Demise of SL

Tell me about it! It's even worse to live it than to think about it! And now - with attachment culling - things are even harder, cause now I can't see the details of the houses I'm building! Like the porch lanterns. Or the light switches - which totally DISAPPEAR if I get a ways from them and sometimes won't come BACK unless I log off! I finally managed to photograph the house by hiding behind the front wall before I moved the camera. (And this was even with draw distance up to a freezing 512 or 264 or whatever the top level is.)

From: someone

Secondly

there are the ridiculous default graphic settings. They might have been designed to make every noobs initial experience with SL as negative as possible. I don't know about you, but it took me some experimenting to get a decent frame rate and the first couple of hours were really horrible. OK, I'm reasonably competent and managed to figure out what was wrong and fix it. How many noobs are?
Tell me about it! Just last night I was yet again helping a noob friend of a friend set her settings low enough to even move, and talk about the blind leading the blind! I don't even know what half that stuff IS, but I have managed to lower my basically everything (I think). And it takes forever to share this with these people, too - cause they are lagged to badly to even have the conversation!

For many if not most newbies, if you don't have a friend - or a friend of a friend - who can clue you in pretty fast - then you will go away, like I almost did.


I persisted ONLY cause I already had friends here, and was about to quit anyway, when someone finally clued me in.

coco

Well, I mentioned it first, and at length, on the Technical Issues forum (I think), and also mentioned my work-around (hiding behind a wall!) in it, too. Haven't checked that thread lately, though.

I, too, am surprised others haven't mentioned it. I figure it's because most of the others on this forum have better machines than I do, and thus don't experience it, or at least not as obviously.

coco

P.S. No, I think it was on the discuss-the-new-version forum.

You'd better be ready to scramble. I bet he won't be over easy on you.

The inventory theory is right...
Being in SL as a content creator my inventory was rather huge (needed backups and shitload of textures). My fps on average was about 20-22, last week someone returned over 8000 items (yes, indeed, an idiot) from land i rented, my fps was down to 10-12.
Trying the 'search' option eventualy made me crash (at that point i had over 13.000 items in my inventory)
So i sat down and sorted, used those nifty inventory boxes and deleted everything that is availlable on my harddisk or of no use. My fps went to a rocking 30-35 fps and my inventory looks like the advertising of Tupperware storage
I recommend to everyone, clean em out! It sure helps!

If I may add Flip, not only that but this is the first game Ive played where the "patches" and "updates" and "revamps" did not completely destroy the game for me. Im still here after all this time

The asset server has properties that make distribution harder than it might seem at first. Like almost any writable database, there has to be a system that prevents two things from modifying the same entry at the same time, this requires some centralized locking system. A good example would be using a bank teller machine at the same time your joint account holder is at a teller window making a deposit; this needs to be avoided:Oops. This is known as a "race condition" and affects all databases, the fix is to lock out the deposit until the withdrawl completes. These lock-outs are "expensive" but essential, now multiply that by a few million assets, each which may need a central lock, and you have a bottleneck. This is not to say that the asset server needs to lock most assets that are mostly just being read, but it would surprise me not if locking took a large part of the asset system resources.

Sorry, doomsayers. SL will only perish when "Da Sexy Avie" disappears ;)

Confirmed - on a pretty high-spec client. However, I'm not sure that this is a Bad Thing although it is a little disturbing until you realize that's what it is. But as Doc noted, it is probably a drop in the bucket compared to the other wastage like sending you mini-map data with no map, or getting sent prims that are way beyond the draw distance.

Oh and Coco is still a <insert silly, gratuitous flak> (just to keep her reputation intact).

I'd have to disagree with the article in general but more so as applied to SL specifically.

First, the graph Joel heads the article with is for a communications tool with strong network effect whereby the more people use Notes the more utility you get out of using Notes. So as a picture of software development, that graph better shows the network effect than anything about the nature of Notes. His next two examples are an RDBMS and an Operating System, both of which are historically the most complicated types of software written. Adressing his "Mistakes" in turn, some are applicable, some are wildly not:

1. Get Big Fast - LL is certainly shooting for this, with their free accounts trying to buy mindshare. Unfortunately their product doesn't support it and can't thus yielding an inverse network effect: the more people play the worse it gets.
   
2. Overhype - I don't think much needs to be said with regard to this and beta quality software as, unlike the other examples Joel cites, SL has not improved significantly since beta.
   
3. Internet time - this point addressed pushing out features as fast as can be done; the last year of SL development had essentially no new features.
   
4. Upgrade revenues - unless you count tier fees which is a bit of a stretch, this point simply doesn't apply to SL.
   
5. We'll ship when it's ready - Given the points above, by some measures, SL has never been ready, and with all the "features" that have been on the block for years, it is showing no signs of ever being ready. SL doesn't even release anticipatory schedules.

Most importantly, Joel was talking about functional software not games.

Compare SL with - for example - Rockstar. Rockstar releases a well engineered, well tested game, sells millions of units, and for almost all of their programs has not needed to even release patch 1.1. The comparison is even more salient when the graphical requirements of Rockstar's games are on the same level as SL (yes, I know it isn't streaming, yes, I know it uses DirectX not OpenGL) nevertheless, SL's faults are not in their stars (cf. Google Earth - another OpenGL app that simply works) but in their engineering. Recent evidence like the OGLE stuff which showed objects well past the largest possible draw distance being streamed to the client is just sloppy coding. That there is such huge variance in playability of SL whilst no one at LL can even explain why is further proof of "accidental coding".

Insofar as Joel's article can be said to be valid, it might more properly be titled "Good software, written well takes ten years".

That would be a problem if you're replicating the databases, but my suggetion was to split it across two machines, leaving only one instance of every record across both machines and make the clients run some sort of hash (even a super simple one like the even-odd hashing) to determine which database to ask for a particular asset.

Ummm...actually you're wrong and he's right.

Sure a 56k dial up IS a bottleneck but a highspeed cable or dsl...and certainly T1s...are NOT bottlenecks for SL at this time.

You make the incorrect assumption that just because you can lower the connection speed till you find a bottleneck that THAT must be the root cause of all the rez issues. You're wrong. I can load up my highspeed cable connection with other downloads from other computers on my LAN and it doesn't affect the time it takes to rez objects in the least.

At higher connection speeds rez times are mostly affected by your PC and video card and by the server load. The internet is not a bottleneck for most people using highspeed connections.

You're quite right; I missed that crucial part of your proposal and at present can't see any reason it oughtn't work. Sorry for my oversight.

But the majority of SL accounts were CREATED during that period! SL had 60,000 residents in late October, when I joined, and over 100,000 by year-end. I read somewhere that it had about 25,000 when LL started giving away basic accounts for free, which happened somewhere around the beginning of September. So, for instance, if you took this measurement at the end of 2005, 75% of the accounts had been CREATED in the previous four months, and so naturally all of those would have logged in at least once!