Is Sansar Just A More Modern IMVU?

[ChinRey]

I think this branch of the thread has grown so long it's time for a summary.

It started with me mentioning that although the Grand Hall featured in the first Sansar video was made by a professional 3D modeller, the version of it that he uploaded to Second Life is not in any way a professional work. I blamed that on a system discouraging builders to strive for quality and quoted another (presumably) professional who had clearly admitted that his SL uploads was left-handed work and explained that making quality mesh for Second Life simply wasn't worth the effort.

Pussycat had a more idealistic view, saying that everybody should always try to strive for the best possible result regardless. I agree with her of course. But on the other hand, if you are trying to make a living from your mesh skills and SL is just a marginal part of your income and the time and effort you spend improving the quality of your SL uploads arenn't going to increase neither the number or sales or the price you can charge, well you just can't afford to spend that time and effort, you have to do it the quick and dirty way.

This is not about the people who may not be top notch professionals but still try to do their best, it's about the people who can do better but choose not to.

There are some builders who can't bring themselves to make such compromises, they do their best and somehow still manage to make a decent income from SL. And there are even more merchants who take a financial risk, commissioning quality works from external makers and uploading them to SL. These people really deserve our admiration. But the makers who decide to take the easy way out, they're just doing what LL tells them to do and I still don't think we can blame them for that.

[Vivienne Schell]

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ChinRey wrote:

 

It started with me mentioning that although the Grand Hall featured in the first Sansar video was made by a professional 3D modeller...

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Well, fact is that a "professional 3D modeller" who creates truly outstanding things on a desktop and within a local environment/network will fail miserably with creating a working model for an online multiplayer environment without basic skills in online, multiplayer environments.  It´s comparable with trying to fit a  2017 Ferrari Formula 1 engine into a 1950´s Fiat 500. It can be done, but only by specialists and by losing about 80 percent of the hp.

I wonder how LL will manage to give these goggles the necessary minimum of constant 90 fps within an environment which obviously is targeted at hobbyist creators. Hobbyists with a superhighend computer and flashlight routers, ahem. How will they manage to enable every and each shader OpenGL and DirectX has to offer for a mainstream audience which runs simple mainstream computers on mainstream bandwidth?

I still believe that someone planted a big bug into the brains of the decisive LL board members back in 2012/2013 and they fell for it. And then decided to drop the flourishing niche they had for that bug which looked like a shiny diamond to them at this time. And now the bug has grown and got bigger and more ugly and less diamond-like while  a bunch of despaired employees tries to do some damage control - while release gets delayed and delayed and delayed ...

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

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Vivienne Schell wrote:

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ChinRey wrote:

 

It started with me mentioning that although the Grand Hall featured in the first Sansar video was made by a professional 3D modeller...

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Well, fact is that a "professional 3D modeller" who creates truly outstanding things on a desktop and within a local environment/network will fail miserably with creating a working model for an online multiplayer environment without basic skills in online, multiplayer environments.  It´s comparable with trying to fit a  2017 Ferrari Formula 1 engine into a 1950´s Fiat 500. It can be done, but only by specialists and by losing about 80 percent of the hp.

I wonder how LL will manage to give these goggles the necessary minimum of constant 90 fps within an environment which obviously is targeted at hobbyist creators. Hobbyists with a superhighend computer and flashlight routers, ahem. How will they manage to enable every and each shader OpenGL and DirectX has to offer for a mainstream audience which runs simple mainstream computers on

mainstream bandwidth?

I still believe that someone planted a big bug into the brains of the decisive LL board members back in 2012/2013 and they fell for it. And then decided to drop the flourishing niche they had for that bug which looked like a shiny diamond to them at this time. And now the bug has grown and got bigger and more ugly and less diamond-like while  a bunch of despaired employees tries to do some damage control - while release gets delayed and delayed and delayed ...

 

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Please explain to us what bandwidth has to do with rendering speed.

[ChinRey]

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Theresa Tennyson wrote:

Please explain to us what bandwidth has to do with rendering speed.

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If I understood Vivenne right, she was talking writing about mainstream computers and then added the bandwidth factor more as an afterthought.

But it is actually relevant in two different ways. Obviously the client device can't render an asset before it has been downloaded. That delay is not strictly speaking render lag but it is very often perceived as such.

