Kami Harbinger

Cristiano Midnight's "Open Letter to Linden Lab" is making the rounds of all the usual whiny twits. I won't be signing it.

When I became a Resident 18 months ago, people were whining that the newest updates then had added bugs, and the Grid was unstable, and the end was nigh. Each new update comes out, right up to the present, same routine. It's really, really old by now.

There's a certain type of neurotic personality that ignores anything good and improved, cannot experience joy at things getting better, and can only see negativity, darkness, and corruption in any change. Unfortunately, these people also tend to whine the loudest, and they all sit around circle-jerking each other until they're convinced they're right. They're not right, they just all have the same mentally defect, and are fantasizing about a perfect Grid of the past that didn't exist.

18 months ago, the Grid sucked. You could trivially crash a sim, you'd drop an object and sometimes it'd rez and sometimes not, the client went down like a L$10 whore with herpes lesions and bad teeth. Client performance was negligible; on a good box, you could set your draw distance to 64m and turn off the few graphical features that existed (local lighting and ripple water didn't exist yet), and be happy to get 10 fps in most areas on a fast computer. Now, I fly around at 256m draw distance with everything on, especially local lighting and ripple water, and get 15-30 fps. It was very easy to lag a server to death with scripted objects; now it's quite difficult. Back then, 40 people per sim was an unattainable upper limit, and 20 would start to cause problems; now you can routinely do 40+, and many routinely handle 100.

Remember the big grey goo attacks? The firebreaks of dead sims across the mainland in a desperate attempt to keep them from spreading? Seen one of those lately? No, you haven't, because LL changed SL to make it significantly harder to make gray goo now. The only times I've seen a sim go down lately have been because of griefer attack. I expect eventually that'll be reduced and then wiped out, too.

Almost all of the specific complaints in the "Open Letter" are spurious.

• Only a few people seem to have experienced inventory loss, and while they've been vocal about the loss, they haven't been as vocal when LL fixes it. In any event, you can make backups of copyable items by putting them in boxes left in-world. This will also help your inventory load faster; if you have over 5000 items, pack some stuff away.
• Search and classified were broken earlier this year, but it's been working fine lately, and they gave free weeks for classifieds which didn't get shown. Again, the whiners don't acknowledge fixes.
• I haven't had a failed teleport or an attachment in an uncomfortable place in months.
• It's hypocritical to whine that LL won't block NPIs from the grid during heavy load, because all of the whiners were out in force opposing this measure as "anti-democratic" when LL proposed it. You reap what you sow.
• I haven't seen prim drift in literally years, and of course the whiners don't mention improvements like the upcoming sculpty prims.
• I simply haven't experienced these "transaction problems". It sounds like a scam to me. None of my customers have had bad item deliveries, AFAIK. I once paid a vendor and didn't get my product... And it was just a buggy vendor, the owner hand-delivered the item.

Linden Lab does make mistakes. The group IM bugs of the last week have been really, really irritating. I can barely use group IM right now... And just when hope is lost, here's Torley announcing a bug fix ready to go soon. They do in fact fix the stuff they break. When it comes to bug-fixing, they do about as good a job as you could expect from such a small company and such a large, complex program.

Despite the occasional bug, I'm having fun working on my adventure game sim. I'm bringing in friends and co-workers from First Life. I may soon be doing SL work as a day job. Things are looking good. And why? Because I don't have the mental disorder that makes me a whiner.

IBM and Sun are making specialized mainframes for virtual worlds (and additional details from 3pointD).

This is pretty damned cool!

Consider a system like Second Life, with a physics engine on the server where the enemy (malicious users) can't reach it. A virtual world can and generally should be more than just a chat room with some textures. That requires more server-side CPU power. This is why SL requires all those servers, even when nobody's present--physics and scripting simulation goes on constantly. Mainframes and minicomputers have always had superior IO capabilities compared to microcomputer-based servers, but until recently lagged far behind on per-user CPU power. This could be a really big improvement. I don't think the Cell is the greatest CPU choice for this, but IBM can make them in such bulk now that the cost for massively-parallel machines is dropping rapidly, so it must make good economic sense.

The end result is more detailed and realistic virtual worlds.

People hunger for detail and realism (or rather, "comprehensibility from comparison with reality"; fantastic realism is good, having to mentally translate the experience into something comprehensible is bad). Consider:

• The WWW vs. Gopher. Gopher had years of head start, had 10x as much content, was far easier to create content for and use, had a search engine that worked, and was 10x faster than HTTP over the slow dialup modems of the day. In 1993, Marc Andreesen added the IMG tag to Mosaic. Mosaic let you show pictures of your cat with a caption "I LUV MY KITTY!!!1!". Mosaic won. Didn't just "win", it crushed Gopher almost overnight. My Gopher site went from around 1000 hits a month to less than a dozen within 2 months. 99% of the users switched that fast.
• Text adventures vs. graphical adventures. Customers had the choice of great writing and great puzzles from Infocom; mediocre writing and great puzzles from Scott Adams and other text adventure writers; or mediocre writing, great puzzles, and pictures from LucasArts and Cyan. Text adventures have all but vanished from the Earth.
• Do I even need to compare text MUDs with MMORPGS?

The one part I can't comprehend is the use of WebSphere. WebSphere is an appserver tuned to running many apps with individual configurations on one or more boxes; great in concept, but in practice, you should be running one app across multiple boxes on the lightest and fastest appserver you can find, and never share a box with two apps. WebSphere just eats your resources and is painful to manage. I dealt with it in my last project at work, and it's a disaster.