Penny Patton Posted March 29, 2013 Share Posted March 29, 2013 Jenni Darkwatch wrote: One way to go would be to introduce a 2nd more modern avi mesh to SL while leaving the old one in place. That way people wouldn't be all pissed... oh... nevermind. Change anything at all and people will be pissed. Nevermind. That seems like the obvious way to handle it. I would assume that LL wound't get rid of the old avatar mesh, but rather introduce a second, newer mesh and let people select which one they want to use. Someone else mentioned there already being a plethora of mesh bodies to choose from, there's issues with that which make it not a solution to SL's aging, badly made default. First, there are a plethora. That's a problem. This means each one can only use clothing/skins.etceter designed specifically for that avatar. For something like SL, people need a standard so they know they can wear things "off the rack". Second, any user made mesh avatar is going to be extremely limited in how you can personalize it. Want to be thinner, more muscular? Sorry! No can do! Want to swap your skin for this one you saw in another shop? Nope! You're out of luck! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Perrie Juran Posted March 29, 2013 Share Posted March 29, 2013 Qie Niangao wrote: its ok to rape and murder but not to be a hamster, Well, duh! I mean, if it's okay to rape and murder, it can't be okay to be a hamster. Imagine the carnage, and PETA's reaction. You Might Wind Up With A Pregnant Hamster Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jenni Darkwatch Posted March 29, 2013 Share Posted March 29, 2013 Oh. My.... PERRIE! Now co-workers are asking why I am laughing hysterically. You fiend. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sephina Frostbite Posted March 29, 2013 Share Posted March 29, 2013 Perrie Juran wrote: Qie Niangao wrote: its ok to rape and murder but not to be a hamster, Well, duh! I mean, if it's okay to rape and murder, it can't be okay to be a hamster. Imagine the carnage, and PETA's reaction. You Might Wind Up With A Pregnant Hamster Love it!! Always a great post! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Perrie Juran Posted March 29, 2013 Share Posted March 29, 2013 Jenni Darkwatch wrote: Oh. My.... PERRIE! Now co-workers are asking why I am laughing hysterically. You fiend. I'm still holding my best stuff in reserve for a real emergency Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hoshi Kenin Posted March 29, 2013 Share Posted March 29, 2013 As usual Penny, your sensible post is surrounded by the inane posts of the personlity cliques. You have also been in SL a long time. I recall I once got a cam hud off you yonks ago, and it was a revelation. Keep up the good work, and I love your sim, btw. ) But, you nailed it when you mentioned a creative art director lacking at LL. It really tells you everything, doesn't it? Hapless Rod out. Now! Before it is too late. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charli Infinity Posted March 30, 2013 Share Posted March 30, 2013 I doubt it. Those characters are made by pros. In second life, most of the creators are not pros, just a small group of them are. There are some full body mesh avatar replacement but then that limits what the avatar could wear and avatars end up having the same face. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ceka Cianci Posted March 30, 2013 Share Posted March 30, 2013 i don't think LL would do it..because the minimum requirements to run sl would probably have a good number existing residents not even being able to fire sl up.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Theresa Tennyson Posted March 30, 2013 Share Posted March 30, 2013 Suspiria Finucane wrote: While browsing graphics news today, I saw a trailer for Battlefield 4 and was awestruck by the avatars in the game. It really made me think about the quality of SL avatars. I’ve been dreaming of high quality av’s like this for some time to use in SL but alas… I do have a question for everyone however. Do you think we will ever have this type of avatar in SL or is the SL avatar unique and what we have is what we have? . I've always been curious about avatar makers whose definition of "realistic" is "always sweaty and/or freshly varnished." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Laetizia Coronet Posted March 30, 2013 Share Posted March 30, 2013 You cannot compare SL to Battlefield. These types of game do not, or hardly, allow user-generated content. This is an important difference, because their fixed sets of graphic elements are stored on your computer. This is impossible with SL, because the content you view keeps changing and new things keep being added. All of SL has to be reloaded from servers in San Fran to your computer God-knows-where, all the time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Amie Kaestner Posted March 30, 2013 Share Posted March 30, 2013 Yeah ours are pretty crap in comparison aren't they. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jenni Darkwatch Posted March 30, 2013 Share Posted March 30, 2013 Compared to video game characters... my RL character is pretty crap! