Realistic Places?

[Benson Gravois]

Just wondering what are some of the most realistic places you have seen on SL? And could you share some LMs? They can be anything form City to forests.A lot of the time when I grid hop I see just old SL graphics form 1o0 years ago. Thank you in advance!

[Laken Moyet]

May I suggest Aly's Fine Art & Jungle, Brand New Colony, or Orchard Estates (private residential Sims but realistic). Happy travels!

[AnnistynSL]

Wasn't there aplace with a famous sunken boat? Titanic, I am sure it looks the same as it was then, and it is a great place to visit....if it is stillthere

 

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, Benson Gravois said:

Just wondering what are some of the most realistic places you have seen on SL?

Sure, but first tell me, how do you define "realistic" in this context?

[Tari Landar]

It depends on your definition of realistic, I suppose, as Chin stated above.

There are loads of sims that are designed to replicate "reality", or rather "things/places you find in real life"-in fact, most probably fall under that umbrella. Whether or not they are well done by your specific standards, however, is subjective as all get out. Not only due to personal taste/opinion, but also personal hardware used to see/visit/whatever

. Me, personally, I don't consider the fact that some things were built pre-mesh, even pre-sculpt, to automatically disqualify them as unrealistic, or badly built, etc... But I can enjoy the whole pie versus simply a piece of it, so that might play a large role in my opinion. Take the Grand Canyon sim(s) for example...much of what one can find there may be considered "outdated" by some, but I rather enjoy the builds, the sim(s) as a whole, versus simply looking at one thing and thinking "oh, that's a regular prim/sculpt, it's outdated". 

I don't recommend checking out the destination guide often, in fact, it's a pretty rare thing for me to do, BUT, if you're not looking to hang out with other people, you can actually find more places to visit(albeit it mostly empty places) that are quite lovely builds. If exploration is your only goal here, it's a good starting off point, if only due to the fact that it has them all categorized and saves you the trouble of using search lol. 

[Dillon Levenque]

Tari, I agree with all of that including looking at the (hopelessly befuddled) Destination Guide. I do believe that's how I long ago discovered The Forgotten City. Sadly, it has gone but it was far and away the most fascinating place I've ever been. I am pretty sure it was built pre-mesh, but it was SO well done. I showed it to Maddy and she rented a house there, stayed until it closed.

My first visit:

 

[Dillon Levenque]

Buzzing the Gondola on Maddy's super duper airplane.

Edited November 5, 2017 by Dillon Levenque

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, Tari Landar said:

Me, personally, I don't consider the fact that some things were built pre-mesh, even pre-sculpt, to automatically disqualify them as unrealistic, or badly built, etc...

I would go a bit further than that actually: I've yet to see a single mesh build in SL that looked realistic the way I understand the word. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying all mesh based locations are bad, some of them are really good looking. But they tend to be in more of an exaggerated fairy tale style than realistic. Come to think of it, there is one exception, Berlin 1929, but it's really a prim build, run through Mesh Studio to reduce land impact yes, but still very much in a prim style. Elaborate mesh landscapes also tend to be rather laggy and that ruins the realism for me. I haven't been everywhere in RL of course but I'm fairly sure there aren't many places there where you have to stand and wait for minutes for the scene to render. I haven't heard of any RL locations with LoD or draw distance issues either. Have you?

This is what I think of as realism - or at least as close to realism as you can come in SL:

And yes, it's one of my own builds - this is my definition of realism after all.

It's a scene from the area around the Twisted Path in Coniston. You can find it at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Coniston/191/186/1803 and if you visit, you may notice it's all very low poly and textured with few and fairly low resolution textures. The fact that each element uses so little resources means that there is room for so much more there - there are several thousand trees there for a start. It also means it's one of the least laggy places in SL. I haven't tried it myself but with a good game copmuter, it should be farily easy to achieve a good Occulus Rift friendly fps there. (If anybody is going try, please let me know if I'm right.) And you can see for miles. No wait, you can't of course. I had to stop at the sim border on three sides and it isn't possible to set draw distance that high anyway. But if I had been able to extend the build to ten times its size and some viewer developer had icnreased max draw distance enough, you would still ahve been able to see it all with no LoD or lag issues worth speaking of.

Last but not least, there are no foreign elements in the scene, everything are details you may well expect to find in the same place in RL.

That's my definition of realism in Second Life. Others may see it different and that's fine. SL would be a boring palce if we all thought the same way.

Edited November 5, 2017 by ChinRey

[Coby Foden]

14 hours ago, ChinRey said:

This is what I think of as realism - or at least as close to realism as you can come in SL:

And yes, it's one of my own builds - this is my definition of realism after all.

It's a scene from the area around the Twisted Path in Coniston. You can find it at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Coniston/191/186/1803 and if you visit, you may notice it's all very low poly and textured with few and fairly low resolution textures.

 

I went to see it and wow, everything in sight rezzed in few seconds, pretty amazing.

Going into some busy ballroom is totally different thing, you have to wait "for ages" (even some ten minutes) before everything is rezzed.

