Dodgy gamecode..

This game runs like treacle on a 3ghz PC with a gig of ram and a fast net connection. Changing graphical options, even disabling whole chunks of renderings via the debug menu barely raises the FPS above 10.

One of the problems is that the game doesn't cache enough data. When I go into a place for the second time that day I'm still having to load everything again.

When I play World of Warcraft, which is far more graphically intensive, the game doesn't even think about loading whatever it cached previously.

Now obviously SL has ever changing landscapes, but there's still a chance to save everything when a user visits and area, and then perform checks to see what's changed - and then just reload that.

Anyway, that's just an issue with latency (which is a massive issue - this game lags like no other, whilst I can play FPS like Counter Strike with less than 25ms latency).

This is simply ridiculous, that such a graphically basic game as this can lag so much, when I can play games like Half Life 2 and not drop a frame. And this is on a laptop!

Oh - and I'd love to be able to try this out on my gaming PC with the latest graphics card, but then of course I'd be banned for using an account on two different setups, right? Crazy.

It's such a shame that a really inventive online experience is marred by such fundamental flaws. On the one hand I can be visiting places like the black library, with its streaming music, tour guide robot and theatre with shows, and enjoy it with not much issue...or I can simply teleport into the newbie area and have to spend 10 minutes waiting for all the textures to load, and then walking around is akin to swimming in molasses. And don't even try with local lighting!

I guess I'll return in a year and see if things have improved.

Actually SL is FAR more graphicly intensive then WoW. WoW's areas are set in stone, meaning everything has gone through a postprocessing application to clear out unecissary data that we can't see. Plus in WoW ALL the level data is stored locally on your harddrive. This allows for games like WoW to have much greater detailed objects without it affecting performance. SL is purely dynamic in nature so there is no premade data to filter or store to your harddrive to improve the framerate. Everything is streamed to you like music from a shoutcast server. That music isn't on your hardrive, hell it never enters your harddrive. Much the same can be said about SL. Yes it does cache stuff like textures and sounds, but because the world isn't prefabbed and perminate there's no "level" data that can be cached. Also if you watch your system resources you'll notice SL uses all available processing power to render all the streamed data compared to the amount of processing power WoW uses to run.

Uh... no. You can run your account on any computer, guy.

its all in your connection and preferences... I have a lesser system and my fps seldom goes below 15-18 FPS.

It takes time to tweak preferences, and this isnt your daddy's WoW or Counterstrike

Actually SL is FAR more graphicly intensive then WoW.

Well maybe we're conflating intensive and how technically advanced the graphics are. SL might hammer my cpu/graphics card like a steel drum, but the graphics are stone-age in comparison to WoW. And I don't think it SHOUL be more intensive - WoW has massive graphical structures to load and high quality music and thousands of players and framerate wise it never skips a beat.

I don't think it's a excuse to say that SL has dynamic graphics - yes, it does, as I pointed out in the OP, but the developers still need to make a playable game environment. Still, despite the fact that SL isn't as advanced tech as WoW (or Half Life) it doesn't run as well on the same system, and this is problem with optimisation and code not anything else.

if you watch your system resources you'll notice SL uses all available processing power to render all the streamed data compared to the amount of processing power WoW uses to run.

Actually SL canes my CPU into non existence. It does indeed take all it can get - to a ridiculous level. I think it took over 400mb. Wow takes less than 300 at the most.

I have a lesser system and my fps seldom goes below 15-18 FPS.

It should be above 30fps at the least, and scalable to lower-end systems. Firstly I shouldn't have to tweak anything because it's running on a powerful machine (although the graphics card isn't amazing), but secondly I've already tweaked and it stays at below 15. Which is crazy.

It takes time to tweak preferences, and this isnt your daddy's WoW or Counterstrike

No, because those would be professional end-products.. I can't believe people are paying for this.

Maybe I should break it down into individual sentances so you can understand.

WoW's maps are stored LOCALLY and are STATIC.

WoW's maps have gone through post processing to strip out stuff you can't see.

WoW's maps are professionally made by exspensively paid designers.

Same applies to Halflife, Doom3, and every other game on the market.

SL has NO prebuilt maps.

SL's maps are NOT made by professionals.

SL's maps are NOT stored locally and are DYNAMIC. Copying sim data to the harddrive and comparing at a later time is pointless and can potentially take up an entire hardrive if you travel beyond a few sims. All I have to do is drop a cube and uh oh.. gotta download the whole area again. Its adding unnecissary steps.

