Skip to content

Rikomatic

Musings on Dance, Food, Geek Stuff

Menu
  • Follow Me on Instagram
  • My Professional Site RangerRik.com
  • Yehoodi.com Archive
  • Every Roller Rink in California (Map)
Menu

I see gray people: second class surfing in Second Life

Posted on September 19, 2006 by

Gray_002It hit me tonight what was so deja vu about hanging out in Second Life on my pre-Intel iBook: it’s like surfing the web on dial-up.

Tonight I wanted to visit some parties, maybe get some new hair, and change my walking animation. Instead I spent almost the entire time waiting for images to render. And waiting. And waiting.

For those who haven’t been, when you first teleport into Second Life, everything and everyone appears as gray sillouettes. Depending on how fast your computer is, how connect to the internet, the graphical complexity of the sim you are in, and how the Linden gods are feeling that day, it can take anywhere from a second to a minute to never for the textures to fully load.

While you are waiting, you can still walk around and fly.  But you risk
bumping into things, or worse, other people, which is very embarassing
and annoying since you can’t see what you just smacked into.

As is much lamented by residents, the requirements for access to Second Life are quite steep. If you don’t have a late model computer (i.e. purchased in the last couple of years), a decent graphics card, and a fast pipe to the internet, you might as well forget it. 

Second Life has close to 750,000 residents, well on its way toward their goal of 1 million registered users.   The problem being that no one says how many of those 750,000 are people who tried out Second Life for a day, realized how sucky it looked on their computer, and gave up after a couple of tries.  I’m going to guess that a huge proportion of the registered population are lapsed accounts of people who just quit after a few trips to gray-ville.

There are no easy answers.  Residents are always pushing the envelope of graphical complexity and bandwidth, wanting to add more streaming audio and video, more complex shapes and structures, and even dragging the World Wide Web into the virtual world.

The scourge of grayness doesn’t look like its going to get any better as Second Life grows.  CNET asks if Second Life is going to be able to scale to accommodate all of these new users.  The answer is that they have to, cause waiting for textures to load is the suck big time.

1 thought on “I see gray people: second class surfing in Second Life”

  1. Crissa says:
    September 20, 2006 at 3:35 pm

    Anyone who can play World of Warcraft can play Second Life. The former looks better, but becomes unplayable as machines get slower… The latter just gets slower and you see less.
    Of course, you can always give feedback about stuff not rendering in a logical order. …I know they’re always working on that one, at least, they always want to work on it, but it’s one heck of a nasty nut to crack.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

A History of the Jazz Split

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlfLr9YmMJU

Recent Posts

  • “Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances” (poem)
  • RIP Rob Reich
  • A Magical Visit to the Snoopy Home Ice Rink and the Charles M. Shultz Museum!
  • Thoughts on Learning and Skating
  • The Voice (poem)

Categories

  • Books
  • Cats
  • Civil Society
  • Creative Writing
  • Dancing / Music
  • Education
  • Family
  • Film
  • Food and Drink
  • General
  • Health
  • Information Society
  • Machinima
  • Media Reform
  • Music
  • New York
  • Politics
  • quotation
  • Real World Places in SL
  • Science
  • SF Bay Area
  • Television
  • The Spirit
  • Travel
  • Uncategorized
  • United Nations
  • Virtual Worlds
  • Web/Tech

Tags

b-boy (76) breakdance (51) breaking (26) brooklyn (36) charleston (11) competition (11) dance (17) dancing (30) documentary (15) education (21) festival (12) frankie95 (16) frankie manning (52) frim fram (10) fundraiser (10) global kids (70) hip-hop (31) human rights (11) inaug09 (11) jazz (12) ken swift (10) lindy hop (144) lindyhop (23) lowcarb (18) lxd (11) macarthur foundation (12) machinima (22) memorial (14) mermaidparade (22) mtv (13) performance (16) poetry (11) popping (11) quaker (27) recipe (38) rockclimbing (16) second life (81) shim sham (15) skating (70) soul music (14) swing (52) swing dance (45) virtual world (19) virtual worlds (29) yehoodi (46)
© 2025 Rikomatic | Powered by Superbs Personal Blog theme