A Bit About Lag

Lag in SL is just as you would imagine. Things happen slowly when there is lag present. Sometimes text chat can be slowed down. Sometimes frame rates will drop to very low levels making every movement appear jerky. Lag can cause your computer to freeze. It can prevent you from teleporting in or out of a region. It can prevent textures from loading and can prevent avatars from rezzing in completely. Lag is undesirable. But what causes lag and can it be prevented?

Basically, lag is a lack of speed. Your internet connection might be slow and this could cause your experience in SL to slow down. Your computer might be slow. This will manifest itself as lag through your SL viewer. This does not necessarily mean that SL is being laggy. All it means is things need to speed up on your end. On the other hand, you could have a very fast computer and very fast internet throughput yet you are still experiencing lag. This could be the SL server that your avatar is currently occupying. A good way to test this is to try teleporting to another region on another server. If you are still experiencing lag then it's probably slow throughput on your end either due to a slow (or busy) computer or too slow of an internet connection. If changing locations improves your framerates and such then there is a good chance the region you were in is experiencing lag due to the server it resides on being over taxed. In this case, restarting the sim might work. But if it's due to too many running scripts (programs) or too many avatar prims, then restarting the sim will have no effect. I mention this because I've been getting lots of requests lately to restart my sim. It's no trouble restarting it really. I just go there and Debug the land and select Restart. But more often than not, when I arrive at the sim to restart it, I am not experiencing any lag at all.

I recently ran into an ARC counter (Avatar Resource/Rendering Cost) which I have place inside my nightclub at Cherry Street. I've found that my avatar uses a great deal of resources as oposed to most. Therefore I create lag just about wherever I go. I can remove some of my huds and scripted items to bring my ARC down to an acceptable level. And I will do that should there be a great deal of lag where I'm at, but it's not always necessary. If I'm in a location where there are very few people, then it usually is not an issue. But the more avatars there are in a region, the more computations the servers need to make to keep up with them. That's when I need to lower my ARC. I'll remove my radar HUD and dance HUD and such and that usually takes care of it. But I cannot control what others do. If someone else on the sim is wearing a lot of scripted items such as HUDs or weapons or wings and piercings, etc., there's not much I can do about that except to either leave or put up with the lag.

Adjusting your 3D graphics settings can make a huge difference too. I turned my draw distance down from over 200 meters to 100 meters and it more than doubled my frame rates. Things are very smooth now even with my older 3D graphics card. Lots and lots of speed can be found by going in and customizing  your graphics settings. One very important setting to look at is under your Network tab. Set the maximum throughput speed slider all the way up. Why not? I mean, why put a bottleneck in your bandwidth throughput? Just turn it all the way up so there are no restrictions to your internet speed. That right there will make a huge difference for most users.

There are multiple sources for lag, some of which were not even mentioned here. It's not always the sim you are visiting. Many times it can be the person standing next to you, using all of the server's available resources.

Been Away

Cat distracting me

Not much has been going on at Cherry Street this past week or so. At least not that I'm aware of. Who knows? There could have been some epic battles going on, fights to the death, huge orgies or awesome inner tube races. I would not know. I have been sick. I tried logging on a couple of times only to find myself fading away at the keyboard. I'd fall asleep and wake up wondering what the hell I am doing. It was a long achy week but sleeping through it seemed like the best idea at the time. The doc fixed me up with a shot and some pills and now I'm good as new.

Exploring a deserted island

I took cat out on a few short and quick 'dates' as time allowed. Those are always fun. A quick cruise through the sea to a secluded island and some laying out on the beach. She always manages to distract me in the most wonderful of ways. And a new/old friend of mine, Pearline has returned to SL. She used to make dresses and shoes so I have provided her with a shop and we'll see how that goes. She's been gone over 6 months so it's both odd and wonderful to have her back. I'm hoping she's here to stay. She is my SL sister.

