When I started my Second Life, I was helped by some intensely nice people who encouraged me to share what I’d learned from them. I’m keeping my promise and passing on these tidbits like the yummy info-cookies they are!
Today, thanx to your continuing support, 16 video quick tips β each is 2 min. or less β await you! All have been done in response to your requests:
- Did you know you can download the viewer with a single link?
- How about turning off the IM “ding-ding!” sound but leaving others intact?
- What is ARC and why does it matter?
- Ways to transfer inventory to other Residents?
… BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!
All of these were filmed in the Release Candidate viewer and most functionality depicted is the same as the main viewer. But, just so you know. π
I’m sure you can improve upon some of these basic recipes with your own knowhow β like what Vidal Tripsa said. Go for it, and share the goodness in the comments. I’m your illuminator, and this is your Second Life to light up.
THE ADVENTURE BEGINS HERE!
DOWNLOAD HIGH-QUALITY VERSIONS
(These look and sound much better than the YouTube clips!)
3 ways to get to About Land
Did you know viewing parcel info can be done via no less than a trio of paths?
Avatar Rendering Cost
ARC is a useful tool which shows you how much viewer-side lag other avatars incur. For full details, see this.
Find Friends & Groups faster
Type in the first few letters of a friend or group to select them in the list.
Give stuff to someone nearby
Here’s how to transfer inventory to another Resident whose avatar is close to yours.
Give stuff to someone remote
Here’s how to transfer inventory to another Resident who’s far away (you can’t see them in-avatar).
Instant viewer download link
get.secondlife.com will instantly download the newest main viewer for the current operating system you’re on.
Learn the Lag Meter
Saying “lag” by itself is like saying “I hurt” to a doctor. But where, and what kind of pain? Have a look at the lag meter!
Make a 1-way tinted window
This simple exercise can be applied whenever you want to texture faces of a prim independently and differently.
Open the Advanced menu
Within this hidden menu are many powerful features which I’ve covered in other tutorials. Since they’re unsupported, use them at your own risk… be aware!
Scroll through tabs faster
Just click and drag the mouse button to blaze through!
Stop falling through floors
Have adjacent parcels of land which span more than one region? You’ll want to check out this workaround.
Troubleshoot sound not playing
A quick run-through of reasons why you might not be hearing sound. Be sure your speakers are on, too.
Turn off annoying UI sounds
Want to silence the IM “ding-ding!” or any other user interface sound selectively? We have an Advanced menu option for that.
Unwear attachments to give them
Unintuitive but it works: you can give body parts/clothes while wearing, yet attachments (objects) need to be taken off first.
Use the pie menu quicker
By holding down the right mouse button and releasing it on a pie menu “slice”, you can use options with less effort.
What do parcel status icons mean?
Hover over to get a tooltip, or click to get an extended description.
… AND THE ADVENTURES CONTINUE! Next up: how to let friends & groups edit your objects…
–Torley Linden 
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Official Second Life Blog 
Yes Torley, we all love you π
Love everything about all you do, well apart from the pink and green watermellon fantasy colors…lol, I have a question about the whole bunch of textures you made, what programe did you use, and how did you come up with all those neat names? Where mushrooms involed in the proccess?
Sadly the ARC is not very accurate and is just some numbers someone concocted and plugged into the code. Many many of us have found this metric to be rather misleading and it would be better if LL would stop promoting this “feature” as it is clearly intended to cause social strife and is nothing more than an arrogant attempt by pastrami linden to blame the residents of SL for the awful performance windlight smashed SL with.
So please stop trying to make sl a flat barren landscape of ugly avatars and cubes for structures *with a pretty sky*. Either code for viewer efficiency and support what the *CUSTOMERS* are doing or just say no more attachments and everyone has to be dressed in flat black uniforms like the windlight team was at that town hall meeting. They really made a point that was not missed by some of us nor was the point very attractive. All they needed were a certain style military hat to complete the effect.
Remember, SL was great without windlight and the residents never asked for it. It is pretty and all but windlight is what is causing performance problems. Not prim attachments. Prim attachments were here long before this windlight thing was forced on the community.
Yeay! Torlized π Bah Lag meter still no help fps of 5-10 normal for me – its images loading (not draw disatance) any1 know a fix? im me π
Prolific!!! π
Hey Christos, I adore pink and green! Torley, don’t ever stop being you. Great helpful info as always, thank you!
@4 Garn: The “lag meter” is for showing the condition of your network connection to the sim you’re in, so it isn’t about your viewer’s rendering speed. If your viewer’s framerate is too low, try lowering the graphics detail settings some and/or shrink the size of the viewer’s window.
@Torley: Thanks for showing people how to use the lag meter. While the rendering costs aren’t 100% representative of an attachment’s impact on rendering speed, it’s an excellent rough guide (for example how invisible attachments slow down rendering). So far the only strong complaints I’ve seen about ARC are from residents who sell very high cost products (think 500 prim boots and hair), who probably fear loss of business if more render-friendly products become the norm. Rather than complain about ARC, how about taking the initiative to build more efficiently? π
Regarding the ARC…
I second Ann in post #3 this time and adds that ARC breaks (or is a tool for breaking) the community standards at a pair of points…
[quote]
1. Intolerance
Combating intolerance is a cornerstone of Second Life’s Community Standards. Actions that marginalize, belittle, or defame individuals or groups inhibit the satisfying exchange of ideas and diminish the Second Life community as whole.
2. Harassment
Given the myriad capabilities of Second Life, harassment can take many forms.
[/quote]
Besides that, keep up the good work Torley
ok i missed a [/quote][quote] between point 1 and 2… but you get the point π
Btw…. my ARC is still in the 5500 league and i don’t plan to change that as long as my old barely minimum system manages it *grins*
@3: It IS prim attachments that lag up the SL client. More prims = more polygons, and depending on how robust your GFX card is, you can only handle a certain amount. Simple as that. Add in things like textures, shiny, glow, and an assortment of other things and your computer will be slowed down when someone walks in the sim with over 9000 attached prims.
Resolution? ARC. Now there is a rough figure to base how heavy an avatar is. Actual Polygonal Count X # of textures X texture resolutions X effects would be a better gauge, but ARC is still a blessing for content creators who wish to streamline and make their designs highly efficient.
Anyone can throw hundreds of prims at something and call it “detailed” but a good designer will be detailed+efficent, keeping the experience of the end user in mind.
Thank you Torley for keeping ARC highlighted. The more savvy end users are about the nature of SL and the way graphics are rendered or the way scripts perform on a server, the better the community will get. Savvy users = higher expectations of quality from the content creators. This demand in turn fuels higher quality content as the content creators educate and improve themselves, which then translates into better experiences for everyone.
Instead of catering to the lowest common denominator, LL is doing the right thing, by educating people.
Because the tutorial of Torley Linden always is irregular, unless you note, Blog to be immediately renewed, overlooking tend. Such opportunity very for the beginner friendly.γThanks Linden
Friendly thankings Torley. Great job as usual!
On the subject of ARC though. I tend to agree with the point that LL should endevour to make it possible for content creators to make whatever they can/like without being branded as “High ARC” creators. Better performance is what most Residents want and not pseudo restrictions.
If I did have 9000 prim attachments I’d probably hit the SL client, with or without Windlight, but maybe just a little less without it, which I think is Ann’s point. But, I like Windlight, and want to keep it, so what we need is a better client?? I’m not an expert, but is ARC an admission that things can’t get much better?
For the Savvy residents who wish to be kind to their fellow residents, it would be great if vendors always highlighted how many prims were in their products, so we’d know before we bought them.
Got Lag? Buy a modern computer. Stop complaining because your experience is laggy. Just because you have poor graphics and lag doesn’t mean everyone does. The $800 pc i picked up at best buy has quad core, 4GB ram, 8500GT, and vista 64 bit. I don’t get lag. Anywhere.
ARC – the virtual SUV. Big grin at Torley!
I would also like to bring this to your attention:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-7139
@13 Yep, Ann’s right. LL effectively killed old or lower end machines with Windlight. No matter what you trim or disable it’s not going to give you a great user experience without at least a new video card. I too have a quad core and a 8800GT videocard. Same thing… I don’t see any client lag. From the looks of Torley’s videos, I would bet he has similar hardware. Bottom line, without the hardware you are not going to get your SL experience to look like one of Torley’s videos.
I would be interested to know the effects of LAG on different design strategies. If you reduce the number of prims to reduce LAG it would seem to me that the most obvious way to keep the detail would be to increase the detail on the texture. So which is better, a piece of jewelry made of 10 small prims with simple textures, or 3 bigger prims with 1024 x 1024 detailed texture? (An off the top of my head example, but I think it explains my question.)
Since different kinds of prims have different polygon counts, the LEAST that the ARC could do is take that into account and, for example, rate a torus higher than a cube… [rolls eyes]
ARC is just another tool so that we can have a number to look at for consideration while building, like prim count.
@Buying faster and faster video cards: That’s a hell of a band-aid approach to an ongoing problem of irresponsibility with builds/excessive attachments. In the spirit of Westboro B*****t C****h, i’d say that’d be the equivalent of being a ~Lag Enabler~.
Way to go Torely, bump you boss down in the blog
lol.
mmm , that notice is cool, now i can discriminate to all people in my land, if i see some people with yellow color in avatar cost i want use EJECT!! FROM MY LAND, because now the lag problems that is not for linden labs, the lag problem is for the people!!
thanks to torley linden! yea,
Are these any where in world? You know where they might do some good.
Wow, Torley, hard to keep up with all those tutorials.
Did you consider creating an RSS feed for them so we can auto-download them an watch them while commuting from home – work?
That would also fix the problem mentioned by #11
ARC is incredibly deceptive. Make a 255 prim object, Set it (via script) to 100% transparent. This ibject will NOT be rendered by the client. Yet wearing it, will RAISE your ARC score.
Take 20 of them (or so) and attach one to every attachment point on your avatar. Your ARC score will go through the roof, and yet the actual WEIGHT of rendering your avatar will not change at all.
NOW.. via script, make ALL these objects visible.
Your ARC score will DROP.. and the complexity of your avatr will skyrocket. Lower ARC, Higher Lag.
Please stop advertising this obviously flawed “feature”.. all it does is give people an excuse to treat each other poorly.
@23 winter: check the link http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/05/01/who-me-yes-you-couldnt-be-then-who-introducing-avatar-rendering-cost/
“- 4 points added for each transparent face of the prim. Rationale: Alpha creates a lot of overhead by needing to be sorted every frame AND by breaking batches.”
besides that, having the lowest arc isn’t really “cool” – I got 1100, 970 just by my hair. I am not going to run around bald now or wear the ridiculous linden hair. However, there are people who and occasions where ARC can help.
Great job Torley, your the best. Keep up the good work.
yea thanks to Torley Linden, great job, now i can discriminate more easy with all comunity in my land all people with yellow color in avatar cost, Eject Power from the land
ARC doesn’t seem to be a feature of the current viewer, seems I’d need to run a RC (beta) viewer to use ARC.
It seems to be a good tool for designers to use to evaluate their own creations, but I think letting a person evaluate another avatar has a lot of room for misuse.
@24 that’s all well and good for PARTIALLY transparent textures.. but I’m speaking about COMPLETELY INVISIBLE prims.. which are simply NOT RENDERED. there’s no sorting done.
“hide” your prims, and the SOCER exponentially increases.. SHOW them, and the SCORE DECREASES. Try it yourself sometime.. instead of beleiving what you read.
