Game Troubleshooting and Performance Website

Hi all, I'm one of the WW2OL invaders ;P

First off, unless you are running one of the older Windows OS's (98, 98se, ect) you might as well ignore this post.

Over at WW2OL, when our game went live on 6/6/2001 it had tons of problems. A great many of those problems were game related, but a significant number were also related to poorly set up computers. WW2OL takes real good computer, well configured and running right because it is a very CPU (processor) dependant and every extra CPU cycle you can get helps a little.

Second Life is very similar to WW2OL in the things it demands from a computer.

During WW2OL's painful first steps, I found myself on the forums a lot helping people get the game running. I also found myself typing the same things over and over for each person...because there are a few very common problems a lot of computer users have. After a few thousand posts typing out the same thing, it occured to me that I have a website and could post all that stuff there and save myself a lot of typing. So...thats what I did.

I created World War Two Online Troublesooting Tips to help players get the game running and running good. These tips can help you even if SL is working okay for you.

This is an old site and I have since retired from tech support and no longer keep it updated. But the info there is still perfectly valid for Win98 based systems. The site is set up in a roughly step by step manner, with simple instructions for things you can do to improve your computer's performance.

Along the left side of the site are the menus. If you go thru these one at a time, in order from top to bottom, the pages will guide you thru a bunch of different things you can try. You dont have to do all of them...and some of them probably wont improve the performance of this game much...such as the HDD tuning tips and virtual memory settings. These tips and tricks are very common and found on many tweaking websites around the net. Virtually all of them are very safe...if the tip causes a problem, its a simple matter to undo it.

I dont know how many of you folks are still running Win98 (I am) and the tips are only really good for Win98. If you are, and are having problems with framerate (FPS, frames per second) in the game...the site might be worth checking out.

Good luck

Avondell

Hey, Avondell

Just thought I'd add a more official Second Life Troubleshooting post to this thread.

Like WW2OL, Second Life requires your computer to be in pretty good shape - we're especially dependent on things that don't usually affect other apps and games, because we're doing things that other games don't usually do very much of. In particular, we put a lot more load on the AGP bus than most other games do.

In any case, I've been working on a revised graphics-related support doc for debugging performance and system stability, but for now, you can take a look at an older one, which is slightly out of date, but still useful.

It's in our Knowledge Base under Tech Support, called "Debugging viewer crashes and slow performance". I'd post a direct link, but I've tried to do that in the past and it's never worked. Sigh...

IMPORTANT! For those of you getting low frame rates on GeForce2/MX and GeForce 4MX cards, you'll actually NOT want to run the latest (43.45) drivers right now, but the 41.09 drivers instead. Trust me, your frame rates should go up by at least 5-10x when there's lots of people around. Complicated story, but basically they removed support for an OpenGL extension that we're using to render our avatars. We'll be working on a fallback approach that will avoid this problem in the future. The reason why the 4MX has this problem as well is because it doesn't have a vertex program/shader engine in hardware like the GeForce 3. For the more graphics/gamer oriented people, this is why John Carmack does NOT recommend that you get a GeForce4MX to play Doom 3.

FYI, we don't currently officially support Win98 for Second Life. While there's no reason that I can think of right now why it SHOULDN'T work, we're not going to guarantee that it's going to continue to work in the future.

If you do ANYTHING else beside playing games, I'd highly recommend the upgrade to one of the newer (and vastly more stable) OSes. With the exception of Windows ME, of course (shudder!). Besides, with our minimum specs, there's really no reason not to. You DO meet our minimum specs, right?


- Doug

As an aside, I remember debugging 3D apps on Windows 98 around 5 years ago. Hmm, let me change this. Does it work? Nope, crash, reboot. How about this? Nope, crash, reboot. It STILL makes me cranky.

Heh, this is what I get for posting on Saturday morning before lunch. I get sort of goofy!

I was kind of surprised when I found SL doesnt support Win98...but I can kinda understand it. I'm a dinosaur, I guess.

I'm currently running an AMD 1.4 cpu, Gf4 4200, 512megs DDR RAM...fast HDD...and Win98se.

I have ZERO problems other than my framerates are a little slow, and thats because I am running old 30xx nVidia drivers. Maybe I should update those today...

Anyways, my box and SL seem to be very stable together. I played 12 solid hours yesterday without a single CTD or relog, but I guess my box may be in a little better shape than the average tyro Win98se box.

I dont know if anything on that site would be useful to you, Doug, but feel free to use anything from that site.

Avondell

Two more things.

One, its interesting to know that the AGP bus can be a bottleneck. Some of the best performance gains I have seen have been adjustments to the AGP settings...but this isnt a great area for n00bs to be messing around in, so be warned. There is info on my site on how to make adjustments to your AGP, if you want to give it a try. Just...be prepared that your system might crash and you'll have to enter safe mode or your BIOS to put things back. FYI, the AGP bus is basically the part of your motherboard that your graphics card plugs into. It is a piece of hardware that contains software (the driver).

Second, you can get the 41.09 drivers for all GEForce cards here or you can try at Guru3d.com .

Avondell