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maryanne Solo Posted March 30, 2013 Share Posted March 30, 2013 Second second life. SL2 Your world your imaginationion. You can only login if your comp is quad quad architecture 3 graphics cards, (no outdated appleish stuffs) optic fibre internet.. No avatars under 1gb in resouce size... :smileysurprised: Everytime you log in a 3rd world country goes pouffe' :smileysad: Oh well.... Bring it on! \o/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Canoro Philipp Posted March 30, 2013 Share Posted March 30, 2013 probably with time we would have the potential to have that quality of graphics, Second Life has evolved slowly because it has to consider the users that have low end computers who provide with income to Linden Lab, i trust that there will be ways to improve the graphic experience without affecting the users with less powerful computers, just like they did with transparent water and ambient occlusion, with an option to disable them. even when we get to have enough graphic development, Second Life mostly would not look like that, because of the user lack of skill, knowledge, or personal standard of quality. many areas of Second Life would look the same no matter how much we add to the experience, because thats the way those users want it to be. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Niamh Suisei Posted April 1, 2013 Share Posted April 1, 2013 Utilizator (maker of Avatar 2.0) posted a rant about this a while back (hope it's ok to link it here) http://utilizator404.wordpress.com/2012/08/19/sl-graphics-update-and-steam/ Basically SL's problem isn't its graphics engine, or capabilities, it's the designers. G-I-G-O, I believe the acronym is. EG if every user has the ability to make things out of lego-block prims, SL will always look like 2004 poo. If you want SL to look like Battlefield 4 - and no reason it can't, more or less - people need to get serious about content creation. Whether textures, learning Blender/Maya, using the forthcoming normal maps etc. Battlefield 4 doesn't look like that because they asked a team of random people to make it, but because they had professionals using professional tools and tecniques making it. If you want SL to look like that, you need to get professional And I don't mean charge L$10,000 for a model of an armchair, I just mean professional in your approaches to creation. Stop with the "ah thats good enough" if obviously its not. (But then, it's our fault for not demanding excellence at the checkout) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jenni Darkwatch Posted April 1, 2013 Share Posted April 1, 2013 Niamh Suisei wrote: EG if every user has the ability to make things out of lego-block prims, SL will always look like 2004 poo. If you want SL to look like Battlefield 4 - and no reason it can't, more or less - people need to get serious about content creation. Whether textures, learning Blender/Maya, using the forthcoming normal maps etc. Battlefield 4 doesn't look like that because they asked a team of random people to make it, but because they had professionals using professional tools and tecniques making it. If you want SL to look like that, you need to get professional And I don't mean charge L$10,000 for a model of an armchair, I just mean professional in your approaches to creation. Stop with the "ah thats good enough" if obviously its not. (But then, it's our fault for not demanding excellence at the checkout) That's a bit simplistic. SL has plenty of users who have truly old, ancient hardware and that won't change. Content in SL cannot be as optimized as game content. In games, designers use every trick in the book to make sure content looks good: Don't use too many different textures Use all kinds of techniques to perfectly control how many polys are on screen at any given time Use low-res textures/low poly models for stuff players are unlikely to notice anyway In SL, you buy maybe a skin from creator A - that's one big texture. Then a jacket, maybe even mesh. But you'll expect yours to be detailed, so it's a high poly mesh and large texture. Same for pants, shoes, hair, jewelry etc.pp. - for one avi that works fine. Now go to a venue. Everyone wants to look different. Different skin, different outfit, different accessories. Very soon even the best gaming rig will just drop to really low frame rates. The very same thing that makes SL so attactive (user generated content) is also its bane. Take user generated content away and you'll get nice FPS and all. But you lose the very thing that makes SL what it is. Leave user generated content in and there's no way at all you'll ever see great performance except in sims designed specifically for performance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Qie Niangao Posted April 1, 2013 Share Posted April 1, 2013 Niamh Suisei wrote: Utilizator (maker of Avatar 2.0) posted a rant about this a while back (hope it's ok to link it here) http://utilizator404.wordpress.com/2012/08/19/sl-graphics-update-and-steam/ Basically SL's problem isn't its graphics engine, or capabilities, it's the designers. G-I-G-O, I believe the acronym is. EG if every user has the ability to make things out of lego-block prims, SL will always look like 2004 poo. If you want SL to look like Battlefield 4 - and no reason it can't, more or less - people need to get serious about