I have not said a word to anyone just yet but I'm already thinking of holding Friday night events at Cherry Street again. I miss our get-togethers and Fridays seemed to work out best for everyone. I know I told Brox I'd try to do Friday nights for his Krimson Moon, but he now has 2 DJs which is 2 more than I have and I'm going to play the selfish card here. I miss our Friday night parties.

Get Together

It seems it's getting tougher for my friends and I to get together lately. That's probably my fault for shutting down the Tuesday and Friday night events at the Cherry Street Nightclub. Friday nights on a regular basis might work out for everyone, but I did promise those nights to Broxton's Krimson Moon. But because he has not held any other events there since last Friday, I'm doubting he will be able to keep the place open. In any case, Emi, Gefter, Darren, Zuri and I all got together Saturday night and had a great time!

First, Darren IMd me to show me a gadget he picked up which makes configurable weather over the entire sim. For a demonstration, he and Zuri chose flaming rain. I've seen these devices before and they sure are impressive, but they also create a great deal of lag. Darren offered to leave the control device on the land for me but I had to decline due to the lag considerations. It's important that I keep the lag at Cherry Street down to a minimum. But I did suggest that we have a party soon where we have bizarre weather while we party on the beach. It would still be very laggy, but it's only a temporary thing and it sounds like it would be fun.

About that time, I wanted to show them my new sim-border crossing boat. I warned them that it was not pretty but that it was elegantly scripted. Because my sim, Styll, does not border on any other sims, I was unable to demonstrate the boundary crossing feature of the boat. At first, Zuri took the helm but she did not understand the controls. She held down the accelerate button until we hit the edge of the sim. Then she turned it around and raced across the sim to the other edge, hitting it hard and placing us in limbo so to speak. I was stuck underwater but eventually made it out and was able to meet up with them at yet another corner of the sim. Hitting a sim border at high speed has unpredictable results. But it's never a good thing. So I thought I'd demonstrate a nice leisurely cruise to them. I took them on a short tour of the waterways on the sim.

All together now

About that time, Emi contacted me in IM and wanted to know "where's the party?" So I figured we should all get together and go boating out on Blake Sea where I could demonstrate the boat's awesome boundary crossing feature. I did not know at the time that Gefter was with Emi so that means there would be five of us and my boat only seats four. But I planned on rezzing a second boat for Gefter or Darren to pilot. As it turned out, we were able to get everyone on board but one person (Gef I think?) had to 'sit' on the boat and not in an animated pose. It seemed like this was going to work out just fine. We crossed one border and while it was a bit rough and laggy, we all made it across together. But it was the second border that turned out to be a real problem. We were all left behind and deep underwater. The boat was nowhere to be found. This is not unusual with the old scripted vehicles when crossing sim borders, but I had expected better out of this new scripting. But I reasoned that it must be due to the fact that the boat had one more person on it than it was intended for. So I suggested we head back to the marina (which had an area where you can rez things) and try two boats.

Sinking Yacht

Darren informed me that Zuri had a large yacht and that it seated 12. Well, I would imagine it did not have the new sim crossing scripting that my boat did but I thought, why not? At least we'd all stay together. But the yacht proved too large for Zuri to handle. Because she is the owner, she is the only person allowed to pilot it. With the new boat I have, they allow for multiple copies of it to be piloted by anyone with the same group membership that the boat was rezzed under. A very nice and handy feature. So if the yacht was not going to work out, I was going to rez a second boat under the Cherry Street group name. And as it turned out, when Zuri tried to move the yacht to a decent starting position, it sank. It didn't happen very fast though. It was a slow, torturous submersion. Oh, the humanity! But we all managed to survive and that's when I rezzed first one boat and started to rez a second when Darren informed us that Zuri had a small sailboat. Well, that will work too, but I had to wonder if it had these new updated sim-crossing scripts. As it turned out, it did not.

