How pathetic are some of these rats who spend all their (welfare) money on secondlife and bloodlines to the point of not even being able to pay for heat during winter? No wonder your kids are a fucked up skeletons piles of shit like their parents.
So who is this rat?
Works on airplanes but wastes all his money on superfluous things such as secondlife and bloodlines.
Is on his 50's, with 5 kids, does illegal mass produced dvd pirate sales
Kids at times are hungry due to lack of proper care and food
Cheats on his wife and she cheats on him. Wife is a drug addict and spends money on drugs.
... and hates p2472 Sideshow to death
RL pictures and information has been obtained about this piece of shit.
... it was one of those... surreal SL bloodlines nights; an intelligent conversation was "slained" by... a hairy snatch, ... who claimed to be shaved ... (click to amplify)
Jeffery could swear that he saw a tail in there ...
Surprisingly; today we have some of that rare educational content here... and having said that; 99% of the readers just vanishedand went to their daily chat drama...
WAIT !!!! do not leave right away.I am also going to bad mouth someone !!!
aaaah... you all came back...
Who hasn't seen those lag whiny bitches around secondlifecomplaining about "why is it so slow".Blah Blah Blah...
Well.. you bunch of dumbass deepshits... why do you load all the crap you can on an underpowered computer/laptop with without enough ISP bandwidth and use a secondlife viewer that deep-throats everything it can on a SL simulator which you decide to enter with your ego loaded of all the attachment crap you need to try to validate the good looks you don't have on real life ? *uhm*!
Avatar Rendering Cost - Second Life Video TuTORial
It’s a weekend where Hair Fair ’09 is in full force, and builders are happily finishing their work for SL6B.
Guess what? Nothing could make Linden Lab more happy than having half
the grid down, going through “emergency maintenance”, and dealing with
the painfully long list of complains that dozens of thousands of
residents are submitting…
There is nothing else but to be patient (Linden Lab will finish their work when they can… they’re not exactly asleep ), and in the mean time, what are residents doing in-world in the very crippled grid?
They accuse each other of creating lag.
This is a typical pastime of the Lag & ARC
Nazis. When things start to fail, specially in very popular events or
highly-crowded areas, it’s far better than to blame everybody else than
to deal patiently with the issue. However, you can have fun blaming
everybody else, but that won’t fix the problems. Really. Let Linden Lab
do their work. Eventually things will get back to normal. Blaming
everybody around you for either a super-crowded event or a failing grid
will not make it happen faster. You will just get
angry and get other people angry. And when we all are furious with each
other, we react irrationally, and lose all the fun we have with Second
Life® — trust me, that’s the last thing you wish to happen.
The Lag Myths
Let’s set the time clock a few years… six or even seven. Back then,
Linden Lab had a handful of servers and the grid had just 16 sims or so.
If a dozen people stayed in the same place and just chatted, sitting on
the ground, the sims would not only lag, but crash — both your SL
client and the sim you were on. People tried to break records — who
could join the highest numbers of avatars in the same place and stay
online the longest? This was usually measured in minutes, not hours or days
And of course a few would have found a trick. If you’d go in with
your Linden skin, no attachments, and cleared the sim from all prims,
textures, and scripts, it was quite likely they could all stay in-world
for longer before the sim crashed.
Why was that so? It takes two to tango — the sim server (what Linden
Lab hosts at their side) and your SL client application. Each contribute
to render this wonderful virtual world. But each does quite different
tasks. Each has also limitations, and that means that when you hit those limits, things start to break apart.
In the past, the sim servers behaved as if they could do
just one thing at a time (which is, of course, an oversimplification).
They sent each avatar prim data, and, most importantly, textures; they
tracked down where on the sim your avatar was; they ran scripts; they
handled physics (this does not only mean the cute physical-enabled
objects — like vehicles! — but also much simpler things like knowing if
your avatar was walking on the ground). The problem was that when one of
those things was being overburdened for some reason, the whole sim was laggy, and this influenced all avatars on it. Similarly, your own SL client would first attempt to load all prims and all textures before showing you anything at all — even those tiny nanoprims on an earring that was 200 m away.
No wonder it was a grey world. On those days, four or more years ago, people had only one way to
deal with lag: make avatars as simple as possible; get rid of all
attachments; stop scripts in the sim; keep event locations as simple as
possible (cubes with blank textures); and hope for the best. The truth
is, all these things actually helped. The technology was so
little advanced that “keeping it simple” really improved the viewing
experience. Even turning off title tags did have an effect on reducing
lag!
Second Life in 2009 — Myth, Etiquette, and Anger
Well, things have changed since those days, and they have changed dramatically. Since SL pretty much looks the same — it just looks better, but not different
— it’s natural that people wrongly assume that “the old methods of
dealing with lag” still apply. They don’t, and they have little
relevance to how SL actually works.
