Category: Opinion

Mesh and ARC – Angst in the offing?

Posted on by Inara Pey

An interesting post popped up in the official blogrum today concerning confusion about Mesh objects and prims counts.

While the technical ins-and-outs of the main discussion largely go right over my head, Lightscribe Infinity raises a point that, if accurate, could lead to a lot of additional angst in-world in the coming months:

ARC is high for any av mesh. The default av, simply smoothed and brought inworld, increases ARC dramatically. 91938 versus the 0 of a present av, with everything detached.

ARC – or Avatar Rendering Cost – is a misleading “measure” introduced by Linden Lab some time ago that was designed to provide a loose – one might say entirely arbitrary – measure of the “cost” to the SL Viewer in rendering your avatar, based on the number of textures and primitives (or indeed, sculpties and (soon) Meshes worn by your avatar. The basic value for an unadorned avatar is 100 (and not the 0 mentioned by Ligtscribe, in fairness), but the more prims /textures your avatar wears – and the higher the resolution of those textures – then the higher the ARC count generated.

ARC itself appears as a number floating above avatars’ heads once the option is enabled from Advanced > Rendering > Info Displays > Avatar Render Cost, and it is perhaps one of the most misunderstood information displays available in Second Life, and one of the biggest causes of unnecessary drama. This is for two reasons:

  1. People look upon ARC is absolute terms. That is, a) the look at it in isolation of other factors; and b) they treat it as if it is an entirely accurate measurement in and of itself.
  2. People believe ARC lags the simulator, and thus directly impacts everything.

In fairness, the first item – ARC being viewed as an absolute measure – could be said to be partially LL’s fault inasmuch as the ARC count is “colour-coded” when displayed, with “low” lag counts (approximately up to 1,000) being shown in green, “medium” lag counts (between around 1,000-2,000) appearing in yellow and those above 2,048 appearing in red. These colours alone send out entirely the wrong message to the uninformed, given that most us of automatically associate green with “good” and “acceptable” but red with “bad” and “dangerous”  – and something that “must” be avoided.  However, as the SL wiki entry on the subject itself states:

ARC isn’t the end-all for pinpointing Viewer lag. It’s a useful estimate which should be used in conjunction with other tools

The second point is completely and utterly wrong. ARC is a factor – as the name states – of rendering. Rendering is a function of the Viewer, not the simulator. As such, rendering is dependent wholly on the client end of the equation – what computer you are using, what graphics card / system, the amount of memory it can utilise and so on, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the the simulator itself.

These basic misconceptions have resulted in a wide range of myths sprouting up around high ARC counts – such as:

  • a high ARC count is indicative of an avatar carrying a high script load.
    • No, it isn’t. Scripts are not, and cannot be, rendered ergo they have absolutely no impact on an overall ARC count
  • a high ARC count directly affects your ability to teleport.
    • No, it doesn’t. Teleport failures are largely related to how many scripts your avatar is carrying and/or server-side issues entirely unrelated to ARC)

While it is true that ARC can provide a measure of the overall cost of rendering an avatar by every single Viewer that can “see” that avatar, the point that people forget is that it is not, nor has it ever been – and the SL wiki states – the only measure. More importantly, its not even an accurate measure in any way, shape size or form; it is simply an estimate. If only those who bow down before the Great God ARC would actually understand this!

The fact that LL openly admitted it to be a subjective measure, entirely dependent on a wide range of factors entirely outside of their control, at the time it was introduced went almost entirely unnoticed by those who use now use ARC as a club to batter people with, and who have reached a point where no amount of reasoned argument will sway them from their entrenched view that those displaying a high ARC count deserve to be shouted at, badgered, and / or banned from sims. Not even perfectly obvious demonstrations of the ineffectiveness of ARC as an accurate and reliable measure can break many of these so-called “ARC Police” from their misguided views.

