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Second Life Pros

Cost of rendering Avatars

by sbrunozzi on May 2nd, 2008

If something is very slow in Second Life, it’s often for Grid problems… However, it seems that 3D rendering of Avatars can have a significant impact on performances.
The latest release candidate of the Second Life Viewer can show you how much an avatar is impacting on performances.

My take? Stop giving responsibilities to users, start implementing a better rendering engine, and make the Grid more stable and performing. Take OpenCroquet as a guiding light!

Tags: 3d rendering, opencroquet, second life

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Jim Takanawa
May 3, 2008 at 1:29 pm

> My take? Stop giving responsibilities to users

I think this is a bad advice.

My take is:
Know the stuff your avatar is wearing and be aware of the lag you’re inducing on servers and other users.
I don’t want you in the virtual world where I live if you refuse to take this kind of responsabilities.

If content creators can create performance-efficient items -and ARC makes this a lot easier for them- they’re adding value to their products and providing a better service.

If customers can choose a product because it’s more efficient and less lagging than another one -and ARC makes this a lot easier for them- their SL experience will be better.

> start implementing a better rendering engine

I’m not sure you realize how long this would take, but this will require a massive rewriting of the client and of the whole platform.

By the way, are you actually following the technical development of SL? Maybe they’re already working on it.

> make the Grid more stable and performing

So you’re basically saying “make SL work better” - well, that doesnt’look like a really meaningful thought - everybody wants everything work better. ‘The Grid’ is a pretty complex environment, you know.

> Take OpenCroquet as a guiding light!

OpenCroquet has got some cool and interesting features, but I’m not aware of OpenCroquet deployments in world-wide communities with 50k concurrent users and hundreds of TBs of persistent user-created data.
Could you please cite some working, existing example about this ‘guiding light’ you’re suggesting?
sbrunozzi
May 3, 2008 at 4:03 pm

Hi Jim,
thank for your costructive comment.
We don’t agree on the fact that users can’t be allowed to be held responsible… if you give them too much freedom, they’ll use it badly, sometimes, and burden their avatar with lots of unoptimized things. You are of a different advice.

Linden Lab is working on implementing better rendering engine, and expecially they’re involved in moving everything under Mono, which is much faster.

If you compare SL Grid to other cluster environments, you’ll see what I mean: the Grid is very unstable because they grew a lot in a few months, and did it without a really solid technical expertise (I don’t say they’re unskilled, I say there were not enough engineering people to handle the growth).

OpenCroquet doesn’t have examples of environments as big as Second Life, you are right; but if you look around, most experts consider OpenCroquet far more advanced than Second Life, also because it’s an open source platform.

Thanks!