First and foremost, on the server side, the sims are now doing things in parallel much better, and allocate different priorities to different things. The largest impact has been on scripts. Scripts will only run when nothing else is to be done — this means they run at the lowest possible priority, and the more scripts in the sim, the slower they will run — without affecting texture download or avatar movement whatsoever.
This is a crucial change. You might have noticed that sometimes your
favourite AO or Dance HUD will respond slowly when you touch its
buttons, on a very crowded event. That’s just the way things work now.
First and foremost, you’ll get avatar data (their position), shortly
followed by their shape, body textures and attachments.
Then you get the
sim’s prim data in your neighbourhood (it makes no sense to
get you all those nanoprims from someone’s earring half a sim away, if
you can’t see them anyway), as well as only the textures you can actually see from your viewpoint. And only then will the sim start to run scripts on your behalf. Having more scripts will not lag the sim: the scripts will only run slower.
In fact, sometimes it might look they’re not running at all, since most
of the time the sim will be happily sending you textures.
So, turning off your AO, entering “sleep mode” on MystiTool, or
detaching everything with a script in it will make no difference at all.
Granted, if everybody is wearing a thousand scripted attachments, they
will notice that their attachments work very, very slowly, or possibly
not at all. But they’re not lagging the sim.
Why do people still worry about how many scripts are running on the
sim? Well, you can imagine that a slow-running vendor script is a
problem: you pay to it, and have no way to know when your item is going
to be delivered: either it happens instantly (on a fast sim!), or it can
take minutes (on a very crowded shop). So keeping the number of running and active scripts down is important because they might be running too slowly to work at all
— and when you’re dealing with shops and money transactions, this is a
problem.
So, although it’s usual that people host mega-parties to launch
their shops (or launch a new line of products in an existing shop),
this is actually not such a good idea: people will enjoy the party, but
they won’t be able to shop on script-enabled vendors. A good alternative
is simply to set prims to sell content (without any scripts) because
these won’t get lagged; a clever shopping area designer will make sure
that the place where the event takes place is not close to any shop (let
them be on neighbouring sims) or that all shops in the neighbourhood
don’t use script-based vendors. Not because of the lag; but because they might be simply working too slowly.
Nevertheless, technical reasons are not always acceptable to
the majority of the SL users. Having in mind that it’s easier to blame
others when things don’t work, than try to understand what is happening
“under the hood” (because it’s just magic…), an etiquette has slowly evolved over the years.
Sadly, it’s an etiquette based on superstition and magic, and not on scientific facts; in spite of that, breaking the etiquette is simply bad manners.
Suppose you invite a Jewish family to your dinner. They will be seriously offended if you don’t offer them kosher
food but insist that sliced ham is perfectly reasonable and healthy to
eat; it’s just their prejudice and superstition that makes them believe
that pork is “impure” or “unhealthy”. In fact, in Palestine 1000 BC,
conserving pork meat was hard, and it spoilt too quickly, compared to
other types of meat; so it was perfectly reasonable to create a
superstitious rule that told them not to eat pork “because God
doesn’t want it”. In fact, it was pretty sound advice — for 1000 BC. In
the 21st century, of course, we have refrigerators and vets monitoring
the health of pig farms, and sterilised procedures to deal with ham
manufacture. Thus, a 3000-year-old superstition (which originally was
founded on a real problem!) doesn’t make any sense today, does it?
Well, no. But it’s still not polite to offend other people
who believe in silly superstitions. Etiquette, or the notion that to
live better in a more friendly society we ought to adopt a polite form
of addressing others, and tolerating their quirks and superstitions,
tell us that we would be very, very rude if we offered non-kosher food
to a Jew. So we don’t. We know it’s silly. Even most of them will know
it’s silly, too. But none of us violate the social norms that rule our
society.
Similarly, in Second Life, a lot of etiquette rules have popped up,
many of which making sense in the remote past, but not any more. Turning
AO offs will not reduce lag, but people still believe they do.
So, even if that’s a stupid superstition, it doesn’t mean we ought to
be rude and offend them. We can be politically correct and accept that
their erroneous views on how SL runs truly don’t affect us; we can live
without our AOs for a few hours and be seen as polite and respectful and
tolerant towards others.
Nevertheless, as time goes by, the myths self-perpetuate, and it’s a
pity to see that more and more of our social conduct is based upon
superstition than on cold, hard facts. Here are some of them.
Lots of prims create lag, so let’s build open-space!
It’s true that the more prims you got on a place, the more textures
your SL client has to download, so that means things will take longer to
rezz. Most people got that right, because it’s obvious
What they fail to understand is that nowadays the SL client uses a very aggressive method to just download what it needs. This is called occlusion
— a big object in front of smaller ones will make the ones behind not
visible, so it’s pointless to download textures for them. Similarly, you
don’t need much detail to view objects further away, so the SL client
doesn’t request much information for it either.
