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Someday SL might look this good...


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http://www.pcworld.com/article/2033746/11-killer-games-that-will-bring-your-pc-to-its-knees.html#tk.nl_pcwbest

That's a PC World article, "11 killer games that will bring your PC to its knees". One thing jumped out at me, in the intro blurb of the article; "In practical terms, if your rig is running anything less than a Core i5 processor, an Nvidia GeForce GT 440 graphics card, 4GB of RAM, and a 7200 RPM hard drive, it's time to consider upgrading"

That made me grin, and I wanted to share this slideshow over here anyway. 

If you look at the linked slide show, bear in mind that all those pictures are screenshots of the actual games. Not movies or cutscenes or promo pictures.

By the way, I have many of those games. I run them on the highest possible settings. The pictures don't do them justice, they look better than that. We can only hope that someday SL uses the same kinds of graphics engines, same levels of anti-aliasing, and DirectX support that these games do.

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Gadget Portal wrote:

That's a PC World article, "11 killer games that will bring your PC to its knees". One thing jumped out at me, in the intro blurb of the article; "In practical terms, if your rig is running anything less than a Core i5 processor, an Nvidia GeForce GT 440 graphics card, 4GB of RAM, and a 7200 RPM hard drive, it's time to consider upgrading"

That made me grin, and I wanted to share this slideshow over here anyway. 

If you look at the linked slide show, bear in mind that all those pictures are screenshots of the actual games. Not movies or cutscenes or promo pictures.

By the way, I have many of those games. I run them on the highest possible settings. The pictures don't do them justice, they look better than that. We can only hope that someday SL uses the same kinds of graphics engines, same levels of anti-aliasing, and DirectX support that these games do.

What's really said is that I can run any of those games on high settings with ease yet SL with it's crappy graphics and low performance tends to slow my system down far worse. Something wrong with that picture.

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Deja Letov wrote:

What's really said is that I can run any of those games on high settings with ease yet SL with it's crappy graphics and low performance tends to slow my system down far worse. Something wrong with that picture.

You are comparing apples to oranges.  Games like those have in world content created by professionals that optimize their content.  The game can download all of it to your PC at one time since the content is fixed.  SL on the other hand must download the content as you view it because it changes all the time.  SL content is mostly created by hobbyists who haven't a clue how to optimize their creations.

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I see that excuse a lot, and it's BS. The only bit of it that holds water is that the content isn't optimized.

 

The graphics engine and options are terrible compared to most modern games, even if all the content were local. And having to download the content has no bearing on graphics. Most modern MMOs have to be downloaded too, the only difference is when you do the downloading. A good cache system would render that aspect moot.

 

Edit: that's not the post I replied to.

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Have to agree to gadget. If you look at some multiplayer games, yes the content is limited, but not everything can be pre-rendered.

You have shadows reflections physics...

 

SL cannot look like them but of course look much better than now. Also a new engine would need to redo most everything and that cost money.

 

That said it doesn't look people in charge are keen to invest that amount on SL for reasons i won't speculate about here.

 

The great newthings coming to SL are far away from what needed

 

Monti

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I think the issue truthfully lies somewhere inbetween. The slow frame rates can be caused by either the outdated graphics engine (for instance the fact that water lags me even though in anyother game my computer thinks nothing of this.) and the fact things aren't optimised (the fact a area with huge textures and laggy scripts will lag me when there is no water around) and botht hose things work against sl. Until one or the other is fixed sl will probably never be able to be looking quite as good as those games and run at a reasonable rate on the avarage computer.

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faydark.jpg

This is a picture typical of what EverQuest's trees looked like.  I'd take graphics like this over anything on the "cutting edge" if the story and music and immersion was there, as well as the wonderful friendships you make spending time playing.

If a social world is so in need of having processor-killing trees, why not just turn your computer off and go outside?

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If the graphics wouldn't been impoetant too why arengame companies working so hard on ?

The graphics can help dive into a virtual world.

 

For me its not only that but if things get stuck years behind if there is no improvement people get bored ...