Zuri floating behind us

Darren and Zuri took off to the east so Gefter, Emi and I followed in the boat. We saw a couple of very cool islands and the border crossings were good. As I suspected, Darren and Zuri did not fare so well. On our third sim crossing, Gefter and I ended up in the sky. So that newly scripted boat of mine did not fare so well after all! But as Darren figured out, it was the same sim that we had trouble with earlier when we all ended up underwater, standing there bewildered, laughing as Gef donned his scuba gear. He's got a great sense of humor! Anyway, we decided to take off in the other direction, north and west. We regrouped and rezzed our boats again, took off on a slow cruise and this time, everything worked satisfactorily. Darren was able to impliment a 'follow' command with some sort of gadget he has so instead of sitting on the boat, Zuri floated behind us, but we were all together that way. So we explored for a little bit until we crossed an as yet uncrossed sim border. It went badly. I was so disappointed with my new boat after that. So we all decided it was time to play a game of hot tub Greedy. Gefter agreed to play too, but he was to be allowed to win this time. He had me in stitches all night

We all met back at Cherry Street and hopped into the hot tub Greedy game that Emi and Gefter got cat and I for our wedding gift. The game went very well because I won! But that sim crossing boat of mine was bothering me all the rest of the night. It should have performed better than it did. It always worked great for me!

So the next morning, I logged on and went out to the place we were at last night, rezzed a boat and started heading for the sim borders that we had issues with the night before. It was as smooth as ever, crossing those sims. So it must have had something to do with the number of people we were trying to force across the borders all at once. So with renewed confidence in my boat, I went out exploring, crossing countless sim borders without a hitch. I found a wonderful island to explore but I'll wait until cat or a friend can come along with me.

K Moon Opening

Finally, after a month or more of planning, my nephew Broxton has opened his nightclub, Krimson Moon. There were several reasons for it taking so long to open. Mostly due to personnel changes with the staff, but it's finally in operation. So he held a Ears & Tails event last night. I was the DJ, Brox hosted and we had three pole dancers, at least one of whom was an escort. Even though escort services were not in demand that night, the ladies did a great job on the dance polls.

Broxton and his new squeeze

I had a terrible time with lag which kept cutting off my music stream. I had restarted the sim just an hour before the event, so that all scripts were cleared out but once people started showing up, the lag surfaced with a vengeance and I was tasked with cutting down the throughput of my stream. The music would cut out and I would drop the stream's speed every time. Finally, it became stable enough to play without interruption. The only problem was that the quality of the music was horrible. Emi showed up just after the event ended and complained that the music sounded almost like pure static, it was that bad. I've played countless events on that sim without that much trouble in the past so I can only assume something has recently changed. The OS upgrade performed by Linden Labs might have something to do with that. We have been having trouble with the sim ever since that upgrade. Another factor could have been the avatars. I checked my avatar lag monitor just before the event and saw that Broxton was running over 300 scripts alone. In comparison, I'm usually running 190 scripts and I get warnings about that being too high quite often. Or it could have been a combination of the two. Whatever the case, something will need to change before I DJ there again.

Girls On The Dance Polls

Ken showed up with his new GF and they had a great time dancing. Not all of the dances in the couple's controller are straight dances though. I've put in some sex animations so that sex can be had anywhere on the sim for convenience. I was pleasantly surprised when cat showed up. I didn't really expect her but it was so nice having her there. I played with her naughty tail and she played with mine. We danced together the rest of the night until she had to leave at the end of the event. At one point, there were eleven people in attendance, which is pretty good for a grand opening. Hopefully Brox can get his group member base built up and he can have many more busy events.

Testing The Waters

The Second Life grid is made up of thousands of regions called sims. They are 256x256 meters square and can stand alone or be connected side by side, end to end. These sims exist on computer servers so when you cross over a sim border to another sim, you are moving your avatar, and all its attachments, clothing, skin, eyes, shape, etc., over to another computer in real time. While walking across sim borders causes brief but strange disruptions in your forward motion, driving or flying across the borders can cause all sorts of strange things to happen including losing your vehicle or viewer freezup or worse. I actually quit driving my motorcycle and powerboat because of this problem. But recently, Lark told me about a boat which had newer scripting which helped to make sim crossing smoother.

