The Linden Lab developer known as Lorca Linden has an informative update on the new Second Life object pathfinding feature in the comments of the blog of Nalates Urriah. ("Although Lindens do not generally post on Resident blogs," he begins, "I am going to make an exception in this one case." Why this is a general rule, I have no idea.) Despite earlier fears, Lorca says pathfinding performances is generally performing well:
Region crash rates – excluding a bumpy couple hours during the roll out – remain low. All of this is to say that as far as the Lab can tell, Pathfinding has not had a negative performance or stability impact in the vast majority of situations... I also want to make clear that the impact on some vehicles is not directly related to pathfinding per say but rather the underlying physics and terrain optimizations that made pathfinding possible and have benefits beyond pathfinding. As far as we can tell, only a small percentage of existing content is affected by this physics upgrade.Tweet
Well I am not so certain about "No Negative Impact". You see last week on Thursday the SS Galaxy disappeared. All 3 sims full of prims went poof. We went from 32,000+ prims down to 100 or 200 at most in a eye blink. It was very random as to what was left (or at least it looked random to me).
The repair required a rollback of all 3 sims. Now keep in mind this is the first time in 5+ years we have ever needed a rollback. Pathfinder was rolled out on Tuesday, and this happened on Thrusday. Might be a coincidence I don't know, but it sure seems suspect to me. Also we were not the only estate affected. Many around the grid were also impacted.
The blog post about it is at http://ssgalaxynews.blogspot.com/2012/08/prim-plague-strikes-galaxy.html If you wish to check it out.
Posted by: DBDigital Epsilon | Monday, August 13, 2012 at 06:56 PM
Now it is obvious, Hamlet you never go anymore to SL!!!
Posted by: foneco zuzu | Tuesday, August 14, 2012 at 08:42 AM
While I would love to see the pathfinding feature working great... I can only call it as I see it.
Pathfinding had to be shut off on many of my estate's regions because of the clear, obvious, significant, noticeable performance hit when it was on.
Simple A/B testing. Lindens, if you are reading this ~ go ahead and turn it on in some of my standard Caledon regions for a minute to see for yourselves. This was not any of the other myriad issues going on lately ~ we could see immediate effects just by changing that one setting.
I'm not against anyone, it sounds like a great feature, but sorry, there is a very real performance hit. Let's hope things get better with it soon.
I would assist and try to help with solving it, but time has been precious lately ~ I'm busy earning money elsewhere, that I used to earn in SL.
Posted by: Desmond Shang | Tuesday, August 14, 2012 at 01:03 PM
Desmond I urge you and All the land barons to make sure that at least all regions under yours control are disabled or enabled but not both!
I found that the worst is when you move from a path enabled to 1 that as it disabled, or vice versa!
Run on a lot of sims on mainland oldest continent and others, that i assume are path finding enabled without problems at all (Sure im using Niran's latest, based on the latest LL dev code viewer, so that can also be a reason).
My region on Blake sea is path enabled and we didnt had any issues as well!
But the important thing is:
You and the ones that pay the big bucks can make LL understand the need to look to users!
If all Big Land Barons decide to disable path finding, im sure LL will had to follow and had it disabled by default, unless......
An agenda is already in progress no matter what, and path finding is only the tip of the iceberg of problems that will show when new havoc is deployed fully!
Posted by: foneco zuzu | Wednesday, August 15, 2012 at 04:56 AM
No negative impact? Oh yes there is: vehicles are having trouble moving along the ground, causing many region owners to switch off the feature until the bugs are worked out. I just received notices from one prominent group I'm in informing us that they just turned pathfinding off because of the way it affects vehicle travel.
Posted by: Archangel Mortenwold | Wednesday, August 15, 2012 at 05:41 AM
I already have a negative impact -- Teleport cubes don't work right anymore. It used to be a teleport cube had an iterative 10m move loop and you were at the destination in a split second, faster than the graphics would show. Today, you get on a teleport and you end up at <0,0,0> for about 10 seconds. Just when you start to wonder WTF, you reappear at the desired coordinates.
I suspect that the iterating movements are being put into the navlist and thus the iteration is slowed down tremendously.
What SHOULD be done is to NOT track every single prim in the navlist unless the owner marks it as being tracked. The only people who will be using the pathfinding system will be people who can define blocks and paths -- don't make everyone in SL suffer with terrible performance when they aren't even using the pathfinder; that makes no sense.
We should be able to opt in the obstacles and the paths. As it stands, those of us making vehicles or using teleporters are screwed. I haven't yet experimented with manually removing teleporters from the navlist, but very few people are going to be capable of doing that.
Posted by: shockwave yareach | Wednesday, August 15, 2012 at 07:18 AM
All i know now is that this is not the way to retain customers!
To ignore all the questions made, to release a buggy feature, to deny its problems, to upset even the Land Barons as well as the builders and users alike?!
Way to go, Rod!
Posted by: foneco zuzu | Wednesday, August 15, 2012 at 08:45 AM