On the server side, a similar process also helps. The sim will keep an interest list
on behalf of each avatar. This is mostly what is in the immediate
neighbourhood of the avatar (other avatars and their attachments, prims,
textures). So only these get sent — and it depends on the setting you
have for Draw Distance on your SL client. The lower it is, the smaller
the interest list. By matching all three approaches — just sending items
on the interest list; just requesting objects you can actually see; not
requesting much information from objects a long distance away since you
won’t see more than a few pixels anyway — this will mean that the
amount of content transfer between the SL client and the sim will be
much, much reduced.
So what should a good shop designer do? Avoid open space! If someone
drops in a sim with a Draw Distance of 256 m, it means that the interest
list for that avatar will cover the whole sim (these days, with more
and more advanced graphics cards, this setting is often the default —
and most people don’t know, or don’t want, to change it). If there is
nothing in front of the avatar, it means there will be no occlusion, and thus the SL client will request everything in sight — contributing to a huge spike in content transfer requests, and oh yes, these will lag the sim.
Now imagine 60 or 100 avatars all jumping to a hugely-packed shop at
the same time. All those residents will be downloading an insane amount
of content, all at the same time. That definitely lags the sim a lot!
A much better strategy is not to build open space shops.
Create partitions and rooms — make them big enough to allow for easy
movement around (remember the camera!) but also artificially enhance the
optimisation mechanisms built in SL to take advantage of occlusion and
interest lists. Thus, if none of the “rooms” in your shop is bigger than
64 m — which is large enough — you can tell people to keep their Draw
Distance at that level. They will still rezz everything on sight — and
when moving to a different room (or cornering a partition) they will
start just to download that content, not “everything else”.
Similarly, partitions and rooms allow for avatars not to be in plain
sight of each other all the time. A clever approach, if you own the sim,
is to have several entry points and disallow direct teleport. That way,
you can set the telehub from the Estate Tools to have multiple landing
points, and avatars will pop up at different parts of your shop. This
will mean that even a very crowded shop will only have a handful or so
of avatars in plain sight of each other, and this will allow each SL
client only to actually rezz the avatars it needs to display. You might
have seen that a few designers use this approach very cleverly, and
their shops, although apparently as densely-packed as others, have far
less lag. Now you know the trick
Remember that for this to work you cannot use alpha’ed
textures. Anything with an alpha in it will prevent occlusion to work —
even if the texture looks “solid”. To make double-sure, and assuming you
do your own shop’s textures, upload them as 24-bit TGA images. Only
32-bit TGA images can have transparency and alpha settings in them (they
need extra information to let the SL rendering engine know which parts
of it are translucent or transparent). So, a glassy partition looks
classy and fashionable, but it also means that it will not only prevent
occlusion from happening, but alpha textures take longer to render than the un-alpha’ed ones. So your partitions will actually make lag worse!
There are also a lot of optical illusions that you can use when
planning your shop. Items on display will usually have huge textures —
512×512 at least, but often more — since people will wish to see your
wares in good, close-up detail. But the rest of the shop is just
“decoration” to make a better shopping experience. It’s not as
“important” as the items on display, so why don’t you save prims and
textures on decoration? The part that people will see most of the time
is the ground — so make sure that you can get the best possible
texture on it. Walls might simply get less detail, and a very good
texturiser will be able to get away with 64×64 textures on walls without
making them look weird. Also, use few textures. If you take a look at
some of the best designs in SL — mostly by RL architects or interior
designers — you will see that their builds will have a lot of prims, but
actually just a handful of textures. They will play with subtle tricks
of texture alignment and tinting to give the illusion that they
have used more textures on the build — but it’s just illusion. That’s
why their builds, even if usually far more complex than the average
shop, will rezz so quickly.
A lot of problems exist that are typical of SL. For instance, imagine
that you have your open space are partitioned correctly with panels —
but you have items covering all the walls, from the bottom to the top.
What will avatars do? They fly. And once they start flying, they will
have a clear line of sight over the panels and partitions — there go all
advantages of occlusion! So should you prevent people from flying in
your shop? Definitely not — flying is a key element in SL, and you
should adapt to it, not prevent residents from using it. So, a good shop
should make things easy to find without requiring avatars to fly.
That will also mean better signage. Most amateur shop builders will
use a lot of signage, usually on the walls or suspended from the
ceiling, so that they don’t cover the items for sale. Well, remember
what I told you that most of the time people will be looking at the floor?
(It has to do with the way the standard camera works: most avatars are
seen slightly from the top) So the signage, unlike RL shops, should be
on the floor, not on walls or ceilings! A further advantage of placing things on the ground is that there seldom is anything behind
the floor (which means that once the floor is rezzed, the SL client has
nothing further to download from that direction, and finishes much
faster), unless, of course, you have a multi-floored build.
Nevertheless, the best shops have been placing information on the ground
and colour-coding areas to make them easier to navigate.
Avatar Rendering Cost Shows That Hair is Prohibitively Laggy!