For example, if ARC were truly an accurate measure of an avatar’s impact on things, then one would expect all ARC counts to be constant for any given combination of clothing and attachments worn by an avatar.

But it is not. For proof of this, simply get a group of friend together, or go to a shop or mall where there are a number of avatars and turn on ARC. You’ll get a range of counts appearing above people’s heads – but if you cam around, zoom in or out – the counts will change! Simply teleporting from sim to sim can increase / decrease an individual’s ARC, simply because the need for the client to render everything else in the view is impacting on the count ascribed to the avatar itself; and before anyone starts telling me the error of my way, yes, every single object you see in your world view also has it’s own rendering cost as well.

So how does this relate to worn Meshes? Well, if Lightscribe is right, and Mesh attachments end up sending ARC skyrocketing, then doubtless the ARC Police (which is perhaps the politest name for them compared to others I’ve seen) are going to be bludgeoning a lot more people with there ignorance and creating even more unnecessary drama and angst.

Which is a shame, because one gets the feeling that Mesh is going to have more than its share of drama, upset and misunderstandings once it arrives on the main grid, without anyone stirring the pot even more.

How do *you* define stability?

Posted on by Inara Pey

In my last piece, I questioned who, exactly, is minding the store. While my question was primarily aimed at SL Marketplace, which continues to acquire JIRAs and unanswered pleas for help, it also applied more widely to the grid in general.

Recently, LL introduced a slew of ideas in order to “enhance” our SL pleasure and promise “greater” stability. All of these initiatives were launched under Philip Rosedale’s brief “return” as the CEO. Outside of Snowstorm, which is enjoying moderate success, few seem to have actually worked.

The new policy of small fixes rolled out weekly? Nope. Not from where I’m standing at least. Rather the reverse. Now, as well as putting up with the weekly irritation of Second Life’s weekend performance gradually degrading between Friday and Sunday, I’m now finding my Tuesdays and Wednesdays routinely buggered up by rolling restarts for Magum, le Tigre, Blue Cheese, White Knuckles – or whatever the heck the latest codename for a “fix” is called – to the point where no matter where I am or what I’m doing, I’m experiencing inventory errors, failed teleports and other issues.

Similarly, even the big roll-outs continue to irritate, with teleports continuing to fail some 24 hours after the “all clear” has been given. We’re also again hearing about things like the Mono freeze-up still being “fixed”. Excuse me, wasn’t this sorted out a few months ago, among some fanfare, and wasn’t there a posting about it having been sorted?

So why is it, in the last week or so, many people are reporting the sim they are on routinely freezing up again when someone teleports in? Has a new “fix” now broken something again? Wasn’t the new strategy supposed to stop this?

Mark Kingdon was guilty of several faults during his tenure at LL as CEO – but once thing he did stand watch over was a drive to improve performance and stability.

So what on Earth is going on now?

Dicing with Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey

Let me say right away that Karsten Rutledge rocks (as much as I hate that term). His builds within Second Life are divine, and his fabulous Neuspa (which for some reason isn’t on his website) is something a male friend introduced me to a long way back in time, and which is something I’ve had huge amounts of fun with barrelling around the mainland roads both exploring and bouncing off sim boundaries, or jetting around water sims and being catapulted into the middle of next week when hitting sim boundaries there…

But Karsten is probably most famous for his board games. These were really popular a few years ago, and now are enjoying a massive resurgence across SL. It seems that it is impossible to go anywhere on the grid without tripping over one in particular I’ve taken to calling “Addictive, Addictive” purely because so many are playing it constantly.

And this has got me wondering if we’re not seeing, in a very minor way something of a social commentary on the state of Second Life with so many logging on simply to play a game-in-a-game? Now, before you start campaigning for my head – this a) isn’t a rant against games in SL; b) nor do I miss the fact that playing board games anywhere can be an immensely social activity full of fun, chiding, teasing and general getting-to-know-one-another. I get that. Really.

