Bug list.... Yes, list.

Ok, there are a few things that I've bug reported, and gone through all the driver updating hoops that support always tells you to do as a cop out. I'm honestly getting so frustrated with this game. One thing in particular and thats video.

Here's the issue. SL is the most unstable piece of software when it comes to playing video. It randomly crashes my computer when it feels like it. I've updated quicktime, updated video card drivers, reinstalled SL, all that basic stuff, so thats not it. it's something more. First thing, I used to crash every time I played video. That got fixed with a quicktime update, NOT the lindens doing anything about it. Now, it seems to happen more often when someone else hits play besides me (synched video shows). My issue is, there is NO reason for SL to crash. Not display the video if there are problems, maybe, but crash, no.

two.... partial alphas bleed through themselves. this was bug reported 6 months ago and has yet to be fixed. This causes prim hair with partial transparencies to bleed through itself which looks crappy.

three.... SL's support for ATI video cards. ATI is ONE of the two leading video card manufacturers, and I find the linden's support (if you can call it that) on these to be somewhat lacking. For one, AGP acceleration is STILL not supported for ATI's, a problem that has been there since the game started.

four....framerate is horrible, and I know they are working on this one... but I have a very very high end computer, that gets in upwards of 60fps in most everything, yet in SL I get screen lag in busy areas. This doesn't seem to be due to prim count or anything other than sloppy code.

Sorry about the rant, I'm just sick of sending in bug reports, talking to live help, and never getting anywhere. I'm not asking for miracles here....

edit: Please dont' respond negatively. only positive feedback on this issue. I don't wanna hear stuff like "if you don't like it don't play" or any other copout response.

Delerium
hi there im a older user like your se3lf .. i see the same things ... been here when they played no music in sl lol .... way back in the days .... All we can do i guess is be paient Parents ..lol as this Software is more stable .... as it is stll like a baby ... not like the others out there .... I can play W.O.W .. Plantside ... EQ on this comp with out troubles .... But with Sl It seem to be a whole different ball of wax ....

If you wish you can send my a Private im ... Huggs and chins up ... Cuiz durning all of this ... and not being able to get in a lost the land i was reant ing iand i suppes my house ect is now in my iventroy ... And dang i liked that place too

Zeph

Yes, there's some really weird stuff going on with alpha, right now. I had a ricepaper floor, for a while, that kept eating the rugs on it. I have *no* clue what that's about.

Your lag issues may be caused by other avatars. Since you're saying it's in "busy areas" and avatars are the single most processor intensive objects in all of SL, it makes perfect sense. Name one other shape that splines. Seriously.

I have also heard rumours that ATI's drivers are... questionable at best, when put to certain uses. This may be causing the delay in supporting them properly.

ATI drivers are perfectly fine. My card works fine in any other game. Great in fact. I'm running with a x800 xt PE. It's a fast card. There's no reason 20 avatars should even put a dent in it's processing power. Not when it can render av's in other games at quadruple the amount. Also, these aren't issues that are new. and this isn't alpha, beta, or anything like that. I'm talking about LIVE SL. The game has been live for a long time now, I know, I beta tested it. And quite frankly the response time on bugs is horrible. The only thing the lindens have to worry about is fixing bugs. thats their main job. They have no content to provide, we do that. So why did it take nearly 2 months to fix the teleport bug 6 months ago? Their response time to bugs and issues is horrible.

Tell me what other games you play that have the in-depth avatar customisation options that SL has. I'd like to go poke them with sticks for a while.

Most games have a fairly fixed set of sizes and shapes that a character can be, and those are stored client-side. That's not really possible for SL. Do a search for "avatar AND lag" and it should turn up the official Linden explanation.

And, really, if you're so irritated at the turnaround time on bugs, apply for a job at Linden Labs, and *do* something about it. They do hire new programmers, every once in a while.

I don't live in cali for one, and don't plan on moving there. Not to mention, thats a cop out response. What you are referring to as far as customization has no bearing on visual lag. The only thing that should effect your visual lag is the actual polygons and effects going on on teh screen. most of the other stuff is handled by your processor, and trust me, I'm running the fastest single processor on the market. I understand SL may be a little slower, but there are a TON of things that SL has done wrong when it comes to CG.... For one, they display every portion of every polygon, even if the camera can't see it. That in itself is very graphics intensive, and most games wouldn't even get away with doing that. It's just plain sloppy. I could go on and on, but trust me. As far as how SL's CG is rendered and displayed, it's laggy.

In order as you posed them:

1. I know more players who either can't get video to work at all or get client crashes that I consider video in SL to be a misfeature and recommend that people not bother.
   
2. The alpha layering "confusion" in the renderer has been long known but appears fixed in 1.7 preview. Indeed there is a sim named "Texture" in the preview grid that looks as if it was designed to test exactly that.
   
3. The ATI card problems has been there since at least v1.1 and the collective "wisdom" on the subject is that ATI's OpenGL support is broken in some was that few other games use. There was also a time when ATI had engineers in game specifically to work on these maybe about a year ago. Some driver/card/motherboard combinations seem to work better than others, but there are still quite a few players who have resorted to switching to nVidia to avoid them.
   