4000+ prims.. hidden they don’t increase lag at all. But they increase the ARC score like mad. SHow the prims, and the arc score drops to near noting, yet the LAG goes through the roof.
Greetings Torley and other SL residents.
although most of the vids are stuff I already know, but there was stuff I didn’t know, but none the less good work, new beginners to SL will def have use for these
@23/28: I can see your logic, but it is flawed, because the scope of lag issues in SL is not only limited to clientside. Have you even worn 4000 prims and tried changing regions?
I’ve worn around 5000 prims once to see what it does (I made a lot of people mad in the process too). I changed regions and it almost crashed a sim. While the 5000 prims are invisible, sure there might not be clientside lag because your GFX card does not have to render the prims, but instead, you now introduce server side lag from wearing that much stuff.
Wear 5000 prims and TP to the Crash Me region. There will be a slowdown in Time Dilation as the SL server has to transmit the data from all 5000 of your prims to all of the clients in the region. This is on top of transmitting the data of the agents and objects in the region to your computer. This includes having to transmit that X avatar is wearing 5000 prims with these attributes and attachment positions. It has to report the attribute and position for each and every prim you are wearing. Even though they are invisible, the basic architecture of SL platform has to transmit that data no matter what to ensure that all users on a server are seeing the same thing, which eats up the available processing power. Processor bandwidth is limited; hidden or not, wearing too many prims will be laggy, one way or the other.
Now consider if everyone wears around 1000 prims @ 20 users in a sim. It’s not a pretty picture…it’s amazing that SL can even run as it is. Ever notice the slowdown in time dilation when someone enters a sim?
The ARC scoring still needs work to be truly accurate, but hiding the prims doesnt make things any better. Invisible prim will save on the client side lag, but server side lag of having too many prims still exists.
A good ARC stat may have separate values for:
Clientside lag: #of prims + #of textures + size of textures + attributes
Serverside lag: what percentage of processing power it takes to transmit all of the data of an avatar and its attachments + efficiency of the active scripts within those attachments
Base the red yellow and green colorings for average hardware loadouts of the majority of SL users (this metric is already collected by the client, I sure wish they made this public).
Well this feature is misleading and will only cause harassment. What I ask myself is why you introduce this feature, there must be a reason for that, or you have something in mind. So the next step will be a limit on how high the ARC can get. All those tools always started grief. And even if my ARC is too high for some people’s taste, i won’t change it, my graphic card is capable of doing that. But then people might eject me from their land. So where is that phrase gone Your world your imagination?
Well I think the discussion is fruitless anyway since LL always did what they wanted without listening to the community.
But one point i like to say is that , if this causes harassment Torley has violated the terms of services:
—
In addition to abiding at all times by the Community Standards, you agree that you shall not:
…
(iv) take any action or upload, post, e-mail or otherwise transmit Content as determined by Linden Lab at its sole discretion that is harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, causes tort, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another’s privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable;
7650 prims…
30x 255 prim attachments.
Bare: ARC SCORE 1
Visible: ARC SCORE 306
Invisible: ARC SCORE 183906
Bare: 18fps
Visible: 14fps
Invisible: 13.3 fps
What was this tool good for again?
ROFL…..
Thx Torley to Help the Ressidents Of SL with your Vids
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*sighs* It’s you guys at LL who created second life without thinkin of the consiquenses! And now you guys at LL turn it around and start blaming your residents? Shame on you!
What good is SL if I can’t dress up properaly. I don’t want to run ugly and naked and bold around. Shame on you LL!
@ Ann Otoole
What kind of remark is that:
“Got Lag? Buy a modern computer. Stop complaining because your experience is laggy. Just because you have poor graphics and lag doesnβt mean everyone does. The $800 pc i picked up at best buy has quad core, 4GB ram, 8500GT, and vista 64 bit. I donβt get lag. Anywhere.”
According to the requierments, LL says we don’t need a computer that heavy! And not all people can effort to buy a new computer.
ahahah, ARC video trips at second 02 in both the blog page and YouTube. Is there a hidden meaning in it ? :)))
Well, at least in my computer. I maybe should upgrade that π
Sigh. What is with all these people complaining about ARC?
Most attachments can still look great without being 255 prims. Swords are a very common culprit, and FOR SOME REASON EVERY SINGLE PRIM IN EVERY SWORD I HAVE SEEN IS A PARTICLE EMITTER, if you want to have a sword emit particles, put the emitter in ONE prim, not EVERY prim! This goes beyond swords of course but they are a great example because they are terrible offendors without needing to be!
Is it just me or are some of these videos no longer available? I keep getting that annoying message when trying to watch these imbedded clips directly.
Regardless, great job as usual, Torley. Hey, why don’t they give you the job of customer relations as well? You’re doing it better than most, include the actual PR that pops up every now and then with those ‘I feel your pain’ messages of hers π
Winter’s experiment is quite informative.
The claim is that invisible prims do not affect performance at all and so should not be counted.
She tests to prove her point, and the numbers do not support this at all; indeed her framerate drops when she’s wearing lots of invisible prims, just as the higher ARC hints it would.
Granted, the ARC score may wildly overestimate how much the impact will be, but the original claim that the score was working backwards is obviously not true.
So the tool is good for showing you that, despite your assumptions about how things work, invisible prims are indeed worse for performance than opaque ones.
@13 said : ” Got Lag? Buy a modern computer. Stop complaining because your experience is laggy. Just because you have poor graphics and lag doesnβt mean everyone does ”
The PC (and Tuxedo) guru again wrote before thinking. Most average graphical devices are able to render fast a set of simple polygons since a couple of years (the basic graphical item being a triangle like in many 3D applications). In most cases the bottleneck is the network link, either on the client side or on the server side. You just forget to think that SL is only a web appication like so many – even though a sophisticated one.
@13 said “The $800 pc i picked up at best buy has quad core, 4GB ram, 8500GT, and vista 64 bit”
There is no need for such a configuration excepted for memory may be, Any 2+ GHz CPU can do well. As for a 64 bit software it is absolutely of no help since, again, the point is the network, not the computation capacity or the address range capability factor.
Anyway i can understand you’re very proud to have such a technology marvel (lol).
@28 said : “Iβm speaking about COMPLETELY INVISIBLE prims.. which are simply NOT RENDERED”
Of course they are rendered at first since the primitive shape exists. Want an example ? Rezz a phantom full-transparent plain small cube as a telehub, then TP to this landpoint, the prim will appear during 1 sec or so (btw this is why things are all “greyish” at time – full-fransparent or not).
“So the tool is good for showing you that, despite your assumptions about how things work, invisible prims are indeed worse for performance than opaque ones.”
Next time you hold an event.. tell everyone to show up with an ARC less than 1000.. I’ll show up wearing 7650 prims, with an ARC score of 306.
I don’t understand how 305 points can take away 4 frames per second.. but 186,600 MORE points, only takes away HALF a frame more per second.
This wasn’t a scientific study, and I had an assistant nearby who kept changing clothes as well. it wasn’t a fully controlled test.
My argument still stands.. The tool is unreliable.
If 7650 prims can be a score of 306 or 180,000… and not change the framerate noticably switching from 306 to 180,000.
“Of course they are rendered at first since the primitive shape exists. Want an example ? Rezz a phantom full-transparent plain small cube as a telehub, then TP to this landpoint, the prim will appear during 1 sec or so (btw this is why things are all βgreyishβ at time – full-fransparent or not).”
That’s true of 100% alpha TEXTURES.. but it’s not true of 100% “SetAlpha” prims. (the alpha setting on the texture panel.
When a 100% alpha texture loads, there is a brief period where it, like every texture, is displayed as “standin grey” while the texture downloads.
This is not typically true of prims that are set as “alpha” via script. Since the face is set to 100% alpha, regardless of what texture is displayed, even the grey “please wait” texture is not rendered.
I met Winter on the Crash Me sim and confirmed that prims that use llSetAlpha value of 100 are weighted very heavily, despite not being rendered. In the above posts, I was thinking of alpha textured prims and the special case invisiprim.
Having any prims in a sim though, does eat up server and network resources. Since ARC has been generally referred to for clientside lag issues, the alpha value of 100 (completely invisible) shouldnt be having as much weight as it does. Hopefully that is fixed in a future RC before making it a main client feature.
Lag from avatars a very complex issue to lump into one metric, so a separate “Server Rendering Cost” should accompany it to paint a much clearer picture of the things involved in lag in SL.
“Iβll show up wearing 7650 prims, with an ARC score of 306.”
That still doesn’t change that wearing 7650 *invisible* prims would be *worse*.
Apart from that, I don’t see the point in the “let us find a pathological example, and declare everything unusable” line of thought. You know wearing 7650 prims is bad. You don’t need the ARC to tell you that. There’s been enough talk about that ARC should not be used to harass people; neither should it be used to legitimize griefing.
The ARC is just one more tool which can help you in some instances. Should we hide the FPS counter as well, since that can also reveal a ballpark figure about how much impact an avatar has?
The ARC is no more authoritative than any other debug reading you can get from the engine. If people *decide* to use it for hard rules in their social context, that’s really up to themselves.
I definitely agree that walking around wearing 7650 prims is clearly not sane behaviour.
That said.. my ARC is only 306 when doing so. People who keep defending ARC as a “good tool” need to reconsider.. if it thinks that an avatar walking around with half a sim’s worth of prims, is “Green”.
@28 last point before i quit : why do you think there would be an option “view/highlight transparency” if the “full invisible” texturing stuff was not rendered as is (i.e.: invisible) ?
Also a big thank you to the soooooooo lovely Torley who thought he reinvented the wheel by showing “his” invisible texture on one video here… may be he forgot to check that this is used since years in SL. But anyway he’s so prolific… π
The worrying thing is that some people will eject avatars with hisgh ARC counts when a more important cause of lag is how many scripts and particles are there
What’s the point of “glow”? Every example I’ve seen with more than a 0.1 setting for it is just whited-out unless I turn off basic shaders to disable glow.
So – 0.0 is off, 0.5 is ‘pretty’, 0.1 is garish and anything more is useless? Is it just my graphics card or is that the way it’s meant to be?
ARC, this wonderful tool. As in, you can make an educated guess about how you might affect others when you get close enough for them to have to render your avatar. And that is, as they say, all.
When it comes to actual rendering, it’s all about polygons. And this has been pointed at by others. Rendering in OpenGL is, to put it simply, to let every polygon pass filters on its way to the screen. Applying textures is one filter. Changing alpha another. And finally, it shows up on your screen the way it should. The reason alpha is given such a high cost is that everything *behind* a transparent polygon also will have to be put through the filters to show up as intended.
To argue that just because you don’t *see* the “invisible prim” on the screen it should not add to the cost is to miss the point.
So, a polygon that doesn’t need to be put through the alpha filter will not force other polygons to do it either and that reduces the cost of rendering. Having a scene without polygons with alpha makes the whole scene render faster. And as a result, you can attach lots of prims (constructed by polygons) and still have a decent framerate. Add some alpha to the mix, and your framerate will drop.
Arguing that ARC will give rise to some kind of discrimination or that LL by adding the feature is breaking the ToS or other things like that is just plain silly. Before ARC was added, people already knew that when some avatars entered the room/dance floor/spaceship their frame rate dropped like a stone. The person running the avatar might have no problem with it, having a state of the art computer, but it made all other suffer unless they had a new computer too. So, this is nothing new, it’s the same old thing with a cost tacked to it to make it easier for *everyone* to make educated guesses about the affect they have on the SL experience for others.
