Vote for prop 700 - No More Features !

http://secondlife.com/vote/index.php?get_id=700

The recent catastrophic release of 1.7 has left no-one untouched. Just as it happened with 1.6

The releases are too big and too all-compassing apart from introducing new uncalled-for features.
Small increments is the way to ensure a stable platform and a enjoyable game.

I suggest Linden concentrate on fixing the major problems with SL, regarding frame rate and performance.
NO more fancy features until it's possible to move around and change clothes without crashing or having to wait 15 minutes for the textures to appear.

ALL work on features unrelated to improve short-term performance should be HALTED and ALL available resources should be directed to FIXING the serious problems.

If I had negative votes to give, this would get all of them.

Apparently, you're not playing the same game as I.

So because they've got people developing new features you're assuming they don't have people fixing the problems? I'm sure LL knows how many people they need working on fixing things and have got them doing it. There's only so much you can do on anything at one time, if all the coders were given the same jobs wouldn't you get to a point where there's nothing for many of them to do?

I'm sure you're right AJ, Linden have full control over what's happening.
They simply like to make us suffer.

lol.

I'm sure they get some amusement from people getting all stressed about things when it's quite unecessary.

Hey Rap,

I am sick of not being abel to play or work like I should.....I do think fixing the problems fist would be a real good idea....that makes since to me

But but...the new features are put in place as an attempt to distract us from all the problems...

Actually, the topic creater has a point.

Linden needs to fix things before adding new things. Adding new things just makes the older problems more difficult to fix.
This is the case with Windows Vista. Microsoft has been adding and adding to the codebase for years, without ever fixing the major problems the OS has, and they finally paid for it at the beginning of this year. They found that all the problems with Windows prevented them from going any further, so they had to switch to the Windows Server 2003 codebase, completely reorganize the structure of their development teams, hire a man who is practically an IT boot seargent, and get rid of a few employees.
The result: This new infrastructure allowed the development team to restore Vista to the state it was before they hit the wall, which was about three years worth of work in three months. By fixing a major problem and modulating windows AND the development team, Windows Vista will be much easier to patch, update, restore, whatever, and it even shortened the compile time from around almost three days to less than three hours. This is why Windows Vista now has nightly and monthly builds.

And just because Linden does have people fixing bugs, it doesn't mean that the bug is really fixed. As was the case with Vista before the rebuild, the dev teams were sometimes days apart from eachother, so one bug would be fixed, but it would no longer be relevant, and the fix would just cause more bugs. Microsoft's mistake cost them millions, which they can survive, but if Linden ever gets in that situation where Second Life has so many bugs that it's almost impossible to fix (Remember Wish?), it could drive them into the ground (Remember Mutable Realms?)

So you're suggesting that there were major problems before the 1.7 upgrade? Personally I'd disagree and say that current hardware just isn't up to the task of running what Second Life is and what's going on in the code would cause problems with development further on.

If you're after a world that runs really smoothly go play WoW or something. That's not what Second Life's about. (IMHO )

EDIT: Although it gives the wrong impression of what I'm saying, I like the way that last statement sounds. So rather than change it, I'd just like to clarify that when I say that's not what it's about I mean that as an experience WoW hangs on the quality of it's graphics, the gameplay (although, apparently, good) doesn't hold a candle to the depth of what you can do in Second Life.

How can a game not be about playing smoothly and having a decent framerate?
If you just tolerate a crappy framerate, then Linden has no incentive to even care.

I don't know if you're talking to me or not, but I know my hardware can handle it.
I can run games like Half-Life 2 with full settings at 1600x1200 at a decent framerate (around 45, actually) and I've got 1.5gigs of DDR2 RAM, 2.4ghz processor.

Anyway, I can't believe you actually say that Second Life isn't about having things run smoothly. Games should ALWAYS run smoothly. If your system meets at least the minimum requirements, it should run at a reasonable framerate, and 1.2-3.4 FPS is not a reasonable framerate. I'm damn sure you'd complain to Valve or ID or whatever company if Half-Life or Doom 3 ran like crap on your pc if your computer met the minimum requirements, so why wouldn't you have a problem with SL lagging terribly?

Okay, we've had this a million times before. I guess I get so say it now.

Second Life is not a game. (Well, by some defenitions it is - but it's not a video game.)

Just because HL2 looks better doesn't mean that it's tougher on your system than SL. All geometry in SL is dynamically generated, so it's gonna hit your system pretty hard. Not only that but everything in standard games is made so that the average PC can handle it. Since all (well, nearly all ) the content in Second Life is created by users and not all users undertand what's going on 'under the hood' so to speak some things made are really hard to render. Tori with loads of rotations, for instance, can look really cool and can be incredibly useful; they also consist of an immense number of polygons when rendered.

It's not that I wouldn't like SL to run smoothly, I'd like nothing better (except maybe decent object to object communication ). It's just that, with what it is, it's not possible. Even at the smoothest I've seen SL running there's still areas where your framerate is going to drop to single figures. I've gotta say it almost put me off when I joined, but stick with it. Eventually you learn where to go to do things that need a decent framerate (like building or playing with toys).

