An exercise in miracles

Talking to people in world about the crash it becomes clear to me that people don't really understand how much of a miracle Second Life actually is.

A common thing I'm finding is that people are comparing SL (unfavourably) with other programs like World of Warcraft. The reasoning generally runs that SL claims to have 2 million subscribers, of which up to 20,000 (a new milestone claimed today) are online at any one time, whereas WoW has 6.9 million subscribers, and is reckoned to have between 90,000 and 150,000 online at any one time. The general argument is that if WoW can do it, why can't SL? What are Linden Labs doing with all our money that they can't guarantee stability on a level with Blizzard?

Well, the major difference between the two systems is the content. In World of Warcraft, the game world sits on your hard drive. It doesn't change in-game. You can even download programs that will allow you to experience the gameworld without ever going online. Here is where the approaches tell - World of Warcraft only needs to exchange data with the server about what is in the characters immediate vicinity, and what it's doing. This is further limited in required scope by the fact that all the models for all the monsters etc are also stored on the customers own hard drive. All the server has to say is "There's a level 30 murloch standing 20 feet north of you" and the client computer knows what a murloch is and what it looks like, and drops the model into the game world at the requested location for the player to interact with.

Second Life, on the other hand, is completely different. All the viewer has is basic terrain textures that are stored locally. EVERYTHING else has to come from the server. In our example, say someone created a murloch (for arguments sake) in Second Life and it was standing 20 feet north of the player - well, the players computer would NOT know what a murloch is or was, wouldn't know how it was textured, what size it was, what it looked like, how it moved... all this data has to be sent from the Second Life server, rapidly interpreted on the fly by the client computer and then rendered in game. Even a simple shape like a cube has to be described sizewise, how far off the "ground" it is, what sides the client can see and what textures are on those sides. Until the client receives every single scrap of information, it renders the cube as a grey item.

When you consider all this, it's a miracle Second Life works as well as it does, particularly when you factor in that Linden Labs have created this environment you can "live" in completely from scratch. This approach is ALWAYS going to be slower than having the complete gameworld downloaded from a DVD on your local system, but makes for unrivalled flexibility in how the resident can interact with the world.

So yes. Second Life does have it's problems. Try and put too much load on it and it starts creaking at the seams. Put much more load on it and it does - still - collapse. But don't forget this is pioneering technology. Nobody has done this before (successfully - some have tried and failed).

In closing, I'd add that I recon I know where a lot of the subscription money goes - on Bandwidth. Imagine describing EVERY single detail of a virtual world to sixteen thousand people simultaneously. That's a LOT of bandwidth, and bandwidth costs money. Most of the money Linden Labs get likely goes to paying for the huge amount of bandwidth they use piping all that data to you.

So sometimes it won't work. Sometimes it will fall flat. When it does, we should not be lining Lindens up against the wall, we should remind ourselves that without their pioneering work in creating Second Life from the ground upwards (literally) that addictive world we all love (to hate) wouldn't exist in the first place.

Stay safe.