Comparing SL to other games is also to miss the point. Game designers who are responsible for building objects in a game get a strict polygon count and to make it possible to show more of the complicated objects (high polygon count) fewer of the other objects can be on the screen at the same time. Simple math. In SL this is not the case, since the avatars move around, rez objects, change objects with scripts and other things that make it impossible to finetune a scene and get a nice and high framerate. So, there *is* a responsibility placed on the residents to play nice and not turn everything into a lag party.
Arguing that Windlight is the reason for all that is bad in the world and that ARC is a copout by LL to try to shift the blame is also silly. With exactly the same hardware and drivers, I got *better* framerates in SL after Windlight got into the viewer and I could even activate some nice new features that would have killed my framerate before Windlight.
I know, I know, I’m just one person, so my experience with Windlight is not enough to give proper support to my point but, for some reason, my gut feeling is that if a survey were to be done, the average framerate after the introduction of Windlight has gone up.
Just a suggestion Indeterminate : why don’t you use the OnRez browser/viewer ? To me this is a good compromise between 1.19.4 and the series of recent RCs . May be you do not have so many options such as “glow” (which remains something mysterious), still you can keep doing nice things with it.
After all we do not always need to add tons of useless maple syrup onto a pancake to make it sweet.
Simple things can be among the best, provided a bit of imagination and creativity is into it. On the contrary “cosmetics” features can at time bring along undesired side-effects such as pushing forward raw technical know-how at the detriment of imagination.
Picasso spent his entire life”un-learning” painting (ok, we are not Picasso – smile)
Wooo… Can I ask you to have diner we me haha :))
I just love these vids !
@28: “Iβm speaking about COMPLETELY INVISIBLE prims.. which are simply NOT RENDERED. thereβs no sorting done.”
This is completely FALSE, unfortunately. Invisible prims are rendered by the client just the same as partially transparent prims. Try it out for yourself if you don’t believe me: go to a fairly empty place and wear a bunch of invisible attachments. I tried it just now for the sake of argument, and a few high-prim invisible attachments dropped my FPS from 72 to 26! Now imagine a room full of avatars like that, and it becomes clear very quickly that invisible attachments are a terrible idea. Maybe the 180,000 vs 306 ARCs is a bit exaggerated, but ARC is useful enough to tell you that invisible attachments can cause problems.
Also, I don’t see the connection between ARC and discrimination. Anybody can have an ARC of 1 with a few mouse clicks (try “Detach All”). As 231 said, ARC provides a rough performance metric for an avatar’s appearance. It’s not perfect, but it can be very eye-opening to causes of viewer performance problems. Want a 5000 prim avatar? ARC won’t stop you, but if your avatar is offensive (for performance or other reasons), it’s the parcel owner’s right to eject you from their property. Once visual muting is released to the RC viewer, we will have a 2nd option: to reduce a visually-abusive avatar to a low-res avatar impostor. This will allow people who don’t care about performance to waltz around in 5000 prim avatars while allowing others nearby to enjoy high framerates. Maybe you can guess which category I’ll be in. =)
I wonder if we could request a feature enhancement for the client to have it so 100% transparent prims are not rendered (or rather that other prims behind said prim do not have to filter through) and help improve some client-side performance?
A workaround that may be good is for people to use a texture with a 100% transparent alpha layer instead of the llSetAlpha() function. This seems to use less resources on the client, if the ARC is relatively accurate on this issue.
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@#53 creem:
“Also, I donβt see the connection between ARC and discrimination. Anybody can have an ARC of 1 with a few mouse clicks (try βDetach Allβ)”
THAT IS DISCRIMINATION!
In the “your world, Your imagination” ™ -world e have the right to wear what we want, and not granting that is true discrimination.
Besides that,…
I persist in staying at 5500-level ARC and if i ever get ejected for that, an AR ti LL is a second away. As stated before, using ARC like that violates the CS pretty heavily.
And no, ARC is way off when it comes to client lag anyway as my red-red level doesn’t inmpact significally on my budget system. (P4 1,6 GHz/GfeForce MX4) so it is missleading.
Been there, tried that, and will happily AR any kindof even slight abusive use of ARC in the future.
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@56
To argue that since you don’t have problems rendering yourself, noone should complain is plain ignorance. Unless you’re going for a subtle degree of sarcasm.
And there are lots of places in SL where I’m not welcomed unless I comply with the rules set up by the SIM owner. Some places I’m not allowed to fly (even though I like to fly) and in some places I’m not allowed to dress the way I want. And I accept this since it’s not my SIM so I’m not paying for it nor making the rules. There are lots of other places for me to go to to fly and dress as I want. To call this discrimination is nothing but broken rethoric.
And when it comes to rights, you are also mistaken. Try donning your finest scripted penis and walk into a PG SIM, or some other place where there are other ideas about conduct. Slum it at Frank’s in your torn jeans and rugged T-shirt, shoeless and dirty, and see how long you get to stay. This is not discrimination, this is sticking to rules set up by the SIM (or parcel) owner.
You don’t have any *right* to go anywhere and act and dress as you please, plain and simple. Do you file an AR as soon as you stumble on a ban line too?
Filing an AR for people telling you to punish everyone around you less or ejecting you when you won’t is just selfish, ignorant and wrong and adding to the workload of the LL support staff for no reason.
I’m sorry Winter, but 100% alpha objects are rendered, which is a feature one of my products takes advantage of! π
Also, in world, you can bump into them or sit on them (but obviously not as attachments). However as attachments, they can affect your mass, which I think is how my Multi Gadget works (it’s size changes when you move).
I think part of the reason alpha objects are rendered is because the system can’t know if it will be made visible in the next instant.
The ARC score IS applicable as your test showed, if not a linear gauge for YOUR system’s FPS. You might find others’ viewers more greatly impacted–which, isn’t that the whole point? To get a clue of how your AV impacts others? (You obviously already know how you are impacted, LOL.)
The thing we’ve learned from LL sharing this info, is it would be better to hide prims inside our AV’s body, rather than scripting them to be transparent.
Also, some of our assumptions were not as accurate as we might have thought! π
regarding most of the ARC woes and general performance issues:
– allow megaprims for verified residents (payment info on file suffices, not age verification, it can be faked anyways, thus pointless)
– maybe clean up your render code some. your memory management seems horrible in my eyes. Ive got 768 megs of video ram, yet in a crowded club, I view 10 people, then turn my view. it stutters as new things are loaded into memory. I immediately turn back and it stutters again because it DROPPED all the data from what just fell outside the view frustum. people have more ram than the disk cache, people have lots of video memory. make SL use it
– simple and easy suggestion: avatar impostors switch on quicker based on amount of avatars in the FOV
– allow mesh import for verified residents. full blown mesh import, with limits on UV channels and vertex count/poly count. this will solve a LOT of promblems where sculpts arent an applicable solution and will help with the vertices wasted by prims and sculpts alike. oh and allow custom collision/physics meshes.
– and for the love of got, PLEASE write decent alpha sorting. it works with the trees, i observed, but apparently with nothing else
@Garn #4-
A quick way to increase your FPS- run SL in a tiny little window instead of full screen and stare at the ground ALL the time…..your FPS will see a big increase π
Joking of course but it DOES help if you are having trouble TP in and out of a laggy place or things like that.
768 MB of video ram ??? π π lol
56
Jessica Hultcrantz Says:
….
“THAT IS DISCRIMINATION!
In the βyour world, Your imaginationβ β’ -world e have the right to wear what we want, and not granting that is true discrimination.”
You’re welcome to decorate your avatar however you like, just as land owners are welcome to eject/ban whomever they like for any reason, including disdain for visually-abusive avatars. Your theory about Community Standards forbidding the parcel-banning of avatars for lag reasons is interesting; perhaps we could test it out?
Nice collectionof usefull little tidbits, and it’s great to see you keep on using your “new” style, since you begun that your tutorials imo became much better to digest.
Torley
Whether you intended it or not (and I doubt you did) this particular blog post has resulted in the perfect primer for how to crash a sim. I can already see based on some of the posts here the wheel turning among the griefer community.
The more I see posts like these the most I see that in the near future SL will be used for corporations to have “sit down” meetings in pretty buildings, with a pretty view.
This is starting to remind me more and more of IBM marketing. Beautiful view from the IBM building in Chicago. Beautiful view of the Chicago River, beautiful view of Lake Michigan from the east side of the building — and no PRODUCTIVE content being created.
At the rate of decline I hope the corporate dweebs, that don’t have firewalls blocking this can support your future content growth. I logged in for another weekend in a sim that has at most 4 people and our scripts are borked, lag is obvious, sound is screwed up so we are doing the corporate thing, everyone sits down (within 20 meters) because group chat is messed again.
What happened to the vision of our world, our imagination. Most of what I see on the web pag is dedicated to how ORGANIZATIONS use the platform. Even then with the content theft and DMCA violations and “flexible” TOS what company should support this platform? Every day new changes, no stability, and a concept of stable that boggles my mind.
But pretty videos the sales department is the only things working.
Actually Torley as the most effective communicator perhaps you might create a week in the life of video.
1. Day one Monday. Start SL and read the “solved” grid problems that indicate the problems with the asset server, or 3rd party provider that caused LL problems. (30 minutes). Log in and crash (5 minutes), attempt to log in and find out the RC has changed, download new copy that wasn’t there 5 minutes earlier (15 minutes) finish downloading, start SL and spend 10 minutes changing all of your settings back to what they were last time. Attempt to walk and find out your AO is now malfunctioning under the new fixes. Notice all the broken scripts and attempt to see what is wrong. Go back and read the release notice (20 minutes). See which of the products you bought no longer work, attempt to contact friends in group chat and see that is broken again and then attempt to TP to where they are and find that is broken. By this time it’s too late to do anything meaningful log off
Day 2 – No dictators, but sun is shining so go outside (because the only time SL residents are here is because of dictatorships, bad weather and economic hardship) don’t log in on Tuesday.
Day 3 – Work overtime to pay for the sim that I haven’t used all week and that no paying customers can enter.
Day 4 – Can’t log in. World down. Go play a game that requires the quad core, quad SLI system with 8gigs of ram and water cooling and gigabyte internet that isn’t enough to support SL on bad days.
Day 5 – Friday, attempt to log in. World having assest problems. Finally after 1 hour get in. Find that there are more changes, more updates, group chat still down, content theft not fixed, a new message from the NEW CEO telling us how wonderful life is. Read the blog for 1 hour trying to figure out what is broken now. Get in and see a msg inworld that services are down. The dance that we spent money for DJ’s and items has to be cancelled because no one can TP to it, toss out 3 hours and 10k lindens. Attempt to go to another sim and crash. Attempt to log back in and find logins blocked. one hour later find out there is a new RC that requires another download to fix the fixes from the last 3. The prime viewer still to unstable to use because of mem leaks.
Day 6 – Log in, see how many things are not working, notice that no one else that I interact in has gotten in, go shopping for more booze
Day 7 – Attempt to log in and can’t because system is down. Attempt to contact Concierge support find it’s down, try telephone support it’s down, read blog and see how many people think that the latest widget that no one wants is so good and why are people whining. Look at the credit card bill for the money I’ve spent to LL London and wonder why I’ve wasted time and money here. Go online and start looking at WOW and other alternatives and start thinking about the near term future when LL is simply IBM Online.