If you're really interested, I wrote a post here where I've gone into detail about what I believe Second Life is.

Don't be put off by the slower framerate, there's lots of cool things you can do that you can't do with anything else.

In a way, AJ, it reminds me of Legos. It's like showing someone a car made out of Legos, and they say,
and then you go,

Actually, there is another game that does things similarly to Second Life.
Guild Wars.
Though Guild Wars' streaming isn't as intensive as Second Life's, it still does basically the same thing, just not as often. What Second Life seriously needs is the permanent cache that Guild Wars utilizes. That would cause the servers to only send the data that has been updated rather than sending the same data over and over again. That's how Guild Wars has very little lag (that, and the instancing). Linden could learn a thing or two from ArenaNet in that respect.

Nice analogy Torley!

Ack, now I'm gonna have to go look into what Guild Wars does so I can constuct an intelligent reply. Can you give me a brief outline? Instancing, though, is something I've been trying to figure out a way to impliment in SL so I can suggest it to the Lindens (as far as my knowledge goes, it's not a simple as it sounds).

Oh, and Guild wars still used meshes to store it's data as far as I know.

Guild Wars basically just downloads the entire area and stores it in the huge "Guild Wars.dat" file that is the entire game. The actual executable for Guild Wars is only 3-4mb. What it does is the server sends the data to the client compressed before the client is allowed to see the area. The file decompresses and adds itself to the data file. Whenever a change is made, the server sends the new data the next time the player enters the area. This wouldn't work for SL, however, since doing this would cause the game to be unplayable (you'd be seeing a "Downloading" screen every 5 seconds). What Linden needs to do is adopt that data file type thing (but in cache form, where the oldest data is truncated once the file reaches its maximum allowed size).
What I think would really help the most though is having textures NEVER removed from the cache. All textures that have been loaded should never be removed. Ever. Not only would this reduce strain on the servers, it would decrease the load times for the players as well. Also, I'm not entirely sure, but does SL store objects as meshes or as vectors? Vectors take up less resources, mostly because all a vector object is is an XML-style file specifying an origin point, then rotation and length.

Rhap, you now I love you Ralph. This 1.7 has caught alot of us for a loop. Many of us have paid dearly for major updates like this one. 1.6 was a real pain and it took FOREVER for the LL teams to work out the bugs. 1.7 rolls around and POOF we have as much problems, BUT what makes things worse is the newbies coming in. They are getting caught in the middle of all this and are suffering. I WISH LL WOULD STOP THESE FREE ACCOUNT UNTIL THEY FINALLY work out the first part of 1.7 bug fixes like maybe 1.7.5. Just a thought :/
Rhap hang in there because the game is stressing due to many factors other then these client problems.

Okay, basically what's going on in Guild Wars is completely different from what's happening in SL. Any user created content (i.e. mods) isn't being streamed at all, it's downloaded as usual. If I understand your post right that's managed by the game itself, which is nice, but in essence no different from grabbing a zip off the web. What GW is downloading when you enter an area is just the location and state of objects and other data related to the gameplay, this is exactly what FPSs have been doing for years.

SL doesn't use meshes or "vectors" (I take it you mean something like nurbs, meshes are actually made of vectors too ) for storing/transmiting objects. If you look in the object tab on the edit dialog you'll see a load of fields to describe the shape, that's all there is. An individual 'prim' is generated on your computer from these variables, objects are made of collections of prims.

And are you seriously suggesting that all the textures get kept on the client PCs for ever? If you were an exploring type you'd run out of disk space in a matter of days! I think the 1GB limit on the cache is quite reasonable.

I'm still under the impression myself that a lot of people are making the 1.7 release seem a lot worse than it really is. Trust me people, all the major updates have problems at first. It's just too difficult to predict the outcome with a lot of users on with a near infinite combination of things that they've created popping up on the grid. We can be thankful though that this release has gone a lot more smoothly than the 1.6 release (although personally, I would've loved to get L$10,000 for waiting days for the server to go back up, but that's just me ). No matter what you guys want, or what LL does, there will always be hiccups in the process. Be thankful though that they're at least making good progress into fixing these bugs. To put it another way, lets say they stop adding features and just start optimizing everything. I think this would upset a lot more people due to the impression that SL is stagnating, rather than progressing. SL with no features is like an Amiga (sorry Amiga users), whereas SL with features is like Windows XP. The latter will go nuts at times, but it's far more capable of giving us what we want than a stable platform with little to offer.

Had to comment on this one. Were there major problems before 1.7.

!!!! YEAH !!!!

If there weren't major problems before 1.7... 1.7 wouldn't have been necessary. They could have just added a new feature here or there and been fine. There have been entire threads dedicated to major problems of 1.3 through 1.6.

While I agree that the current hardware setup may not be the ideal choice for running SL (and in fact, I think I recall a rather heavy thread on just that subject)... from what I've been able to discern there are some major existing coding problems.

My educated guess: Second Life grew much faster than LL expected it to. They coded spaghetti-fashion, patchcoding features and fixes with nothing set up in easily fixable modules.

