However, every time I take a peek in the door, I'm reminded of the frustration I've felt over these past years about the Second Life platform. It's slow and buggy. Upgrades are touted as being the next best thing, solving all of my problems and leading me to new wonders, but invariably lead to new problems or don't fix the existing ones. Promises made, promises kept. Cue my eye rolling.
In January 2018, I went out and bought the fastest, most powerful badass Dell laptop on the market, including a NVIDIA graphics card, as per the optimal specs published by Linden Labs. I was determined to have the best virtual experience possible. Somewhere around November 2018, Microsoft updated my computer, and my dream environment fell to pieces. The entire operation of my computer, not just SL but Word, Excel, and even browsing bogged down to a crawl. After fiddling around with the Task Manager and the Device Manager, I discovered there was some sort of conflict going on with the NVIDIA card even when the card was not engaged. If I disabled this graphics card, my computer returned to normal operating speed.
As a consequence, I permanently disabled NVIDIA, a waste of four hundred bucks. Let me add, that in the past 6 months, over five years after this incident, I experimented re-enabling the NVIDIA card and my computer now works as it should: it does not bog down to a crawl but seems to be working correctly.
That November 2018 caused another problem: My mouse would occasionally freeze. I have a Logitech wireless mouse, and I've used such a device for nearly twenty years and never had a problem. Since then, every once in a while, the arrow stops moving on the screen. I pull out the USB dongle (wireless receiver) for a moment and plug it back in. The mouse starts working again as normal. I've been through all the device drivers updating everything. I've run every diagnostic check possible, to no avail. This still goes on to this day. However, I've noted it occurs far less frequently in the past six months than before. Has some Windows update corrected whatever update messed things up in the first place?
Now, I'm sure anybody is going to chuckle and say this is the experience of anyone with a computer. It is a fact of life; get used to it. There's nothing any of us can do. I say that about computers in general because that's the attitude about Second Life. We have come to accept a so-called norm, which is anything but perfect. Our desire to play Second Life is so great, we ignore the bugs. The graphics can be clunky, and the lag can be horrible, but we keep coming back, anyway. Are we all nuts?
Mesh
I've jokingly said that you need a PhD in Information Technology to play Second Life. You thought Prim was tough? I can sum up Mesh with Holy Cow! Years ago, I took one look at Mesh and thought about quitting. I said there's no G.D. way I'm going to invest (waste) the time necessary to learn all the ins and outs of this new system. I already had one foot out the door, so Mesh was sort of the final straw for me.
Luckily, a friend volunteered to help me out. I gave her my password, and she did everything to transform my Prim avatar into a Mesh avatar. She didn't want anything, having enjoyed the experience, but I did pay her $5,000L for her time and effort. The man I am today is due to her expertise, not mine.
A couple of years later, thinking I was being an irresponsible SLer, I looked at all the components of my avatar and thought to try to convert an alt from Prim to Mesh. This was my opportunity to learn mesh. I paid out nearly $15,000 for various things, then set about trying to duplicate the set-up of my avatar. I couldn't get it to work. I read tech docs. I experimented. And I got frustrated. What exactly was my reward for persevering? In the end, I said, "F*ck it!" and to this day, I admit I don't understand mesh.
Let me point out something I've said all along on this blog. I come to SL to socialize. I had a 30-year-career in Information Technology, and I said right from the start, I would never delve into the technical side of SL. No more programming, no more late nights fiddling with lines of code, etc. I'm just here for the fun. I'm here for the people. Now, in SL, any fun entails some knowledge, but I like to say that I'm a knowledgeable driver but can't do any mechanics under the hood. I can run SL (to a point), but I don't know the details, and I have no urge to know the details. Hats off to photographers, artists, builders, developers, musicians, DJs, etc. "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din".
PBR
Physically Based Rendering is the new lag on the block. If I thought the complexity of a mesh avatar was three to four times higher than prim and consequently meaning all that much more data to be downloaded to the viewer, PBR seems to have jumped off the charts.
When Linden Labs started rolling out PBR, the lag in the SL viewer got unbearable. I switched to Firestorm 6.14. That was a bit of an improvement. Until Firestorm 6.17. What the hey? I visited a dance club to listen to some music and chatted with a friend. I've always expected avatars to remain glowing blobs until the viewer downloads sufficient data to render them. That's SL. However, my friend remained a blob for forty minutes until I had to log out. I never did see her rezzed.
I switched back to version 6.14. Decent performance. Recently I snapped some photos of a friend's new club and sent her copies. She noted I was missing all the good PBR work she had done. I installed Firestorm 7.1. Oh! My! God! I was back to interminable download times. I visited a club with thirty avatars around me and after ten minutes, only three or four had rezzed. Ahhhh!
Now, I'm sure a whole host of readers could drop me suggestions about tweaking this and turning that, but I have to ask: Why doesn't any of this work at least 99% correctly straight out of the box? I think the default setting should be 95% correct and any adjustments are to get closer to the ideal perfection of 100%. I don't think doing an install and only managing to attain maybe 70% is acceptable.
Final Word
Pet peeves? This was a rant. Pardon me if I get it all off my chest.
I've had good times in Second Life. I've had bad times. And, as you can see, I've had frustrating ones. Will I be back? Maybe. I always enjoy a good story, a good interaction with an imaginative, like-minded personality. However, technical issues over the years have dampened my enthusiasm and, admittedly, I've sought other means of expressing myself. Overall, and here I'm talking about outside of SL, I can't help thinking I spend far too much time on social media. It's a time suck, and when I step back and look at it as objectively as possible, I see I'm wasting my time. Let me paraphrase an old joke: My tombstone reads "I wish I had spent more time on Facebook."
2025-01-14
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