How long for an area to "settle down" upon arrival?

Okay, this has been bugging me for awhile now, and since seldom inside SL do I see someone actually acknowledge that I asked about it, I'm asking here...

What's a "reasonable" amount of time to sit patiently waiting for an area to completely rez-up? I've noticed a problem with the most recent client with rezzing being even more irregular than it was before. Go to somewhere like the Slingo/Tringo board at Ice Dragon's and the freaking scoreboard won't even completly rez up half the time.

I've got a Gb of RAM, a fairly happy cablemodem, and a Athlon 64 3200+ CPU (and the cache setting is maxed in the game).

Anyone else seeing a similar issue with textures not "bothering" to come down the wire?

Textures not bothering to come down is as good a description as any. I've experienced this ever since the notorious 1.7 upgrade. However, I can be quite successful in 'coaxing' the textures to download. I can arrive in an area and everything is grey, and if I remain passive then everything simply stays grey. If, on the other hand, I move my cursor over objects, or even better Alt-Click them, then they tend to rez pretty smartly.

At the risk of second-guessing what's going on here I could describe the situation as one where textures do not bother to come down unless I manually express an interest in the texture.

This can be very tedious in areas where there are a lot of objects.


Conspiracy theorist maintain that LL have somehow throttled the texture downloads because their servers are maxed-out, and it is curious that LL consistently remain silent on the question of texture issues even when directly asked. LL certainly don't currently report it as a Known Issue. Unfortunately that pretty much leaves us with nothing but speculation.

As far as my client is concerned I'm experiencing good performance with low bandwidth usage... it is just as if the SL servers don't register my interest, and as you say can't be bothered.

At the risk of speculating too much, I can note that we have yet to have an update from LL on the previously acknowledged Interest List issue.

Clearly, another explaination is that it is my set up, and the silent majority of SL users aren't experiencing any texture loading problems at all.

You've described the exact behaviour I'm seeing (even though I didn't mention mouse-overing things can often coax them into rezzing), and frankly at this point I'd even pore over the interest selection routines (with my shaky knowledge of C) because I'm pretty sure they're breaking. In light-duty areas the problem doesn't manifest as much (a few prims might not map) as it does in high-prim areas (where I have trouble getting almost *anything* to completely rez in)--to me that says there's a linked array structure being corrupted (and melting into goo) through use.

I begin to wonder if the reason people are still playing Tringo is because they've been camping that area for so long they already have everything cached through sheer luck. I'll have to try the alt-click thing and see if I can't force a scene to complete.

It isn't you, it is everyone I've ever encountered in game geographically dispersed around the globe (okay, no Antarctica), with machine configurations as varied as they come. I've even known people to move the same machine from California to the East Coast with no change at all. I've sat in one place and waited literal minutes for textures to grace me with their presence with no one else in the sim.

The "interest list" (what should SL send me next) and the texture cache (do I already have this or do I need to ask for it) have been admitted to be broken by LL and then no fix mentioned, but no improvement seen either. There is also a known problem with their use of video card memory which the lastest patch was "maybe going to help on some configurations" according to the release notes.

If I had a systemic limitation this bad and didn't know what, if anything, I could do to fix it, I'd be tempted to be pretty quiet about it, too. However, I would probably not give into that temptation. LL appears to have done so; I consider it an accomplishment of the players diagnostic abilities that LL is no longer categorically denying the phenomenon exists - which, I fear - is the most we are likely to get out of them at this point. "Come to SL where the people are nice and the world is not always grey" makes for a bad marketing slogan. Sigh.

I know we've had countless threads on the texture issues, but I too am fed up with what is quite obviously a bug or design flaw that's been with us since 1.7.

I have a home built system, Athlon64 3700+, 2G RAM, 7800GT graphics card, 2Mb broadband and frame rates over 30 MOST of the time.

I'm thankfull to be getting such good performance given the problems many other people with high end systems are having, but the fact that the slow appearance, non appearance and apparant un-caching of textures when I look away happens to me too, indicates it's most definitely a fault with SL. Sometimes the tricks to force them down work, sometimes not. Oh and clothes too, I can spend an entire evening with friends and never actually see what they're wearing beyond a blurry impression sometimes.

I'm not buying into a conspiracy theory, but if I can be showing little to no network activity while looking directly at something that hasn't rezzed properly, either my client's not asking for it or the SL server isn't sending it. Partial rezzing suggests the latter, but I think there may be issues with both the client interest list as well as the servers ability to do its job and supply data.

It's a bug and a design flaw!

The design flaw is that the asset system is running at 10x to 100x of its design specifications. Unfortunately, the asset system is such a central design element and inherent bottleneck in SL operation that it cannot be feasibly fixed; the best they can do is tweak it while hopefully someone is working on a more scalably designed SL2ish thingy. The way they have been tweaking it is to alter priorities of asset requests and service so that everyone has a slow experience instead of no one (or a few) having a good rate of service.

That said, I also think they broke something badly in 1.7 because the client doesn't even appear to be requesting assets when idle and nothing else is going on. I am of the belief (hope) that SL1 has been tossed into maintenence mode and the engineers best qualified to fix it are working on its successor. This leaves SL1 in the hands of those who are least capable of fixing what has become a spit-and-chewing-gum house of band-aids over the last few years. Worse still, rumor has it that the internal code documentation is either non-existent or lousy as SL1 was written in "get it out the door now" mode. Add to that the presumption that the SL1 maintainers have likely been told to interfere with the orginal SL1 developers because it would hamper the development of SL2. In short, a total maintenance snafu; those who are charged with keeping SL1 from dying should be pitied.

Much of the last paragraph is informed conjecture based on much observation of LL behavior and significant experience in the life-cycle of software projects. A more pessimistic view is that they've gotten bored and frustrated and are working on something completely unrelated or are even less capable than I assume they are.

It would be nice if LL would tell us what their vague plans are, but given their historic degree of openness, I'm not holding my breath.

Think of it this way: chat still works pretty well, and that's the primary reason I use SL any longer - to keep in contact with the splendid people I have met there.