Since Linden Lab introduced Avatar Rendering Cost
as an option on the Debug menu, people have been shocked at how
terrible hair is! This has lead hair designers to despair — the better
hair looks, the more likely it’s going to clash with the ARC Nazis, who
are always eager to shout angrily “Remove your hair now!
You’re lagging the sim!” So this means that as a hair designer you have
a difficult trade-off to deal with: either please your customers but
displease the ARC Nazis, meaning that common residents will avoid
gorgeous designs (or just use it privately at home) because they fear
they’ll be lagging the sim…
Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, prim hair usually
uses just one or two textures at most, and it often uses the most
simplest of prims, because they’re the ones that can get flexified (when
flexible sculpties become a standard feature of the Linden viewer, as
they already are on some viewers, there will be a new Hair
Renaissance!). They still get a very high rating on ARC, because, of
course, “lots of prims” will always get a higher rating,
specially if they have a lot of alpha textures on each prim’s face
(which will be the case for most of the very primmy hair).
But… high ARC does not create sim lag! Seriously! A prim is
just a prim, 200 prims on the ground or attached to an avatar’s head
take exactly the same time to rezz (actually, prim hair will rezz first,
since all attachments have priority when downloading). So what’s the
problem with high-ARC prim hair (or shoes)?
To understand this, you will need to know that there is sim lag, and
there is client lag. Sim lag happens on SL’s grid and affects everybody
on the same sim. Client lag is what you experience on your own computer. Typical cases of client lag are… an underpowered laptop on wi-fi.
Sure, it’s fun to be chatting with your beloved one in bed, but your
poor laptop on wi-fi will simply be much more laggier than a desktop
computer of half the price with a wired connection to the Internet.
There is little you can do about that — it’s just the way technology
works. Wireless and wi-fi are bad for SL — they lose packets, and when
that happens, information has to be retransmitted.
Laptops overheat
quickly and easily, and that means that the laptop has to start slowing
things down — CPU and graphics card are the first to go, and these two
are what you need for ultrafast performance in SL!
The next most common mistake is an unconfigured computer.
Although these days almost everybody in the Western world owns and uses a
computer daily, they’re still viewed as an appliance — like your
toaster in the kitchen — that you just plug in and it works. Sadly,
they’re not even close to that, even if every year they get better at
predicting what kind of use you’re going to give it. Here goes a typical
example. Some of the most recent Vista-based, low-end laptops have a
setting to run the CPU at half speed. Why? Vista is more demanding in
CPU, and this meant more power consumption, and a battery that runs out
quicker. This meant that the computer manufacturers felt that their
products would be evaluated against other, non-Vista computers, and
people wouldn’t want such short battery life. Thus, they just switch the
CPU down to half the performance, and that will make the battery last
longer. It will also mean that Vista will be far slower, but since
people are used to slow computers anyway, it wouldn’t make any
difference at all.
How each manufacturer deals with this is different, but the point is,
by just clicking a checkbox or a slider you can suddenly get twice the
performance out of your laptop! There goes your SL lag away… But
tweaking and experimenting takes time, requires knowledge, and patience. And usually requires an expert too!
Not all of us are experts, so SL tries to estimate what are the best performance settings for your
brand and model of computer. It often guesses wrong. I always tell
people to experiment with the settings under Preferences to see if they
get a bit more performance out of their computers; sometimes, a trick
that makes a huge difference for someone will do nothing for you — and
inversely, something that everybody else tells you never to touch will
make all the difference! I have a very underpowered MacBook from late
2007, and I was very disappointed with it: it has an Intel card that is
not supported by Linden Lab. So I wasn’t much surprised that I just got
1-3 FPS out of it, which pretty much frustrated me.
But one day I gave it a try again, and started tweaking with the
parameters. By placing all settings at the lowest setting, suddenly I
got it going at 40 FPS! Granted, SL didn’t look nice, but clearly that
old, unsupported Intel card was not that bad! After playing a
bit with the settings I found out that the only serious limitation was
with the shaders (used by Windlight to get you gorgeous sky and water).
Well, I could live without water reflections — so long as I got the
avatars rendering nicely, with plenty of shiny, and good enough detail
on the objects. So, getting rid of water reflections turned a “useless”
laptop in a quite performing machine! On a good day, I can easily get 30
FPS out of it, and SL doesn’t look that ugly, either!
So is all client-side lag caused by improper configuration? In most of the cases, yes, but the truth is, some
features in SL are really meant for high-end graphics cards. If all you
can afford is a US$700 laptop or a US$500 desktop, you will get a “bare
bones” graphics card — good for Word and a web browser, but not for
much more. You can’t expect a low-end, US$10-50 graphics card, which is
what comes with the low-end computers, to be able to render things like
state-of-the-art graphics cards that will cost more than your laptop!
Sadly, most people simply cannot afford a
state-of-the-art graphics card, and will have to make do with what they
have. I’m afraid that what this means is that you’ll always be
experiencing some sort of client-side lag. Even if people around you run naked, without script attachments, and paint all walls white… you’ll always lag on a sim with 50-100 avatars on it. Your graphics card is simply not powerful enough to deal with that.