But let’s be honest here a moment, and look at the other aspect of board games in modern life. The reality is, they are something comes out on three occasions: at family get-togethers, perhaps a couple of times a month (if we have kids, etc.), when we’re having a small social gathering of like minds (which is about the closest equivalent to SL, in fairness), or when we’re fed up with the rubbish on television and there is really nothing else to do…

Second Life is supposedly a rich, immersive experience offering a rich diversity of entertainment, distractions, opportunities and the like. Yet it seems that across the grid, even in sims that have been purpose-built to provide unique role play and other experiences  – experiences one might have thought would naturally attract those wanting to available themselves of the facilities – it seems that the one guaranteed activity one will find in them is … people sitting playing a board game involving green baize and dice – frequently while the rest of the sim stands ignored and empty.

Could it be that, to paraphrase (or possibly update) Bruce Springsteen, Second Life is feeling to many like television – that while there may well be 357 channels, there is actually nothing on that appeals? I mean, again in fairness it’s not even as if something like Greed….”Addictive, Addictive” actually encourages direct interaction; unless Voice is used, conversations are hard to hold when focused on pointing at the game table, clicking, calculating and so on. Do is it really the case that playing a humble game with dice has usurped shopping, exploring, roleplay, dancing, skydiving, and so on?

Or are we all just a digital nation of closet gamblers?

Conversational consent and the CS

Posted on by Inara Pey

There has been an increasing trend within SL for people to post comments in their Profile and / or Picks along the lines of:

“TOS Disclaimer: My IM’s are logged and might be distributed if i wish…”

Or

“Since Linden Lab demands this notification you are by this informed that all my IMs as well as Local Chat are logged to harddisc and that I will use the logs in any way I feel suitable. If you are uncomfortable with this you are free to avoid interacting with me.”

So how much weight do such comments actually carry? Do they actually conform to the Community Standards (and not the ToS, as many with such comments in their Profiles wrongly refer to)?

These questions can be answered simply and in the order given:

1. None whatsoever.

2. No.

Let’s see what the Community standards actually states (Section 4, Disclosure):

Residents are entitled to a reasonable level of privacy with regard to their Second Life experience. Sharing personal information about a fellow Resident –including gender, religion, age, marital status, race, sexual preference, and real-world location beyond what is provided by the Resident in the First Life page of their Resident profile is a violation of that Resident’s privacy. Remotely monitoring conversations, posting conversation logs, or sharing conversation logs without consent are all prohibited in Second Life and on the Second Life Forums. [emphasis mine]

The very clear implication here is that informed consent is required before such conversations are distributed. Informed consent is a two-way agreement. As such, posting a unilateral declaration of intent within one’s Profile does not absolve oneself of adherence to the Community Standards.

Note also, that at no point in the section is any caveat given that allows people to bypass it. There is no “unless otherwise indicated in an individual’s Profile” or “except where the individual monitoring and distributing conversations states XYZ in their Profile”.

Rather, all these comments actually achieve in the first instance, is to demonstrate the poster’s own woefully inadequate understanding of the Community Standards for the reasons stated.

Of course, there are exceptions to Section 4: as stated elsewhere in the CS, open chat is not regarded as a private conversational area. Similarly, where outright abuse is concerned, Section 4 does not mean a person cannot use a transcript of an IM conversation when filing an Abuse Report.

But really, that’s not what these disclaimers are about; rather they lean towards the individual posting them as being at the least insecure – if not potentially malicious in their intent – by posting such comments. Certainly for me, encountering someone for the first time who has such a statement in their profile leaves me feeling they are somewhat less than trustworthy and thus I pass on communicating with them.

I have to admit as well that the sheer hubris of people putting such comments in their Profiles – particularly those who have been in SL long enough to know better – does, to use the vernacular,  get right up my nose.

I’m not alone in this feeling, as friends have pointed out. To this end, a number of us have started posting the following (sometimes amended to suit our personal style) in our picks (with thanks to Yasmin Heartsdale for the original wording). If you feel the same way, I invite you to add it to your own Picks.