So I went out and tried a jetski and catamaran demo containing these new scripts. Sure enough, the sim crossings were fairly smooth! The first thing I'm thinking of is being able to tour the Blake Sea. The Blake Sea is a cluster of sims which are mostly water all grouped together to form a sort of virtual ocean. Many of these sims are decorated with seaweed and coral under the water, but some have small islands popping up out of the water with decorations and even some pose animations. I recall exploring the Blake Sea in my old powerboat, finding some interesting places to visit but becoming frustrated, and in the end, fed up with the sim crossing problems. I kept losing my passengers or boat. I would end up at a sim's 0,0,0 coordinates unable to move or teleport. While the appeal of exploring vast sections of the sea was quite strong, the sim crossing issues ruined it.

So the first thing I'm thinking of is that I can go exploring, but I would need to purchase one of these newly scripted boats. So I shopped around frantically, motivated by the thought of my boat traversing the open sea surrounded by bikini-clad babes, searching for islets to check out. I had to buy a boat that night! There are plenty of sailboats out there with this sim-crossing feature, but I wanted a powerboat. Sailboats in SL are for the most part, quite realistic and for me, too complicated. I'd rather not have to wear a HUD as I navigate and control the vessel as that would take away from my flirting with the bikini babes. The powerboats that I did find worked quite well and were reasonably priced, but I did not like the looks of them. The textures and prims were not very appealing. So I quit searching when cat logged on and went to spend time with her.

Exploring the Blake Sea

I told cat about the sim-crossing scripts and my vision of exploring with her. She immediately wanted to go shopping for them, so I took her to the place Lark showed me with demos to try out. I got her on the catamaran and did a short demonstration as we crossed a couple of sim borders. She's had bad experiences of sim crossings too and was as amazed as I was. Finally, I decided to get a boat from the demo place we were at because none of the other places we checked seemed to have any demos, and the ones that did, were unable to cross sim borders without problems. So cat wisely suggested we get a boat large enough to accommodate several friends. I was also able to find a boat which was capable of allowing friends to pilot it so that if we ended up with too many people for one 4-seater, we could rez a second boat and have up to eight friends come along. So we got the boat and headed home to unpack it and rez it.

Cat had to leave at that time so we said our goodbyes and afterwards, I took the boat to the Blake Sea. I had a terrible time finding a place to rez it. Most sim owners understandably do not want to enable rezzing on their land. People leave their stuff laying around and it takes up prims which should be available to the sim owner. However, there is a feature called Auto-Return which returns objects after a certain period of time to the owner's inventory. I finally found one of those places and rezzed my boat. The region had an indirect connection to the Blake Sea so I was able to head south for a bit until reaching open waters. On the way, I crossed many a sim border without any trouble. It was wonderful! It was exactly as I imagined it could be (onley without the bikini chicks). So I explored for a while, practiced navigating teh boat (which was a bit tricky due to its touchy controls) and logged off with thoughts of a smooth sim-crossing helicopter in my mind.

Chatting with cat

The next day, cat and I had a little free time from RL, so we got together. I told her all about the boat and even sent her some pictures of my brief travels from the night before. We had a nice long "chat session" then setup a date for later that night. It was worth the wait.

Our Getaway Date

I found a place to rez the boat near the Blake Sea and teleported cat over and we were off on our journey. We did not find much at first, but I did see a sort of long channel/waterway on the world map so I went for it. It was very long and crossed countless sims without much trouble. We were going quite slow in order to smooth out the already mild sim border crossings and to allow the surrounding scenery to rez in properly. It took a while but we finally found the end of the waterway which emptied out into a huge circular lake surrounded by very high brick and mortar walls. I certainly didn't feel like scaling impossible walls just to get a look at what might be up there. Besides, we had not found an islet to explore yet and time was running out. So I turned the boat around (I should give the boat a name...) and I gunned it heading back out to the east. The sim crossings were not too bad and before we knew it, we were back out in open water. I set a course for south and west and finally found a small island.