Now you know that all ARC Nazis, by definition, have low-end graphic cards
I can only pity them for that, because they have a perception of the
world that is just unique to them, and they yell and get angry with
everybody else because they believe that the whole world is conspiring
against them to make their computers more laggy. I’m sorry — but, again,
this is just superstition, just a magical belief that you can transform
your underpowered computer into something powerful, if only everybody else used Linden avatars.
ARC Nazis will always put the blame on someone else. If they manage to get everybody in a place turning into Ruth, and they are still
lagging, they will immediately suspect that everybody is secretly
running scripted attachments. So they immediately yell to people to drop
their attachments, and visually confirm if someone hasn’t done so. When
they’re satisfied, they will still lag… and then remember that people also have HUDs.
HUDs, unfortunately, you cannot see — so the ARC Nazis, living in their
RuthWorld, will still believe people are hiding their HUDs behind their
screens just to create lag.
But wait — you’re thinking — I’ve actually made some measurements, and high-ARC avatars, specially a lot of them, really make my computer run slower!
To understand why this is the case, you have to forget about prims
for a moment. Graphics cards know little about prims or even avatars —
all they know is about polygons (or triangles, depending on the
model). You can see how Second Life looks like from the perspective of
your graphics card by going to the Advanced menu and looking for the
“Wireframe” mode. SL will look funny that way, but you’ll see that
everything is actually really made out of small triangles, all the way.
Now you’ll notice one thing: the more complex the prim (i.e. the more it’s twisted!), the more triangles it has. Avatars have a lot of triangles on their own (about 7500 at my last count). A plywood cube will just have 12.
As you can imagine, your graphics card can only render a specific
amount of triangles per second. How many? That depends on the brand and
model, but you can expect that higher-end cards can actually render thousand times as much
as lower-end cards. Now, SL is optimised to try to feed you a stream of
25 or so frames per second (enough to give you the illusion of smooth
movement). This means that in a single second, all those triangles you see in a scene in front of you — hundreds of thousands, often millions have to be rendered at least 25 times.
It’s hard to get a list comparing graphics cards — most use
“synthetic tests” where the overall performance is measured using a
combination of techniques, not just merely polygon rendering — but you
can imagine what happens on a low-end graphics card. At some point,
there are so many avatars in the same scene that the graphics card
cannot simply keep up with the polygons. As a result, the frame rate
drops — you get that “slideshow effect” instead of smooth, video-like
motion. This is just your graphics card telling you that it has reached
its limit. High-end graphics cards will have a way higher limit, and, for them, rendering hundred avatars with 10,000 ARC doesn’t make them sweat. The problem is, most of us don’t have such high-end graphics cards. So what actually happens is that most will experience a huge drop in performance when rendering too many avatars with too many attachments.
The important thing to remember is that this affects you only. You can tweak your Preferences so that avatars render with less polygons (yes, they will be ugly). You can be on a crowded sim with a hundred avatars with 25-30 FPS on a low-end graphics card (I do that every day!). But it means you have to deal with trade-offs.
Typical trade-offs are using avatar impostors even at close range
(avatar impostors are just a texture, they have no meshes, and thus, no
polygons to render); having a very short drawing distance (keeping those
avatars out of your field of vision!); turning off all shaders (bye-bye
water reflections and gorgeous skies!); and so on. So… this is actually
the reverse of what the ARC Nazis want: instead of lowering your settings so that you can get a good performance of your card (but probably an uglier SL!), they demand that everybody looks ugly in SL so that they can get better
performance! But that’s thinking upside down: you should be the one to
adapt your computer to what it can actually deliver, not the rest of the
world that has to conform to your under-powered or misconfigured
computer!
It’s pitiful when you look everywhere for sources of lag that don’t
really exist — except on your computer. You can search and search, yell
and yell, but the lag in your own computer will not go away. Unless, of course, if you kick everybody out of the sim.
Why?
Time dilation
There is, however, one thing that will definitely lag everybody on the sim. And the answer is actually paradoxically simple: more avatars will lag everybody, but not for the reason described above!
Keep in mind that your goal is to render all those polygons 25 times
per second to get smooth performance. Now, to keep with that goal, the
sim will need to feed you with data, at least also 25 times per second.
But — here’s the catch! — it has not only to tell you where everybody
else is in the sim (and what they’re doing, e.g. what they’re saying in
chat, what animations their AOs have activated, etc.), but it has also
to send you the textures for your SL client to render content.
So if you push up the View Statistics window,
you’ll see there is a section called “Simulator”. Under that section
there is a subsection called “Time”. This will tell you what the sim is
actually trying to do to keep up with all the requests.
