Reading Radar

Well, I’m the one who “whined on the internet” in Twitter, so I take it this is directed at me. I’m not sure why my 140 character comment generated this response, but I certainly get the point.

I’ve never said anything remotely like that, dumbass, and you know it. What I’ve said is that Pastrami has had a hugely amplified sounding board to claim that it was necessary to kill usability for his debilitating Windlight, and he and the Lindens and general — and the tiny minority of geeks like yourself — are boosting Windlight and claiming the rest of us are simply too stupid to set it right or too cheap to get updated graphic cards that weren’t made in the last decade.

All of that is wrong, as Hamlet and other figures that command respect (even if not from me) who have patiently stayed on this story month after month, and asked the unmentionable question: are economic downturns, loss of accounts, slowing of growth, etc. due to Windlight? Answer: of course. Anyone with logic and half a brain can see that. It’s only if you are hugely invested and wed to the geek ideology that you can’t see this.

Nobody somehow begrudges the Lindens from moving forward and evolving. But as I’ve said a million times, changing the basic specs *every six months* and making *brand-new cards this year* hopelessly obsolete is a killer.

Read what this educator writes about this severe problem, and in general, *stop being a dick*:
http://homepage.mac.com/jessid/iggy/iggyssyll10.html

You’re the one who needs to take your head out of your ass and read the truth about this situation, which is NOT only about Nvidia and NOT about people having old systems — it is very widespread.

Your arrogant statement needs to be flung *right back at you*:

“It may infuriate him to hear it, but the fact is that at some point, not moving forward with realism would cost SL as people *point out that other upcoming technologies and VW platforms do not require this intensive a graphic card*.

Regardless of the issue of user-generated content, there just aren’t any other modern games or platforms that have this frequent a change, and this high a demand. The Lindens are building in total virtuality — building a virtual world virtually with virtual suppositions about who can really use it — they need to get out of the Lab, out on to the shop floor, and sell a software that works with most people’s machines, and stop putting in crap like Windlight which has not done anything for the beauty of the world as only a tiny handful of people can use it fully charged.

I’m happy to continue my “ad hominem” approach very consciously, and very deliberately. We’re not in boys’ Latin school, where you lose points in the rhetoric class debate if you use the “ad hominem” arguments. Ad hominem attacks are permitted under the Constitution; indeed, encouraged by Supreme Court decisions as necessary for debate in a democracy. So I will continue to use this method, as geeks only understand force, only understand having it pushed right back in their faces, and only understand if they are called the most resounding names — after all, they do the same thing themselves. I don’t believe in taking the higher road; I believe in fighting as nasty as it needs to be fought — the stakes are high.

Of course it’s a deliberate plan, dumbass, and the Lindens like Pastrami absolutely gloat in this. They delight in being superior and having the high-end machines, and making the plebes grovel. They’ve said the most outrageous things about people on machines “that are now ready to go to kindergarten” as if we are all on five-year machines, and not ones…bought this year, even six months ago. They don’t care; they are supremely arrogant about this, and they need to be called on it, as do you, as you are exactly like them.

Let me once again point to Hamlet, who is ONCE AGAIN writing about this, referencing perfectly credentialed geek Morris Vig:

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/10/beautiful-disas.html#more

What does it take? Aren’t these people authorities for you?

I will not be changing *a thing* about what I do. You *are* a dick.

Prokofy appears to be unencumbered by knowledge of logic as well as technology.

The problem with “ad hominem” arguments is that they are logically invalid, i.e. they do not provide guaranteed true inferences from true premises. That Prokofy proudly boasts willingness to use such arguments demonstrates blatant sophistry, and renders his writings irrelevant to those interested in reasoned discussion.

(I’d love to see a pointer to the particular case in which the Supreme Court argued that ad hominem arguments are essential to debate in a democracy.)

There is no magic or design challenges to user generated content. Content streamed from hard disk, optical disc or network is just content, the speed it is delivered and how the client/renderer handles it affects performance. Windlight is the only portion of Second Life to use any modern rendering techniques (shaders in this case), the rest of the 3D code is creaky last century technology. Add that to Windows which doesn’t like OpenGL, the render path to the 3D card that Second Life uses, and there are always bound to be problems. Since the Lindens are to lazy to develop parts of the client unique to the operating system Second Life’s look will always be generations behind modern 3D applications and games running on the same hardware. The only advantage they have is the simplistic nature of the 3D objects users can create.

Many years ago before 3D accelerators became a standard part of video card technology, 3Dfx brought hardware accelerated 3D into an early standard. John Carmack’s Quake technology was an early test of bringing an application into a standards-based 3D system rather than a hardware proprietary one. Microsoft wasn’t a fan and developed DirectX to cover lower-level multimedia hardware development interfaces for Windows. Given Windows market penetration, modern 3D accelerators are developed against DirectX feature sets and OpenGL is an afterthought, particularly in terms of silicon-based acceleration techniques. It would be easy to develop a Windows-based Second Life client that rendered using DirectX while leaving the Man and Linux clients to use OpenGL but that hasn’t been the Lab’s choice. This means hardware that runs many technologically superior games to Second Life doesn’t perform nearly as well with Second Life’s limited 3D feature set. This makes the less technologically inclined either irritated or believing Second Life is too advanced when the opposite is actually true.

Back to user-generated content: the client’s limited cacheing features are the real stumbling block. With the size of modern hard drives you could store hundreds of regions worth of textures to be quickly recalled with little change to the current code. The real change needs to be cacheing of prims so the server only needs to be probed for changes and more of the rendering (particularly occlusion) happening on the client. Prims are the earliest types of 3D objects from when the personal computer first allowed decent 3D applications. For those not in the know, the time was the early 1980s on the Commodore Amiga with programs like Sculpt 3D. Twenty years later these building blocks are only useful for 3D beginners as it is like Legos or Lincoln Logs rather than the modern 3D artist’s toolset of meshes, bones, path cutting, merging and more. These few shapes can’t compare with the polygons (or triangles) of objects you see in modern 3D games. And yet because of how poorly Havok is integrated the number of these simple objects is limited, the maximum draw distance is limited, ultimately producing scenes with tens or hundreds of thousands of triangles to render rather than the tens of millions modern games put on the screen at a locked 60fps.

Hardware could be better utilized today if the primary client, the one for Windows, was optimized for that system. User-generated content is no magical concept, but it is hampered by the way it is delivered, stored and rendered. And that’s my non-geeky take on this situation!