SL maps CANNOT go through post processing as its a lengthy and time consuming process (1 map takes HOURS to post process).

In a nutshell, comparing SL to other MMO games is like comparing Apples to Oranges. If you're unhappy you're welcome to try and do something to fix it (ie tweak it) or leave. Everyone is aware of of the issues SL's rendering engine has yet many have stuck around for YEARS. So if SL has a userbase that loyal something must being done right.

EDIT: forgot to mension that in games like WoW, HL2, and such characters are also static and have gone through post processing. SL cannot do that for the same reasons it cannot do that with maps. Basicly what needs to be done to drasticly improve performance can't be done in SL's case.

Hi Iorek!

I can't say much 'cause I'm just off to bed, but for what it's worth this point comes up a lot - you should be able to find loads about it if you search through the forums a little.

I nearly got put off by how slow things were (movement lag particularly) but after a while found that there's actually very little you need high framerates or accurate movement for. It really does help if you try not to think of SL as a game (which, if it was, would not only be very very dull but still in beta too) and more as an application - the rendered 3D view in 3DS Max, for instance, can be so slow the camera's unmovable.

I won't argue that the performance should be better, but we make do with what we've got. I remember waiting miutes for pages to load when the web was new, now I would give up after a couple of seconds - this is the same thing. The tech in SL is just as advanced (probably more) as that in WOW or HL2, it's just advanced in different areas.

One thing it might be useful for me to point out (if you don't already know ) is that holding alt you can use the mouse to move the camera, which doesn't have to check with the server for anything so is really quite smooth and saves you having to move your avatar.

Framerate also depends a lot on where you are - some people have no concern how much what they build will slow things down, whether because they don't know better, don't care or don't need high framerates for what they do. If people could make their own objects in WOW there'd be the same problem, someone would make a billion poly castle and every time you got within viewing distance your FPS would bottom out. If you're interested in the technical side of things you really should look into how SL works, it's really quite interesting and once understood you can see why the framerate is so bad (keep an eye out for mention of twisted torii ).
At the end of the day, I don't pay for SL and for something I'm getting completely free I think it's pretty fun.

Oh. Looks like I wrote a load anyway.

On the other hand, since I already agreed - in both of my posts - that SL was dynamic, there wasn't much need to restate it, but I appreciate the effort it took to retype your previous post.

I think it's a step that SL needs to look at very carefully. No, you can't cache the entire world, but you could optimise the world so that it would download/load faster when it was cached.

Again, as I noted, and I didn't make the comparison that direct.

Some things are being done right, sure. It's a very clever idea, and in theory it's brilliant. In practice it's got a sluggish client and poor code. Sometimes it clicks, most of the time it's a chore. Everything has a loyal userbase, that doesn't justify it - it usually means their standards are slipping.

Of course it can, and it must be done. You've refuted the idea of caching to certain extent, but there are many ways to skin a cat. I'm tolerable of fledgling ideas, I just think SL has major problems, and without solving them it won't reach a wider audience and make its mark.

I looked at this from a mapping perspective since I'm a mapper. When you map for games you have to be wary of fps and and so on so that the maps run smooth when they are played. This means looking at how many objects are on screen, in simple terms, making sure the lighting is behaving, and so on. SL isn't smooth, and it should be smooth. Since you can't cache or post-process as you note, then something else has to be done to the way the code runs. At the very least, when I load a map, I'd expect a wireframe to be loaded, then a shaded wireframe, and so on. What I in fact get is a whole bunch of crude objects seemingly dropping in at random, so I can't move for several minutes.

It's a problem, but it needs to be overcome. If it's simply a case of bandwidth limitations then SL at this point is not a feasible concept. I don't think it's acceptable to say that someone downloading at 10mbs is fine because he can load it all quickly, and someone with a lesser connection can't, but it's okay because some people can.

AJ DaSilva: thanks for your post, the ALT tip is useful. Appreciate the effort.

But when you map for a game, you are (more often than not) running compilers that will later optimize your polygons and strip out the extra bits that the game player will never see (the dark sides of walls facing the void, for instance).

Also, there is a drive to optimize with game maps that simply doesn't exist in SL; people will build (and have built) prim avatar attachments that would make ANY game engine seize up; we're talking several hundred thousand unoptimized polygons twisted in unholy ways popping up on your screen, not only that, but moving. SL handles it's torturing userbase surprisingly well.



