Solution to SL Performance issues

Here's a big reason as to why Second Life's performance is so shoddy:

The default avatar models are ripped directly from poser. Yep, that's it. The polygon count for each default character model (excluding excessive addons) is well over 8000-10000 polygons.

For reference, Half Life 2, Doom 3, Far Cry, and Painkiller's character models are 5000 polygons or less. World of Warcraft's character models are in the 2000~3000 vicinity.

I see this as not only laziness but an abject failure on behalf of Linden Labs because budgeting character and model detail is a fundamental REQUIREMENT for any game developer.

Solution: For the next patch, I HIGHLY urge LL devs to completely remove the default models and replace them with lower-poly characters.

"But.. they won't look as detailed!" I hear some of you cry. Quite the contrary, the detail can be made up for with better textures. Textures take up less memory than polygons do, and at the hands of a skilled artist they can create just as much detail while saving performance.

Another issue: No foreseeable polycount or data limit for objects that players create.

I realize in a perfect world we would be allowed to make absolutely ANYTHING on a computer with no limitations whatsoever, but when it comes to 3D game art, there is always a ceiling. Breach that ceiling and even the most powerful & expensive computers will be brought to thier knees.

Solution: Put some sort of limit in either poly count or data amount (in total KB or MB) per object. More robust sculpting tools so that unneeded polygons can be deleted. An extrusion tool, because slapping multiple high-poly objects together is SHODDY modelling.

The average Second Life user does not understand this, so the unfortunate reality is that some limitations must be imposed. Again, this can be counter-balanced by robust texturing & an addendum to the SL user guide to explain these limitations.

Issue 3: SL's rendering is plagued with loads of pop-up and object draw in, particularly when teleporting to a new area. Many object textures are still blurry even long after a scene loads.

Don't ask me to upgrade my computer or any such thing. The advertised system requirements for SL are quite low.

My machine:
Self-built
2.0ghz Athlon 2800XP
1.5 GIGABYTES of RAM
Geforce FX 5900 XT 128MB video card
SB Audigy Sound Card
200 GB hard drive with over 110 gigs free
Completely clean of spyware/viruses and regularly maintained.

Even by today's standards this is somewhat modest, Obviously it well exceeds the minimum advertised system specs.

As a 3D game art major @ savannah college of art and design, and a game modder for over 8 years, I know a thing or two about game development to say the least.

I say this not to toot my own horn, but to assure everyone that I need not be patronized.
My machine is not the problem and I know I'm not the only one having performance problems with this game.

I can play painkiller, a game with massive levels, tons of action, hundreds of simultaneous running scripts, and hundreds of characters onscreen at once and it still looks gorgeous, even more beautiful/detailed than Second Life.

Second Life, on the other hand, cripples my system and brings it to its knees begging for mercy if more than 5 avatars enter a given area. Even more so if its some guy who has slapped a bunch of random objects together to make a custom avatar.



It isn't the amount of scripts running, its the ludicrous waste of polygons that burden this game.

If you have no idea what I just said, imagine carrying a book in your backpack that is 10,000 pages thick and weighs a couple of hundred pounds, but half of those pages are completely blank.
This is what Second Life's character models are doing to its servers and its players.


I'm not making this thread to rant or upset anyone, its just simple fact and if Linden Labs wishes to survive, they need to fix these issues before they do anything else. Period.

Otherwise, thier oft-advertised game development features are rendered moot, and This ambassador won't be coming back after his free trial is up.

Yeah....

23 views and no response.


I hope you people realize that log in issues aren't the only major problems facing SL......

Is true SL is woefully inefficient with its graphics, but frankly, who cares? It runs a fair 10-20 FPS on my, (also very mid-range), 18 month old computer, even at 1600 resolution.

And of course, even if the Lindens wanted to, there is no real way they could roll-back the way character avatars are displayed, since 90% of the Linden$ making industry in SL revolves around avatar models, clothing, textures, textures, attachments, etc etc. Change the fundamental rules and all that content goes out the window. (Along with a lot of angry subscribers

Frankly, anyone who wants to do more than chat, fly, and play dressup, cares.

Don't think I don't already know this. Clever planning and implementation could circumvent this issue.

Untill then, PvP and game development are nonexistent and SL is nothing more than a glorified art trading, real estate, and chat client, as its major selling point (creativity) is CRIPPLED.

Instead of shooting down this badly needed change you could contribute some ideas as to how it can be implemented.

Users can be compensated in millions of ways. Think, is all I ask.

I think there is Level of Detail algs on the avatars, so you only see a fraction of the polygons.

Correct me if I am wrong, anyone?

If there is then it's either not very well implemented or its only clientside.

I've looked for one and have not found it......

Did you play AC? And was your name Tinc Metals?? LOL

Nope.

I think you make a lot of interesting points, Calah.

Can you show us a screen shot of a game that can show dynamic polygons more than 256 metres out from your avatar?

Can you show any screen shots of an example of what you're talking about?

I think if you reference something which already exists and is comparable than your thesis will have a lot more oomph.

My experience here is that there is nothing like SL. The largest cut distance I've ever seen is about 60-70 metres out from my avatar.

okay, you're right. I stopped to think a little harder about what you said. And the conclusion I came to was this:

The inefficiency of the client-end application is still easily overcome by modern high performance computers and...
Would require a great deal of money, time and programming to repair without creating compatilibility problems, but...

The bottom line is that the real issue, is the server to client communication. Second Life is never going to be able to support actioney gaming or fast movement because the rate of downloading, and the server's actual response times are just an order of magnitude slower than (vastly simpler), action game servers.