We made landfall and surprisingly, our boat did not get returned to my inventory. So we checked out the island, found a campfire and some sitting logs. That was nice for a while but I wanted to wrap my arms around my girl so I activated a dance from my couple's hud and we danced and talked until cat had to leave. It was a wonderful evening and inspired me to go out briefly before logging off to look at some aircraft which might contain this sim-crossing scripting. I did find one but decided to wait until the next day to look closer at its features as the cost was a bit on the high side. Besides, it was getting late. There will be plenty of time for exploring with cat and friends soon enough.

Prims

Four table legs = four prims

Prims, which is short for Primatives, are the basic building block of SL objects. By default they start out as a 0.5 meter square cube when you use your SL viewer's Build function. But they can become just about any shape you can imagine. Think of a basic dining room table. It has a flat surface with four legs. You can create a prim (rez a prim) and stretch it to the table top's size then create four prims stretched to the proper dimensions to represent the table legs. Move them into position so that everything looks right and there you go, a dining room table! This is a very simplified example of object creation in SL but it's to help illustrate the meaning of prims in SL and how they affect your virtual 'life' there.

Plus top = five prims

In the above example, our dining room table requires 5 prims to create. One for each leg and one for the table's surface. It is very important to know the number of prims an object is made up of. Because SL exists on computer servers, each location (region/sim) or parcel has a limit to the number of prims it can process. The more prims a piece of virtual land can process, the higher the tier (rent) cost.

Full region sims can contain up to 15,000 prims. The sim owner can divide his land into smaller sections called parcels. Each parcel will have a limit on the number of prims it can contain usually based on the parcel size. For example, if the sim owner divides his land into quarters, each quarter could contain up to 3750 prims or one quarter of the full sim's 15,000 prim limit. Once that prim limit is reached, the parcel or land can contain no more prims. If you try to rez an item or build something, you will receive an error message telling you that the region is full and no other prims can be created. This is why it is very important that land owners perform what I refer to as Prim Management.

I could go right ahead and fill my Homestead Sim (3750 prims) right up but there would be all sorts of problems with that. First off, I have devices on my land which create prims as you use them. If there were no free prims available, then that device would not function. The first thing that comes to mind are the palm trees I have on the nude beach. Those are capable of rezzing pillows for cuddling, a master's chair for spanking and a rope swing for two among other items. Without the free prims this device requires, it is useless. Therefore, a free reserve of prims must be maintained at all times.

The magic number of free prims for me is between 500 and 600. This ensures that my friends can rez their items and use them. It also ensures that devices such as palm trees, beds, board games and the like will function properly. I also have a rezzing vendor which allows potential customers to walk through my buildings so that they have a good idea of what they might be purchasing. They simply browse through the pictures in the vendor and click on a Rez button once they see something they are interested in. The vendor rezzes the building and the customer can walk through it to check it out before purchase. Some of these buildings can be hundreds of prims, so it's a good idea to have hundreds of free prims available on the land.

If my friends want to rez their vehicles, such as cars, boats, cycles or aircraft, then there must be enough free prims for them to do so. On the other end of the spectrum I have had friends rez their toys and actually just leave them there for me to return to their inventories later. This is just plain rude. We should all be responsible for the 'messes' we create. Go ahead and rez your stuff, but clean up after yourself when you are done with it. It's just common courtesy.

While a region or parcel has a limited number on the prims that it can contain, there is an exception. Any devices or objects attached to an avatar do not count against the prim limit. For example, I have some leather bracelets which are studded. They are 250 prims each and when I wear them, I wear both of them. When I attach them to my wrists, their prims do not count against my sim's prim limit. But they do create lag (which I'll deal with more in a future posting). Lag is undesirable and it is basically the effect perceived when  computer server is slowing down due to over processing. So while the number of prims on a necklace or skirt or head of hair do not count against the land's prim limits, it they do require extra processing. If I were to rez those bracelets onto the ground though, the prims that make them up would count against the land's prim limit.

In future posts, I'll go into more detail concerning other types of prims and also the causes of lag and what it does to dampen the SL experience.

Adventures And Socializing

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