In the past I have been pretty outspoken about how Linden
Labs insane changes to SL are detrimental to how SL itself works. However, like
many other users and creators on SL, it all got to a point where trying to talk
some sense in to Linden Labs was beyond a joke, and I gave up, settling myself
in to just inworld grumbling, however thanks to “Project Sunshine” which has
now been rolled out grid wide, I have felt the need to sit down and grumble in
public again.
First off, I think I should, from a users perspective
actually quantify what project sunshine is.
According to Linden Labs
Project sunshine take the baking process away from the
viewer and the user, and does it server side to speed things up, and cut out
the “blurry” avatars.
To understand that though, you need to understand what
baking is in the first place otherwise for all you know, making cheese toasties
are now done server side rather than with the user.
Baking is a process of making a combo pack of the various
textures you are wearing, and creating 3 images of it.
So... you have a skin on (3 textures), a shirt (1
texture), Pants (1 texture), alpha masks (upper and lower body – 2 textures), a
Tattoo (3 textures).
So... with that you are wearing 10 textures. Each of
those textures will need to be downloaded by anyone who sees you in world.
Obviously thats a hell of a load to work with.
This is where baking comes in.
When you first wear an item of clothing you will see it
appears on your avatar. Roughly 30 seconds later, the avatar goes all blurry
and then comes back. The blurry bit is you actually baking.
After a set time, your viewer (as in the one on your
computer) takes the 10 textures you have on, and merges them in to three – the Head,
Upper Body and Lower body.
It then uploads those textures to the Second Life Servers
as a temporary bake files.
Now, when someone sees you in world, they only have to
load 3 textures, rather than 10.
I use 10 as an example because its convenient, but its
not unheard of for some people have to have 30 or more textures on their AV, so
the benefits of baking are very apparent.
Now... where does sunshine come in to this?
Well, the basics of Sunshine are, it takes you out of the
equation.
When you wear an item of clothing now, rather than your
viewer doing the baking work, a server at Linden Labs bakes the textures and
stores them. The result is, things are faster, and less bandwidth and errors
will occur. In addition, this is supposed to speed SL up, as there is a
database of items that will take various textures, and store their bake
permanently so if you and another user have the same outfit on, it wont need to
bake – you get the texture.
Sounds great doesn’t it.
However. What really are the benefits of Sunshine?
SL to me has worked perfectly for years – never had
issues and even with sunshine, I am still seeing half baked people.
But, what about this faster database of stored bakes?
Yeah... thats just about as dumb as it gets. How many
times, realistically, do you see someone wearing exactly the same skin, with
exactly the same clothes as you?
Answer is never. There will always be something slightly
different about you.
In fact there is only one occasion when this will help.
You can now see noobs faster.
Now, lets cut the crap here. Project Sunshine is a step
forward, but is it the brilliant thing its made out to be. I would say not
really.
This is sadly typical Linden Labs – big project, big noises,
little inworld impact and massive inconvenience to users.
Which does kind of neatly bring me back to the point of
this article... why’s Hemi on the soapbox this time?
Well, it all comes back to one of my other major gripes
about Linden Labs over the last three years. The next generation viewer – also known
as Viewer 2 / 3 what ever it is this week.
I remember the utter disbelief and backlash against
Linden Labs when they proudly showed off Viewer 2 to the users.
Basically everyone with a few small exceptions hated it.
Passionately.
I remember vividly though the comments posted were not
rude, unfounded or harsh. In fact they were very constructive, and tried to
help.
Linden Labs after this consultation and testing of the
new viewer then said effectively “thank you all for your comments, we don’t care,
its going ahead as it is”.
In fact I know of at least 5 personal friends of mine who
actually said “If this is the future of SL, then I don’t want anything to do
with it..” And shortly after, they left SL.
Sadly Linden Labs didn’t back down on the new viewer
format, and it was taken on board by Third Party viewer makes to try desperately
to clean up the mess Linden Labs made and produce a viewer that people could
use, rather than what LL’s were forcing down their throats.
In fact today, its almost laughable that the current
Official LL’s viewer is being beaten in to the floor by TPV projects like
Firestorm.
About a year ago, with new features being pushed in to
SL, and with the official Viewer 1 from LL’s getting the chop, as well as the
sad news that viewers like Phoenix getting axed too I decided as Viewer 3 was
now almost useable, to move on to Firestorm.
