Catwa Head Mob Crush Perfectly Encapsulates Current State of Second Life (Comments of the Week)

Photo of Catwa sale mob crush by SL blogger Kirsten Corleone; large version is not worksafe.

The L$1 sale of Catwa avatar heads caused the Marketplace website to crash due to heavy demand, provoking Linden Lab to remove the item from the store, and instead, make it available in-world on several sims... which also overloaded with head-hungry shoppers (see pic at right). All this happened while Linden Lab advertised a search for an engineer who could help craft the virtual world's future -- and that irony was not lost on some New World Notes readers:

Crashing Marketplace over a L$1 Mesh head is cause to weep for all of the [SL users] who have taken over Your World, Your Imagination. Not having that mesh head is the first step in having a head of your own. Stop the madness.

-- Clara Seller 

I think Clara's arguing as others have, that mesh has made Second Life a consumer-focused world. To be sure, there have always been sim-crashing shopping crazes, but in older times, there would also be massively popular arts and culture events across the virtual world at the same time -- but now those are far and few.

The laggy in-world mob crash also shows the limits of the Amazon cloud migration's ability to improve performance (though it definitely has improved) and points to the fundamental problems with legacy code:

SL's viewer code is such a shitshow that Linden Lab is probably having to write a whole new client for SL, that doesn't use at best, a sizable amount of existing viewer code, and at worst, is written from scratch.

Linden Lab has essentially made what amounts to 7-layer spaghetti code that has had layers of code plopped on top of or replacing others over the years. We still use a rendering pipeline that doesn't use multi-core rendering or take more advantage of higher VRAM than 1-2GB outside of certain TPVs who have overridden Linden Lab's hard limit on that VRAM - Which would be fine if we weren't living in 2021 and not 2001, and if Mesh wasn't a factor. The UI is, while I am accustomed to it, is clunky and hard to understand for new users, making onboarding a nightmare. The loading of assets such as textures is a joke, as the viewer fails to prioritize loading assets closest to either the camera or the user's avatar, and even then, it is horrendously slow to load at times and sometimes takes hard refreshing textures on an object to get it to render properly.

This isn't helped by the fact that Linden Lab is quite restrictive on what Officially Approved TPVs can do to mitigate this. While this is reasonable for some circumstances... some viewers, like Firestorm, are known for having gotten more bloated over the years. 

-- Nodoka Hanamura 

Much more here. To me the added irony is that none of this had to happen; as I've said before, Linden Lab should create an entirely new mesh-only virtual world that's integrated within the existing viewer as an "SL 2" option -- then rebrand the existing Second Life as SL Classic, and promote it to the teens raised on Minecraft and Roblox.

Comments

[Adeon Writer]

The Catwa head is more customizable than the default linden system head.

It allows more creativity than LL does, not less.

[camilia fid3lis nee Patchouli Woollahra]

Given the current state of SL's shader engine, optimization is often a murder victim when flexibility is desired in any build. This needs fixing or this issue will persist with all mesh builds, not just heads.

(Disclosure: I have never bought into any of the standard mesh heads - I do have most of Utilizator Mode's work in this regard, and I don't regret one moment how different I look to others as a result, even though this complicates skin matching. The lack of polygons really helps drop my render costs slightly even as I stick to conventional mesh bodies and fashions.)

[Iggy 1.0]

"I'm crushing your head! Take that, Flathead!"

+1 for you old enough to get that reference. +2 if you were in Canada and walked by so he crushed your head during the filmings.

[Observer2]

First of thanks for deleting my first comment that states marketplace weksite is not on AWS Amazon Cloud servers but in Akamai technologies servers secondly if that is the way your computer renders avatars and Second Life its total crap and either you need to upgrade it or get a better connection :)

[Alessandro Cintoli]

Most people fail to mention that Second Life tends to overtax your graphics card so much it fails more rapidly than it would if you did not play SL.

I had to change 4 high-end iMacs between 2006 and 2018 (when I finally decided to abandon SL). Average lifespan of each iMac: 3 years and a half. Cause of death: graphics card fail.

The last iMac I bought lasted 5 years, only because I stopped playing SL in 2018, so it gained two extra years, but eventually died the same death as the others.

In every iMac, the graphics card was always the first hardware item to fail. And now I am absolutely sure SL has to be blamed for the fail. I don't think Apple hardware (or more precisely, AMD or nVidia hardware) has anything to do with this.

This would be a good enough reason to re-write the SL code from scratch.

[Summer Haas]

@Alessandro Stop running your GPU at max then. Firestorm lets you lower your FPS to something reasonable instead of constantly pushing it to the limit. You can go as low as 20 FPS and SL is still very playable for what it is. Also if you find yourself at a busy event, use "Show friends only". Textures on the vendors will load significantly faster and you'll stay at a nice even 20-30fps, wherever you set your cap.