I think your issue here should be further split into two separate ones. SL's prims system, as I (crudely) understand it, are basically parameter files sent to your client. The client parses these parameters and creates objects on your screen based on those parameters; your client knows what a 10x10x5m cube is, so it rezzes an appropriate shape. Loading a wireframe wouldn't really help, as the mesh is already there by the time you're hitting the server for the texture anyway (the texture UUIDs come packaged with the prim data, if I'm not mistaken).

As for the random crude objects problem, that's again a problem with the userbase; I'd hazard that 80% of "things" in SL arent linked together; a house is going to be 500 separate pieces, rather than 4. People CAN link things together, and when they do, they rez in all at the same time; advanced/careful builders do this with large structures so you don't experience the problems you're describing. But, again, many folks in SL don't know/don't care, and the engine is forced to cope with the most inefficient builds known to man.



I'd actually posit that it's more a result of having unfettered limits to the world's parameters than an actual technical problem; if there's a limit to be hit, no matter how obscene, the SL community will run into it within hours. And then within a week, the limit will be broken spectacularly.

My favorite case in point: There is a hard-set limit of a 40m diameter size on linked objects; something to do with the physics system, I think. Anyways, there was a way to overcome that barrier with a little creative linking/resizing. Then, someone figured out that you could sit on one edge of this (theoretically) huge pole, and end up like 5 sims over. I think they successfully stumbled upon one of the hidden development sims once, before the problem was patched. Amusing, though.

When looked at initially, SL's technology looks crude, amateur, boring. But then if you start poking around, you see how really robust the system is; it looking amateur is because, well, amateurs are making stuff with it.

One thing I feel it might be worth mentioning is that I've heard a lot of people say that using SL has taught them things that have improved their work in other progs.

Yes, SL is dynamic, no, you cannot do view preprocessing for hidden surface removal (probably not feasibly in real time). Nevertheless, the renderer was coded for expediency and offloads almost all of the scene construction to the GPU. It need not be this primitive, but I think that development on the SL1 renderer has been abandoned as the SL2 renderer is largely complete. The SL2 renderer currently generates the big-map view. As to when it will enter the product main-view is anyone's guess.

Changing tangents slighty; how does SL cache textures? It would be possible to build up a texture cache (stored by UUID), maybe even optimize it to focus on caching areas you visit a lot. The downside to this is it would make texture theft trivial.. although the idea of hacking my texture cache to replace the "IMPEACH BUSH" texture with a 100% alpha texture makes me smile.

*smiles*

Just wondering..... if SL is so horrible as you say, why do you stay?

The big map for me is slow, sometimes doesn't display the land at all no matter how long I wait, doesn't ever display the island sims when zoomed out, producing stupid looking green dots in the water that look like they need a lifesaver thrown to them, it's blurry and sometimes won't un-blur when zoomed in. and some of the icons are so big you can't see the land beneath them depending on zoom factor.

Do I have the same level of improvement the SL2 renderer brought to the map to look forward to in the scene and avatar rendering when SL2 is fully implemented?

Saying "this wine would be better if it had been cellared a couple more years" is very different from "this wine is lousy". It just now occured to me that this underlies a lot of the "sucks/fanboy" discourse on these forums.

There are plenty of things that make SL interesting, unique, and compelling. There are some absolutely atrocious design decisions, bare UIs, performace limitations, engineering tradeoffs between coding time and processor time, etc.

As one of the biggest complainers about SL around, I feel qualified to say that the "this is nifty" part is frequently left out as the poster, by posting, feels that it is implied. That which you don't care about you walk away from silently. SL can be particularly maddening because there is so much "really cool" stuck amidst the "this could have been (can be) done so much better".

In principle the cache is there and contains textures and other assets. I think they may be encoded to protect them from trivial copying. However, given some very heavy weirdness with the cache operation in the last few releases, it isn't clear that <deity> himself knows what's in the 1MB of files in the cache directory. It certainly seems as if the client doesn't know what it contains. The most recent thread on the topic points to a defect but we've not been able to divine much more than its existence.

p4 2.8 CPU, 1gb ram ddr2, ati 9800pro 128mb ddr2 GPU, SATA.

Every setting in sl maxed out for quality, (highest resolution, maximum draw distance, all options set, etc etc)

getting 10 FPS

on the default setting

with 1024x768 resolution, getting average 40 FPS.

hope this helps you see that SL is capable of high fps

This is an issue brought up a lot by new Resis—performance expectations and whatnot. It's perfectly reasonable, but perhaps should be brought into the limelight more and stated in an official document so there's some prelude of understanding and clarity. Otherwise, sayings like "Why doesn't Second Life run like all my other games?" come up. I think some of the people best qualified to answer this are Lindens themselves.

