only way it's been tolerable for me since 1.7 has been to turn off local lighting, shiny objects and shadows. Of course I do run ripple water and my draw distance is rather high at 256m because i enjoy seeing the landscape.

My computer is setup well with an AMD 64 3200, 1.5Gb RAM, and G-Force 6800 AGP card. It still hasn't run as good as it did on the 1.6 version. I suspect those days are gone forever. At least I had to stop holding my breath.

Maybe I'm just in a snarky mood, but dig this Linden response as to why VIEW PROPERTY LINES has been made intentionally more difficult to enable:

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Karen Linden has just replied to a thread you have subscribed to
entitled - ctl-alt-shift-P for property lines? Why? - in the Second Life
Answers forum of Second Life Forums.

This thread is located at:
/invalid_link.html

Here is the message that has just been posted:
***************
We changed the shortcut because using Second Life with the "Property
Lines" option negatively impacts viewer FPS. Great effort is being
made to implement any fix small or large that will help increase FPS.
This was one of those tasks.

Since the shortcut for it before was so easy to type unintentionally
-- for example, if you typed a chat message without having the chat
bar open, the viewer would pick up any "p" characters and turn on the
lines -- we decided to change it to something more complex and
therefore unlikely to be triggered accidentally.
-------------

It appears that the Lindens are so DESPERATE for any FPS improvement that they're making useful features more difficult to enable! I think this answers my question as to whether the mainland sucks. SL is in distress. We've been hit and we're sinking fast. Some Lindens are rearranging deck chairs as we take on water. Some are continuing to play music or serve drinks. Some are bailing water. Can you hear the screams?

While I might add, with some degree of immodesty, that some pretty good ideas which are trivial to implement, promise significant improvement, and have no obvious downside escape notice? Must everything be hotlined now in order for it to at least cross their eyes?

This is the first time I've read that enabling the "Property Lines" option negatively impacts viewer FPS. I find that my level of performance is way too dependant on the hit or miss nature of forum browsing.

I live in the mainland as well, lag is seldom, neighbors are great...

and seen many private sims hit with lag more then i get, rebooting, etc...so like the mainland life..

I really don't mind the fact that it's more difficult to enable. I used to have it turned on all the time, so that would be no biggie. I am, however, annoyed that it now doesn't keep my setting between relogs. Or maybe it always had that behavior and "P" was just so convenient that I reflexively turned them on all the time.

But it does seem as though the property lines are different than they used to be. There's a noticable lag now between when you turn them on and when they actually show up.

So, instead of attempting to make the code run better, LL decides to MAKE THE UI MORE DIFFICULT TO USE???

That's the solution?! What school of interface design teaches that the proper way to speed up a slow interface is to MAKE THE CHOICES THAT SLOW DOWN THE INTERFACE MORE DIFFICULT TO USE IN HOPES THAT MOST USERS WILL NOT USE THOSE CHOICES ANYMORE?

That's madness!

I run with shiny, ripple water, no shadow, no lighting, draw distance 96-128, with fog set to 2. It's fine and I'm even a vehicle nut.

Hey, it worked for Sholes why not for LL? When the UI allows the operator to drive the machinery harder than it can handle, slow down the operator.

Linden Lab: bringing you the technology of 1873 today!

Actualy I've been hit with more lag on private islands then on the main land

I own land in a lot of mainland sims and have no trouble at all but I have shiny, shadows and local lighting turned off because I don't want my SL to look like Saturday Night Fever.