Torley Linden who is worth our respect and admiration for his work, his communication skills, and his love for SL (and probably many other qualities and skills, but these are important to us)
I would have liked to see Torley working in helping communities and helping SL projects as Pathfinder used to do “before”…
Maybe Torley will give back its soul to SL…
Thank you Torley!
PS (warning!): (no one who knows me just a little can say I am doing any kind of lèche-cul!)
Great Vids!
And thanks to Kate Linden or whoever for putting the blog post back in the client interface UI. And I like the status also now in the upper right.
@#58 aswede
I assume that you also are aming at quite a degree of sarcasm there.
A woman wearing a penis in a PG sim is definitively breaking the CS so that was a rather stupid example.
TOS and CS has to be followed and when they aren’t there is a cause for an AR.
I think that you have not fully understood that little fact π
I would also like to question your statement about that it is not valid thinking that it works for everyone else just because it works for me.
I use the bare minimum hardware really, and everyone else i have chatted with this far has better equipment. In any given situation, rule out server lag and network issues focusing on the viewer performance, would it not be assumable then that the bare minimum would suffer more than the newer and better systems? That is at least common for all other computer practice so i can not follow your point there. Sorry.
@#63 creem
The point is not about the technical aspects about parcel banning due to lag, but the act of doing so. It is not much different than baning based on age, sex, ethnics, religon, disability or likewise. Discrimination by definition is to tell someone that it is not acceptable due to something that it either has choosen or is living with. The difference from the real world when it is transfered to SL is that because SL in it’s bas is a technical solution, there is also technical aspects that has to be weightened into calculation in a much more thoroughly manner than the normal life would have needed.
I would not argue with a recommendation from a parcel owner to leave or get lower ARC, IF it is done politely and in a non-forcing manner.
simply banning or ejecting avatars based on ARC is and will be an abusive act.
And just to make things clear, i do not support ARC griefing π
I’d love to see a script that can ban avatars with a ARC less than a specific amount as opposite to the eject-avatar-with-high-ARC thoughs that has boomed through this blog. But wait… that would be discriminating the n00bs. But who cares about them anyway?
(Yes that WAS sarcastic if the point was missed)
i find that my computer runs the same or better with windlight, and i feel that attachments are the cause of lag. i agree with #10. more prims = more polygons = more lag. you ALSO have to take into account that if someone has more prims the longer it takes for them to tp or simcross. just try it detach all your stuff and try to tp. its much faster. making content createors use prims more wisely and efficently will result in better performance for everyone.
argh guess i should have read all 70 comments before i posted.
Think I’m quite done with Second Life,
all my friends are gone,
you can shout into groups and get now answer,
sims are empty
and the thing with get some bucks from business is almost through on the grid.
So which game next to play?
How big is the chance you will be banned for a high ARC:
* most people don’t read the blog and have no idea what ARC is
* most landowners prefer high traffic
* most landowners dont want to upset their visitors/customers
* most landowners don’t have interest or time to monitor their sims 24/7
* most people certainly are not interested in looking like newbies or having a sim full of newbie looking people
* many high ARC items are freebies and will never be stopped anyhow
so whats the point? a whole lot of fuss about nothing
@69
My point was that the right you claim to have is something else. May you be limited by ToS, CS or rules made up by SIM or parcel owners, the right you claim you have simply isn’t there.
And I’ve seen too many women with penii in SL to think that my example was stupid. But I gave another too, which you chose to not comment.
And when it comes to my understanding of the use of ARs (thank you for the pat on my head) I think of reporting things as a last resort. But perhaps thats more a matter of taste than anything else. Talking to people trying to solve problems is my first approach but perhaps that’s just silly and naΓ―ve.
When it comes to computer performance, this is not about you being able to attach as many prims as you want and look the way you want standing alone somewhere with great framerate. It’s all about several avatars at the same place incurring a high rendering cost for the others. Even if you have low end hardware, you can get it to run just fine by turning off rendering features but when you walk into a room with others who enjoy those features, it will make their experience worse. And with this I’m not arguing for a barren SL with simple boxes moving around.
With some care and thought, many things can look just as good with fewer prims just to name something. Already builders are creating new things and changing old things to reduce the rendering cost since their customers can make better choices.
I run a system that’s not top of the line when it comes to graphic but it’s not low end either. I get to experience the times when avatars enter the room and my framrate is cut in half (after loading all textures and shapes) just because they have prim hair with hundreds of prims with alpha thrown into the mix and shoes/boots with yet another couple of hundred prims. And then they start to dance, hair and boots all over the place turning things into a lag party. So, for me, it would be nice with products with a lower rendering cost and these avatars would look just as great.
Personally, I walk around with an ARC of 1 most of the time (sometimes 2 when i fly) but that’s a choice I’ve made. My teleports work nine times out of ten, if not more, and I don’t have to wait for things to load or get placed where I want them. My SL life is simple in that respect, and that’s how I like it.
“Even then with the content theft and DMCA violations and βflexibleβ TOS what company should support this platform? Every day new changes, no stability, and a concept of stable that boggles my mind.”
Linden Labs doesn’t takes DMCAs seriously, they have a few “I’m sorry but I am not responsible lindens” to handle DMCA questions and thats it. Serious businesses wont go here any more than on napster, kazaa and other illegal download sites. secondlife is great to promote porn sites, but thats it.
TORLEY ROCKS!!
And the pink and green makes you even more special in my eyes! *wink*
“…Want a 5000 prim avatar? ARC wonβt stop you, but if your avatar is offensive (for performance or other reasons), itβs the parcel ownerβs right to eject you from their property….”
And so it begins. Once ARC is mainstream viewer… we’ll have the usual Script-kiddies creating in-world ARC Meters that rez everyone’s ARC-Value in a display object, and laugh and point at each AV as they come into range. “Oooh.. you are 3000! Ban the Witch! Ban the Witch!” Yeah, Lindens support ‘creativity’… up to the point where they have to prove that 6 year old Rack Servers are still strong enough for relaying all the vaiues in-world 3D mega-prims and advanced scripts.
Tiny Mad.
A bunch of us tested the ARC system and found it really pretty inconsistent and with questionable results.
For example… I have an incredibly detailed, highly-primmed armor avatar (around 1300 prims). ARCed right in about 2700.
Another of my avatars is a plain guy, only prims he wears are boots and hair. ARCed in at 6500+.
Another primmed avatar with about 400 standard prims ARCed above the one with 1300 prims.
So it seems like another one of those tools with questionable results. I think it will probably do more harm than good.
I think it’s real interesting that Linden Lab is once again spending time bringing in dubious nonsense like ARC measuring instead of working on needed and valuable tools (such as people being able to determine the run time of their own scirpted objects).
Rather than creating what one person above appropriately labeled as WITCH tools which have absolutely no consistency and value in the game, how about Linden Lab turning their attention to bug fixing and real tools that will do us some good?
Hair and boots are some of the highest ARC ratings on the system. You think women are going to stop wearing hair and boots? Come on Linden Lab, wise up and stop wasting your time and our money.
BTW, forgive the triple post, but #3 Ann Otoole hit the nail right on the head. If ya haven’t read her post, read it.
For years, Linden Lab has been spouting propaganda about how lag is due to customer content. They keep trying to shove problems off on to the customer and blame the customer and come out with tripe like ARC to try and prove it’s the customer. Well ARC is bogus, it gives flakey results, and Ann is 110% right.
Bottom line people: LAG IS CAUSED BY LINDEN LAB SERVER AND DATABASE ISSUES. Yeah, there are some customers who scirpt and cause all kinds of problems. So how is it that we visit a sim where the sim owner knows what he’s doing, lowballs and controls everything on the sim, and THE SIM STILL LAGS. How you answer that Linden Lab? Oh, let’s blame their COMPUTERS now.
About a year ago your company blamed textures for lag, so hey, let’s limit texture uploads to 1024 x 1024. So great, now all textures are limited. But hey, there’s still lag! How can that be?
So Linden Lab, why don’t you get off your propaganda horse and put blame for lag right where it belongs: corner cutting, inefficient coding (not customer coding, LINDEN LAB coding), incorrect network design, and poor database handling.
Cos I tell ya: when I go to a moderated and controlled market on a “fast” sim, and I’m the only person on the sim, and I click a vendor to see the next item and it takes TWO MINUTES FOR A TEXTURE TO LOAD… NEWS: that ain’t freaking customer issues.
That’s Linden Lab issues.
@81 You may want to read post #13 also by Ann where her new computer solved a lot of her lag problems. Lag is a combination of a whole lot of things including LLs software,your own computer and the speed of the connection between your computer and LL just to name a few.And I have been here more then long enough to know that wearing a ton of scripted prims and attachments makes lag and slows down even being able to teleport. Anyone experianced in SL don’t need the ARC meter to tell them that.
To those who say, “It’s my right to wear however many prims as I want,” you are so totally right! And it’s equally our right to run as many thousand scripts as we want, and to rez as many thousands of non-attachment prims as we want, and to use as many hundreds of 1024×1024 textures as we want. To point out resource usage to any individual is discrimination! All these things use up a minuscule amount of server and client resources, so it’s just a smoke screen for you to talk about them. We’re not as stupid as you think, Linden Lab. We understand the technical details enough to know that all the problems are in the server code which you won’t fix. We know that it takes only a few milliseconds to transfer a few hundred thousand vertices from the sim to the client, and for the client to loop through them, do the math on each, and compute what’s visible and what isn’t. The problem is not in our tiny consumption of resources, and we’re deeply offended that you would even discuss resource usage.
Great tongue in cheek Orson, and Kenny, you’re right, there are lots of things that cause lag. But Linden Lab seems to have a real habit of constantly blaming lag on the customer instead of taking the blame themselves. I’ve been on SL for three years and know what I have never, ever seen in that entire time? Linden Lab saying, “Yes, our servers are definitely responsible for lag.” Know what I always hear them harp on? Customer content, customer content customer content.
So now they present a flaky ARC system that not only gives apparently bogus and arbitrary results, but is a needless tool that can only result in “avatar witch hunts” as pointed out above. A guy mentiones that his 1000+ prim avatar lags less than a guy with hair and boots… so just how valuable can that ARC system be?
I’ll tell ya a fact: Linden Lab uses object occlusion. Which means that the majority of the prims on a standard avatar (necklaces, boots, armor) disappear beyond a distance of 5 to 20 meters. No prim under .5m shows up beyond 20m. So regardless of what the ARC meter states, that avatar is not lagging you AT ALL is you’re more than 20m away from it and even if you’re closer, the smaller a prim is, the closer you’re going to have to be for it even to register on your graphics card.
Yes computers do influence the amount of lag a person experiences. It is obvious that a person who has a quad core computer with graphics out the gills is going to experience better performance than a person with a single-core computer and a $49 graphics card. Duh. So how does that explain the quad-core user lagging? Shouldn’t their computer just handle anything SL wants to throw at ’em? And what about when a group of people are working together and all of a sudden all of them lag to pure syrup. They are from all parts of the country, all have different kinds of computers, and ALL of them are lagging to a standstill. What, all their computers are messed up?
I guess customers are also to blame for constant crashes, teleports not working, voiding out when crossing sim lines, “inventory not found in database” and all those other interesting things? That’s their computers too?
Nah man, stop swallowing the LL stooge releases. I’ve followed lag issues ever since I’ve been on SL and I’m telling you square: the vast majority of problem on Second Life are not caused by customers. If you buy the LL line on that one, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell ya.
