SL unplayable for new player

Hello there.

Yesterday I decided to give SL a try, I've read the features and was very interested.
So, I made an account, downloaded the client and logged on.
Logged on ok, and appeared in the tutorial place. Everything around loaded just fine, and the only problem was some 1-2 sec lag i had with walking. After I finished the tutorial, I was teleported to the main SL world.

I spawned in the home location, and that was about it. My SL experience kind of ends here, since the game was/is unplayable for me at this point. I will explain.

Stuff around me started loading. I wait. I tried walking, I couldn't. The terrain around me seemed to have loaded, and some parts of the building. People also appeared, but textureless. I thought that if I waited some more, everything would load up. I waited and waited, but nothing changed. Although data transfer was working fine. Nothing else was loading. And I still couldn't walk.

I thought of coming to the forums to look for help. I minimized the game. I noticed I was disconnected from every active connection I had in other programs (Mirc, MSN, everything disconnected). Tried to come to the forums using firefox. Nothing happened, connection timed out error. Happened on every page I tried to load. My internet was practiaclly dead outside of SL.

Also noticed CPU usage of SL while minimized is around 50%.

I exited SL, since I thought that a game like this would keep cached everything it downloaded, and next time i would get in-game, it would continue downloading the rest.
How wrong i was. I re-entered the game, logged in the same location i quitted, and EVERYTHING started to load from the beginning.

So that means that even if i decided to let SL try to download everything it needed to let me interact with the location I was, I had to leave my pc for several hours, since i could NOT use the internet while SL was running, and I couldn't use any other (offline) programs, since SL used a lot of CPU, even if minimized.

This, as you see, is intolerable. Below I have attached a screenshot of the in-game network statistics.

My pc is: p4 2.5ghz, 1gb ram, ati radeon 9800pro
My internet connection is adsl 384/128
The firewall i use is kerio personal firewall

I would require some help, if you can provide, because I REALLY want to check this game out.

Thank you

Hi!, yeah SL streams constantly, so you need a pretty decent isp and machine to constant render, SL can take gig of rechaching every day depends how long you stay and do, CPU use can be 100% constantly , doesnt matter that much tho.

Sadly the welcome area is usually populated with many people and can be quite killing on your fps when you render,and enter first time, Sims in SL are errr not to good handling 20-30+ avatars. (why they have 4 sims in SL welcome area)


some tips here:


Network
Maximum bandwidth ; 2-300 (sorry but you need faster isp to use it higher)
Disk cache ; eeh pick one , normally 1000


Preference/graphic
Anistropic filtering ; off
Local lightning ; off (this will make you realllly slow, but pretty lights)
shadows ; off (these tend to crash you latly)
disable far clip ; off
shiney object ; on
Avatar rendering ; Normal

Adv.Graphics
Agp Graphic Acceleration ; off (ati cant use them in SL)
Texture cache size ; Large
Vid card memory ; max as you can use

Object detail ; middle
Tree detail ; low/middle
Avatar detail ; low/middle

Avatar vertex program ; on (if you can use it)
Draw distance ; 64 (this is a thing that can force you to download AAALOT you dont need if its in big sims with loads of stuff)
Fog Distance Ratio ; 1-4 (i like 4 = no fog)
Drop draw distance ; 0
Bumpiness draw distance; 0
Max Particle ; 1024 (this can be quite heavy on lower vid cards)
Outfit composite limit ; 1


You can contact me ingame if you want to ask anything, or just ask people, they are usually helpfull ; Thili Playfair

I'd also suspect your firewall. Try running the game with it turned off completely, also ensure that the Windows Firewall is off completely. If you get better performance with the firewall(s) off, then you probably need to find out which ports should be wide open for SL.

My machine has almost identical specs to yours and I run the game just fine. Speedily, in fact, in spite of the fact that my 9800 cannot use AGP with SL. (I wish I knew why SL doesn't like ATI cards).

The main difference from you is that my firewall is a D-Link router, and I use ZoneAlarm Pro on top of that. I haven't needed to open any specific ports for the game.

If you are running any Non-NT (i.e. Windows 9x or Me) I strongly advise upgrading that, too. These old clunky OSes have not been build with "network" in mind at all.

I'm running WinXP. I tried also with with the firewall off and the result was the same.

However, last time i logged on, i tried to teleport to a random location. I teleported to a region named Rainbow Island, and to my surprise, everything worked fine! Everything started downloading slowly, but I could see the progress around me. My ping eventually stabilized at around 300-2000, in contrast to the 30k (!) ping i had in the starting location (Dore). I could walk around fine (with only 2-3 secs lag). I even tested quitting and relogging, to see if the cache worked, and it actually worked. Relogged, and everything was there.

I don't know what's the reason for the game's stall in the Dore location...

I'll play some more and test.

you are not alone.

ive got SL a second try today (got a faster internet connection) +
got a new pc:

winxp
P4-3 Ghz
2 Gig Dual 400 Kingston Ram
1 x Sata2 200 HD
Ati X850 XT 256 MB
Creative Audigy2 ZS
all latest drivers

network: 3mbit down / 376 up

its total unplayable for me.
got only 3-6 fps.... same as with my older P4 1,8, ati 9800 pro, 1 gig ram system; but much lower (my second isp) network speed 512/512.
it make no sense.
i cant rotate without stutters and frame drops.
low res, or all low settings does not change a bit.
when i fly i have the best fps with 7-10.

sorry but this isnt enjoyable for me.

the only thing what is same on both pcs:
second life warns me for an older intel agp driver?! but both pcs got the latest updates! and the agp card option cant be enabled.
other games works fine with it.

sorry for my bad english, im outside the us

edit: without vertex avatar program it runs a little little bit faster.

Just like to add that the shadows bug has been fixed so it wont crash you anymore, main think to drop is your draw distance with graphics slowness, to load objects faster, set the bandwidth slider as fast as your line speed ie 300 for 300kbps or 1000(max) for 3Mbps

As far as agp not being selectable its not that sl wont work with it, more like that ati wont write good enough drivers for sl to utilise the full functions, ati dont even use opengl drivers they use their own, so in a way sl has to cope with ati.

I don't have any fps problems, graphics run smoothly for me.

the cpu usage is normal, although it seems to indicate usually more than its using sometimes, i think it likes to grab what it can even if its not being used. if your far away it could be bad pings to the sim, im in the uk and get about 180-200 but its all isp dependant and if they are speed limiting then it will get higher etc.

nice post.....

what system?