SL's behavior often functions more like a 3D modelling app than a typical "game", which makes sense as you spend more time inworld. So it's not only jarring on a social, but a technological level.

I think this sort of thing will become less problematic as the underlying technologies become more common. If SL can run increasingly smoothly and improve, we're certainly all the better for it.

It is important we bring this up so the future can be, and we can look back and laugh at how primitive things used to be.


P.S. I'd hope Local Lighting's descendants are far more advanced and make more use of your GPU, instead of being so CPU-bound (I think—more technical insight is always appreciated).

I don't know what programming background you have, but all your points are ... well, pointless.

SL does have dynamic content - that is a given. However, when you upload a texture to the system, it's given a unique identifier (based on a hash of the content?). Once you enter an area, your system should cache the texture locally. It doesn't matter if someone has rotated an object or moved it to a new location - the point is that the textures previously loaded should still remain cached and the texture ID can easily be pulled from cache to match.

The point being made is that the game isn't optimized. The caching issue is just one of many examples. I've made this point in a few other threads already, so I'll sum it up quickly: The graphics engine itself bothers me more than reloading data that should have been cached. There's no reason for the client to try to render ALL objects in the draw radius even when they're not visible on the screen. That my friends, is why your quad AMD 950 opteron box with 16 gigs of ram on a GeForce 7800GTX SLI is having issues.

I haven't found SL to be CPU bound at all. I run a "camping chair" client on a desktop that uses a Turion MT-30 laptop cpu. It's throttled to 800mhz with the same framerates as my primary desktop. Far as I can tell, CPU only helps with the initial load time of the game client, once it's up and running, the game's framerate based on the video card alone.

This keenly reminds me of more things I'd like to see here. While I've never heard of a Opteron 950, a current system Adam Zaius runs is very high-spec and he's mentions he's been getting great performance. Meanwhile, there've also been anecdotal responses from those who have comparable systems but may have some components that seem "allergic" to SL. So, I'd like to know, who else is doing really, really well?

I think there's a lot of room to focus and pinpoint "target boxes": fast computers at an effective (albeit somewhat costly, which is understandable) price, centered around several key elements which work well in tandem. Once this knowledge becomes increasingly common, excellent performance with SL won't be as elusive, and at the rate technology's going, what's "high-end" today will be "mid-range" next year.

I haven't seen enough evidence to support this yet, especially since I've had several friends go from one graphics card to a significantly faster one (common example would be something like an Nvidia 6600GT to a 7800GTX), and the boost in framerate hasn't been as dynamic as expected. How else is your primary desktop different from your laptop?

Wish there were more ways to get benchmarks out of this.

O, one additional idea I have for an experiment regarding how CPU-bound is: underclock your computer significantly at the BIOS screen, and see how it performs SL. Drop a few hundred MHz and observe what happens.

Part of what leads me to believe SL is so CPU-dependent is how, when you check it on the Windows Task Manager, it will be taking close to 99% of the CPU. That's quite clear utilization; where else would that processor time be allocated, otherwise? Is there a similar way to measure that for graphics cards? (I.e. how much "juice" is left?)

Historically, one of the first Resis that told me about this was Catherine Omega. Searching the SL Forums for "CPU-bound" brings up her name and reasoning several times.

I'm always open to more info!

I just upgraded two computers from 5200 to 6600GT, the increase in framerate was about what I expected - but only if you leave all the settings exactly the same. If you increase the draw distance, add additional graphical options, it starts to slow down.

Also, you misread what I said - it's not a laptop. It's a laptop cpu in a desktop. You can run the turion cpus in any 754 board as long as the bios supports the low voltage. But I have to admit I misread your post too - you were talking about local lighting specifically, which I haven't done any testing on since the game runs so slowly already with it off.

Ah, sorry about that! That's a new thing to me, I didn't previously know.

I'm definitely looking forward to more testing.

Local Lighting was slow but noticeably more useable for me in 1.6 than 1.7-1.8—I filed several bug reports about it, but it just slays me right now. When I call up Fast Timers near a Light-filled mall, my framerate tends to drop to 0.1 FPS, give or take a few... well, it doesn't effectively matter at that point, it's quite unuseable.