Is It Always Like This ????

Hi:

I just joined Second Life and I am very disappointed with my experience in it. My first entry into the world was unplayable with horrendous lag. I logged out and reloggged to see if it would make any difference. Well, it did = it's worse!! I can't get into the game. The login process has been extremely long (minimum 5 minutes-then I give up and try again). and I get stuck on "Connecting to Region." I have not yet been able to get into the game again.

I have a very fast custom gaming PC with a high-end vid card, a gig of RAM, and a dsl connection. I have no problem playing graphically challenging games.'

What's the story??

UPDATE:

Well, I finally was able to log in again after about ten minutes BUT the lag still is making the game unplayable. Looks like you folks have a major techinical issue on your hands. Lotsa Luck In Resolving It.

Players: Don't Let NE1 Blame the Problem on Your Rig, Your Settings, or your Connection. The problems is clearly server-side.

This is HOK,
Over and Out

Uh....system specs please?

I have no idea what you are talking about. The game runs smootly for me. While there might be some lag, its not noticable enough to piss me off. Only the areas that are occupied by lotsa people (furnation, camping areas) are the areas that lag for me. And yes, system specs please.

SPECS:

AMD 3800+
1 Gig PC3700 DDR Ram
Nvidia 7800 GT 256Mb
Verizon DSL

Nokuma are you playing the game right now?? [Thursday 10:21 AM EST] ?

It's definitely not on my end. I logged into Everquest II just to check and I am fine, I play EQ2 at Very High Quality Settings with full antialiasing and anistropic filtering. There is no more graphically intensive game than EQ2.

Maybe it's just in the Newb Tutorial area that there is a problem.

All I know is that I can not play the game right now.

Try one thing for me.

Under Options ---> Graphics, uncheck the box that says "Disable Farclip".

Before I switched a Mac I was using an Athlon 64 4000+ with a 7800GTX and a Gig of ram and I could not play it with out doing that or else it would lag like crazy.

Dude, seriously. Don't bother asking for help here. This forum is really only good for a couple of choruses of 'must be your pc/connection'. Because, hey, SL works for them!

The best you can do is write support with as much detail as possible and hope they bother to respond.

I sympathise. My main pc is much like yours and I have a 10mb/s connection. I can run just about any software you care to mention with zero problem, and yet come SL 1.6, suddenly I can't play SL at all because of random lag and some of the oddest bugs reproduceable bugs that occur since inworld (on any one of my pc's and my friends too, I might add). But of course, it's something my end.

As you can prolly tell, I never got a resolution on that and I don't have the heart to bother pursuing it any more.

But keep at 'em and keep your fingers crossed! You never know!

I'd suggest checking what your settings are under Preferences | Graphics and Advanced Graphics.

I understand that your machine may play other graphically intensive games with ease, but one thing you have to understand is that with a typical game, 99% of the content is on the CD you bought and installed. In SL, EVERYTHING you see is streaming from the server to your PC. It has to be that way, due to the fact that 99% of everything you see in-world is created by US -- the residents -- and it's constantly changing.

In particular, look at the 'Draw Distance' (if it's set too high, it'll slow you down drastically) and whether you have 'Local Lighting' on (that's a performance hit for a lot of people -- if it's on, try turning it off).

I have nowhere near the machine you describe -- mine is an Athlon XP 2600+, running at 2.1 GHz with a Radeon 9600 video card and 1.5 GB of RAM -- but I don't have much problem with lag at all. Of course, YMMV.

P2

SLs motto could be "Shit Happens."

Anyway, the only thing I can really reccomend is playing with the graphics options in preferences, you may have turned them up of habbit from playing other games, but try turning them all the way down, if you get better performance, turn them up 1 by 1 and see which gives you the performance hit.

No, hok, it is most likely your system. I had the EXACT SAME PROBLEMS WITH LAG...1-3fps with over 3 folks around 10 tops in empty sims. Ended up finding out my Gigabyte MB had a defective AGP implementation (Gigabyte gimped it to get their PCIExtreme port to work, there support's answer to it was 'replace your 2 month old board with our NEW model) and it was treating my AGP 6800GT videocard like a low-end PCI!

Replaced the Motherboard with an Asus and fired up SL...empty sims 38-40FPS, crowded areas 15-20, averaging 25-35FPS. A flakey AGP inplementation (gimped board, cheap offbrand board, storebought PC with low-end parts) can and will have problems. just cause its the latest 3.xx with 2 gigs of ram and quality vidcard doesn't mean the rest of the PCI isn't off the rack average.

whatever you do, dont enable Local Light if youre in a populated sim , thats just slooow. :>

But yeah its proably one setting you have way to high, draw distance/local light is big killers on fps.

Also keep in mind that any system running below 30FPS is pretty normal in SL as well because the way everything is rendered (no locally stored content, no static meshes, etc.).

Hello:

Looks like my vid card may be the culprit here. I am using an NVidia 7800GT 256 Mb=Latest Generation=High-End, which otherwise is a very good card. Another member this afternoon posted in a new thread that he had just replaced his vid card with a 7800 and the game became unplayable for him, and he had to reinstall his old card to play the game.

So unless I am willing to give up my 7800 and purchase something else I won't be joining you folks in SL. Probably just as well. Knowing myself this game probably would wind up costing me a fortune to play

Cya'll in another game.

HOK

Try this

Alrighty- as someone who's deals with this stuff (PC's->A+ Certified technician)....

First- make sure all your drivers are up to date.
2nd- Check Preferences. Other than the Farclip suggestion, Try clearing the Cache, turn down the amount of particles, UNcheck everything in Graphics->Performance Options (except for Disable Far Clip), In Adv. Graphics, set the options at the bottom to lower specs. I find Particles to be a big lag-fest at times.

Try those & see what happens. Dont forget it also depends on where you're at. Really busy areas with lots of people wearing lots of attachments will cause a lot of lag.

If you're using a router, check the FAQs about which ports to have open. Sometimes this doesnt help as I had an Belkin Router that just did NOT like SL even with the ports open.

EDIT: I run Battlefield 2 with the settings cranked but still get some lag in SL. Thus is the nature of the beast.

That has to do with the fact that nVidia just came out with an AGP version of the 7800, which had previously been available only as PCI Express.

P2

SL is actually far more graphically intensive than EQ2 and just about every other 3D game out there. Everything in SL is a dynamic object -- SL doesn't come with precompiled maps; so basically everything has to be calculated in real time. You will not get "uber" FPS rates like you do in most 3D games, and your CPU will usually limit your framerate more than your video card here.

Start by turning off all the graphics options. Local Lighting is the worst culprit. Then set your draw distance to 128. This should get you at least about 20-30 FPS on a 7800 in most places in SL.