Why do I say "educated" guess. Because here a while back we presented to LL the concept of allowing a sim owner to designate a list of people who would have access to the estate tools. The reply was that this was an extensive change that would impact several different areas of SL. This struck me as strange, because if the code had been written according to standard computer concepts, access to estate tools would be granted through a single common sub-module. All that would then need to happen is change that one, single subroutine to allow access to people on an owner-designated list.

That's obviously not the case... which tells me that the system right now is probably fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants sphaghetti. That means they probably really need to go back through that code and optimize, simplify, modularize, make it work. They need to get rid of the lag effects, whatever teleport problems still remain, fix the linking and "traveling prims" problems, make the current features work.

So in principle, I agree with the sentiment of "fix what you have". If you have a foundation that is rotting away... you fix that before you paint the walls a different color.

Chances are the code masters need to go back into the SL code module by module and restructure. They need to bug hunt, fix the problems... even if that takes 5 or 6 months (which I'm sure it would). SL can function as it is until then. At the end of that time, once they have it established that 1,000+ sims are ALL functioning on optimal levels and that 100 avatars can enter a sim without experiencing significant lag effects... then maybe we can start talking additional bells and whistles and "movie screen" projects.

like if linden lab even bother about these kind of proposal, it will just be flagged "cant be done"

When I said before 1.7 I meant immediatly before, and as the code is I don't think there were - everything was reasonably smooth (for SL anyway ). I thank you for bringing up the idea that it's actually not coded to standard practices though, I really hadn't considered this before and it's thrown a new light on my thoughts. Fingers crossed LL will decide to do a major rewrite and get it right this time for release 2.0 if this is the case.

Yeah, I understand. Yes, in fact several have commented that prior to 1.7... 1.6 was running fairly smoothly. Of course, we expected some serious problems with 1.7. But I didn't actually expect them to be this grid-involved (the continual pattern-lag) or last this long.

My guess at this point is that
a) It's *one* single thing that LL may be overlooking and is affecting the entire grid
b) LL must be tearing their hair out at this point LOL

My only concern is a thread I read the other day from LL stating that sims are working far better under 1.7 than 1.6. Not from what I've seen! Either stats are being misinterpreted, or something is being ignored, because just about everywhere I go there is serious "pattern lag" (some places worse than others of course, but always there) and a lot of people I've spoken with have stated the same experience. 1.7 has a problem that wasn't in 1.6 (or if it was.. didn't strike as often). It manifests itself as turning movement to karo syrup on a regular basis, and avatars being "kicked back" 5-10m at a time when travelling (ie, when flying or walking along... suddenly being move 5-10m backward). It's there, people are commenting on it, surely it has a cause somewhere.

Time Dilation is all messed up. And despite the fact that the IMAGES reading is way down from what it was... image rezzing is still as bad as it was (which makes me wonder what that reading really means and if it has any value at all).

Well, them's summmations, anyway.

actually, Proposition 74 was "acknowledged for development" in April or May.

The proposition read:



The acceptance comment was:



...and then as I remember they told us to stop putting bug fix requests in the voting tool. There was some discussion, but it came to nothing. Certainly they don't take any notice of this apparent acknowledgement, because they keep piling on more useless crap instead of making it useable, so I guess that was more to get the proposition out of the way. In other words, don't waste your time or votes. It's been done. And all those votes back then didnt make a bit of difference.

My reason for saying what I said is indeed, after I got my house in order, I am basically playiing a different game than you because I am seeing performance in crowded sims that blows away 1.6. In addition to that, multiselect ( a new feature, btw) is one of those added features that Sl sorely needed, HUD's add a whole new demention to the game the "open" option on the pie menu and a whole list of other improvements. These improvements add to the game over all and I encourage them wholeheartedly.

Linden Labs has stated on numerious occasions there first priority is bug fixes over features. Has been that way for over a year. The problem is they can't just hire a guy off the street and toss him into the grid with the order "fix bugs". They can't, because SL is unique in the way its setup and no one has experience working with SL other than long time employees. They have to be eased into the grid and one of the best ways it to have them work on features. You think it took a programming genius to come up with "mult-select"? No, it took a newbie who they wouldn't let anywere near the grid working on it to learn how everything worked and get their feet wet while the experienced employees are running around fixing problems and putting out fires. You think things are bad now, imagine them just dumping techs on the grid. Because of the change in emphisis from features to bug fixes, large scale changes like Havok2 are pushed back in favor of improving sim performance and camera jumping. The reason I would vote all my negative votes on this is because LL is already doing it to the best of their ability and proposing this only makes matters worse. You notice how fast it was accepted.

My suggestion for those having problems need to make absolutely sure the problem is not with your machine before proposing LL stop making improvements and throw away all the work done for 1.7 because you haven't done basic things like uninstalling SL, updating drivers and reloading the full version of SL from the website or that 1998 era clunk-o-tron with the 32meg video card isn't playing SL at 30fps. My machines are all getting good framerates and smooth movement, even with 19 avatars in the sim, even my clunky laptop.