Perhaps even more important, one solution to render lag is the SlGo way, feeding the client a prerendered video stream. Once you do it that way, bandwidth is suddenly very important and Ebbe Altberg has mentioned at least once that they are working on such a solution for Sansar.

[ChinRey]

I was writing a rather long and elaborate reply but then I had better thoughts and decided not to post it. There wasn't much there that haven't been said several times already.

Just one comment though:

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Vivienne Schell wrote:

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while  a bunch of despaired employees tries to do some damage control - while release gets delayed and delayed and delayed ...

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It's Kumbel's three t's:

Things Take Time

Easy to forget when the project is new and you're full of enthusiasm but it hits you sooner or later. I can only speak for myself but I would rather have a delayed release than a premature one.

[Theresa Tennyson]

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ChinRey wrote:

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Theresa Tennyson wrote:

Please explain to us what bandwidth has to do with rendering speed.

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If I understood Vivenne right, she was

talking

writing about mainstream computers and then added the bandwidth factor more as an afterthought.

But it is actually relevant in two different ways. Obviously the client device can't render an asset before it has been downloaded. That delay is not strictly speaking render lag but it is very often perceived as such.

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That's why Sansar is being built with "baked" regions with their contents in an orderly package instead of relying on the process of the ad-hoc snatching of hundreds of assets from a wide variety of locations which Second Life has to use because of how it was designed.

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ChinRey wrote:

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Perhaps even more important, one solution to render lag is the SlGo way, feeding the client a prerendered video stream. Once you do it that way, bandwidth is suddenly very important and Ebbe Altberg has mentioned at least once that they are working on such a solution for Sansar.

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Also, once you do that the view becomes essentially the same as a streaming movie, which people routinely watch on their telephones today.

[ChinRey]

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Theresa Tennyson wrote:

Also, once you do that the view becomes essentially the same as a streaming movie, which people routinely watch on their telephones today.

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Yes and no.

Did you ever try SlGo? It was a brilliant idea and it did indeed offer anybody fast rendering (except for the really laggy palces in SL) and amazing draw distance. But the image was low resolution and really grainy. More than good enough for a low res mobile phone screen but not something you really want to see on a larger screen and definitely not in your VR goggles.

Without going into details, there are several reasons why streaming prerendered games and "games" require high resolution than a ready made non-interactive video and there's also the issuse of frame rate.

Take a look at a high quality YouTube video in full screen. Notice how grainy it is. Click on the pause button and see how grainy it really is. Next, find a recording of a computer game on YouTube. Do you see how much more noticeable the graininess is in digtally generated images than in RL footage?

YouTube uses VP9 compression and the frame rate is usually 24 (although 30 is also used these days). To create a prerendered video stream that really does Sansar justice on a computer or tablet screen, we need at least four times the image resolution and preferaby a little bit higher frame rate. To view it in VR goggles, we need at least four times the resolution and 3-4 times the frame rate.

[Vivienne Schell]

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Theresa Tennyson wrote:

That's why Sansar is being built with "baked" regions with their contents in an orderly package instead of relying on the process of the ad-hoc snatching of hundreds of assets from a wide variety of locations which Second Life has to use because of how it was designed

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The problem you refer to is not rerlated to rendering, but to database accessibility and server infrastructure, backbone and whatever,  but certainly not to rendering.

Might be that Sansar has a different and more efficient database structure as Second Life has. Which might help a more speedy download and more direct data access. Nevertheless, each asset the client displays must get downloaded and processed, regardless where it is located and how the database structure looks like and however efficient the client software is. The impact of such an improvement on the rendering process is zero.

Still, as soon as a mobile avatar from a different region (or, as LL calls it: different "experience") whicjh is not "baked" (better would be expression "pre-stored")  enters your tidy, romantic scenerery of "orderly packaged "baked" content" won´t work anymore, anyway. Only if users would be forced to slip into pre-defined, not customizable, "experience"-bound avatars which will differ from "experience" to "experience".

And even then you would need a high end gamer PC to experience the experience, ya kno. Hardware minimum requirements will certainly not be lowered but skyrocked in comparison to Second Life, concluding from what I saw of this nicely shaded but totally overrated piece of software so far. You will not even be able to log into it with a laptop.

Edit: Well, maybe you will be able to log in with a laptop or mainstream desktop somehow, but then it will look like Second Life  without your inventory.