BTW after reading post #3 (which is very accurate) and post #13 (which in attitude totally contradicts post #3) I would have to either say that this is some joker just trying to spoof the blog, or a schizo. Or… it could be that in post #13 she’s being sarcastic. I mean, if a person has to buy a new quad-core computer just to use Second Life, that’s a pretty poor statement. Not eveyrone happens to have $800 just laying around. (And btw, I can guarantee she didn’t buy a brand new quad core computer at Best Buy for $800).
Just wake up and smell the roses people. They’re dead, in case you haven’t noticed.
this is a very nice collection of wonderfult tips Torley! π
thank you very much. you continue to add joy and fun and nifty tips that make SL such a great place.
and all the Linden team is doing a wonderful job. my experience becomes better and better. and since the build of my “sl only” machine, I have not crashed in over two months. the worst i get is a little 10 second freeze now and again. but then, i have all my setting maxed out and “glassy” reflections on (some neato watermelon loving person taught me that in their neato vid tuts)
sorry to the peeps that have a tough go of it, i’m not techy but i keep a very *read OCD* clean machine for sl.
thanks Torley, you taught me a few things once again! π
A person dont even have to have a quad core box.I run SL just fine on a AMD 3800 x2 with a nvidia 6800 card in it at an average of 30 to 35 fps. the lowest fps I have ever got on it was in a club with 40 some avies there and was 18fps. Which a comparable PC can be easily bought for 500 in many places anymore.
Nobody is even saying that a part of the lag does not come from LL end or that the Arc meter is accurate. I am not listening to what LL says I am talking from personal experiance in SL and what has worked well for me for over 2 years now. Not everone has such a bad experiance in SL as many posters on this blog seem to have.
Ah Torley I know … KNOW … you will understand when there is a noise that is quite literally unbearable π How can you turn off specific noises within objects not responding to being muted? Specifically, water noises (soothing to most, deafening to me) – I usually cheat with moddable objects by replacing the offending noise with silence but if it can’t be modded or it’s someone elses … for this reason I have sound turned off at all times and I miss out on quite a few things as a result. I realise I could ask this in world of the many fab people I know but asking here might strike a chord with other residents!
“Don’t go witch hunting…”
Well, guess what will happen?
@video: Stop falling through floors
Heh… now what if you do this between a void and a prim stuffed region? I can tell you that your trick will fail. Horribly. Until it makes you scream, actually. xD Even if you use 5 prim layers… it will fail.
Anywho, it can also be solved by raising the land surface at a specific point.
all make a test in ahern, and public areas and the womens avatars have much more prims than mens for the etreme detail hairs, the extreme lag is for womens avatars, the second life dont have a blame for the lag problems, that is for female avatars uy!!
@Ivantgwin
Stop making womans are the bad! The worst prim counts are from the guys wearing incredible fantasy costumes. I saw one with a prim count of 12340! As long as the cpu load of my PC is not at the maximum but the network transfer rate is slower then 300kbit on my 6Mbit DSL the bottleneck is the database and n othing else! If i TP in some places it needs more then 5 minutes untal all is rezzued. So not the prim count to render is the biggest performance problem.
@Blinders Off
If you read the description of how the ARC is calculated, you will see that it’s a simple aggregation of numbers. It’s not flaky, it’s a counter, pure and simple, with weights added for things that *do* affect rendering. Interpreting the numbers is, perhaps, where the problem lies since this is left to the residents (apart from the colours added in an effort to help with that).
It’s easy to rant and rave about tests with hundreds (or thousands) of prims giving an ARC of more than 180000 where your own FPS dropped by half a frame but ARC is not intended to work as a measurement of your performance, but as a hint about how you might affect others. In a group of avatars with people all using state of the art computers beefed up with SLI and whatnot, massive use of alpha prims won’t do much. But when the group is mixed, it’s something else.
As time passes, what is today seen as obscene ARCs will be mainstream since computers and graphic cards gets better and better. But now, an average ARC around 5000 in a room with 10 people might be high enough to make people suffer. And that is all.
And as far as I know, LL employees have, time after time, commented here on being just as affected by the problems and that they are working on ways to make them go away. I’d guess that’s as far as any company wanting to make money will go in declaring where the blame lies. You won’t get a lineup of somber LL employees and managers saying “It’s all our fault.”, no matter how much you want that to happen.
Because it *is* a problem in their end when the database fails. And they admit it when they say that they’re trying to find ways to solve it.
Your example with you and friends working together on a SIM, and all of a sudden things lag, might as well be SIM problem or networking trouble. Your viewer might still render the scene in 60FPS but when you rez or move a prim, nothing happens. There are different kinds of lag but you didn’t bother to go into detail about what kind you experienced.
Ranting about LL claiming, or wanting to claim, that it’s trouble in my end when their database is failing is just pointless and a waste of comment space. And i’m sure you’re aware of this.
i go to ahern and welcome areas, and i see the womens avatars , female creations with more prims for a detailed hairs than mens, in generals terms the womens avis create the lag in this area for the hairs because the mens avatars are more simple. i see some complex males avatars but second life have more playing womans than males
the womens hairs have about 4000 prims , second life clean the hands about lag,
Except for a very basic avatar outfit I am wearing flexi hair and a necklace with a few prims. That’s it. Yet I account as ARC “too high” (Torley-“grrr””), red number. What if I wear one of my fancy outfits for special occasions? I’m not saying that ARC should not be considered at all, but the steps set to mark the next level of the “Linden homeland lag advisory system” “avatar cost alarm” are ridiculously low. It would seriously spoil my SL experience, if i could not even wear my hair.
Speaking of lag. What really would help us Europeans here, would be having our own servers on the old continent. I heard that the average framerate on the American continent is twice as high as in Europe. If that’s true, this would be the main reason for lag of many many users and a priority project for Linden to offer a solution.
92 Aida Lundquist: 12340 prims is impossible. The avatar has 30 visible attachment points. Ans at each point, one object can be attached. An object can have a maximum of 255 prims. So the maximum prim count one single avatar can wear would be 7650.
94 Ivantwin Rogers: 4000 prims for hair would mean at least 15 attachment points which needed to be on the head and not moving relatively to each other. This is impossible. Let’s say, a hair builder goas really crazy and builds hair that uses Skull, Left/Right ear, Nose, Mouth and Chin, you would end up with 1530 prims max. This would be huge, but nobody really does this π
the womens hairs and are to high than males and when the females make the avatar and wear the hair with others accessories and clothes the total prims are over 4000prims than a males, go to welcome area and see it. the most female avatars are to high and looks to a humans lags!
that is thanks to torley linden, they clean the hands about lag!
Think about how many prims your elephant pixel penis can be dear Ivantwin. Well i guess you’re joking π
(at least i hope)
98 Ivantwin Rogers: No success with the first accusation, starting a second? This really doesn’t increase your credibility π One question: How do you count the prims on an avatar? I’d like to know if you really have the knowledge on how to do it.
thanks to whom ever to bring blog news AND grid status reports back to the login screen.
regarding ARC, I also thought it could be a tool to discriminate avatars with a hight ARC count. However, this did not happen yet as much as I know. So, don’t worry, but I second te argument not ton include this feature into the main viewer or somewhere outside the advanced menu as it could happen then that it develops to be a tool for harassement. I also second the observation that is is not only the ARC that creates rezzing problems. I can move to some sim where there is nobody, let it be a shopping mall (more and more often there is nobody, ahahahaha) and still it takes minutes to rez all buildings, vendors etc etc. And this phenomenon is not getting better but rather worse. There is no joy shopping if you stand for 10 minutes in a shop (even with draw distance turned down to 64 m) just to realize that the item you have in your mind is not available there and you need to search on in another shop where you stand again staring until things rez. Even worse if you want to click rthrough a vendor with 20 items in it and item takes 1 minute to rez. Luckily, I have already tons of clothing, buildings, vehicles, plants, animas etc etc in my invent so my shopping needs are limited….
p.s. I love that game and where is katt?
Okay.. Everyone, about quad core computers… Those will not benefit your Second Life experience at all. A dual core processor will help somewhat, but quad will not (unless you run several instances of Second Life or other high-demand aplications).
Why? Windows XP Home edition will only support ONE processor core, so if you want your operating system or any program you run to take advantage of more cores you need Windows 2000, or Windows XP Professional or higher (Linux and Mac also support multiple cores).
Furthermore, a more interesting (and perhaps crippling) problem is that Second Life is only designed to use ONE processor core. The other core will be left to do very little work, although it will still benefit you because then everything else on your computer can run on the second core. However, a dual core processor is sufficient for runnning everything else on your computer if you’re only using it for Second Life, and maybe Internet Explorer, some instant messenger(s), music, etc low demand programs.
Second Life also does not use your graphics processor very much, particularly if you have shaders turned off (or are using a pre-windlight veiwer). It does most of the work, even graphics work, on your CPU (and yes this is very inefficient) (this isn’t to say it doesn’t do ANY work on the graphics card, just not most of it).
I would also like to point out that there is no way currently to make a scripted object that will tell you anyone’s ARC, it’s all done client side.
#101 pantaiputih korobase: You can make textures on objects load faster by right clicking on them. This will make your client prioritize the textures on that object instead of trying equally hard to get all the textures in front of you.
Hmmm…. Something people seem to fail to realize is this: Regardless of what your prim count is; I have EVERY right to eject whoever I wish from my sim(s), high ARC or not, and for someone to fruitlessly file an AR because I ejected you from MY land is ridiculous.
If you are ejected; that simply means you are not wanted there. Sure, if someone ejected you on YOUR land, that absolutely warrants an AR, but as per the Lindens, property owners have EVERY right to eject and or ban ANY AV they see fit, and for some to think they can file an AR report for an AV ejecting you off of THEIR land is simply insane…
97 Zi Ree: Hey, facts have no place here! Quite frankly, everyone could already see that the supposed prim count of “12340” was made up. The poster could only be bothered to change the last digit to zero from five in order to try and gain credibility, and that’s just not inventive enough. Incidentally, the other day I saw someone with an ARC score of 123456782 – shame on them.
I blame Linden Labs squarely for the current situation, because it was utterly ludicrous for them not to limit avatar prim allocations from the start in the same way that land prims always have been. I can understand people not liking the idea that one of their apparent “freedoms” – the freedom to wear a lot of inefficently designed stuff – may be taken away (not officially, of course – but practically).
Here’s an idea – if I voluntarily agree to some enforced limit on the number of prims my avatar can wear, how about LL reciprocates by giving me a small percentage of the saved number of prims back in the form of land prim allocation? That why I’m reducing the total burden on the server but still getting something back in return (other than improved frame rates for my neighbours, which admittedly should probably be reward enough).
@104
But, according to previous posts, actually the one you comment on, there *is* a limit to the amount of prims one can attach, namely 7650.
So, your blame game looks broken.
Vista 64 bit supports spreading the processor usage out quite nicely thank you. Unless you are running Vista 64 bit on a quad processor and have done the simple homework of monitoring CPU utilization then you do not know what you are talking about and best leave it alone. XP “Home Edition”? ummm ok. XP needs to be pro or it is not worth running. Again you get what you pay for.
And yes I did get this unit from Best But for $800. It was on sale. Yep. a screaming deal I could not pass by.