For historical reasons, the sim will try to refresh everything in it
45 times per second (not merely 25), which gives it some headroom. This
means that each “sim frame” is sent every 22 ms (milliseconds). Ideally,
the largest value should be on “Spare Time” – meaning mostly that the
sim has plenty of time left to do whatever it needs to be doing. Net
time is related to texture download (and other assets) from other sims;
Agent Time is for sending data about prims to avatars; and Images Time
will tell the amount spent in actually transmitting textures to avatars
logged on that sim – so, if anyone in the sim is downloading
things, a slice of those 22 ms will be “wasted” on downloads and not on,
say, tracking where avatars are (Sim Time – Other). The example on the picture shows a very healthy sim: half a milisecond is spent every frame
to track avatars down, deal with textures, and so on. But most of the
time, the sim is just idling away. This means — zero lag on the sim.
What happens when suddenly a lot more avatars start entering the sim?
Well, first, more time is spent to track them down, and this grows exponentially. That means that to track down 10 avatars, you have to send a hundred times more messages! Tracking a hundred avatars means ten thousand times more messages. If we wished to have a thousand avatars per sim, that would mean a million messages exchanged to keep all avatars in sync — but there is no technology sufficiently fast these days to handle that and still be able to deal with calculating each frame, 45 times per second.
But things get worse very quickly. Sim Time – Other (tracking down avatars) is actually one of the quickest
things to do, in the sense that it doesn’t require much time to send
updates. Texture data is another story, because a full texture requires
several seconds (thousands of “frames”) to download, and while
the texture is being transmitted, the sim momentaneously fails to track
down where avatars actually are and what they’re doing (from your point of view, this is not very serious, because the SL client interpolates —
it tries to figure out where other avatars were the last time, where
they were moving to, and what animations they had loaded, so it can
pretty much give you a reasonable display of what is happening until
they get fresher data).
But now imagine that a hundred avatars are all requesting
texture data (because they’ve just arrived to a huge event at the same
time). Suddenly, all the sim is doing is sending textures everywhere.
But in most cases, the textures might not be loaded on the current
sim (imagine all those attachments and clothes that came from other
sims!), so first the sim has to request them all — wasting time and
bandwidth. At this point, the sim might simply begin to fail tracking
down avatars. These will request new position updates, all at the same
time, but the sim might simply not be able to send them all the
required data in less than 22 ms. So here is where strange things start
to happen: your avatar starts to “walk through treacle” or suddenly
hiccuping and appearing a bit ahead or below of what you expected. This
is just because the SL client is expecting some data that it never
receives.
In the mean time, the sim starts to receive some texture data. Since
all hundred avatars require the same textures, now comes the moment
where one texture received from a remote server suddenly turns into hundred uploads to as many avatars. So if texture retrieval from a remote sim was already painful, now it’s a hundred times worse.
But it doesn’t stop here. Once you’re missing a lot of positioning
information, you cannot feed the physical engine with accurate
information on where the avatars are. Like the SL client, the physical
engine can work on guesstimates — “well, this avatar was moving
northwards a second ago, so it’s safe to assume it’s still going that
way”. Sadly, you never know what’s in the path. Other avatars might
become obstacles; the path might suddenly end; there is a stair in front
of the avatar and so the physical engine has to calculate the new
position based on where the “ground” now is.
When the amount of computation by the physical engine is too high,
and it cannot deliver an accurate prediction on where the avatars are
supposed to be, we enter “slow motion mode”. What you will see is that
the value of Time Dilation, which is usually 1.0 (that means: events
happen in real time) might suddenly drop. A drop to 0.5 means that the
physical engine is now operating at half the speed of real time, i.e. that all actions that avatars start taking twice
as long. A very overburdened sim will quickly get worse and worse —
when Time Dilation is at 0.10, that means that everything happens ten times as slower, and so on.
What does this slowdown mean? Well, the SL client can compensate for
the lag (what literally lag means: things are not happening in real time
any more) to a degree. It doesn’t need to update the avatar position so
often, for instance, because the sim tells the SL client that it can’t
keep up anyway. You’ll see that for relatively high Time Dilation values
(until 0.7 or so) you might not even notice the lag: sim and SL client
work in tandem to compensate for the lack of available processing power
on the sim side. Usually, this should not happen often: it’s designed to
deal with “spikes” (when all of a sudden a lot of people drop in the
sim, but quickly disperse, each going their own way).
The trouble starts with a very intense and long event (say, an hour or so) where avatars are constantly in pretty much the same spot — which is what actually happens at almost all events That’s why they lag all the time.
The sim cannot keep up with so much information to transmit to all
avatars; the physics engine is constantly working to keep up with the
amount of information it needs to calculate everything, and never
“catches” up. The event is usually laggy from the begin to the end. At
the very end, as avatars start to leave, the physics engine finally
catches up, the sim finally can track back all avatar positions, and at
last, “slow motion” becomes real time again, sometimes all of a sudden.