Maybe in 5 years something like SL will need to have a more efficient client end application, but right now.. the real bottleneck is not sitting on your desk.

It's only clientside, it does exist, it's actually very effective and you need to be running in high resolution to spot it doing its work.

As soon as I can log back in, I will do just that.

ANSWER ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!! please?

Well, is that entirely true, Heidi?

What if I unplug my network jack and have my cut set to 512 and then spin my avatar around.

Why is it still slow at that point?

Um.. well I think that's something to do with the updateGeom thing people have been complaining about for a version or two?

But come on.. (if you ever manage to log in again), get into the air, fly in a straight line non-stop. How far do you get before you're flying over half formed terrain with not a single prim on it. How far do you get before the packet loss bar goes right up into the red and that bungee cord starts pulling you backward.

That happens whether there are avatars below you on the land, or not. It's just volume of data.

Fast, twitchy games are able to be fast and twitchy because ALL the info required to draw the graphics is already on your computer. SL, all of it has to be downloaded, pretty much non-stop.

The original point of this thread was the statement that avatars had too many polygons and that was the "Solution to SL Performance issues".
My counterpoint, which I've stuck to, is that avatar polygon usage is a drop in the bucket compared to server to client communication.

Well, I was going to let this go, but if you insist...

Linden Labs has to make the system work. All you have to do is imagine that you can make it work better. You're going to win that face-off every time.

Sometimes I think that the hardest thing they have to do is smile and say thank you to all of the know-it-alls that flit through.

That said, be sure to let me know when your version is up and running, and I'll be one of the first to sign up!

--Allie

edited: "of" is spelled "of"

This was rather arrogant of you.

I assure you I understand (probably a lot more than you do) the kind of difficulty any game company has to go through to make a game work. MMO games 100 times even more so.

I don't claim to know everything about anything, but I DO have a thorough understanding of game development.

And ignoring a glaring flaw for the sake of being nice just does not cut it, especially when a company has thousands of users who each pay anywhere from ten bucks to several thousand monthly, AND when said company just received 8 million bucks.

The difference here Is i'm not merely raising a complaint (or linden labs blood pressure), I'm offering a potential solution.

By all means, if you have a better idea, post it. My idea isn't perfect, but it IS a requirement of the survival of any game.
Second life is the only game I've ever seen that does not enforce SOME kind of polygon budget.


Also I assure you that if I had 8 million bucks in my wallet right now I'd already have a much better game in the works with a crack team of developers and a meticulously planned design document and polygon budget BEFORE I released a playable client. But I don't. So I play and enjoy second life, and see that it just needs to be fixed.

If you aren't part of the solution you're part of the problem. I'm attempting to be part of a solution.


What are YOU doing?

Nah, Calah, it's good you're sharing ideas like this -- sometimes a thread doesn't get responded to for whatever reason, but as you see, the discussion has been kicked up a notch here.

Have you considered asking this on Hotline To Linden yet? It would be addressed to the proper technical experts at Linden Lab. Myself, I don't understand what would be going on fully unless I actually experienced the difference, side-by-side, but something tells me there's more going on here (especially given that in SL, there are such scattershot definitions of "lag" and a lot of things are affecting performance).

Reducing the polygons per avatar might slightly improve lag for users with low end graphics hardware in locations where there are a a lot of avatars, such as a packed tringo game or crowded dance floor. Aside from that I would predict no noticable difference, because the lag issues with a large number of avatars are not caused by drawing the default avatar shapes on your screen. It has a lot more to do with attachments, clothing textures, sensors, scripted objects detecting the avatars, etc.

It would do absolutely nothing for the login queue problems and asset server load.

I think that the coming upgrade to the graphics rendering engine to havvoc 2 will have a much more profound effect than dumbing down default avatars.

Games like Doom need low polygon counts because of the speed of the action. Of course, you won't be able to approach Doom's level of action with such complex avatars, so SL in-world action games are limited.

I think it would be a good idea to offer a simple avatar model that users could switch to for action-oriented in-world games, or for crowded venues like town-hall meetings.

You didn't completely read my post.
I denoted specific object limitations as well. Please read. Then read it again.

ALL games need low poly models or its just a waste of system performance, "fast action" or not. The pacing of a game and amount of motion has *NOTHING*

read that again, *NOTHING* to do with performance whatsoever.

I dont think you understand the degree of excessive waste that is occuring in the avatars of second life.

The polygon count is well over TWO OR THREE TIMES MORE THAN DOOM 3, AND THEY DON'T LOOK HALF AS GOOD.

The default models weren't even made by Linden labs, either, they just copied them from Poser, A PROGRAM WHOSE CONTENTS ARE DESIGNED TO RUN ON $10,000 GRAPHICS WORKSTATION COMPUTER'S.

Like I stated, MY machine is hardly "low end", and second life cripples it.

I think perhaps you don't understand. Without looking at the source code, you have no idea if this is actually the case. Just because they can import the model from Poser doesn't mean that that model is the one that is used internally.

You can upload Windows BMP files that are enourmous, also. A 1024 x 1024 bitmap is over 3 megabytes. Just because you can upload something in one format doesn't mean that the game uses it in that format. In the case of textures, we know that isn't the case. They have an exceptionally well-compressed format that streams very well. The people at LL are pretty smart about this kind of thing, so unless you've got some hard evidence to the contrary, I don't think you'll get much support.

- Jon

sheesh there we have the quake 3 modder coming along and explaining the "truth" to everybody, man its not quake 3 here and you have to live with it

if you think its so important to reduce the avatar polycound then propose a feature vote
but i dont think you will get many "entousiastic votes"