SecondLife today - Not bad at all!

I have my fair share of bug and abuse reports on my name, but those who've been here for several years, will have to agree that SecondLife today isn't as bad as resident comments often suggest.

Please stop TPing around for a second and realize that the amount and impact of hacker attempts have been signigficantly reduced. And so has the amount of downtime.

SL is faster than ever and before complaining about 'lag', maybe you want to try SL version 1.0 for a day Imagine SL without scripts, without the ability to buy (or sell) lindendollars, having to pay L$10 to rez a cube, plus L$3 per week to keep it in world... Not to mention SL without skirts, primshoes, primhair, and female avatars sitting with their knees wide... Oh, don't forget about an SL without custom animations! Imagine SL with only 28 regions and 1 (read: one) private island - although that one was better than most today. And even without all that and just a few hundred residents logged on, there still was more 'lag' than nowadays...

There's always room for improvement, and I'm definitely in favour of fixing old bugs rather than introducing new ones, but overall, LindenLab isn't doing that bad at all.

/clap

(does this get me that nasty alpha texture bug fixed? )

Harald Nomad
Joan's (Kissling 225,153)

Um, which grid are you playing on? I get less FPS on the current client than I did on v1.6 and 1.7 when I joined. Simulator performance seems to have improved certainly, as the simulators are able to cope with quite a bit more than they used to, how much of this is software vs hardware I have no idea.

The client however is in dire need of people going over it and fixing and improving things, rather than adding stuff that seems to make it worse and worse.

well I am glad YOU are able to connect and think SL is better than before.

Do you work for LL?

Dont know why everyone is whining about "FPS"? I usually get 40-50 FPS in an almost empty sim, and 14-20 FPS in a Full Sim.

I see Second Life as a Work in Progress.

Considering how horrible my computer is (currently running off a fabricated computer, nothing special about it, because my normal computer is dead) I can't complain too much... Though... It did better a year ago.

A work in progress that's LOSING performance rather than gaining it?

Of course you can't whine, you have a better computer than the machine I would like to build. What're your specs?

Honestly, you won't know the meaning of the word "lag" until a 5 FPS drop hurts like a stab wound.
These days I'm lucky to break into the double-digits.

Like with everything else, when I began SL, there was much less, but as it grew, so did my system, I could not possibly expect to be playing on the internet with 1,000's of other people in a VR style game such as SL, on a 286 with dialup and 16 colour 14" monitor. Over the years I have built and rebuilt my systems to give me the most pleasure possible from. That is my investment. It is the same reasons I no longer have an 8 track player, or a VHS tape player/recorder or a black and white TV.

Retrospectively, the system I bought back in the 80's in real terms, cost me more than the systems I own today. When I began creating VR worlds for the internet, I did so on a system, although cutting edge then, would probably struggle to load the client of SL, let alone run the game. Yes we all suffered lag on our 56kbps connections, had multiple crashes every 5-20 minutes, but nothing could compare to daunt us, when we had finished out 5,500 prim, scripted world of fantasy or replica, and wanted to show it to anyone that could TP to it.

We held 'plays' in the Globe Theatre, sunbathed and chatted on the deck of an ocean going liner, explored the many sets from Lord of the rings in our custom avatars, or visited the Olde English village replica that was just down the road from where I lived. Companies would engage our talents and enthusiasim to create themed worlds for them, that they used as a branded internet 3D website, where their clients/customers/passer by could engage their company members to talk about their products in a unique way, or just individuals that would wait and greet curious people surfing the internet, dropping in and saying Hi, passing the time showing them a VR version of their 'website'.

When I transferred to Worlds.com from Adobe Atmosphere. things seemed wonderful and exciting, however, to get to grips with being creative there, was a step back... until I discovered There.com, the graphics seems wonderful and they had voice!!.. but still there was something huge missing... Then came SL and the void was again filled and more.
There has always been lag in SL, buggy updates, problems and issues.. but the payoff... the door opens wider and wider and the ability to digress into greater creativity yet still have the basic 'chat game' genre roots there, doesn't detract any enthusiasim when I crash or can't TP for a while.

Those that loose interest in SL, are mainly those that do not have a wide agenda for being here... they can gain what they need from other programmes such as There, Home, Sims on line, etc... for those that want more, SL, for the time anyways, is THE only place to be.

Ah so you prefer to take features out at updates to make it faster?

If that's what it takes. But really I'd prefer to just have a team of Lindens actually dedicated to fixing and improving what we have. There are so many working on the 'next big thing', but that next big thing is unbalancing the poor, struggling system underneath that has to try and hold it all up. I very much get the impression that LL is more focused on enjoying themselves and doing new things, than they are on actually delivering a product/service to people. Spending hours and hours fixing and improving things may be a thankless task that doesn't have the same impact as some gorgeous new graphics or wonderful new feature, but ultimately it does more for the game than any of the big things will.

They've obviously been doing work to try and better balance traffic etc on their end, but the client meanwhile is suffering as every update hacks off more and more speed. That's not progress.

I've created several meta-issues on the Jira which I hope can be used to give LL a better idea of what we actually want, and what we think will help to get it:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-267
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-864
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-241

Totally agree Haravikk !

The [SLDEV] mailing list shows heaps of activity by residents working on fixes for the open source client. Not sure how I got to be on the list.

Rob Lampier (LL) has been coordinating this but I understand Soft Linden has taken over to push the devs into accepting all the fixes that have been posted on the JIRA.

One big thing is the fixing of a major mem leak that would crash the viewer!

They seem to have weekly meetings to arbitrage the JIRA entries.

Where can I get the patches for these fixes?

They post the fixes in their emails and also on the jira. The compilation of the viewer is a major task that I have not tackled yet. One of the correspondents actually has a version that you can download from his site. You need to be on the mailing list! Sorry, I am still not sure how I got to be on it, but surely someone can elucidate?