So how can you prevent this? The short answer is, you cannot. You can’t tell people to stay away from events — which is the only thing that actually creates sim-server lag. The mere act of connecting to a crammed-full sim creates lag. The amount of prims on your 10,000-ARC hair is pretty much irrelevant. Just the tracking down, the physics engine,
and the few textures that it’s constantly downloading from other
locations and feeding to all avatars in the sim, is more than enough to
bring it to its knees. What the Lag & ARC Nazis do not realise is
that all this happens independently on what you’re wearing or attaching to yourself.
But doesn’t it help? After all, if you’re not wearing 200-prim-hair, you will have less information to transmit, right? So it will surely help a bit? The short answer is no
— the difference is almost impossible to measure. As said, 200-prim
hair is usually just two or three textures to download. If your SL
client doesn’t ever get them, that’s all right, they’ll just remain
grey, but that doesn’t “lag” you. Remember that a sim with Time Dilation
of 0.5 is two times slower than real time — and 0.10 is ten times slower.
If the overall difference of having everybody wearing 200-prim-hair is
0.01 on time dilation (probably it will be far less), that is hardly
important. The sim will not recover from lag even if everybody detach their hair, shoes, and HUDs. Avatars will still be requesting data; the physics engine will still be having a hard time to calculate where avatars are. No, the only way to deal with a sim crammed full of avatars — is to get rid of them. But that’s not an option!
The conclusion?
Etiquette dictates that you ought to conform to other people’s rules
when you’re a visitor, and should accept their insane superstitions,
just out of politeness, even if they don’t make any rational
sense. If the Lag & ARC Nazis request that you detach your things,
out of politeness, you should do so. But you should also be aware, if
you’re hosting your event, that it makes people angry to impose
superstitions on your guests. Blaming your guests for completely the wrong reasons
is as rude as ignoring your host’s requests — in fact, I would even
claim that some cultures view it as much ruder. As in the example
earlier, it would be far more rude for the host to offer not-kosher food
to Jewish guests (and insulting them for their superstitions) or
blaming them for having to be forced to serve something you dislike just
because they have a silly religious rule.
In almost all cultures in the
world, hospitality is important, and a part of being hospitable is to
be nice and welcoming to your guests, and accepting their differences
and ideas. Also, in almost all cultures, guests also try to comply with
their host’s reasonable demands, if their motivation is a good one. My
grandfather, who was a Jew, would not engage in drama if someone would
offer him a ham sandwich; he’d just smile, eat a bit not to offend the
guest, and later explain that unfortunately his religion forbade him to
fully enjoy the sandwich, but still thank the host for the effort in
doing a nice sandwich just for him. A polite host would offer their
apologies to my grandfather and remember not to use pork ham but stick
to chicken ham on sandwiches next time.
Similarly, a polite host in SL would probably request guests not to
use high-prim attachments and turn off their HUDs because they believe
in the myth that these create lag. Insulting and yelling at your guests
is very rude — specially well-informed guests that would kindly
point out that this lag myth has no grounds whatsoever. On the other
hand, specifically ignoring your host’s request, and wearing the
highest-ARC hair you can find, attaching a thousand flexiprims on your
scripted skirt, using all kinds of particle effects and sounds on your
shoes and bracelets, just to provoke them, is also very, very rude.
A
good compromise can be met: there are less primmy hairs around which
still look good enough; you don’t need to wear earrings if you have a
very dense hairstyle (nobody will notice them anyway); and wearing jeans
instead of a high-prim skirt is sexy and fashionable too, and a lot of
prim shoes just have one sculpty and still look great! You can
also turn off your avatar radar on a very crowded place, since it won’t
work properly anyway (as explained, scripts will run so slow that the
sensors used by the avatar radars will never really find all avatars
around you).
What we call “lag” is basically split among two categories:
server-side lag, which you can’t avoid in crowded areas, since it comes
simply from having a lot of avatars in the same place, which require a
lot of time to compute their positions and what they’re doing.
Attachments will have little relevance to lower lag. The other category
is client-side lag, and that one can be dealt with — both by the event
hoster, who can design the environment to take advantage of the so many
tricks that the SL client does to keep a good performance, but also by
the visitor, who, even with an underpowered graphics card, is always
able to tweak their settings to adapt to an avatar-intense event. Sure,
that requires that you experiment a bit with the settings, but it’s
within your power to effectively turn down your client-side lag if you’re willing to do some tweaking — instead of blaming others!
What will definitely not work is to stick to superstitions
and myths, assuming that things work by “magic”, and being rude to your
visitors who are better informed and are not willing to get insulted.
By massive popular demand on private messages; the head of Merlin Swordthain is very requested on this blog. However what is not know is that it is already here for more than 18 months... waiting to get what it deserves and for those who do not know his nickname among 4 very well known high bloodlines profile people including liaisons he is known by Mr Ego for quite a while (i have no clue who baptised him that way... *whistles*)
Part 1 of 3
For now you get thehead as an entrance because the main course will be served later (with lots of ice) for you to know who he is, what he did, how he got to where he got, how he was booted, how he is borderline to get what he did to another (link later) and how his hypocrisy & double face is even bigger than his ego (some liaison is going to love this last caustic one); but you will all have to wait because others need to be here first in order to properly fit Merlin in the same garbage pile that points the finger at. Until then send us everything you have about him. Spin the wheel ... spin it!