4. The visual FPS of SL will likely never equal that of Quake and such because of fundamental differences in the way they world models operate. There is a lot of precompliation of static "levels" in Quake-like games which means that X obscures Y from point Z can be known ahead of time. In a non-static world such as SL, you cannot do that precomputation. They are working on optimizing the rendering code, but don't hold your breath for that. 20 FPS has long been considered "good", 30 "very good" and if you are looking at a void sim you might be able to see it spike up to 60. I've never known anyone to see Quake-like rates of 80+ FPS. Try lowering various details and draw distance under preferences.
   

I hope that helps some.

Video is buggy for everyone pretty much. It really becomes a problem in built up, populated sims.



Does the same to me at times. SL crashes to the desktop to prevent screwing up your machine or more importantly the servers so it is quite sensitive. If some bit of information is not where it should be or takes too long it can trigger a crash. This is a good thing really because if it didn't errors could affect the servers and mess up the world for everyone else. Video is a little bit of icing on a good cake right now and fixing it is likely a low priority for now.



That one's been around for years and likely not going away soon. The way to fix it would likely add more lag than it is worth.





That one isn't LL's fault, it is ATI's fault. SL uses a standard for video cards called OpenGL. It is called a standard as that is what it is, very much like HTML is for web pages. As long as you stick to the standard, no matter what machine or browser you use you can still read the web page. Well, ATI decided to vary from the standard (much like Microsoft does ). Nvidia, on the other hand, has maintained a strict adhearance to OpenGL and that is why SL works so much more reliably on Nvidia cards. Newer PCIe ATI cards are much better at sticking with the standards and seem to cause less problems with SL. ATI makes great cards but they have a reputation for writing sloppy, buggy drivers.



"High end" and "horrible frame rate" are subjective. My 4400+ X2 AMD duel core, 6800Ultra and 2 gigs of ram is probably high end but barely. Now if I had duel 7800's in SLI then I might be nearer the top. With my rig I average 30 fps, 15-20 if there are a lot of folks around and I have seen 90+ on empty sims. 10-15fps is about what most folks in SL see and 5- 10 fps on lower end systems. Considering what SL has to do and that it is streaming, you can't expect 100fps on a 2.4 P4 with a 5500Nvidia.



Bug reports aren't going to get you individual help on any issue. Quality Control uses them to spot trends to address issues that affect a lot of players. They get 100 reports that say they can't rez a prim then they will look closely as to why, one report likely won't show on anyone's radar. Live help isn't going to be able to do more than read a script given them by SL (contracted IT support most likely) so don't expect a whole lot.

You guys sound like you know what your talking about, so this probably wont help much. The fps thing is a lot lower because everything is streamed in real time. Its really pretty amazing that I can rez a prim and torture it and you can watch the whole process.

In Quake, HL2, and all the good eye candy games, most of those files of the environment are already on your system and you dont have to download it everytime you look at it. But, SL is fundamentally different in that if my neighbor is building a skyscraper, I can sit on my porch 50m away and watch it go up, in real time.

ahhh. where to start....for one, my system specs:

athlon 64 fx-55 liquid cooled
dual raptor drives running in a raid-0 configuration
ati x800 xt pe video card also water cooled
1 gig of low latency ddr400 ram
temp sensors on all vital parts....



As for rendering, I'm not talking about quake or half life. I'm talking about other online games like swg, matrix online, etc... I know their poly count is lower per character model, but still. And as for x y z rendering, this is irrelevant, since all of that is handled client side. the code for what sections of poly's to show is client side during the frame render, so it knows exactly what can and can't be seen. Btw, doing a calculation on this takes less time then it does to actually render the poly.

As for openGL being THE standard, you are mis-informed. It is A standard, not THE standard... there are others, like say for instance, the largest one, direct-x. It still doesn't address the issue of there being an "agp acceleration" checkbox that becomes greyed out if you don't own a geforce.

For the computer specs, I said high end, not top dog. kath, you listed off your specs, most people would consider that as high end. it may not be "top of every single class super duper kill all" computers, but it is high end. Mine is the same. I'm not sure how SL supports dual cores, if they even do, so I'm not sure if there's much of a speed increase there.

Honestly I wasn't intending on getting into a debate over the mechanics of 3d rendering, as I've dabbled in it myself, and I understand the code behind it. I can't speak for your knowledge, but mine tells me that a higher framerate than 20 is very possible. Remember, we are talking video lag here, which has nothing to do with server side. this is strictly how fast the objects render that are already client side, and thats the part that is lacking.

Malachi, I found your post very very informative and helpful. thanks for that. I'll look forward to alphas being fixed with the next version. only problem is, I don't feel like replacing a 600 dollar video card simply because SL says, "oh, thats crap" when every other company says, "oh, we'll try and find a way to support that"

loki, screen lag and net lag are two different things. What you are referring to is called net lag, and it's effected by your bandwidth, your latency, packet loss, etc... screen lag is client side only, and it's effected by your computer's hardware, the amount of poly's on the screen, your performance settings, etc... not sure quite how else to explain that, but what I'm referring to is screen lag, it's purely client side, and the code works just like as if you were playing quake, or any other offline game. (the graphics get rendered just the same)

Anyway, this is turning into a bad rant.... loki answered a few of my questions, I guess I'll just have to live without video.