Actually because RL with his amzing graphics and sounds becomes boring from time to time we go online ;-)

 

Implementing mesh was a big thing but far to late.

 

Monti

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Gadget Portal wrote:

...

By the way, I have many of those games. I run them on the highest possible settings. The pictures don't do them justice, they look better than that. We can only hope that someday SL uses the same kinds of graphics engines, same levels of anti-aliasing, and DirectX support that these games do.

And of these games, how many are free? Remember, Second Life doesn't cost a single penny to participate in.

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Because you really can't.

Many of us are not gamers and don't feel the need to have a top of the line computer just to see fancy virtual rocks and trees.  And if SL, for instance, were to suddenly require a ton of processing power and memory it would cause a lot of the lower-end users to leave, and the people are what makes SL run, your customers and people to come visit clubs and socalize.

I thought that was pretty obvious?  :smileyindifferent:

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Janelle Darkstone wrote:

If a social world is so in need of having processor-killing trees, why not just turn your computer off and go outside?

There's REAL trees outside you know?

I've SEEN them!

(Who me? Noooooooo. I'm not *that* Suella Ember. I'm a totally different one. Don't know what you're talking about!)

:smileytongue:

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Suella Ember wrote:


Janelle Darkstone wrote:

If a social world is so in need of having processor-killing trees, why not just turn your computer off and go outside?

There's REAL trees outside you know?

I've SEEN them!

(Who me? Noooooooo. I'm not *that* Suella Ember. I'm a totally different one. Don't know what you're talking about!)

:smileytongue:

I've seen 'em too. Including this one... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glochidion_ferdinandi

Now get out of here and pick some cheese!

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I think this would be nice for some people but like I think it was mentioned earlier in this thread, it wouldn't be for everyone.

SL isn't really a game per say, at least that's not how I look at it. It's more like a community and most of the people I know (or knew) on SL didn't have a high-end computer because they didn't really play games like Battlefield 3 or Sleeping Dogs.

So even if by some chance the graphics quality of SL jumped ten-fold, a lot of people would still be running at half or lower settings. And in my opinion, SL has come a long way in the quality of the user generated content, especially once Mesh was released.

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Gadget Portal wrote:

I see that excuse a lot, and it's BS. The only bit of it that holds water is that the content isn't optimized.

 

The graphics engine and options are terrible compared to most modern games, even if all the content were local. And having to download the content has no bearing on graphics. Most modern MMOs have to be downloaded too, the only difference is when you do the downloading. A good cache system would render that aspect moot.

 

Edit: that's not the post I replied to.

Here we go again.  Even if content was optimised you'd still have trouble because the computational power does not exist yet.

 

Scalability for Virtual Worlds

 

"However, the transaction layer also introduces severe scalability problems. First, as users move about the virtual environment, they send transactions to the net-VE at an extremely high rate. Even the fastest MMOs cannot handle more than about 10 frames per second [4] through their database transaction layer.

Second, the transaction layer architecture of most current net- VEs requires that significant parts of their application logic be executed on the server side. As a result, the scalability of an application is strongly related to the computational footprint of a single user. Figure 1 illustrates this observation for a sample of todays net-VEs. Collaborative software such as Wikipedia is highly scalable because user actions involve only simple computations. MMO Games with a static environment such as World of Warcraft require comparatively more computational resources, leading to a drop in scalability. Simulators, particularly military simulators such as SIMNET, are even more “real” than virtual worlds, in that users can interact with the virtual environment (e.g., destroy buildings); the result is even less scalability. Finally, user-designed virtual worlds such as Second Life allow objects to be created, modeled, and scripted by the users at run-time. This flexibility comes with high computational complexity; for example, the resulting

 scalability of Second Life is on the order of at most 25-30 users per server. If the player-to-server ratio of collaborative software were possible in a net-VE with the flexibility and degree of immersion of virtual worlds, this would allow for a user experience beyond the reach of current systems."  (my bolding and underlining)

One of the biggest reasons you can not compare MMO's like WOW to SL is because their content is STATIC, not DYNAMIC like it is in SL.  Also, as you read through the article you will find that MMO's do other things that limit user interaction that would not work in SL unless you wanted to limit Resident interactions. 