People on the sldev mailing list know that LL is looking at the issue of WL affecting lower end systems in a rather bad way and that just disabling atmospheric shaders does in fact not remove all of windlight induced GPU computations. It is not that simple. I do agree LL needs to create a non WL light client for lower end systems. I.e.; Systems such as schools and libraries have on hand and are not bloody likely to be upgraded anytime soon. Of course people using the lightweight client will not enjoy WL or the upcoming really cool interior shadows as the low end GPUs simply do not support advanced graphics.
So, to put it in really simple terms, if you really want to enjoy windlight and all the incoming coolness of secondlife, you need to upgrade to nvidia gpu 8x or above. end of story. And if you do choose to upgrade your not likely to care about “ARC” at all.
My gf7600XT works fine with WL, thanks.
I will be enlightened if you finally clear up that asset server problems, and don’t keep bugging ppl with region restarts when they are busy.
Stop promoting ARC
You made windlight mandatory
You made the viewer heavier
You are trying to put the blame for the lag you introduced on users.
We were happy and less laggy before windlight being mandatory
And without ARC.
Stop trying to push blame on users for mistakes you did.
And, yes. I am still running on 1.19.0.5, because 1.19.1 and next kill my machine. They AREN’T faster.
By the way, friday night and you are FUBAR again.
FIX THE THINGS THAT MATTER,
stop trying to let us look elsewhere, we know what are the true problems
Ann, when I said “Windows XP Professional or higher” I was including Windows Vista, all the 32 bit and 64 bit editions except the “Starter” edition (32 and 64 bit), which is only available in “emerging markets” (see Wikipedia if needed).
However, it is Second Life that does not support more than one core. It will use up all of one core, but it is not very well multithreaded and thus will not make significant use of any other cores.
Second life does indeed still use the graphics card even with shaders (when I say shaders like this I mean “Basic Shaders” as well as “Atmospheric Shaders”) turned off; however, this usage is minimal. Most of the work is being done on the CPU.
Another thing I want to point out is that I use an nVidia GeForce 7900 GTO, and an Intel dual core processor. I get rather nice frame rates, and can use Windlight with all of the graphics features turned on and at the max. It’s just that it could be so much better, if it would make more use of my video card or more use of my second processor core.
However, you are missing the point of ARC. It is not just for your own system, you have to consider other peoples’ experience too. You should not walk around KNOWINGLY ruining other peoples’ experience just because YOU are getting a nice frame rate. If you are aware and willingly destroying their frame rate (telling them to get a better computer when they complain) then you are in more position to be AR’d than the land owners that ban you.
AR for a high ARC? Well get the lawyers then because LL made all this possible. SO now your saying you will AR people for High ARC? Sorry thats lawsuit time pal. SL enables this and you have no business telling anyone what they can or cannot do. YOU are not the master of SL. You are a customer just like the rest of us.
Well if that doesn’t spell it out clearly that Pastrami Linden intentionally tried to start a civil war between the residents of SL.
Pastrami Linden should have been fired for the kid in a dunce hat picture and calling the customers of LL mentally handicapped.
In fact the entire windlight team should have been given walking papers. In the sldev list you can see there is work under way to clean this WL mess up.
The new CEO needs to get busy and demonstrate SL is not some little game for LL staff to playt with and he needs to fire people end of story starting with the top of LL working down until someone stops playing COD4 on LL time and gets busy. Roll windlight back for a start. Then move forward with real software engineers. WL was a bad move and LL needs to get rid of it and move forward slowly. Maybe WL will be good for all in 10 years but today? WL is good for only those of us with up to date hardware. And for us ARC doesn’t matter.
And hire real database experts and ditch this dumb Mysql junk. You get what you pay for.
And yes SL needs a total rewrite. On a real data architecture based off of real Object architecture. Not this code on old code pile.
I didn’t say I was going to AR anyone. In that part of my statement I was merely referring more towards Jessica Hultcrantz’s implied intention of ARing land owners who might ban her for having a high ARC.
Everyone that complains about SL and Linden Labs…go make your own game if you think you know everything…or go apply if you know what is wrong and needs to be fixed…now if you cant just sit back play the game or leave…please…stop with the dumb fighting..don’t just randomly comment a be mean to a company that is trying to run this game for all of you at any point they can just stop the game…I don’t think anyone of you would want that nor would I but please give them a break…just a little?
the maximum number of prims that can be WORN by any avatar, is 7650.
I am not sure what Linden Labs is trying to do by blaming the users for the lag in the game. Even if they are right on some characters having a larger prim count than others, this system will destroy the fantasy of the avatars. People will not see great looking, facinating avatars. They will see you as a human lag machine because of your prims. This will affect more the female avatars that do tend to have a few more prims than the male counterparts.
This has hapened because Linden Labs is tired of everyone critizising and insulting them. Including comunity members attacking the employees of Linden Labs. So Linden has tossed hot water in all of our faces as a punnishment. Linden is right an a way, the users are the cause for the lag this time.
Someone above pointed out that the ARC should have separate client and server side counts. This is a good suggestion. Better multithreading and more offloading to the GPU would also help.
Another suggestion; Avatars under 30 days old max out at 750 or so, non-paid avs get 1,500, and paid avs get 12,000 or so. Maybe that would help?
I COMPLETELY agree with #144 all you whiners and complainers that post 20 times whenever theres a blog post should just go and make your own game. PLEASE just leave the rest who actually like the game to play it. i would love to see how far you get making your own version of SL. all this talk about WL being horrbile is nonsense, i have a amd athlon x2 6000+ and a 8800GT and my frame rates are usally a stable 30, BUT right now im use an athlon (not64) 3000+ with a radeon 9600 and i get a decent 7fps, yea its low but about the same as normal sl and i have basic and atmosphereic shaders turned ON.
ALSO i really hate hearing this discrimination crap about banning pepole for high ARC, if your allow to wear whatever the hell you want. then im allowed to ban your butt for being on my land. I REALLY hate “scrimiation” its just a stupid, learn to deal with it. if someone dosent want you on their land for whatever reason they have the right to ban you.
“Sorry thats lawsuit time pal.” lol suing someone for abuse reporting them in a game over a ban about the way someone looks. god i love the MG community.
Disciplining customers for something that is not against the TOS/CS is the legal issue I refer to. Filing an AR on someone for something that is not an abuse or violation should result in the person filing the AR to be disciplined instantly for wasting LL’s Governance Team’s time.
If LL is going to slap limits on attachments then they need to disable all attachments and scripts including hud attachments. Cobble the game because LL wants to support old computers? Now that makes a lot of sense. I’m sure there would still be a few *nix geeks in sl given their preference for green dos text on a black screen. But SL would die.
The simple brutal fact of the matter is your computer determines your lag level. You can either afford to be in SL/WoW/EQII/COD4/ or any modern 3D game or you can’t. If LL wants to support antiquated hardware then they need to deploy a non windlight viewer with no support for scripts, building, or attachments and no view capability beyond 32 meters. However, IIRC still works and so does skype so if you can’t afford to be here there is always that for your chatting and cybering. Old computers will still run Secondlife but it is not the other customers fault if someone running an old computer has poor results.
Setting the speed limit on the Interstate to 10 Mph because an Amish family wants to run their cart down that stretch of the highway is not logical and thus why horse drawn carriages are not allowed on the modern day interstate.
Secondlife needs to move forward and LL needs to make the decision whether or not to support a next to zero graphics version (16 bit all avatar imposters) for old computers and inform those users they will not have a good experience nor will they see anything remotely like all the pictures and movies out of SL until they acquire a decent system. And limit those connections to a few educational sims that have next to nothing on them.
Then concentrate on advancing the graphics to support the next generation of capabilities. Failure to move forward is an error.
Attempting to support an endless array of GPU/CPU/Mem combinations with one build is a resource expensive luxury. Telling the residents/customers that they are no longer welcome to build and use all the stuff that made SL what SL is would be a seriously poor and incorrect choice.
The idea of developing a plug in architecture to support GPU capability bands is a nice idea too. Perhaps one day the SL infrastructure and defect rate will be low enough to justify a team going and working on that idea of Mr. Soo’s.
I would prefer LL concentrate on building a better database on a real database platform before they go burning time on supporting old GPUs.
ok, that is not a violation the AR system but Torley Linden said sometimes the lag in the game is because the players have a high prims in a avatar, and the most people are womens for all accessories , hairs etc
oiiiiiiiiiiii
Been teaching the “overlapping prim bridges” to cure “falling through floors” problem for quite some time. Jesmaine Tzara and I discovered this when she got Eldamar and attached it to Eragon and we built bridges there. Many others have reported discovering the same thing before and after. Maybe should be in the basics ?
@118 said : “Another suggestion; Avatars under 30 days old max out at 750 or so, non-paid avs get 1,500, and paid avs get 12,000 or so. Maybe that would help?”
Want a cup of tea ? an aspirin ? an ambulance ? did you just get out of a bad trip ?
Off-topic for this, but since there’s no other official venue…
A heads-up, folks. LL, in its infinite wisdom, has forbidden SL ‘childrens groups’ from having a build/exhibit at the 5th birthday celebration. Oh, child avatars can attend, but they’re forbidden to contribute. Way to go, LL. Trying to set new standards for politically correct cowardice?
Speaking of standards… why do the TOS and Community Standards shake the finger at discrimination if LL, the author of those documents, is going to freely engage in it?
Hypocrites and cowards. Every one.
Strange freedom of expresion must be a double standard one?
Got banned and money taken by linden and stil not know why
@ Phantom. I’m sorry, but you contradict yourself. You state that quad-core will not help, that dual core helps some, but that XP can only take advantage of single core.
Sorry, that’s bogus. XP Home can most certainly take advantage of quad-core processing. Maybe not in the same manner that Pro or Vista does, but I asure you, quad core is a definite advantage on SL over single or dual core. I own both a quad core and a dual core system, both with high-level graphics cards and running similar speeds, and the quad outperforms the dual hands down… even in Second Life. XP *does* take advantage of extra cores (or your claim that dual core works better than single core would be invalid).
Now, to deal with 2 other issues:
We warned you all that an ARC witch hunt would start. Read some of the above comments. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. It’s already starting. Hopefully, most of the inhabitants of SL will have the good sense to totally ignore ARC (or, fortunately, it’s sufficiently difficult to access they won’t have the brains to know how to use it). But there are a lot of drama queens on SL just waiting for another weapon to add to their harassment arsenal. And like I said, according to ARC avatars of over 1000 prims “lag” less than avatars with flexi hair. So tell me just how valuable and useful ARC is suppose to be, and then think about what motive Linden Lab had in releasing such a tool.
A far, far more valuable tool would be one that would allow customers to examine how much script time their objects require. Or to be able to count their own prims on a piece of rented land to make sure they’re not over prim limit. But instead, Linden Lab releases ARC? That screams of corporate propaganda. Shift the blame to the customers.
For those who YET AGAIN tell people “stop complaining, create your own game” I have one thing to say: Nanner nanner boo boo.
If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the blogs. Freedom of speech means people have just as much right ot point out the negative as the positive. The guy back there who claims such posts do no good at all has got to be kidding. A lot of the useful tools we see these days on SL came from people hitting Linden Lab over the head (mainly because LL wouldn’t listen otherwise). A lot of the major bugs on SL these days are because people like YOU didn’t complain loud enough.