Not in SL. The renderer and netcode are in the same thread. I believe it has long been established that one will lag the other. High ping will cause low FPS, and low FPS will cause high ping.
This was supposed to be fixed in 1.6 but was postponed due to instability.

I didn't mean to imply that your concerns were not valid; regulars here (especially the Lindens) think I'm pretty damn crictical of SL's approach. Nothing you said was a priori incorrect, but was perhaps "overoptimistic" in the SL context.

I'm not a gamedev, but I do know some things about development. Emma Soyinka (who is a newish player and also a gamedev) has posted more extensively on the subject and knows more. Look her up.

I don't think the things you speak of *should* be that way, nevertheless it currently is. I will note that Linden Lab is hiring and you may wish to "Be the change", as they are fond of saying. Good luck.

I don't know if this is directed at me but I never said it was THE standard, I said it is the standard SL uses. The agp greyout according to the Lindens is due to the way ATI cards handle textures and its in a non-standard way. I don't know for a fact but this is the answer they have given over the years this comes up in the forums over and over again.



And I said mine was kinda low on the high end and also said it was subjective. I know a guy on SL who runs a quad Option with 12 gig memory. That's truely high end to me. Yours is a peg or two higher than mine for sure. As for the duel 4400+ chip, it isn't designed nor is SL made to exploit the duel chips but it does allow me to work in Photoshop, listen to MP3's and run two instances of SL without slowdown easily.






The rendering isn't so much the problem as it is the textures. SL allows you to put huge textures on prim faces that would make a regular game designer choke. A sim full of two meg textures being refreshed and streamed makes you amazed SL works at all. Then again in 1.7 we are going to see framerates capped at 45fps so those extra cycles can be put to better use on the server. You might be able to get faster than 45fps but thats the max the server is going to do.






SL does support ATI and it does work with SL. The things that are turned off to make it work are how they support it. Doom3 is another OpenGL based game and it too has to make allowances for ATI hardware (although invisibly) and if you look at the reviews Nvidia's consistantly outperform ATI's. On the other hand ATI's whollup Nvidia cards on most everything else but especially on direct-x based games. SL chose OpenGL for a variety of good reasons I suspect, two of the biggest is they don't have to pay tribute to the Cesar Microsoft and it makes it much easier to support Macs.

egg, I see. I didn't know that. That makes much more sense, although I disagree that it should be handled on the same thread. I can't say though, because I don't know how they structured everything. Hindsight is 20/20 so to speak. egg, do you know if this is even being worked on anymore? could this be coming in 1.7?



very true. textures sizes do become a problem. But that was a design flaw in letting textures have no limitation on size. The framerate thing I did read about, and as I understood it, that only pertains to scripts causing net lag. Screen lag due to how the game is coded will still be there as I understand it. Who knows, I guess I'll see when 1.7 gets here.



again, makes sense. I bought this particular ATI (I've owned all Geforces in the past) because it benchmarked higher in just about everything that I saw tested with it. Of course, SL is never in those benchmarks, so I didn't give it another thought. Those two reasons you gave for using openGL make sense though. I just get the feeling that because I chose to buy an ATI card, and mind you ATI is a fairly big company and alot of people have their cards, that SL chose to keep ATI compatibility on the backburner. It may use a different standard, but look how many people own ATI cards? shouldn't that customer base be a concern for making sure things run smooth for them? Thats my only concern with that issue.

ATI works a lot better with SL than they did a year ago before their engeneers came into the game and modifeid their drivers for better compatability. They may have rebuild SL from the ground up to really do anything about it at this point. Maybe by 2.0. Also keep in mind SL was started on back in 1999 and the graphics world was a whole lot different than it is right now. Back then VooDoo was the king card and Tomb Raider was the big thing.

Im not sure what other graphics standard there is that is cross platform, directx doesnt work on macs, and wont work on the indevelopment linux client, while opengl is a long used multplatform system and many games have used it.

Ati decided to write their own gl driver, which is pretty much streamlined in the way it communicates back to the client on errors, in that it doesnt give much feedback for the developers work out whats going wrong while nvidia use the opengl driver which gives alot of feedback to the application which can be fed back to give fixes.

As far as 1.7 im still seeing problems with alpha textures, thats using the tests on texturetest island move close to one of the alpha numbered blocks and turn side to side and you'll see the side pieces sort into view incorrectly

.... 64-fx57 , dual 7800's in SLI , 2GB Corsair XMS PRO ...

And I still get framerate reduction with prim hair in the picture =P

The AA and AF are incredible when there's a team sharing the work though

.... SL is VERY processor intensive. Better to upgrade that with some faster ram than a new GFX card, NVida or ATI, for a *Slight* performance boost.

Remember the Internet on a 12k phone line? That's kinda where we are now with SL... give it time, it'll get better

..hehe, just my 2cts

byby!