[Coby Foden]

19 hours ago, AnnistynSL said:

Wasn't there aplace with a famous sunken boat? Titanic, I am sure it looks the same as it was then, and it is a great place to visit....if it is stillthere

 

It's still in SL. However it is a bit shortened version of the real thing. The real one was 261 meters long.
The one in SL is few meters shorter than full region length, which is 256 meters.
Anyway it's worth a visit. I saw that in the ship ballroom there were many people dancing.

The ship is here:
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Desolate/186/171/30

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, Coby Foden said:

I went to see it and wow, everything in sight rezzed in few seconds, pretty amazing.

That's good to hear. My viewer has much of the content there cached of course so I've never been quite sure how fast it loaded for others.

Since this thread is about realism, how about VR headsets? Would they have added to the realism? Linden Lab gave up on that for SL because they couldn't get the frame rate high enough and people seem to think that was because the software can't handle it. Nothing could be more wrong, it's all about poorly optimized content. The Twisted Path isn't actually a particularly well optimized scene. It's essentially a quick and dirty assembly of things I happened to have i my inventory and my focus was far more on land impact and LoD than on lag. I can do much better than this and so can many other 3D modellers. Even a few of the builders already active in SL could manage to optimize well enough if they had some reason to do so. Second Life VR was killed by Second Life content creators, that's the fact.

I suppose it's too late to do anything about it now and maybe it's just as well. More worrying is that there seems to be even less to encourage Sansar cotnent creators to optimize for speed. It seems to me the general attitude there is that you can load the experience with anything you fancy and let Umbra take care of the excess. Well, Umbra is good but it's not that good I think.

Edited November 5, 2017 by ChinRey

[animats]

On 11/5/2017 at 10:44 AM, ChinRey said:

Linden Lab gave up on that for SL because they couldn't get the frame rate high enough and people seem to think that was because the software can't handle it.

Frame rate is a client side issue. It depends on client CPU and GPU power, and how much geometry has to be rendered. The client should be reducing level of detail when necessary. It does, but not very well.

SL doesn't seem to be very good at reducing level of detail. Probably because game LOD technology is much better now than it was 15 years ago, and SL hasn't kept up. A big push to modernize SL's LOD technology on both the client and server side would make SL far more usable.

One way to do this would be to have the server generate a textured low-resolution elevation map of each sim. Maybe 1 meter resolution. Also generate a version with maybe 4 meter resolution. Those would be sent over early in the update stream, and that would be what you saw of other sims until the prims were delivered over the network. No more looking at water where there's really land. Reasonably good looking when flying. Not too hard to retrofit.

Second level fix - compute bounding boxes around buildings, and ship the outside over the net before the inside, unless the avatar is very close. This would help with buildings appearing from the inside out, which looks silly.

(Won't help oversize "sky boxes". They'll render slowly. Might help to discourage sky boxes.)

[animats]

New Babbage is very well built. They have a building code, and the buildings from different people match well.

They also have an annual Oiling Festival, where everyone tries to clean up outstanding problems.

[Bree Giffen]

There is this sim listed in the destinations tab right now that has a really realistic looking abandoned town/japanese street style. Quite picturesque. 

[Klytyna]

1 hour ago, animats said:

Second level fix - compute bounding boxes around buildings, and ship the outside over the net before the inside, unless the avatar is very close. This would help with buildings appearing from the inside out, which looks silly.

The reason buildings tend to rez from the inside out as you approach them iusn't because of bounding boxes...

It's because back around 2014 some LL Fubar specialist came up with a 'hella-kewl' idea, to alter the server code so that 'large architectual prims' over 10m on a side, would render upto 32m BEYOND your viewers "official" draw distance...

So as you approach a prim building... the large floor and roof prims rez, but the smaller prims that make up the wall sections between and around the windows/doors etc., wont rez till you are 32 m closer.

Mr Fubar Linden ACTUALLY thought this would make SL look better, unfortunately when it was first rolled out on the RC channels, the revised rendering priority for the servers telling your client about what prims were visible meant that whle you could clearly see the insides of a building outside your draw distance on the next sim... You couldnt see the floor you were standing on, or about half the prims in your hair/skirt/boots.

 

[Aislin Ceawlin]

I used to love the Trinity College build, I imagine it's still there.

[Aethelwine]

I love Sailor's Cove, a sort of Cornish fishing\tourist village with quaint little shops along the waterfront. One of the residential sailing sims attached to the Blake Sea area so it fits in to its context one of a number of places around there that are great place to sail too and from.

[SAULGOODiE]

On 11/19/2017 at 11:29 PM, Aethelwine said:

I love Sailor's Cove, a sort of Cornish fishing\tourist village with quaint little shops along the waterfront. One of the residential sailing sims attached to the Blake Sea area so it fits in to its context one of a number of places around there that are great place to sail too and from.

I can vouch for Sailor's Cove, it's a very nice little bay area with quite the realistic feeling. Many marinas near Blake Sea are quite bloated, but the little area of Sailors Cove is surprisingly natural. Used to rent a dock there, but now I just stop by for a stroll and a beer on occasion