It was a move that unsettled me as I tried to get my head
around some of the serious building usability issues that had been pushed in to
Viewer 3 such as the mental methods of skin and clothing construction that
increased the production time by three (yeah – I timed this. If you took at day
to build something, with Viewer 3, it will take you 3 days).
However, I bit the bullet... and forced myself to get
used to Viewer 3, although technically working on clothing and skins, I continued
to use Phoenix.
I have to admit by this point I had almost resigned
myself to the fact this was SL now but I still had options.
That is, until Sunshine arrived.
As Sunshine changes the way the viewer behaves, unless
you are on a Sunshine capable viewer, you cant see SL. Just lots of grey
people.
Well... shouldn’t be a problem. Just update Firestorm.
That is kind of where my problem started. I updated
Firestorm, and by the end of the day I had to roll back to Version 4.3
The viewer was effectively unusable for me.
So, what was the problem?
First and foremost was the viewer throwing a fit every
time it saw an alpha texture. Not the actual rendering of it, but if you cammed
on to it.
The viewer would for no reason at all, freeze solid for
10 seconds.
My first reaction was, check my graphics card driver
software – I did, updated it.
No fix.
I then went on to the Firestorm Wiki, and spent over an
hour running through ever single graphics glitch hotfix I could find... nothing
worked.
The only solution I found for the problem was
unacceptable. Setting Graphics to Low cured it.
However working on a PC that has been running on Ultra on
4.3, sorry – not putting up with Low.
So in the end, I had no choice but to roll back, and hope
that Firestorm would release an update before it got critical.
Well, Sunshine went live on Tuesday, and with no update,
I had to put back the glitched release and in fact I found even more issues
since the reinstall.
1/ Loss of connectivity – effectively without warning,
sim ping times were in to lag out mode, with 1500ms being the average. This was
all sims too.
2/ Avatar blinking in and out – the avatar would just
disappear for a second without warning.
3/ Freezing on camming around a sim – as the viewer tried
to load in the sim, the whole thing would freeze up regardless of first load,
or even being at home with everything in cache.
4/ Menu freeze up – open inventory, preferences, etc, and
the viewer would freeze up for 10 seconds or more.
5/ Cam to semi transparent object would freeze the viewer
up for anything from 10 -20 seconds.
Which I suppose brings me back to Sunshine.
Which is better for your company? A viewer that allows
users to actually use Second Life, or improving Second Life’s loading times and
making a viewer that is at least for some of the population, unusable.
In a laughable way though I found a solution to the
problem though.
I have moved back to Viewer 1.
Over time, while the better known viewers like Phoenix
have perished, a small hardcore group have continued to push viewer 1, and I am
very thankful that TPV’s like Singularity decided to stick with Viewer 1 and
build software that can offer what is for people like me, essentials.
Singularity is fast on my PC – in fact it seems to be
running circles around Firestorm in terms of FPS rates. It also is much kinder
to my PC – its operational load cost on my CPU and memory is a third of Viewer
3. Its also stable – everything that
should work, works flawlessly.
Its more useable for builders – as it still has the older
Edit Appearance system, it means faster production times for clothing and skins
compared to viewer 3.
It seems to have all of the “unique” features that viewer
3 has.
The only thing I really still have to test and work on is
mesh uploading, however I assume that these issues have been cleaned up since I
last used it.
Well. This is awkward as I think its about time I asked a
question here.
Way back when Linden Labs unveiled their amazing Viewer 2
we were told by Linden Labs that this new viewer was the way forward and that
it was a necessity as the technology Linden Labs was developing for Second Life
in the future required this new viewer.
Today in near enough three years on from that. The new
technology Linden Labs was developing, is mostly here now and there new viewer
has gone through massive development in that time.
But as a user of Second Life, all I can see that has
happened is this.
The new viewer is still an overweight, cluttered, messy
design with a GUI that has had to be adapted to look like the original viewer
in order for it to work right. Its memory and CPU over intensive and has from
my point of view, become an untenable and unusable piece of software thats
throwing out multiple errors all the time.
The irony of this though, is that viewer 1 base systems
like Singularity, based on tried and tested software is faster, more stable,
less memory and CPU intensive and gives equal or better FPS rates than the new
viewer does.
And here is the serious point. We were told the new
Viewer was a requirement due to the new technologies coming. And yet, today,
Singularity has effectively integrated ALL of those new technologies in its
build and seems to be running circles around the new Viewer.
I don’t really have much more to rant about so I will
sign off with this.
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