I hate to complain, but

I have blogged about how great i thought the idea of open sourcing the viewer code was.  I still hold that position, because people have been working on the viewer for a bit now, and there are some versions available now that have some really cool features.

Putting aside the security issues of having an open source viewer, there is something that I have not seen done yet, and I am not exactly sure why.

While there have been many changes to the User Interface, and things to make your experience easier, I wonder why there has not been much, if anything done about the raw speed of the viewer.

Here are a few things I notice when running Second Life:

I am at my home, and everything is fully rezzed.  I tp over to a store, or to a friends place.  I am there for say 20 minutes.  Then I tp home.  Why does everything have to rerez?  I watch my computer, and its not loading these images from my hard drive, cause my hard drive is not being accessed.  It seems to be downloading all these images all over again.  Um...why?   Isn't that the point of having a cache?

Lets talk about going to a store for a moment.   I tp in, and usually set my draw distance down to like 64 meters (there is a chat command that does this in the Emerald Viewer, its called DD.  It is very handy).  I sit there and watch the rezzing process.  I look at my frame rate, and the bandwidth being used by the client.  While I admit my video card does not have the best frame rate in the world, but why is my bandwidth only at 50 kbps, when my internet connection is at least 10mbs?  I do a ping test, and a ping plot, to see if there is anything that might be having trouble, and it all tests out with PLENTY of speed.

I know there many questions inside all of that, but my big question is...are the caching and networking routines that complicated?   I know from my own programming experience that changing around an interface, and even just making an interface for a given feature is not all that hard.  This is not to diminish the work that people ARE doing on the viewer, because they have done some awesome work!  I am just wondering why nobody has done much work on these basic issues.

Can you imagine, if somebody came out with a viewer that had a significant speed increase for everybody?  Talk about improving the user experience!

To be fair, I am in the process, slowly, of downloading the source code, and all the tools required to compile this code myself.  I can only hope that I can decipher enough of it to see if there might be something that can be done about this without too much pain.

Even if I cannot figure that part out, I am still very interested to see if I CAN get it to compile!  How cool would it be to have Al's Viewer!  Maybe I can take all the features that I like, and put them into a viewer, just for me.

If there is anybody out there, who would be willing to help me decipher the caching and networking code for the viewer, please contact me.  I am seriously wondering if its just been overlooked because nobody thinks they can understand it!

Have a great day everybody!
2 Responses
  1. Anonymous Says:

    I'm not nearly geeky enough to know how to tinker in viewer code, but I suspect that many of the problems your personally experiencing have to do with your video card. Particularly going to a store and having to re-render home again. the smaller the texture memory of your card, the less memory it has to hold textures before it flushes them to download new stuff. Particuarly at a store, which tends to have a lot of big, discrete texures. if you're running a Mac, SL probably has your graphic card settings set for half of your actual video card texture memory for performance reasons (problem with freezing when set full) so that makes the flushing even more often (at the expense of less freezing/crashing, so it's a tradeoff)

    Sure there's bugs. But before trying to compile a new viewer to work on the network stuff, start with getting a new video card with some healthy specs and see how much that improves your experience. There's an SL wiki page about video cards recommended, read up on it and esp for your operating system of choice.

    So much of people's bad experiences with SL have to do moreso with their own setups. Not saying there's not viewer/server bugs, but there are many which are so very certain-video-card specific. and with so many flavors and blends of possible set ups, it must be a virtual nightmare to deal with.


  2. You are absolutely correct Queen!

    I know my video card is limited. It is in a laptop, which I cannot switch out of just yet.

    Even given that limitation, it still SEEMS like there are areas that could be improved upon.

    My question is, if all these textures are saved not only in video memory, but hard drive cache, I have a screamin hard drive, why are they redownloading them from the server?

    And why does my bandwith meter in SL show that I run way under 1mps all the time, when my ISP is giving me 10mbs?

    Is the problem on the server side only? or is there something that can be done on the viewer.

    That is where I was going with all that.

    Thanks for the comment!