Paul Hexem Posted July 31, 2018 Author Share Posted July 31, 2018 1 minute ago, AmandaKeen said: Real Life is an unmoderated game designed by a madman. Truth. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lucagrabacr Posted July 31, 2018 Share Posted July 31, 2018 4 minutes ago, Gadget Portal said: In SL I can attach a HUD to emulate SE's survival mode. That makes them both games, by that definition. The real fun in this debate though? SL server: 512 meters with build limits well below what the server can handle. SE server: 987,345,946,560 meters (yes, that's the real number, 6.6au) with no build limit until you crash the server. And for a fraction of the cost. Such HUD would be a creation of the users and not as how it was conceived by the creators. SL currently has around 24 thousand regions or simulators, most of which are filled by things created and owned by the users. Which can be expanded by adding more. An SE world has tons of empty spaces with limited amount of blocks. It also gets very laggy once you have many objects in the world, I know because I used to own a dedicated SE server. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Hexem Posted July 31, 2018 Author Share Posted July 31, 2018 1 minute ago, lucagrabacr said: Such HUD would be a creation of the users and not as how it was conceived by the creators. SL currently has around 24 thousand regions or simulators, most of which are filled by things created and owned by the users. Which can be expanded by adding more. An SE world has tons of empty spaces with limited amount of blocks. It also gets very laggy once you have many objects in the world, I know because I used to own a dedicated SE server. I'm fairly certain that SL was originally conceived as a game by LL. I even recall seeing terraforming done via projectile weapons. Both SL and SE get laggy when you start filling the servers, yes. Just another thing they have in common. I do find it interesting that SL has thousands of small servers, but SE has far less servers that are millions of times larger. Which is, again, what the point of this debate morphed into, as noted in the first few posts. Imagine if LL had focused on quality over quantity, the sims we could have? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lucagrabacr Posted July 31, 2018 Share Posted July 31, 2018 1 minute ago, Gadget Portal said: I'm fairly certain that SL was originally conceived as a game by LL. I even recall seeing terraforming done via projectile weapons. Both SL and SE get laggy when you start filling the servers, yes. Just another thing they have in common. I do find it interesting that SL has thousands of small servers, but SE has far less servers that are millions of times larger. Which is, again, what the point of this debate morphed into, as noted in the first few posts. Imagine if LL had focused on quality over quantity, the sims we could have? Yes, I believe it was Lindenworld which is the precursor of SL. I think a sim can be more powerful if they buff up the hardware, but I'm not sure by how much because I lack the technical knowledge in the matter. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
animats Posted July 31, 2018 Share Posted July 31, 2018 7 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said: OTOH .. I would love it if gaming in SL was possible, we're so close .. but LL senior staff really need to spend a few days playing WoW and then come back to SL with fresh eyes. We need a few architectural changes, such as authoritative client side physics and an attitude shift that SL can be brought forward, and not just tweaked and maintained. Technically, SL has to solve much the same problems as an MMO that allows building. Many MMOs allow building, although seldom with the generality of SL. Mostly, you can buy and place approved objects from some store. Of course, that's effectively how SL works for most users. Modern MMOs, though, have higher frame rates and much less lag, even with more avatars in the same area. SL's technology is sluggish. SL's performance problems are probably fixable. Not easily or cheaply, but possible. Here are some ways to do that: Level of detail. We all know this is a problem. Fixing it would be a big job, but here's an approach. Generate impostors for low level of detail for not only objects, but parcels and entire sims. Distant sims should be represented by something like a 256x256 height map and texture. Now you can see for kilometers. No more fake water in the distance. Parcels get their own low-rez impostors, too, so at 200m, you're probably looking at a parcel impostor. All these imposters are generated by a background process that trails the actual world, like the task which updates the pathfinding mesh a minute or so behind changes. And all this would run servers in the cloud separate from the sim servers. Don't expect creators to deal with this. It has to be automated. Which it now is in most game development. It used to be a manual job, but there's been progress. More server side concurrency. The servers still seem to be single thread. Script