Two Tri Trick?

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

I agree, and unfortunately those limits are nowhere near what they should be for a good overall SL experience.

Now, that raises an interesting question, and one we haven't discussed nearly enough. Why do we want "better graphics"?

I'm sure many - not all but probably most - users will agree that it ultimately is to make SL look and feel more "real". It may be only a paper moon saililng over a cardboard sea but we want to believe in it, we want to immerse ourselves into it.

There are several important immersion factors. For a 3D environment some of them are:

• Timing. Only a few seconds to wait for things to load and render and we get distracted.
• Glitches. Well, obviously.
• User interface. Every millisecond we spend operating the menus and buttons is a millisecond spent distancing ourselves from the scene.
• Point of view. The closer we get to the avatar, the easier it is to feel you're a part of the world, not just a wacther in the sky.
• Soundtrack. Can be very effective when used intelligently.
• Context. Lack of proportions, stylistic inconsistencies, eyesores, collapsed LoD models, jellybeaned avatars, Those are all rocks shattering the mirror of immersion.
• Smooth visuals. short draw distance, objects flickering in and out of view or shape...

I suppose I could add more ot the list but it's late night where I live right now.

These are all factors that are far more important to immersion than detailed graphics. SL scores very low on them all and many of them are very much negatively affected by the chase for "better graphics".

[animats]

On 9/28/2018 at 2:54 AM, ChinRey said:

The fourth reason is the one I'm not sure of but as far as I know, SL doesn't have consolidated draw calls. It certainly doesn't have it across linksets, which is abd enough for the texture atlas concept, but I don't believe it even consolidates on object level, each face one ach mesh is a separate draw call even if the texture is the same.

Too many draw calls seems to be a major cause of low frame rates when the main thread in the viewer hits 100% of one CPU. The viewer has strategies built in for dealing with texture overload, but nothing for too many draw calls.

The key to speeding up SL is finding some way to reduce the work needed to render distant objects.

Potentially, there are many things that could be done for the case where the avatar isn't moving too much and the distant objects are mostly static. I've tried some prebuilt impostor tests to see if that might help. Draw load goes down, texture load goes up. The viewer could render sections of the background once and turn them into static pictures. Multiple static objects could be baked into one mesh and texture, and displayed with one draw call. If you didn't move too much, the frame rate would gradually climb as a background task did all this work. Moving too much would invalidate all this baking, of course.

A simple trick that might help - give all un-colored objects a temporary color which is just the average of its textures. The "1x1" texture, if you will. No more grey during loading. Vegetation would come in greenish, dirt brownish, asphalt blackish, buildings in roughly the right color. As the texture data loaded, objects would return to their proper look. One of the easier fixes that could make SL look better.

 

[Macrocosm Draegonne]

Yeah SL under the hood seems all amazingly complex and actually pretty damn good already, nothing else on Earth has ever had to contend with such a paradigm of content, its brilliant what they've been able to do, seriously.

I would wager the lighting/shadows system getting a rework would do far more than increased texture resolution could. Or more peppy physics, those are two huge immersive qualities.  Either way texture size is not a high priority for many reasons (for now), but Atlases could be cool, maybe if only limited to SIM owner, or other smart limits & controls.

I was somewhat recently listening to a Linden/creator meeting and he was discussing something similar to what @Animats mentioned above, a box around the user, reducing draw calls and such.  Its difficult to remember exactly what he said, though it was something they were working on already, along with some other sweet performance updates.

I like the idea of the object color thing Animats mentioned, it would certainly reduce the visual disruption as textures load.  If we could do something about hiding avatar mesh thats floating before loading its attachment point. that'd be fantastic too.

Now that I've got a SIM (waiting on the transfer now) I will really have to work my ass off and apply all this helpful info ive found here in the forums.  I want optimization to be a primary focus, equal to visuals of course.  I will keep low spec systems in mind and not have everything too broken and ugly for them, but there are limits to that of course.