I warned you Merlin; 3 times.... or was it 4 ? *ummmm* /me *massages chin* .... damn alzheimer... oh well...
Well 'me' damn it ... it's about time someone give me some credit and recognition for my skills.
...I was hoping for Forbes with the top biggest 400 assholes in the planet (where i would take all the seats ... of course - don't get any ideas or pathetic hope) but i will have survive with this very poor version of the razzies.
However Joey Carrots(i've upgraded him) once again fails to deliver and since he has not flushed ever since, it is fair enough to assume that he is literately full of shit.
Maybe someone should pass by, 1812 Tanner St, Rockingham, NC 28379 - (910-997-5462) and have a word with someone.
Some people should be left alone when they tell you to take a hike in the first and only time that they exchanged some words.
that took months to create since that chat conversation and recently motivated by a couple bloodline bans of his alts/mindless soldiers who decided to bother me while i was clipping my toenails.
While in May 2010 the desperate gang here did not have the disgust anguish of my company; they got it now in October 2010. (enjoy... with mouth full and 2 fries with ketchup in your nostrils)
... all that work and effort to have to share the podium of assholeness glory with some irrelevant cartoons; left me crushed and crawling through the swears of life that i locked myself in a room and stayed in bed for a week mopping around boxes of chocolates and candy (chicks recovery mode) until i saw ... some light ....
But minutes later it was visible that this tribute was done by someone ... anencephalic.
Obese ? (use some real man wordslike FAT) USI? Next time do it properly like a man. ( i will wait 30 years to read it) Now learn how it is done.
Draconian Hax - Necroticly fucking fat ass and swollen colon with USI, HST, TXT, HIV, PST, STD, HEX, FST, DNR, FDC, RCT, ESX, AHC, TUL, ASD, CGH, HIO, CGI, GCC, ASP, FAT, PHPand multiply 26 x 26 x 3 for more possible key combinations. (throw in some numbers to make it look l33t like 4$$h0l3 )
ah.. much better now, which i dedicate to my hate fan group for their loyalty, dedication and of course endless support. You are the reason why i get up everyday at 4 am to count my pubic hair collection while using my balls as marbles.
Now joey; my next goal is to get recognized in the planet 'ur anus with a well shaken corked bottle of champagne in there and ready to party like an animal.
There are 2 questions that i am continuously asked about and the result of one those questions is the answer to the other.
I have been asked many times in private by many people how is it that in the middle of the snake pit of bloodlines; that i manage to keep sanity and i haven't become like the rest.
Well.. wait no more... a secret is about to be revealed that will answer this question and also your friendship requests.
But before you can see with our own eyes lets have some sort of introduction just for some personal enlightenment. (maybe you can use it for some bulbs at home and save some electricity)
-->
... while someone was whining about problems with friends ... (one among ... hundreds in my confessionary) here goes an extract of the conversation.
[2010/01/17 19:13] Draconian Hax: oh joy
[2010/01/17 19:14] Draconian Hax: do you know why i don't get any problems with friends ?
[2010/01/17 19:14] (name removed): was giving him medical advice when he was in emmortalz
[2010/01/17 19:14] (name removed): you don't have any because you are an arse hole?
[2010/01/17 19:14] (Draconian Hax): very good.
[2010/01/17 19:14] (name removed): hehehehe
[2010/01/17 19:15] Draconian Hax: *clap * *clap *
[2010/01/17 19:15] Draconian Hax: problem free solution
[2010/01/17 19:15] (name removed): heheheheh
... no shit stains on my suit ...
Get the picture deepshits ?
now go vote on the poll at the upper right corner of this blog
... as much as i would like to insult the genius mind that wrote this comment for it's rare and indeed quite correct conclusion regarding the findings and self compliment i can only ask:
Was it hard to find ? ... i mean... for a moron of course.
Stuff i have been called:
Sir Drac, Lord Hax, Mr Bloodlines, Haxy, Grumpy, Draccy, Scarface Wannabe, Lord Grumpy, God in white, Pablo Escobar, Oracle of Bloodlines, Puffin White, Freddy Mercury, King Dracon, MacGyver of Bloodlines, Smart ass, Forest Grumps, Mr Untouchable, George Michael, Master Hax, Mr Disco, Wise-man, Muppet, Resident turd, Indy, 80's Guy, Draco, Rene "Boxer" Enriquez, Narcissistic, Chair Warmer, Magic Man, Rod Stewart, Mr Smiley, Haxie Waxie, 80's Porn Star and the usual less enlightened swear words that we all know.
I am sure the list will grow...