execution, the big variable load, needs to get off the main thread so more CPUs can be applied to the problem. Concurrent physics (a Havok option) would be nice but may not be necessary. When necessary, it should be possible to spin up a sim on some giant AWS server. Their max server is now 112 CPUs and a terabyte of RAM. Rents for $4 an hour. That could handle Fashion Week or a big concert. More internal fault logging and bug fixing. Nobody should ever have to tell LL a sim is down. They should know already. And my pet bug, region crossing failures, needs to be fixed. An AAA MMMO with a bug like that would be laughed out of business. This thing should Just Work. Viewer automation. The viewer should automatically be managing how much detail is shown on screen to keep the frame rate up. This takes resources. LL should move resources from Sansar (50 concurrent users) to SL (50,000 concurrent users). It's now pretty clear that headset VR virtual worlds are a very small niche. Sansar, HF, SineSpace, VRChat, Facebook Spaces - none have taken off. It's now safe for LL management to admit Sansar is a dud, because none of the competitors are seeing success. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Monti Messmer Posted July 31, 2018 Share Posted July 31, 2018 Technically SL is a game but it is not designed to work as a game. All "game modes" are added later on, falling damage, hit damage .... and nothing works in a real MMO. If MMO's allow content adding then this content is uploaded and pre-rendered. In SL, before mesh that happened often, people build inside SL while you where watching things grow. Game or not ? SL is what you make of it, there is no fixed definition. It started as a game but developers never had a complete game-mode in mind. For me it´s not a game because all the "games" added by users are just rubbish because of the SL technology. Race games, Ego-shooter ... if i want to play these games there are hundreds even free that can do this better. Monti 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Qie Niangao Posted July 31, 2018 Share Posted July 31, 2018 (edited) 5 hours ago, Penny Patton said: 5 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said: Simple example : It is impossible to show different things to different avatars Totally agree and I'll even give an example that's more oriented towards a social experience. Wouldn't it be great to be able to go into a sim, be it a club, a roleplaying sim, or even your very own home, and press a button to momentarily highlight all of the interactive objects? As a sim owner maybe you'd want to make it so not all scripted objects appear as interactive so you might want the ability to flag specific items to be highlighted by this feature so people don't try to sit on the bush that is emitting ambient garden sounds. It's a simple thing but it would make this one universal element of SL so much more intuitive. At the same time, you don't want all of the interactive items lighting up every time someone in the room wants to see what they can sit on. Only the person looking for it should see the effect. Analogous things are possible using HUDs that employ some overlay magic that Nexii Malthus developed back in the day. IIRC it can have trouble when the viewer scales the UI, but handles cam zoom, etc., as well as possible for our sim-side-only scripts. Coincidentally, this work resurfaced recently in the scripting group. On the other hand, the specific examples here are for object attributes exposed only to viewers, and that's a problem with the Lab's development approach that continues today. (A current example: EEP is being released with a whole elaborate viewer control interface before there's any script API at all, instead of releasing the API and letting scripters build the UI -- which approach would admittedly benefit from richer scripted UI features that we all need anyway.) But re: showing different things to different avatars: Scripted Experience-based EEP will be one example of this, so one visitor can be travelling through an area at night while another sees it at midday, or cloudy vs sunny, etc. That will allow different avatars to simultaneously role-play different co-located stages of a narrative for which different environmental conditions are appropriate. (Of course, that would make problematic "talking about the weather" -- so that's a consideration in social settings.) With PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_LIST scripts can display content specific to the avatar. For example, I used this (way back in SL6B) to display some wiki pages translated into the language the avatar's viewer was using (known via llGetAgentLanguage()). In a sense, this makes a "feature" of the limitation that parcel streams can't be precisely synchronized across viewers (abundantly evident to any scripter who's tried to make PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_TIME do anything predictable). I don't have anything useful to add to the "video game" debate. I don't like video games, I don't play video games, and frankly, video