content creation. Whether textures, learning Blender/Maya, using the forthcoming normal maps etc. Battlefield 4 doesn't look like that because they asked a team of random people to make it, but because they had professionals using professional tools and tecniques making it. If you want SL to look like that, you need to get professional And I don't mean charge L$10,000 for a model of an armchair, I just mean professional in your approaches to creation. Stop with the "ah thats good enough" if obviously its not. (But then, it's our fault for not demanding excellence at the checkout) I read that post very differently, especially the last part. He is saying that SL's visuals will never be up to gaming standards and that this is due to user-generated content--all that is a correct interpretation of the post--but that this is okay: there's plenty of other limitations to the SL platform that would make a race for visual excellence a waste of effort and that people should enjoy SL for what it is, not b!tch about what it's not. Given those other limitations, even the best "professionals using professional tools" couldn't turn SL into a compelling, state-of-the-art platform for games qua games. He's right about that, and it would still be true even if every user had infinite network and graphics processing bandwidth. But there's something else, too. These "professionals using professional tools" come with a budget. Bioshock Infinite was rumoured to have cost US$100 million to develop (denied by its creative director, but I'll bet it was more than half that). Nonetheless, it will easily clear a profit. Now contrast that with a sim designer in SL. How much revenue can that designer ever hope to generate from that sim over its entire lifecycle? Could it ever be enough to invest even 1% of the development cost of a state-of-the-art game? Not a chance. To be honest, I'm pretty sure that a real "professional"--that is, one with market alternatives--would declare "ah that's good enough" much sooner than the hobbyists who generate the majority of SL content as labors of love. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lindal Kidd Posted April 2, 2013 Share Posted April 2, 2013 They already have! I visited a store the other day where you could buy complete mesh avatars, and clothing appliers for them too. The basic avatars were WAY pricey...$10-12K. I've also seen a "partial mesh" avatar...just the head. It comes with several HUDs allowing you to change makeup. Given the way that LL seems to let the residents pave the way, then step in with their own version, I can see them eventually giving the SL avatar mesh a facelift. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lindal Kidd Posted April 2, 2013 Share Posted April 2, 2013 What if there were a "classic" avatar and an "SL2015" avatar? You could choose which avatar you used with a Preferences switch. The SL2015 avatar would be higher resolution mesh, have a wider variety of facial morphs, or animated features, and animated hands/fingers. It would not be able to wear "classic" clothes, but could wear Mesh clothes and new clothes created for the new avatar mesh. Its skin textures would allow for multiple shader layers that skin designers could take advantage of. This way, the old content would not be rendered instantly unusable...and yet the floodgates would be opened for content creators to start making new things for the new, improved avatars. EDIT - now that I read more of the thread, I see others have preceded me. Story of my life. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Suspiria Finucane Posted April 2, 2013 Author Share Posted April 2, 2013 Thank you all for such great insight and opinions :matte-motes-big-grin: I do need to apologize for posting this when I wasn't going to be around but weekends are busy for me. I'll post a few replies but some answers are so good, nothing more needs said. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Suspiria Finucane Posted April 2, 2013 Author Share Posted April 2, 2013 Charolotte Caxton wrote: I think eventually creators will make complete avatars to wear over the existing avatar. For example, that guy on the left, if someone made him you could just wear it over your current avatar and look just like that, minus all the copyright infringement issues. At first there would only be limited things that avatar could wear, but with enough time I think businesses could make avatars along with corresponding clothing and accessories. Much like the petites. They are an avatar that you wear over your existing avatar and there are many fashions and accessories made by different creators you can buy for them, aos work with them and stuff like that. Almost everything in SL is user created anyways. At first there would not be much diversity, but given enough time I think there would be more. Also, I am not sure how it works, but some sliders do affect mesh shapes, like the petites you can lengthen their arms torso legs and widen them and such, maybe if done right, enough of the facial sliders could be rigged so those would work also, but I am just guessing. eta: or even if the sliders couldn't work, the avatar creator could make options, such as several different noses, eyes, cheeks, chins, lips, ears, etc so different combinations would make different faces so people could still be unique. