Yesterday Linden Lab announced a major series of new initiatives aimed at improving the overall SL experience. The announcement came via a Tools and Technology blog post, which covers the initiatives in great detail. These focus on four main areas of activity, one of which is directly related to hardware and infrastructure, and the remaining three are focused on the platform itself and are grouped under the Shining project banner.

The hardware / infrastructure element of the work is described thus:

This year, Linden Lab is making the single largest capital investment in new server hardware upgrades in the history of the company. This new hardware will give residents better performance and more reliability. Additionally, we are converting from three co-locations to two co-locations. This will significantly reduce our inter-co-location latency and further enhance simulator performance.

The Shining project is something that is already known to many SL users – especially those who attend some of the User Group meetings. It is perhaps most famously associated with the Lab’s work on the Viewer rendering code, removing outdated functions and calls no longer supported in modern graphics systems (most notably Nvidia) and improving graphics handling overall. Shining has also been responsible for other incremental improvements to issues around streaming objects and avatars.

Under the new initiative, Shining is split into three core performance projects.

Project Sunshine: One of the biggest complaints from users in SL is related to avatar rezzing. This can appear slow, and usually manifests in avatars remaining grey for periods of time, or in skin and system clothes remaining blurry (see right) – and at its worst, result in a user changing their avatar’s outfit – but others either seeing the avatar still dressed in the previous outfit or naked. Collectively, these issues are known as “bake fail” and are the result of the Viewer having to do all the compositing of avatar textures locally, then sending the results to the SL servers, which then send the information back to the simulator the avatar is in to be accessed by other Viewers in the same simulator.

Under Project Sunshine, to precis the blog post, much of this work is moved server-side, using a new, dedicated server, the Texture Compositing Server, which is separate to the simulator servers. This effectively allows all the “heavy” communications and calculations work relating to avatar texture calculations to performed within LL’s servers and across their own internal network, removing the reliance upon the Viewer and on Viewer / server communications which are outside of LL’s control.

Object Caching & Interest Lists: This is intended to directly address another common request from users: improving how the Viewer handles local object caching. This effectively means that once the Viewer has information relating to a specific region, and providing the information is still valid (i.e. there have been no changes to objects that the Viewer already has cached), then it will no longer need to re-obtain that information from the server. Only “new” or “changed” data needs to be streamed to the Viewer. This should mean that on entering a previously visited region, the Viewer should immediately be able to start rendering the scene (rather than requesting a download from the server), while simultaneously requesting any “updates” from the server through a comparison of UUID information and timestamps.

HTTP Library: The final aspect of Shining’s three-phase approach is to improve the underpinning HTTP messaging that are crucial to simulator / simulator and simulator / Viewer communications (and thus key to the other elements of Shining) through the implementation of “modern best practices in messaging, connection management, and error recovery”.

Overall, Shining will be tackling some of the major causes of Viewer-side lag and user frustration in dealing with avatar bake fail and the complexity and wastefulness of scene rendering that is encountered when moving around SL.

No definitive time frames for the improvements have been forthcoming with the announcements – and this is understandable; there’s a lot to be done and matters are complex enough that LL will want to proceed with minimal disruption to the grid and to users. Doubtless, more information will be made available as becomes known through the LL forums and (possibly more particularly) via the relevant User Groups.