The Lindens list the jira issues that they have incorporated in the release notes for that viewer version. By waiting for the official release you can be sure the updates are kosher.

And because I might disagree on several points with your opinion, I fall into this group? Thanks.

However, you started your post with "when I started in SL.........." and then started talking about 8 track cassets, black and white TV's, 286 processors, 56 K dialup. Whew, you've been around SL for a long long time...........even longer than Linden Labs!!!

Progress is often defined as improvements for the majority of the users. Yeah, SL would not run on an old 80286 cpu..........but I doubt it would run on a Pentium 1 either. The point is that SL now takes such a "cutting edge" computer to really enjoy like it's billed on the Second Life webpage ("Your World, Your Imagination" that the average downloader and member misses out on a lot of what SL has to offer. Many cannot even get the thing to run on their machines...........AND THEY MEET THE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS (and in many cases far exceed those). When the program outruns the average users ability to keep up it ceases to be useful for the majority. You cannot call that progress. That is a major step backward.

In the year and a half I've been in SL my old P4 1.5 gig, 512 RAM with an ATI Raedon 9250 screamed on SL. Never crashed, lagged only in busy sims, never lost inventory, could build with confidence, and had a ball playing. Since then I've upgraded to over 2 times the CPU speed, RAM, GPU speed, and I'm having a hard time doing most anything in SL. In a year and a half, I've done my part..............I doubled my stuff. But it seems SL required me to quatruple my stuff at a minimum. No where did it say (nor does it say now) that in order to continued to enjoy SL you must quadruple CPU speed, RAM and GPU every 3 or 4 months. If that is what is required to run SL, then SL needs to be put back in beta so the geeks only can have all the fun with the "wows" and "shit, man, look at this........." stuff.

Slow the heck down on the new crap.............fix what you have so your users can enjoy. Then make the fancy bells and whistles work..........and up the up the minimum requirements too so people don't get surprised like I did.

I started running SL 6 months ago on my dual core intel 2.2Gz, 1Gig ram and a 7800 video card, Since then all I've done is added another Gb of ram and upgraded to a 8800 video card when the 7800 died from too many 16 hour sessions I suspect.
Performance really hasn't changed much for me, better because many bugs that were here 6 months ago have been fixed. My next step is to add 2Gb more of ram, then my motherboard and processor will be next in a new case and I will continue upgrading till my old machine is functional again then give my current spare 2.6Gb pentium to family.
Perhaps SL should get rid of minimum requirements, and just say something like give it a go and you will need to upgrade. No company selling an evolving producrt like SL can say you can still run it on the same machine 5 years down the track unless they freeze the program at an early version forever.
Note: SL's minimum requirements state you can't run SL on dialup either but you can, abeit badly.

But it would be nice if you could expect to be able to run SL reasonably well for 6 months WITHOUT a major outlay of cash just to keep up. A gig of RAM and a new, good, graphics card cost near 400 USD!!! That is a little high on the expenses for something like Second Life............for most of us anyway. I spent 1000 on my new custom computer in a year and a half..........and I just barely kept up. That is not a reasonable thing to expect a customer to do with your product.

This is the SLDEV info page where you can view postings or sign up.
https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sldev
It gets a bit technical but does show what is going on behind the scenes.

I didn't need the graphics card upgrade, I actually went back to a 7600 card for a few days with no problems, the extra memory helped a lot, for around $90Aus, considering the game is much cheaper in subscription than WoW and Coh too.

Peggy, I wasn't saying anyone could run sl on a 80286 chip.. and my point was that everything about the PC architecture, the evolusion of the internet and what is now possible, must be inline with evolution with the systems in which we need to run to gain the maximum benefit.
I have stated many many times on these forums, LL MUST update their minimum specifications for this programme and stop kidding both their users and themselves. It's just bad marketing and business.
6 months ago, LL began to open up the graphic pipelines in the client to allow a richer environment and potentially, faster download/rezzing of graphic elements, based on the demands/gripes of the user base, about how long things took to rez/download.. but they never have spoken about the trade off of having to upgrade your system to cope with it, and they still haven't.

I upgraded to 4gb of RAM recently and can now visit malls =/

SL seems to try and send an absolutely ridiculous amount of texture information to a user's graphics card, even though many of them are in the distance as far as I can tell it's still sending the full-sized texture to the graphics card! The result is SL trying to fit 1gb of textures into 256mb of VRAM (plus geometry and whatever else) even though I'm only close enough to see the detail in maybe 100mb worth. Of course part of it goes to the poor design of many places where this problem is most evident (malls with a very open layout where nothing blocks your view of other sections, resulting in large spaces not being culled).
But it can happen in many outdoor sims too.

The result is that your RAM is constantly swapping these huge amounts of texture data in and out, and if it doesn't all fit in RAM either then it's swapping from the hard-drive which is even slower. Fun. Really it should be using reduced textures for the distance and swapping these in and out (if they even need to be swapped anymore), while leaving the big textures to go to the hard-drive until needed again for re-sampling. But such a feature may not work so well until the client is actually made multi-thread compatible to prevent the various performance enhancements it desperately needs actually reducing performance (because other things end up having to wait for them to complete, rather than them just working in the background).

Here are the related proposals:
Texture LOD: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1119
Better multi-threading: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1135
Improve Performance (meta): https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-864

Agreed... the openess and freedom we have in uploading textures at whatever size we want, is responsible for many failed systems as they are stretched to their limits. If we had to pay by the pixel, you would see a much more efficient use of texture sizes and quality in SL, and potentially a little less lag. Does a single door prim really need a 1024x1024 texture on it?
People will only build smarter, when it hits their pockets.