Let's discuss:

Sorry for the double post, but I really do want to hear other's thoughts on the ideas expressed in this post:

A little bird told me their opinion...

These degradations to performance, like the sharp loss of texture serving as of 1.7, including this most recent "attachment culling", are indications of Linden Labs' conscious tradeoffs in favor of supporting increased population but at the cost of somewhat reduced quality of experience.

This reflects a fundamental weakness in the architecture of the Second Life platform.

Even for those without a technical background, what's going on here is more apparent from what LL is NOT saying than what they ARE saying about the problems.

The question is: Will this strategy of LL work to carry them forward to a new level of users that will financially justify radical architectural changes, or will SL wither, crash and burn due to the declining quality of the experience being insufficient to retain resident loyalty?

Yep, that's what the little birdie told me (cuz it's OBVIOUS these aren't MY words..hehehe)...I'd be interested to hear other's thoughts on this opinion.

I'm not worried about this. They're doing what they can to keep this renderer afloat. Bear in mind a whole new rendering architecture is already underway.

Also, I don't think that quality of service == my ability to perfectly see every curve of someone's prim hair 100m away. I'm really not impressed by this FUD interation. Surely we can do better for drama.

Enabran, this isn't about polygon reduction, it's about selectively not rendering entire attachments. Read the announcement again.

Uh, again, does that matter if the avatar is 100m away?

Drama = defense and exaggeration.

I just thought it an interesting idea. As for me, I love SL, I'm in here almost every single day doing something. But I do see "issues" and I think there may be some validity to this idea...anyone have anything to add or subtract?

Really, the only people with anything to add are those who are happy to draw conclusions without facts. No one has seen this in action. Yet. On Wednesday, we can all get to bitching with righteousness.

distance does not enter into it.

If I am standing right next to you, and my right arm doesn't render but the rest of my body does, that's totally different from me being smaller and less-poly at 100m.

In some cases.

I have a sneaking suspision, though, based on other examples of LL's LoD competency, that we aren't going to have anything to lenient as 100 meters to contend with.

Uh huh. And where does the announcement say that Linden Lab is going to SCREW OVER THE ATTACHMENTS OF PEOPLE STANDING RIGHT NEXT TO ME OMFG PLEASE SAVE US JESUS?

'Cause I don't see anything about doing it to people standing next to you. Check this out:



Now, call me crazy, Hiro. Call me crazy. But I am willing to bet that that "certain distance" is not -- now, bear with me, come on now -- is not 3m.

Just guessing.

Not sure that 3m would make any sense. But if that's what you're thinking is going to be the distance, well, we'd better all panic right now!

uhhh...



methinks you need to read the announcement again.

Edit: hehe, Enebran beat me to the punch

No, Chip! If he reads it, the drama goes away!

No, Chip! If he reads it and comprehends, the drama goes away!

Well it does seem to be a slow news day.

We could always reveal that I am your alt, created to make the remarks that are too uncouth for you to make with your main account.

edit: wtf, this isn't a PM, what is this doing on teh main forum?!

Umm not to feed the drama or anything, but I saw the attachment culling deal in action. When we took the LL tour last week Steve Linden was working on it and showed us. It was a really long distance away stuff started to disappear. He was in Da Boom and everyone close to him rendered, and the people further away looked fine, they were smaller and far away so you didn't really notice they weren't all the way rezzed, cause it gets rid of teh smaller prims first like rings and stuff, bigger prims are the last to go. I'm a prim addict and I can't see how this is a bad thing, people don't need to see my wedding ring from 200 meters away, if it's going to lag them.

Oh, I see. So this isn't an ill-conceived, tragic development? It actually works? Why, that's crazy!

Thank you for injecting some actual opinion based upon reality into this discussion.

What are they actually doing? can someone explain this in a blonde form of way?

Yes:

The further away someone is from the viewer, the fewer attachment details will be transmitted to that viewer.

Yeah, and if the slider is low... then it will be what? 20m? 10m?

It doesn't matter. Maybe if it was *only* 100m+, that'd be different.

That kinda sucks......

and it's selective - the announcement says the slider controls *which* attachment - meaning someone's head, wing, leg, etc will just disappear.

My thread has been hijacked.

You're absolutely right in saying that the platform is stretched to the limit.

I don't think this un-uniform scaling down of attachments is any kind of solution or even assuation of the situation.

As I understand it, the problems with textures was an accident - do you really think they'd do that on purpose?

The attachment culling should enhance performance, I'm guessing you're not talking about performance though - I'll come back to this subject in a bit.

As far as supporting more users goes, I'd say that's necessary - LL needs money in order to continue, do you personally want to give them more money to keep things going?

Can't really disagree with that. Personally, I really hope that what were're seeing at the moment are quick fixes while the majority of the development goes into SL 2.0, I really wouldn't care in the slightest if they stopped trying to fix the current problems and concentrated entirely on the new version - lots of people would, though, and that wouldn't be good business.

I'm not entirely sure what's meant by this, so I leave it for now.

Well, you'd hope so. I don't know the answer - who does - but I can't think of a better one.

Now, this attachment culling issue...

I'd hope it's been sensibly implimented (can you tell what someone on the other side of the sim looks like? I can't), if it has it won't affect furries except on really bad systems - and in this case I think it's right that the user should have the choice of poorer visual quality in order to get enough performance to actually do things. In fact, I can see it actually helping the visual quality (at least while things are loading) in some cases.

Unless it's been horribly implimented the only thing I can see this affecting is giant avatars that can be seen from a long way off which, while being sad, doesn't affect that many (I've seen probably 6 max in my whole time using SL). And still, we don't know how this has been implimented yet - it's quite likely that prims big enough to be seen will still be rendered.

I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that it's selective culling. Think about what you'd be trying to cull if you were making it - parts of avatars bodies consisting of relativly large prims or jewelry consisting of tons of tiny prims that you can't see unless you zoom in, even at close range?

I'm confident that I'll barely notice the difference when this is implimented.

Precisely why it's bad - selective instead of general.

It could be jewelry, or it could be a head. or a giant wing. But the Lindens are getting us more info. I'm content to let it lie til tomorrow.