If you want to live in your Utopia and not have anyone rock your rosey-colored boat, do so. But standing there and sactimoniously telling people to “write their own game” if they don’t like this one is about as helpful as ice on a freeway. You’re not going to stop the complaints, YOU’re wasting blog space with unproductive posts, and it’s just plain goofy. LOL
ARC stinks. The idea stinks, the implementation stinks, there is nothing positive about it. When a woman (or man) with flexi hair shoots an ARC rating over the roof, it’s pretty obvious that rating is totally useless. People are not going to go bald so Second Life can run better (with all its cut corners, server stacking, asset server problems and poor system management). ARC is yet another waste of Linden Lab programming time… an attempt by LL to bogusly place blame for lag on customer avatars.
The best way to control a mob is to get them to turn on each other, eh?
Blinder I was pursuing your 5 or 6 post in a row up there and I couldn’t help but notice all the talk about lag lag lag. I don’t get much lag personally. Except when I go into a really bad sim and then I leave that sim and it stops. I have a good machine I have to admit.
I used to have a older machine that had terrible video lag, in other words I had lag no matter what I did. I always thought it was LL’s database and LL client. When I got a new machine I realized it wasn’t the case. It was device specific for me.
In other words if people are having lag playing SL all the time and it never stops, no matter what sim you go into, then it will never go away until you get a new machine. Not what you want to hear I know, I didn’t either back then. Just a few months ago for me.
But LL is not going to start downgrading the client until your machine start to work right. At least I hope they don’t, I like Windlight and turning on Full Water reflection.
The funny thing is idSoftware did not downgrade Quake Wars because my old machine lagged terribly while playing it. I couldn’t play Call of Duty or Medal of Honor AA or any of the good ones, without very bad lag. Now I can but none of those companies downgraded, no they made there stuff work on the latest devices to be competitive.
I saw where someone up there said they blamed LL for the “Current Situation” I wasn’t aware of a situation? Honestly if your lag never goes away… It probably never will and LL just like other video game companies will move ahead in order to be competitive on the latest devices like the other companies do.
But if you have a really bad machine, maybe you can play “My Little Pony” from Microsoft, its free I think.
I mean if you are actually paying for SL monthly and you don’t have enough machine for it, than you’re a lot dumber than you seem to be. And if you a sim owner shelling out $1700 for a sim and you can afford a new machine? Please tell that to someone who would believe it.
But Rant away if it makes you feel better.
@ 128 Pside. Dude, this has nothing to do with ranting. This has to do with Linden Lab corporate attitude and propaganda machine… currently and most notably the ARC “tool”.
Hey, I’m please that you personally (and a limited few others here) don’t experience lag. Frankly, I think that absolute BS and painting the rusty car red, but that’s your business. Someone who says he doesn’t lag on SL is either lying or just not aware.
But this entails far more than lag. The numerous complaints you hear from members these days are often from people who have been on SL for quite some time, and compare how it’s running now with how it used to run. Not that SL wasn’t always full of problems and lag mind you. It’s an old issue. But somehow, people expect system function to improve with age, not get worse.
While they’re bringing in useless tools like ARC and eye candy like Windlight, spending countless thousands of man-hours on such gimmicks, they still haven’t fixed the problem of users crashing regularly, teleports failing, inventory getting lost (don’t you just love those “item missing from database” message), and yes, molasses-syrup lag. If you’re telling me you never lag to a stand still, your movement never slows for no perceptible reason, I’m going to look you right in the eye and tell you I don’t believe you.
Me, I can tolerate the issues on SL. No problem. But what I don’t tolerate is LL coming out with BS no-value tools like ARC while those issues are going on… especially since a number of us can see through the smokescreen and realize what the ARC is actually for… to cast yet further blame at supposed customer builds.
“An empty sim is a happy sim”. Isnt’ that what LL is trying to tell us here? “A featureless avatar is a fast avatar”. Thanks Linden Lab. That is really flippin’ helpful.
Hey! Torley! Have a look at the Linden road in Lenimov (see xrl.us/lenimov). We gonna see Linden Moles in scuba gear? A sunken road with kelp and stuff all over everything?
@ 129 Blinders
I never said I haven’t been lagged I said on an average day I don’t and I said *if* your lag never goes away then its video lag and since you think that SL doesn’t stop lagging, then you more than likely have video lag, its not connection lag or too many prims in a sim lag or too many people in a sim lag. Thats normal lag and is expected with *any* game. Yep dude you are screwed. You are stuck thinking that SL can somehow fix that… It ain’t happening.
I like windlight, I like changing the sky to some of the ones on the list. I wish it remembered that setting. And turning up water reflection to reflect everything. So you see your reflection, your plane, boat, avatar, etc. It even reflects the sky and moving clouds, yes moving clouds, If you turn on atmospheric shaders. I don’t mean moving like the standard foggy looking clouds, I mean moving across the sky from one side to the other like in RL. They move past you over head and keep going. If I had lag like you are talking. I would not even know about these things because of the video lag I wouldn’t be able to turn the graphic setting all the way up.
If I went to one of the ocean sailing sims right now and stood beside you, I’ll bet you would be lagged to hell and I could walk circles around you, while you bumped into s**t… stuff.
And weather you believe it or not, I haven’t got lagged to stand still since my old machine, unless you count the time the sim crashed and I was stuck in one place because I didn’t realize the sim was gone. And with a good machine my inv loads fine I am telling you I was in your shoes… you are screwed until you get something better.
I am not saying that it is a practical option, I am saying that you are screwed and destined to spend hours and days waisting your breath trying to get them to fix something that they can’t. I was there so I know. I feel your pain. I am just telling it like it really is. I am not a fan boy dude, otherwise I would not have said its dumb to pay premium with your trouble.
The only time I get lag is in Sims with tons of prims or people is in a sim like Xenox which has several airports, aircraft carrier and tons of planes, cars and boats everywhere. I get lag there but I can still fly, but it is laggy. But when I leave and go to a average sim I don’t see much lag. And now my friends list loads off the bat and inventory doesn’t get stuck with LOADING 7,215 ITEMS….. like it used to. And in a sim with 50 ppl yes it get laggy but I can still walk just fine, with my old machine I would be running into walls and people.
You want to get me fussing then lets talk about sim crossing I have been beating the drum trying to get them to fix that for a year or so. I have come to a conclusion… they don’t care about it because they are spending all their time trying to fix your video card problems and memory leak issues.
Now with that said as far a teleport down and 500 servers offline and the inworld service interruptions and the “Don’t buy anything for a while” because transactions are down, and all of that BS yes these thing would piss anybody off.
But 500 regions down doesn’t have anything to do with my client and its fixed *for now*, so what am I supposed to do go to the San Fransisco office start shooting Lindens when they leave for lunch.
Yep hate to say it but they get you hooked and then they start making a better graphic hog environment like windlight and then your experience goes downhill from there.
You’re screwed… Screwed I tell you! and it isn’t fair, and the next thing you know your daughter’s knocked-up and there is change missing from the dresser, I’ve seen it a hundred times.
But for your sake and your daughters sake don’t pay premium if you have that kind of experience, man That’s about all you can do. Ride the free SL train. Cause if you are paying for that kind of aggravation I feel sorry for you.
131 PSIDE, you are ridiculous, when you said about linden labs cant fix the lag problem,because all lag is for the high prims ARC community, linden labs need make better the optimization in the program and make compatible with two processor dual core, linen labs make a punished over costumers about second life problems with this ARC, The customers don’t have blame for large prims in avatars because linden labs make this style from the beginning in year 2002
although Linden Lab is right on the ARC and the lag is not be honest by making a tool and blame the residents because this game has been in this style since 2002
Maybe the new CEO should commission a study to see how many customer’s computers have fried since windlight was released. The results will be disturbing as I know what I was doing when my old dual SLI 6800 pro system went pop. And I hear more and more incidents of SL frying older computers on nearly a daily basis. I suspect Windlight overdrives the older GPUs and people try to put up with lag to enjoy SL with WL but in the end the older GPUs just fry from being overdriven.
Most likely from glow, a feature I happen to like a lot.
I wonder how much this is related to the decline in participation?
@134 Ann Otoole: A game can’t “fry” your GPU or overdrive them. If they can’t cope with a game’s needs, they simply work too slow or fail to work at all. If they overheat, it’s a thermal problem inside of the machine, not a software problem. Cleaning out the fan or applying fresh thermal compound usually fixes this problem.
Well all the nice assumptions here want to do a nice test turn on the nvidia monitor and watch your gpu temperatures. first disable atmospheric shaders and nearby lights. make a note of your gpu temperature then with out moving turn them back on and watch the furnace kick in. In my experience they are worth a good 10 degrees C or on my system a 15% rise in the temperature of the core. Now thats programming for ya
@135 Zi The temperature difference of my GPU between the “old” viewer and Windlight is a good 10-15C. The fan and sink are clean, and I didn’t change anything to my card….so how can it not be a software issue? Keeping the box open and installling an extra fan keeps the temperature under 60C…the temparature silicone likes. And yes SL fried my previous card.
eeeh silicon))
@136 coventina dalgleish:
@137 Kwakkelde Kwak:
I never said that additional load wouldn’t increase temperature. I see that on my system as well, and I expect it to happen. What I say is that the cooling system must be able to keep the chip under it’s specified maximum temperature. On my system that would be 110 Β°C. My graphics card stays nicely below 95 Β°C all the time under full load. So this is fine.
Who says, silicon chips need to be kept under 60 Β°C? This is nearly impossible in modern CPUs or GPUs. Look into the datasheet of your CPU/GPU to find out what temperature it was designed for. My card starts throttling (by driver) at 120 Β°C. It works on 75 Β°C if there’s no 3D load at all.
And no, SL didn’t fry your previous card, your card failed either due to age or due to insufficient cooling.
@Zi last reply…if someone punches you in the face and you don’t duck…… is it your fault your nose is broken or or the person smacking you?… i think i know your answer…i just don’t agree)) and yes silicon chips can live with temps higher than 60…but a hell of a lot shorter
sorry zi I have been in the design of electronics for longer than you have been alive does the computer number IBM1603 mean anything. Electronics are designed to operate in a bandwidth of temperatures 60 C being the optimum for long life when you exceed the design parameters of any silicon chip you will begin to destroy the substrate and just because your gpu throttles at 120C this does not mean that you will have decent performance or life from the product. Yes, you can maintain the optimum temperatures for the chip I do it all the time in the 55 to 75 band. A good rule of thumb if you can not put your hand on it for 5 seconds then you are running too hot. Many systems have expired here from over heating both from dirt and poor cooling. Oh unless your fingers are dead you cant touch 95C might as well just put your hand in boiling water.
@140 Kwakkelde Kwak: I also said that. Higher temperature speeds up aging. But it’s not like it ages instantaneously, it’s simply degrading life span, and we’re talking about (just an example number, no fact) 4 years lifetime vs. 5 years.
@141 coventina dalgleish: You don’t know how old I am, so your point is moot. I know, silicon is best kept cool but again, it doesn’t simply break or fry if it’s operated higher. It ages faster, as you said yourself.
All I am saying, once again, so everyone can see it: Proper cooling prevents the chip from being fried. Usually the drivers even throttle the chips before this can happen. If the GPU burns down, the cooling was insufficient or it was old and just broke (could have happened with any other high load application).
@141
Please, arguing that your age in some way gives your statements validity is a sure way to make people think the opposite. If you’re as experienced as you claim, it should be *easy* for you to supply links to good resources supporting your claim.
And if you’ve been working with designing electronics for that long, you, if anyone, should be aware that the quality of substrates going up with less and less impurities is a fact.
