For as long as I can remember (literally from day 1 of joining Second Life almost 4 years ago as of this writing), Second Life has had a problem loading textures.  This is a specially debilitating problem because the entire environment is built around textures.  Textures define what we see, where we walk, signs that we may wish to read.  It effects our shopping– which is totally reliant upon textures to present the product.

On Second Life, textures often take 10, 20, 30 seconds… sometimes up to 2 minutes to load.   This is inexcusable.  Can you imagine trying to look through hundreds of items at a market with each texture taking up to 2 minutes to load?  No wonder people get frustrated with the experience.  Not only do they often leave the market, thus depriving merchants of much-needed sales… they often leave Second Life, telling their friends of a lag-filled, second-rate boring game.  And no wonder it’s boring; they can’t see anything.

What adds insult to the injury however, has been Linden Lab’s continued insistance on blaming the customer for the experience.  Those of us who have been on SL for some time are well-acquainted with this phenomenon.  If your sim lags, it’s because of “customer content”; you have too many prims, too many scripts, too many textures… and it’s never Linden Lab’s fault.  No, of course there’s nothing wrong with the servers.  They’re professionals and they deal with such things every day.  You need to cut scripts, cut textures.  This customer-blaming attitude is so prevalent among Linden Lab, that a joke phrase is well known on Second Life:  “An empty sim is a happy sim.”

The real problem here is that all of such claims are pure corporate propagandistic BS.   Yes, it IS indeed possible for customer content to severely lag a sim.  This is even quite often the case on Mainland, which is largely unregulated and unmoderated.  But in my experience, most privately-owned sims are honed.  The sim owners keep an eye on such things as prim and script usage (at least, as much of an eye as lax SL tools permit).  Still, they experience problems. 

The TRUTH of the matter is that Second Life is a genius product poorly implemented.  The asset servers don’t work properly, internal communications simply don’t work, and YES LINDEN LAB, THE TEXTURE LOADING SYSTEM IS TOTALLY BORKED.

Consider:  at this time– and this has been the case for over a year now– group chat times out and stalls on a regular basis.  Public chat often severely lags and ones own postings appear out of order and even disappear entirely.  Group notecard delivery appears to have about a 50% success rate.  Now what can we honestly say about a software program that can’t get simple chat and notecard delivery right? 

Yet, when I and others have posted on the JIRA (Linden Lab’s method for bug reporting) that such things as textures are not loading properly, do you know what kind of answer we get?  Here is a word-for word Linden reply.  Note, this is not an uncommon reply; it is typical to the experience:

“First, I assume “Textures loading worse than ever since new upgrade” means
“Textures loading is slower in the 1.20.15 (92456) viewer than in the 1.19.1.4 and older viewers”. If that’s wrong please correct me so I may redirect my testing.

wayfinder wishbringer, I have a couple questions about your particular setup:

What resolution do your run SL at? SL run at higher resolutions > downloads larger, higher detailed textures > greater time for texture download completion.

How much Bandwidth is your avatar + attachments using? You can find this by going to an empty region or face the ocean at the edge of a region, turn on View menu > Statistics Bar. Watch the Bandwidth meter, just below the FPS meter and see what your average Bandwidth is. The Bandwidth your avatar uses contends with the Bandwidth for downloading textures.

Balpien Hammerer, I see the stall in the middle of texture downloading. I’ll look into whether that stall is new or has always been there.

So far, my texture download testing indicates textures are downloading at the same speed they did back in 1.12 and 1.13. I’ll keep investigating.”

Now mind you, at least this Linden is replying, and I have to grant that it appears he is actually trying to solve the problem.  However, this is rather astounding, considering the reply of user Maggie Darwin who posted a simple Linden Lab webpage post:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Texture_Pipeline_Improvements

Now when one goes to this wiki webpage, we find out that the techs at Linden Lab are fully aware of the texture loading problem, have been aware of it for some time, and it’s on their “top priority” list for getting fixed (now why it’s hasn’t been fixed yet is one of those universal wonders, but there it is). 

In addition to his post, user Balpien Hammerer made some tests of his own, and found out that texture loading almost in every case took 10, 20 or 30 seconds… always increments of ten.  Ah, the puzzle starts fitting together.

And no, the problem is not “bandwidth”, or screen resolutions, nor the flippin’ avatar we are wearing, thank you very much.  It has to do with the foundation-method Second Life uses to send textures to a customer.  Apparently these are sent out in packets via a method called “UDP”.  If a packet is dropped… instead of simply re-sending that packet, Second Life starts at the beginning, sending the entire texture all over again.  A dropped packet takes 10 seconds to time out… thus the 10, 20 and 30 second texture rez problem.  Comes the dawn.

But there is more to it than that.  Apparently instead of just sending the texture across all at once where it can rez instantly, an experienced tech friend relayed to me that the texture is sent across in “pieces” of varying resolution.  That is why we see a texture first appear gray, then blotchy gray, then blotchy color, then out of focus color, then finally.. finally… finally rez. 

In the computer field we have a technical term for such process:  amateur.  This method of texture loading was ill-conceived, ill-designed and poorly implemented.  The fact that Second Life has operated for over 5 years on such a process tells us two things:  1) customers are really gullible and 2) Linden Lab really needs to get their act together.  (And yes, I know LL is raking in money hand over fist.  The question is: how long will they continue to do so now that the Virtual Food Fight is on?  And could they have done so if they had any viable competition all this time.  I think the answer to both is NO).

But in truth, texture rezzing, as important as it is, isn’t the main issue of this article.  The main issue is this:  we, your customers, are getting tired of having smoke blown up our tails.  Yes Linden Lab, your customers are people, and people really hate being mislead, misdirected, misinformed and outright lied to.  Linden Lab has been aware of this texture issue for how long?  You have known what causes it and you have had plans to fix it (intentions, intentions), yet when this matter hits JIRA, instead of simply posting that website yourself… one of your customers has to do so? 

Seriously, how lame is that?

Communications folks.  I’ve said this from my earliest days on Second Life.  We can put up with bugs. We can put up with lag.  We can handle issues and will even applaud you when you fix a serious one.  What I do not tolerate, never will tolerate– and what brings blog posts such as this– is being lied to.