Linden Lab Update Borked Black Dragon's Viewer Frame Rate in Second Life -- Here's Why, And the JIRA to Upvote

Go to this JIRA bug report (BUG-225584) and consider upvoting if you're a fan of Black Dragon, the SL viewer with a cult following for its ability to make Second Life look like a AAA game. Because as you can see from the above video, shot be lead creator NiranV, a recent SL viewer codebase update will utterly kill Black Dragon's frame rate when displaying the viewers' new animesh features.

"I imagine chaos and mass panic when this goes live and everyone is having complete shit framerates," as Niran bluntly puts it." 

The problem? That's pretty technical (definitely for me) so let me just quote him:

"With animesh [Linden Lab added a bone rigging table that contains information of which bone is rigged to what. The update that fills this table was done all the time without any regards whether the list was up-to-date, empty or full. And this information updating costs a lot of performance. But they also had some commented-out parts that only allowed it to go through whenever it needs an update -- let's say when you attach a new piece. Enabling that part (whatever reason they disabled that) fixed the performance, and should let the Viewer still function as normal, although everything I've seen use it so far was the bone-metadata display which now colors bones when they are rigged. So they were basically somewhat exponentially impacting your framerate for a stupid bone display no normal user is ever going to see. BIG oversight."

 

What he said! More details on the JIRA. More on this /SecondLife thread here.

Comments

[vwfan]

"...will utterly kill Black Dragon's frame rate"
I assume this won't impact just Black Dragon, but any viewer that merges this code. Right?

[NiranV]

@vwfan

That's correct.

Worst case (as it is right now) no one will notice, since no one hasn't noticed yet even with the huge amount of testing of animesh. Then it will go to FS, FS will be blamed for their shitty stuff once again and boom everyone got a smack in their face because one single tiny thing slipped through testing. It might get fixed someday or it might not. Problem is Lindens often don't use the Viewer they are developing enough to make such concrete observations, they are way busy with other stuff like getting this stuff to work in the first place. So it's up to testers to see this stuff. Problem is because most people use FS they will disregard the possibly lower framerate as it simply being "LL's Viewer", besides most people testing the Viewer for what it was made = animesh, rather than normal usage. This causes no one to notice until it hits their own Viewer which in case of FS with its extremely long release cycles could be a problem. Even if they were to notice it shortly after release, you most likely wouldn't see another update until another half a year. Most users will assume that it's simply FS's fault (and as much as i like the thought of that) and their usual degradation of quality and performance over several updates, which if you followed FS's development, you'd think is "normal" meaning you start ignoring the issue, no one might investigate and this thing will have sneaked into all Viewers reducing everyone's framerate for no reason.

And this is how fast shit can hit the fan.

[vwfan]

@NiranV

Yikes. Thanks for the clarification and bringing this issue up. Looks like a Linden just accepted your JIRA submission. I assume that's a good thing but I don't follow JIRA enough to know how things work (heh).

[sirhc deSantis]

Sing and SL latest version user... i.e. an older user. So nothing of value was lost.

[Amanda]

Good catch NiranV. NWN needs to change this article to reflect that this will affect everyone not just Black Dragon users.

[NiranV]

@Sirhc
As Amanda again pointed out. You would face this issue too the moment Singularity would update to animesh if they don't catch this issue either. LL would be the first one to face this issue (besides my own users, although i already fixed it in my latest release and it seems like LL accepted it and will be fixing it too, hopefully before release).

There's one thing though... Cool VL Viewer was always faster than me, i'm sure Cool had Animesh for a while now... i haven't noticed Henri saying anything about it yet, i wonder if he found it... i mean if he did he'd have probably made a big vocal thing out of it just like i did so i'm sure i would have heard about it in the opensource mailing list. If not even our almighty Henri noticed this (that is if he even could, considering that he often rewrites large parts of everything coming from LL because everything they do is trash to him and he has the skill to completely rewrite it)...

So many questions. Anyway, it's accepted and soon going to be fixed. Phew.

[NiranV]

@Confused

Did you login to the Jira?

You have to click "watch" on the right side where it shows the count of people watching it. That's essentially "voting". Although it's already through and LL is now seeking help in their Forum to confirm this.