To those with comments about their “right” to distribute conversations logs, etc:

Linden Lab’s Community Standards state (Section 4: Disclosure): “Remotely monitoring conversations, posting conversation logs, or sharing conversation logs WITHOUT consent are all prohibited in Second Life and on the Second Life Forums.”  (Emphasis mine)

The key here is MY *informed* verbal / written consent, *not* your own misguided attempt to waive consent on my part.

Therefore, in the correct spirit of the CS, you are hereby informed that *UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES* do I give you consent to monitor, post, or share any private conversation involving me, *regardless* of any misguided language to the contrary contained in your Profile. ARs can and may follow should you choose to deem yourself above the CS.

Consider yourself forewarned and informed.

http://secondlife.com/corporate/cs.php

Churn, churn, churn (as the song might have said)

Posted on by Inara Pey

The last couple of days have seen rumours flying around concerning Microsoft making an offer on Linden Lab. I was pointed towards the rumours when a friend asked me if I’d seen Tateru Nino’s personal blog post on the matter;  I held off commenting, because on the one hand, the idea really did seem absurd – as some of the comments on that post point out. Ciaran Laval also did some digging, and it appeared that the matter might be all down to wicked rumour-mongering.

However, from Tateru’s blog (again) it appears the an offer may well have been made – and rejected – although not necessarily from Microsoft. As Hamlet points out, offers within the tech industry are not uncommon and don’t necessarily mean an acquisition is going to be forthcoming.

To be sure, an offer from Microsoft would both be hard to rationalise – and yet make a degree of sense. In the case of the former, it is hard to see what value MS would get out of SL as a platform in and of itself – it is barely cutting edge, it has more issues than any of us can safely shake a stick at and would be a nightmare to “turn around”, with little in the way of technology benefits that could be stripped from it. But the flip side to this is that MS has been very active elsewhere in the OpenSim environment  – so it might be argued that had they made an offer, the aim might well be to simply close SL and use the acquisition to become a dominant force in shaping the future direction of OpenSim through the use of LL’s existing “expertise”. But even given this viewpoint…it’s hard to see MS really benefiting to the degree that would warrant the investment…

If Tateru’s sources are right and it was someone other than MS, then further speculation as to who and why is pretty pointless until further information comes to light. What is important is that it appears to have been rejected by LL – which suggests that the company either a) has a robust belief in its own survivability and return to full profitability without the need for any buy-out, or b) the offer simply wasn’t big enough…

Certainly, as Hamlet rightly cautions – offers and sniffing are not uncommon in the technical industry – or even limited to it. I’ve worked in publishing for a long time, and when employed by small house publishers, a month rarely seemed to go by without one of the major Houses showing interest and sniffing around at “potential” options for purchase. That said, however, such sniffing would help put into perspective some of the more robust – if not subtly aggressive statements – Philip Rosedale (and others) have made about LL’s financial status in recent months; certainly his comments at SL7B when he “returned” to LL as CEO and his comments at SLCC 10 struck me as being more than merely attempts to calm troubled waters. Given this, I’m hoping that if an offer was made and rejected, then it is because of option (a) above.

While it is true, and others have commented, that the “killing” of LL would not slay the “vision” of SL – I personally would rather stick with the devil I know for the time being, rather than finding myself uprooted and forced to move elsewhere…

Emerald: the green goodbye

Posted on by Inara Pey

Oh what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive!

– Sir Walter Scott

Well, it seems that Emerald is now over and done with, and quite acrimoniously. It’s a shame that a project that – despite reservations in some areas – gave birth to an exceptionally flexible Viewer should be ruined by childish idiocy on the part of one or two of the players involved.

But then, as others have pointed out; it’s not as if the track record of certain individuals involved in the project was not unknown, and while everyone should be given the chance to turn over a new leaf, putting so much control in the hands of individuals who have previously demonstrated a desire and ability to abuse such control was a mistake.