Optomised content would help a lot in SL, but it is not the end all.  There are a lot of other issues involved.

 
 
 
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SL has come a long way in the quality of the user generated content, especially once Mesh was released.

Mesh has taken  away more than it brought us. Starting with sculpties, and now mesh, we lost the ability to create cool stuff in world. You need to master some 3D graphics software and create your models offline. That's directly diametrical to SL's very principles and philosophy. I mean oldstyle prim building is still cool but the results are lacking in professionality. But it's a nice pastime.

@ Gadget Portal: you sure you even belong to SL's target group? Gamers are the last people Philip had in  mind when he came up with his virtual world. And that holds true even today. The typical SL resident wants to log on from their smartphone or tablet or equally underpowered consumer grade hardware. And most don't care if they can't even see the bad SL graphics to their full extent.

 

 

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Amethyst Jetaime wrote:

 SL content is mostly created by hobbyists who haven't a clue how to optimize their creations.

I wish LL taught remedial classes in such things. I wish they taught more than remedial classes, but, at least that. 

SL seems to be a social experiment the more I think about it. How will we fare left on our own? Like a science fiction novel in which the first explorers land on a strange planet.

I would love to know how to make the land I decorate as lag free as possible. I would love for the visuals to load as quickly as possible for first time guests. 

Of course, until someone gives me a clear answer on LL's classification of whether ball gags, harnesses, and other CLEAR BDSM sex toys are against its policy for child avs to use...I might be leaving SL completely anyway. No one has as yet replied. LL should be crystal clear and transparent on that issue, above all else. Every online community should. 

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You missed the point, Perrie. I'm talking entirely client side improvement. Things like DirectX and anti-aliasing support in the viewer, and more of the sorts of improvement they're intending on doing with the caching system.

 

Why should we limit everyone to terrible graphics support just because some people can't or won't get decent computers?

 

Let me rephrase that. Person A can run SL in ultra with ubersampling anti-aliasing and DX11 while Person B runs on medium with OpenGL, for example. No one gets excluded, and SL gets to take advantage of the ridiculous hardware that some of us have.

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Orca Flotta wrote:

SL has come a long way in the quality of the user generated content, especially once Mesh was released.

Mesh has taken  away more than it brought us. Starting with sculpties, and now mesh, we lost the ability to create cool stuff in world. You need to master some 3D graphics software and create your models offline. That's directly diametrical to SL's very principles and philosophy. I mean oldstyle prim building is still cool but the results are lacking in professionality. But it's a nice pastime.

@ Gadget Portal: you sure you even belong to SL's target group? Gamers are the last people Philip had in  mind when he came up with his virtual world. And that holds true even today. The typical SL resident wants to log on from their smartphone or tablet or equally underpowered consumer grade hardware. And most don't care if they can't even see the bad SL graphics to their full extent.

 

 

You may be on to something there, I'm probably not SL's target audience.

That said, I do use the platform. I'm a content creator, land owner, and social media user. I use all that SL offers. And, I know I'm not the only one out there with a high end, overpowered computer. I've exchanged PC building tips plenty in SL, and some people have even more powerful hardware these days than I do. My GPU is almost a full generation out of date now, and I know my CPU is two or three behind now, too.

My stance is, there ARE SL users that have these computers. Why shouldn't SL be able to take advantage of the hardware, as well as run on your mid-range laptop?

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Why do so many MMO or whatever, have to be violent, though? I don't want to kill things. I don't want to fight things. I want to make beautiful happy spaces Lol.

I do wish SL would upgrade a bit more gradually. I've never thought about changing computers for anything else but SL. And yet there are alwasy still performance problems. I don't know what the answer is, but it doesn't seem efficient.

But then the basic game is free to play as Leprekhaun said.

And to me it's both a game and a virtual world as both are entwined in SL, before anyone gets hot about the word 'game.' 

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