[extropy-chat] SECOND LIFE info from a seasoned veteran

artillo at comcast.net artillo at comcast.net
Tue Dec 12 13:26:15 UTC 2006


Yeah, Mac users have been fairly poorly supported in the past with the SL client, but it has been improving from what some of my Mac using buddies tell me. As far as overall connection speed to the net, my Comcast cable used to be 3 megabit and SL still ran pretty good even with that. My guess is that it's your graphics card most of all that's the slowest part of things, but again, depends on where you are in-world as well. :D

-------------- Original message -------------- 
From: Randall Randall <randall at randallsquared.com> 

> On Dec 11, 2006, at 11:01 PM, artillo at comcast.net wrote: 
> > There are many things one can do to reduce lag/frame rates to an 
> > acceptable level, in the preferences menu some of the largest 
> > culprits are having local lighting turned on, having draw distance 
> > set very high (I leave mine between 64 and 128m and it's usually a 
> > very manageable 20-30fps with my system), having certain detail 
> > levels set very high versus what your gpu can handle, and also 
> > having particle effects set high (I usually have my particles set 
> > to less than 1024). There are lots and lots of useful suggestions 
> > by longtime users about how to reduce lag and what are it's causes 
> > if you look in the SL forums. http://forums.secondlife.com . 
> > Unfortunately, a sim that has 35 people in it will DEFINITELY run 
> > much slower than a sim that has 3 people in it, and also private 
> > islands tend to be run on slightly better servers so they also 
> > perform better even with a lot of people around, primarily because 
> > they dont have to bring in data from adjacent servers that comes 
> > within draw ! 
> > distanc 
> > e. 
> > 
> > My system is about 3 years old and handles SL very well, even when 
> > I am running several other programs at the same time. My system is 
> > an ASUS P4P800 motherboard (800mhz bus) with a Pentium 4 2.4GHz 
> > processor, 1GB of PC3200 RAM, an ATI Radeon 9600 pro 128mb AGP 
> > graphics card and a 5 megabit cable connection. SL supposedly runs 
> > better with Nvidia based cards, but other than not rendering waves 
> > on water correctly for my ATI card, I don't see much difference. 
> 
> I wonder if that 2MB difference in our connections can really be 
> so important? I suppose it could be. 
> 
> > As far as comparing SL to a game such as WoW... that's not 
> > comparing apples to apples at all. The entire world of Warcraft is 
> > prerendered and resides in the client's computer. A relatively 
> > small amount of data is actually exchanged between the player's 
> > client machine and the game servers (such as avatar location, 
> > combat stats, IM's, etc.) as compared with Second Life which is 
> > streaming in an enormous amount of data to be rendered/handled by 
> > the client. SL does some little tricks to help things along, such 
> > as having all of it's prims as parametrically created objects that 
> > are generated by the client's computer rather than having large 
> > polygon meshes downloaded. 
> > 
> > The fact that you can BUILD in realtime and create all of your own 
> > unique content in SL (scripts, animations, textures, guestures, 
> > sounds, and composite objects etc.) even further separates it from 
> > the MMO gaming world, which uses preexisting libraries of objects 
> > and predetermined animation sequences for its characters. 
> 
> I agree that SL is far more ambitious in scope than games 
> like WoW, and I'm not seriously comparing SL as a whole to 
> WoW. Rather, I'm just saying that WoW is *so* much smoother 
> and faster than SL (on my computer; I guess this is really 
> uncommon), that it points out how well SL could run on this 
> hardware. 
> 
> If you watched the movie I made, you'll note that the textures 
> of everything are already pretty basic. However, I just logged 
> in again to look, and sure enough, I had many of the graphics 
> settings in the upper range. Turning them all down didn't 
> seem to have much effect. 
> 
> Maybe what I'm seeing is a really crappy video card in this 
> iMac model. 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Randall Randall 
> "You don't help someone by looking at their list of options and 
> eliminating the one they chose!" -- David Henderson 
> 
> 
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> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org 
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