In her blog post, Arabella Steadham points the finger in numerous directions – LL are being unreasonable; LL simply want the user numbers from Emerald; others in the group attempted a “hostile takeover”, etc. I’m sorry, but all this is hogwash.

The bottom line is, a single (apparently) individual opted to abuse Emerald  – and the trust of every single Emerald user as well as violate the TPVP – and launch a Denial of Service attack on another individual. Frankly, it matters not as to whether the individual on the receiving end is/is not a hacker himself. Two wrongs do not make a right. And given the mentality of some of the Emerald devs (we’ve all seen the infamous You Tube vids), who is to say matters would stop at one DoS attack?

Beyond this, Emerald clearly violated several parts of the TPVP by:

  • Gathering user information beyond what was required to enable users to access Second Life
  • Failing to comply with the TPVP by revealing the user information being collected
  • Obfuscating the data collection process through encryption in order to hide the information being gathered after those responsible for the data collection had given verbal assurances the practice would be stopped

In their demands, LL required that Emerald:

  • Provide accountability for all the developers on the Team
  • Remove those with a known history of transgressions and who played a part in the issues outlined above
  • Omit the use of emkdu.dll (the offending file used to commit the breaches of the TPVP)
  • And a number of other wholly reasonable requests.

Again, rather than admit to these, it is a shame that Arabella (or Phox, one of the culprits, and whose name is tagged to the Emerald blog post) sought to obfuscate and hide these core matters – possibly in the mistaken belief that the genuine set of demands from LL would not enter the public domain…

However, Jessica Lyon has issued a Notecard and opened a blog that both paint a far more revealing picture of the entire situation. In her Notecard, Jessica states:

As of some time this morning, all access to the servers have been severed to all but Arabella Steadham and Lonely Bluebird. Neither me, nor any of the other Emerald Developers have the ability to put out releases at this time. Beyond the recent beta 2587, we also cannot certify the safety or validity of any future releases.

Now, I made a promise to everyone to disclose the remaining requirements from LL. Those final two requirements that were given to us by LL, was to have a release out by Friday September the 3rd that would not support emkdu or llkdu even if one of the files was present, and that Lonely Bluebird, Skills Hak and Discrete Dreamscape be removed from the project. The alternative was that LL would block the viewer from access to the SecondLife Grid. While Discrete and Skills gracefully stepped down, Lonely refused. A long argument ensued in dev chat and, I created a new dev chat, where most of us discussed how we could remove Lonely from the project, however it failed. Ultimately Lonely has removed access to the servers and has also stated that he is applying for trademark on the Emerald Viewer name. Preventing us from continuing on the project without him.

Unless circumstances change, in my opinion, the Emerald Viewer Project is dead. We simply cannot achieve a release by the deadline given to us under the current circumstances.

Without access to the server and website, I am forced to make a very difficult decision as I will not allow myself to be held accountable to anything that happens from this day on in regards to Emerald.

Why should we believe Jessica over Arabella? Well, for one thing, Jessica echoes much of what has been said elsewhere, and her viewpoint matches other Emerald Devs forced to leave the project. She is also perhaps the only Emerald dev to provide RL information on herself, rather than hide behind the anonymity of an avatar. And the fact is, through this note and her blog, she has, like LordGregGreg, shown more courage and conviction than any of those within the Emerald team who have placed spin before honesty.

Jessica has never failed to be open in matters; that she and others are trying to salvage something from this mess that is both as flexible as Emerald and meets LL’s requirements is to be applauded. I genuinely hope they succeed and would, as a starting place, suggest they consider using LordGregGreg Back’s Emergence Viewer as a potential baseline, if an agreement can be reached.

It is a shame that a viewer like Emerald should be so crippled and ruined by the ego-driven hubris of one or two people. But as another saying goes: pride goes before a fall.