game features (such as NPCs) in SL give me the heebie jeebies. Edited July 31, 2018 by Qie Niangao 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Deakins Posted July 31, 2018 Share Posted July 31, 2018 (edited) 11 hours ago, Gadget Portal said: By almost all definitions of the technology, SL is a video game. "almost"? The definition of a phrase is decided by the words in the phrase, not technology. So you need to examine the 2 words in 'video game', especially the word 'game' Edited July 31, 2018 by Phil Deakins 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Hexem Posted July 31, 2018 Author Share Posted July 31, 2018 1 hour ago, Phil Deakins said: "almost"? The definition of a phrase is decided by the words in the phrase, not technology. So you need to examine the 2 words in 'video game', especially the word 'game' Snoogans. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fionalein Posted July 31, 2018 Share Posted July 31, 2018 (edited) 1 hour ago, Phil Deakins said: "almost"? The definition of a phrase is decided by the words in the phrase, not technology. So you need to examine the 2 words in 'video game', especially the word 'game' Yeah not almost, "totally" All the reasons brought forth so far in all the threads across the interwebs would lead to the following games not being considered "games" either: railroad modelling, Dungeons and Dragons, Lego, hell even Barbie and dolls in general would be no games anymore, becuase our beloved fashion doll never had a goal, you can do whatever you want and even recreate a virtual existance and economy if you find enough Barbie fans to share your vision... Phil say what you want, do a backflip and turn green- doesn't change it - SL is nothing more but a better game of dress up dolls (but with model railroading and dungeon crawls with creepy basement trolls of Gor on top, YAY!) Apparently we have cultural differences on what we call a "game". To me a game is anything played with toys, toys can be a props, a ruleset, or in the case of SL- software. 5 hours ago, Gadget Portal said: SL has far more rules and limitations than Space Engineers, and that's just regarding prims, physics, and simulator size. you Sir, obviously never played Kerball Space Program... Edited July 31, 2018 by Fionalein 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Theresa Tennyson Posted July 31, 2018 Share Posted July 31, 2018 1 hour ago, Phil Deakins said: "almost"? The definition of a phrase is decided by the words in the phrase, not technology. So you need to examine the 2 words in 'video game', especially the word 'game' What authority does a church deacon (or his servant) who is fond of horses have to make that statement? https://www.etymonline.com/word/Philip http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Deakin 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Hexem Posted July 31, 2018 Author Share Posted July 31, 2018 1 hour ago, animats said: Technically, SL has to solve much the same problems as an MMO that allows building. Many MMOs allow building, although seldom with the generality of SL. Mostly, you can buy and place approved objects from some store. Of course, that's effectively how SL works for most users. Modern MMOs, though, have higher frame rates and much less lag, even with more avatars in the same area. SL's technology is sluggish. SL's performance problems are probably fixable. Not easily or cheaply, but possible. Here are some ways to do that: Level of detail. We all know this is a problem. Fixing it would be a big job, but here's an approach. Generate impostors for low level of detail for not only objects, but parcels and entire sims. Distant sims should be represented by something like a 256x256 height map and texture. Now you can see for kilometers. No more fake water in the distance. Parcels get their own low-rez impostors, too, so at 200m, you're probably looking at a parcel impostor. All these imposters are generated by a background process that trails the actual world, like the task which updates the pathfinding mesh a minute or so behind changes. And all this would run servers in the cloud separate from the sim servers. Don't expect creators to deal with this. It has to be automated. Which it now is in most game development. It used to be a manual job, but there's been progress. More server side concurrency. The servers still seem to be single thread. Script execution, the big variable load, needs to get off the main thread so more CPUs can be applied to the problem. Concurrent physics (a Havok option) would be nice but may not be necessary. When necessary, it should be possible to spin up a sim on some giant AWS server. Their max server is now 112 CPUs and a terabyte of RAM. Rents for $4 an hour. That could handle Fashion Week or a big concert. More internal fault logging and bug fixing. Nobody should ever have to tell LL a sim is down. They should know already. And my pet bug, region crossing failures, needs to be fixed. An AAA MMMO with a bug like that would be laughed out of business. This thing should Just Work. Viewer automation. The viewer should automatically be managing how much detail is shown on screen to keep the frame rate up. This takes resources. LL should move resources from Sansar (50 concurrent users) to SL (50,000 concurrent users). It's now pretty clear that headset VR virtual worlds are a very small niche. Sansar, HF, SineSpace, VRChat, Facebook Spaces - none have taken off. It's now safe for LL management to admit Sansar is a dud, because none of the competitors are seeing success. Lots of the stuff LL does with SL would get most any other AAA MMO laughed out of business. It's shocking how much we tolerate with the "because SL" excuse. 