And as Zi states, *any* 3D graphics intensive application might be the final straw for old or flawed equipment. If the SL viewer is the only one you and Ann Otoole use, it might be the one in your case, but that’s not a fault in the application, that’s a result of your preferences when it comes to games/applications.
I have an nVidia card with passive cooling (just to get rid of one extra fan) and I use the viewer a few hours per day and I’m hoping the cooling is enough. I can, by just sitting next to my box, feel it getting hotter after some time but that would also happen if I was playing Crisis or COD4 or any other new game.
Just a comment from the non-technical side (although I have supported networks back to pre-PC days and PC networks since memory came in plastic tubes and prong legs). The make-your-own-game people and LL need to pay attention. The property up for sale is way up in the three sims I have pieces – there was a time that almost none was for sale and the maps weren’t half yellow. The av count in these sims, adjusted for fewer occupied property is way down. Often I am the only av in the area or one of few on a Friday night. Sim visits – my properties are largely the same, but the greeter lists are way down.
Make our own game? People, if these avs continue to leave and businesses continue to fail, either LL raises the rates on the remainder (I’ve set a budget – when a month in SL costs more than $ 50 now, I’ll try to sell, but if necessary, I’ll abandon the $ 250-$ 300 of land I have left and walk away. I once had four times as much…) or they turn belly up. Its not like you happy people are living on a federal reserve. You need the whole mass to be on-line, happy and BUYING, or you don’t have happy lala land. That means people need to have a good experience with what they have and are able to drop into a shop and buy. Generate Lindens and keep them in motion.
And get this – I know that I have dropped in and made major purchases in five or six minutes while my wife was taking a few more minutes before going out. That stuff adds up. When people can’t drop in and do stuff, but have to take ten minutes to do anything (like finding out how Search sorts this time, as compared to last time), business drops, people go away and the real, non-bot subscriber base contracts.
So lala land folks, this from a CPA with an MBA in finance and a lot of experience with tech firms – you DO have a vested interest in how us disgruntled folks feel. The LAST thing you need is for us to go away and make our own game (like riding my bike more in RL). Unless you really, really like a monthly charge for everyone left to keep the servers powered…
Hint: Right now, the happy SL users are NOT the important ones. The rational, but very displeased need to be listened to.
Well aswede to address your asus passively cooled nvidia card load the nvidia monitor and watch your gpu temperatures, I do think you will be surprised at the temperature level. Most people I know that use that card have added a fan when playing this game after seeing just how hot it runs.
Yes substrates have improved radically in the past few years but on the other side of that coin the micron level of the circuitry has been reduced thus creating the the same basic condition as previous creations. In fact the new sub micron construction is even more sensitive to the effects of heat and deformation. Also most of the modern processors be they graphic or core have hot spots normally focused on the central core of the chip creating an uneven map and creating internal stress on the dye.
As far as the age )) all that allows me is to have the pleasure of having heard all of these arguments multiple times from multiple sources.
As far as old flawed equipment as I stated before I am far from the current state of the art in video as I use several 5 year old nvidia 6800 ultras, once the cats meow, but now just old hot tech. These cards do run 10 degrees C hotter than the 7800 and 8800 series.
The only board that I have seen that uses passive cooling is made by Asus in the 7600 or 7800 series and this game gives you the guarantee of short life as it will run at 90C most of the time.
Not to belabor the point the only concept here is that this game delivers extreme stress to the video and therefore the power supply’s of user computers and perhaps consideration should be given to producing a viewer that makes lower demands on equipment.
All of the 2nd and 3rd party viewers use the base second life engine as they are only an add on, some better than other. Yes, I have tried all of them and prefer the Nicholaz as most of the memory leaks have been plugged. The coolife also has some nice features with the inclusion of the RR viewer by Marine.
@ 131 Pside. I agree in general with what you say… but not on your take in lag… nor in your factuality. I seriously doubt you are ever going to “walk circles around” me. My system is about as maxed out as they come and I have a 7.5mbps cable feed. As one Linden said, my system is more powerful than 98% of the systems on SL.
Which is why I’m saying that if you seldom lag then 1: you either have some kinda wierd almost-direct connection to LL servers or 2: ya really don’t know what people are talking about when they talk about lag. I would think #1 would be more likely.
But general lag is obviously a major problem… because if it wasn’t a problem, why would LL find it necessary to bring out ARC in the first place? Obviously lag is real, it’s predominant throughout SL, it’s experienced by all sorts of people no matter what kind of computer they have, and LL felt a need to yet again make it look like it’s customers causing the problem… which is absolute BS.
How do I know it’s BS? Try logging in sometime around 3 or 4am. Notice how much smoother Second Life is running? Wow, stuff actually works. Amazing what happens when Linden Lab doesn’t overload their asset servers. Which means that frankly, this company is pulling down more than $5 million a month… and not providing customers with the hardware and servers sufficient to meet customer needs and requirements. It’s just that simple.
@134 Ann: I haven’t actually heard of frying older computer cards, but I don’t doubt it. This kind of thing can happen any time a company FORCES an “upgrade” on their customers instead of letting customers choose that upgrade as an OPTION. When they brought in Windlight, they made it the DEFAULT instead of the option, which is a BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD idea, Linden Lab. Unfortunately, LL doesn’t seem to care much for industry standards and decades of experience. They do things their way and hang the customer.
Sorry, just telling it like it is. If ya don’t like it LL… I strongly recommend changing your operational policies so that they benefit the customer instead of Linden Lab agendas. In other words, put the customer first.
@ 135 Zi: Actually, yes games CAN fry video cards, and even computer monitors. I don’t know how common it is these days, but I’ve read documented cases of games handling graphics in such a way as to cause not only the graphics card but the monitor itself to blow. (read what 136 Conventina and 137 Kwakkelde point out. 15 degrees increase can literally fry a card).
I think what you are failing to recognize Zi, is that they are talking about older cards. These cards were specced and designed to work with systems 2 years or more ago. They never foresaw games that would be so graphics intensive that they could literally blow a card… so they din’t put water-cooled Nordic systems on their graphics cards. The cards were fine for all the games of that time.
The problem is that Linden Lab engineers fail to take such things into account when they bring out new items. They get an idea in their heads, and they just do it, regardless of the havok it can wreak on their customers. That’s LL’s hallmark way of doing business. The SMART way of doing business is saying, “hey, this function is really going to overspec the average computer system and might even burn some cards. We better default it to the old method and provide some significant warnings.”
And btw Zi, as far as I know, the Intel Dual-core chip is indeed spec’d to run at… 60 degrees C. At least, that’s what MINE runs at. And if it gets much over 70, I start shutting down processes.
@ 143 Aswede: Age may not automatically give someone’s statements validity… but neither does attitude and lack of age. You can argue improving products and manufacturing all you want. Industry standards decades old stipulate that before a company releases a product to their customers, they test the product for possible damage to existing equipment. And if that is NOT done and warning not provided, that company can be held responsible for damage to the customer’s equipment, no matter what their TOS says. It falls under the heading of “gross negligence”. No TOS in the world protects a company from lawsuits regarding foreseeable damage. So no, that user’s age doesn’t automatically make her statements valid, but at the same time I think you pay a little more respect and be more willing to listen to voices of experience. Because no matter what your education or training (or hobbyist tinkering), it doesn’t equal decades of professional work in the field. And if you think it does, well, that’s the voice of inexperience speaking, not reality.
Back to the main point of most of this folks: it is high time that Linden Lab stop working on garbage projects like ARC, high time they stopped blaming the customer for THEIR problems, and got to work on what is REALLY causing the problems on SL, namely, Linden Lab coding, overtaxing their servers, having too many @#$@#$ customers using limited servers, poor database design and implementation, and focusing on eye candy instead of getting all those problems fixed.
Windlight is dandy, but I’d honestly rather see teleports work every time and I’d REALLY like to see an end to inventory loss.
Or uh… is inventory loss caused by customers too?
@146 Blinders Off: Older computer monitors could be destroyed by applying the wrong frequencies, yes. Those times are over though, modern monitors simply switch off.
The 15 degrees/percent increase might happen, I see it myself, but it doesn’t necessarily cause a problem, as long as the temperature stays in the specified range. If it goes too high, the cooling should kick in and dissipate the excess heat. As a last resort, the driver should throttle the chip. All this happens with my machine (throttling happened when the fan needed to be cleaned, I talked about that in another blog posting).
Older cards don’t even have the new and shiny features that make the newer cards heat up. They simply don’t have the computing power and lack the hardware features for it. So this is nothing that can cause damage to the card. Lindens can ass lots and lots of new features to the client, if your GPU doesn’t know how to handle it, it simply will ignore it.
It might very well be that your processor’s specification is 60 degrees celcius. A GPU usually runs at higher temperatures. My CPU runs at 62 Β°C right now with Second Life running. My GPU however is at 80 Β°C right now. And this card is in service for more than 1.5 years now, running Second Life every day.
Oh, and about lag, would you believe me that I don’t lag very much if I showed you a video capture? We can even meet in world if you like and I capture our meeting, so you can see it’s authentic π
Zi, bottom line, whether you personally experience lag or not, or do and claim not to (which I’m not accusing you of mind you), whether you lag only slightly or to a standstill or not at all, is really irrelevant. What is relevant is that the majority of SL users DO lag, and it’s not because they have old computers or low-power graphics cards.
The old “Oh these people are nuts, I never lag” claim is a tunnel-visioned viewpoint. There is usually an exception to any rule. Isolated personal experience does not found the basis of universal truth. π
Well I do not believe the claim that there is a no lag situation 100 percent of the time. I run a 10 meg line and rarely have long periods of lag but during the week ends when concurrence is high and the grid is loaded lag is easy to find. Sim crossings are a prime example of poor server hand off lag. The eternal walk through the next sim while the servers try and locate your code and place you in the proper locations. I have 2 class 5 islands border to border and the transition from one to the other is always a crap shoot as is teleporting. If you want to experience lag first hard go to any of the most favorite places located in search and just take a stroll. Another contributor to lag is our wonderfully efficient asset array and its inability to access data rapidly with reliability. So you may state that you never have lag or perhaps you do not consider freezing, crashing, and dirt walking lag. There are many things you can do to limit lag such as reducing your draw distance to 64 but thats also a compromise. Why have to live in a 64 meter world when 256 is so much nicer.
Probably it’s all a matter of language. “Lag” means for me “events not happening as quickly as they should”. And this really doesn’t happen too often. Even in a crowded place I can usually walk around without much of a problem. Sometimes I see rubberbanding, usually when a sim experiences time dilation for some reason. My FPS dropping to 3 or 2 (happens quite frequently with many avatars or lots of alpha textures) is not lag, it’s my machine being a tad old. The asset server not responding in time, yes, that’s something I see as well, but this is not lag, it’s a database overload.
So probably we are all talking about the same things here, but I like to differenciate between “Lag (Network delay)”, “Low FPS (complex graphical scene)” and “Database failure (Asset server overload)”. Probably even more pieces.
Yes, of course, SL has problems and no, not all of them are caused by the resident’s machines. Maybe I’m lucky or there is another reason for it, but with my (pretty out of date) system (AMD64 3200+, 2 GB RAM, GeForce 7800GS/512, 6000/512 ADSL) I can use 192 meter draw distance, have decent frame rates in mildly complex areas and with the latest RC almost never crash (the previous RC was a nightmare;) ).