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Suspiria Finucane Posted April 2, 2013 Author Share Posted April 2, 2013 Min Barzane wrote: Havent you heard about rigged mesh? It completly replaces normal SL avi,now you can make ANNY kind of avi if your modeling skills are up to the task and rigg it to move same as normal SL avi,no creepy attachments that have joints you can see! Yes, of course I have heard of rigged mesh. Still photos look good with it but once movement occurs, the realism falls short. I've watched vids and seen people in-world but to me anyway, it doesn't compare to game graphics. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Suspiria Finucane Posted April 2, 2013 Author Share Posted April 2, 2013 Penny Patton wrote: Jadeclaw Denfu wrote: This technology allows realistic reflections on textured surfaces, so skin could look like it does in the posted pic. Since resources are limited, especially after the last big round of layoffs, I don't know, when this will go live in any form. Yes and no. Materials will be a huge boon to visual presentation in SL but there's a few things to consider. First, LL has stated that we will not be able to apply materials to the avatar mesh. So, unless you're using a custom mesh body you will not be able to look any closer to the videogame characters pictured. Second, the standard SL avatar has a lot of other issues, generally in proportion, poorly made mesh and a broken appearance editor all of which make it difficult or impossible to create avatars that could look as good as those pictured. Again, forcing you to rely on a custom mesh body. Such a mesh body will also likely suffer proportion issues because few people understand how the basic avatar sliders are skewed towards bad proportions. Also, custom mesh bodies will always be limited to clothing items made specifically for them and a lack of personalization options such as skins, tattoos, shape customization, etcetera which standard avatars enjoy. It's possible LL will introduce a brand new avatar at some point, but they seem reluctant to do so and as a company still lack the necessary design experience to put together a good replacment. Jadeclaw Denfu wrote: However, there are much more basic bugs to fix first: Translucent earth. Since when goes light through solid ground/brick walls, etc. Shadows do work with Sun & Moon, but when it comes to local lights, the whole thing fails miserably. A simple light block, that prevents light going through non-transparent solid walls should be easily to implement, even in basic shaders without much additional CPU/GPU-load. Most of SL's basic problems don't go unfixed due to a lack of resources, but because LL doesn't see them as problems worth fixing. SL has never had an art director or someone taking a "game designer" like role in crafting the user experience. LL desperately needs these things to make educated decisions on how to prioritize their resources. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Suspiria Finucane Posted April 2, 2013 Author Share Posted April 2, 2013 Qie Niangao wrote: Also, custom mesh bodies will always be limited to clothing items made specifically for them and a lack of personalization options such as skins, tattoos, shape customization, etcetera which standard avatars enjoy. Right. And that's one reason that a new standard avatar is such a formidable challenge. Those guys in the first-post picture? I'm guessing they don't have to change clothes and skins a lot. Even if they do, I'm thinking those clothes aren't made by end-users of the game, and so there doesn't have to be any special facility built-in to that platform for end-users to make such clothes and skins -- to say nothing of an array of magical sliders that make them look more buff and intimidating, or less, on demand. Second Life is now at the stage where an avatar of currently acceptable quality can only be made by full-mesh replacement, and where, in contrast, interchangeable user-generated avatar content can only be used on avatars that are obsolete by the standards of everything else on the platform. This is not a stable situation. As always, a solid contribution:matte-motes-wink: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Suspiria Finucane Posted April 2, 2013 Author Share Posted April 2, 2013 Nova Convair wrote: - SL lacks of the technology for surfaces, materials, lighting, avatars and so on to keep up with this. - Top hardware required for the full quality of the game. - In a game there is a game designer, who will keep a scene playable by making sure the vertices and the textures ane within the limit. Not to mention that everything is predefined and on your hard disk and can be optimized for every scene. - In SL there is no game designer - there aren't even many people with some understandment for the limits. Mesh for example doesnt cause lag, but if you make some mesh with an incredible complexity and add plenty of high res textures - congrats - you made it! So SL will never keep up with any average game, thats for sure. But of course there is still alot of space for improvements. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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