5 minutes ago, Fionalein said: you Sir, obviously never played Kerball Space Program... It's on my wishlist. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phorumities Posted July 31, 2018 Share Posted July 31, 2018 I don't cry when I play a game and lose. A game doesn't rip my heart out and hand it to me and say here deal with it. So no, Second Life is in no way shape or form a game to me. To others maybe, but not me. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fionalein Posted July 31, 2018 Share Posted July 31, 2018 (edited) 55 minutes ago, Phorumities said: I don't cry when I play a game and lose. A game doesn't rip my heart out and hand it to me and say here deal with it. So no, Second Life is in no way shape or form a game to me. To others maybe, but not me. What kind of argument is this? It can be reapplied to any game not being a game to someone... Logics, some have them.... Edited July 31, 2018 by Fionalein 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Theresa Tennyson Posted July 31, 2018 Share Posted July 31, 2018 4 minutes ago, Phorumities said: I don't cry when I play a game and lose. A game doesn't rip my heart out and hand it to me and say here deal with it. So no, Second Life is in no way shape or form a game to me. To others maybe, but not me. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2045856/Big-boys-College-football-players-shed-tears-higher-self-esteem-study-shows.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Love Zhaoying Posted July 31, 2018 Share Posted July 31, 2018 Trolls got posts! 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Deakins Posted July 31, 2018 Share Posted July 31, 2018 (edited) 1 hour ago, Theresa Tennyson said: What authority does a church deacon (or his servant) who is fond of horses have to make that statement? https://www.etymonline.com/word/Philip http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Deakin Ah, but my name is Deakins, not Deakin. Maybe it became the family name because generations of the family were deakins Horses are nice Edited July 31, 2018 by Phil Deakins Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Talligurl Posted July 31, 2018 Share Posted July 31, 2018 Real life is a game. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Callum Meriman Posted July 31, 2018 Share Posted July 31, 2018 19 minutes ago, Talligurl said: Real life is a game. I tried saying "XYZZY" and "nothing happens". 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marth Coberts Posted July 31, 2018 Share Posted July 31, 2018 5 hours ago, AmandaKeen said: Real Life is an unmoderated game designed by a madman. The graphics, physics engine, and sound design are all 10/10s, buuuttt.... The gameplay sucks, the controls are confusing, tutorial lasts WAY too long, no PVP whatsoever, resources are difficult to grind, and everyone's arguing whether or not there's an Admin. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Callum Meriman Posted July 31, 2018 Share Posted July 31, 2018 3 minutes ago, Marth Coberts said: ...no PVP whatsoever... Second Amendment, I believe. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Hexem Posted July 31, 2018 Author Share Posted July 31, 2018 13 minutes ago, Callum Meriman said: Second Amendment, I believe. No, that just opens up access to the PvP cash shop. For actual PvP you need to go to one of the PvP arenas, like Somalia or Iraq. Or Chicago. 3 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fionalein Posted July 31, 2018 Share Posted July 31, 2018 16 minutes ago, Callum Meriman said: Second Amendment, I believe. that's a funny one - it proofed useless - you can drop it with next revision process 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ceka Cianci Posted July 31, 2018 Share Posted July 31, 2018 It wouldn't be a video game even if it's a game..we're not playing on consoles here.. It would be considered a computer game.. See,I can get technical.. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phorumities Posted July 31, 2018 Share Posted July 31, 2018 2 hours ago, Fionalein said: What kind of argument is this? It can be reapplied to any game not being a game to someone... Logics, some have them.... An either or proposition was made. I was offering my personal opinion. I apologize if what I based my opinion on did meet your criterion as acceptable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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