I love it when technology just works. I just successfully sat here and watched my PC clock flip from 1.59 AM to 1.00 AM. Simultaneously my Mac did the same thing. All I had to do was sit there! It was a thing of geekly beauty. What bothers me then to no end, is that with all the machinery in the world, we can't seem to create an SL experience that is seamless.
Linden Labs has a few data centers that aren't anything to sneeze at. Yet, as 1.59 is quickly approaching a second time (an event that can only be witnessed once a year) in one hour, my AV has not fully rezzed yet. Oh and I already did three rebakes!
From a technical perspective, although I don't claim to understand how the SL viewer works, it shouldn't be that difficult. It is of course highly likely that me thinking it shouldn't be that difficult is exactly because I don't understand how the SL viewer works. But it occurs to me that the rendering engine of SL needs some work. Say... my upper body is gray, it stays that way until I change my shirt, in which case my torso is all of a sudden, as if by magic, rezzed in...
Again, I don't know the innards of the SL viewer, but I do happen to understand how data-communication works. And from that little experience I would have to conclude that somehow a message traveling between LL and my computer got dropped and neither machine is any the wiser. That being the case, I would have to conclude poor error handling. The other day, I saw Linri's boobs! She swears she had a shirt on and none of the other patrons at the Palace corroborated my experience. Mind you I am not complaining, the lady in question is not entirely unattractive so there is an upshot to all these glitches at times.
But lets think about this. Linri's computer sends a message to LL. The message being "I am wearing a shirt". LL responds "OK, you are wearing a shirt". Then my computer comes in and asks LL a question. That question being "What is Linri wearing?"
The computer sitting in the LL data center is a) ignoring my question or b) giving me the wrong answer! Before you ask, this wasn't a case of clothes not being rezzed yet, I actually saw boobage! The litmus test for this one is always "Do you see nipples?" And why is it, while we are at it, that the minimum configuration for running SL are so insanely high? Specifically, the graphics card!
SL uses a graphics rendering engine that is fairly unsophisticated. When I say unsophisticated, I don't mean bad, but's let's face it, it's nothing compared to some video games, which incidentally run fine on machines that the SL viewer can't even be started on. In my current household I am running FOUR different versions of the SL viewer. My netbook runs the Cool SL Viewer, on my laptop I run the SnowGlobe release, on my desktop PC I run the official release, and on my Mini I run the official Mac release.
Not surprisingly, the Mac does best... It has a wicked video card! On the Windows side, the two machines that do best run unofficial releases. One (Cool SL viewer) not even produced by LL! It's pretty sad that a third party can create a better experience than LL themselves, On less hardware no less...
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