Will Secondlife be able to provide what we need ?

[EmpressLuna Starchild]

I have been an active member of SL for way too long over 13 years of my life and it has been an amazing ride LL has made some improvements to improve are experience but the improvements are coming so slowly and I fear the cost to bring SL to the point it needs to be at is way too costly to even consider...

Normally when a games engine gets too old you stop supporting it and make a new game to replace it witch tends to be the cheaper rout but with SL you cant do this :(

I just dream of the Day Secondlife takes on a hole new life but the real question ?is it even possible!!!?  

I ask again is it even possible for SL to upgrade to unreal engine 5?

[Arielle Popstar]

I would prefer to see more features that are doable now than another engine. Inworld puppeteering, Mobile viewer, VR, enhanced inworld building options, texture manipulation/modification, to name a few.

[Drakonadrgora Darkfold]

14 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I would prefer to see more features that are doable now than another engine. Inworld puppeteering, Mobile viewer, VR, enhanced inworld building options, texture manipulation/modification, to name a few.

Well with a newer engine you could do some of those things. More modern game engines support a lot of that. It might not really be feasible to add a lot of that to the current engine being used.

 

[Evah Baxton]

20 minutes ago, Tresia Beck said:

I ask again is it even possible for SL to upgrade to unreal engine 5?

Anything is possible.

Build the perfect scene in the engine of your choice.

Build a car with perfect physics that can drive for "miles". Invite your friends in and have races without any lag. Perfect scenery, beautiful skies, rich forests with branches swaying in the wind and bunnies hopping around in the undergrowth.

I guarantee I can create a single gray cube hidden in a tree trunk that makes it all suddenly run like garbage.

LL does a great job (from my outside perspective) at policing user creations, considering the variables.

Creative standardization works at a corporation where you are paid to make standardized creations.

It just doesn't work the same in a place where you get paid to create a platform where people expect to be able to make whatever they want.

My point, you'd have to impose rules on the people before you could move to a new engine.

[Drakonadrgora Darkfold]

I dont really see that ever happening. because if it was changed too much people would complain about having to learn new things and all the objects that would have to ever be updated to support the new engine.

they would have to make a completely separate new world and then slowly and expensively move all the old objects over to it or else a lot of current players would not want to migrate over to it similar to what happened to the other project they tried and how it failed.

no one would want to start completely over fresh again and that is almost what would have to happen.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

you will not get the real real vr support,  you have to maintain 90fps to keep people from getting sick.   even with a killer game rig, to get 90fps constant, there can be no shinies, those have to be turned off.

[Arielle Popstar]

28 minutes ago, Drakonadrgora Darkfold said:

Well with a newer engine you could do some of those things. More modern game engines support a lot of that. It might not really be feasible to add a lot of that to the current engine being used.

 

But some of the newer engines or even older ones, never mention anything about inworld building tools. Usually require either Unity or Maya or some other high end creation tools to be done outside of the world.

[Drakonadrgora Darkfold]

4 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

But some of the newer engines or even older ones, never mention anything about inworld building tools. Usually require either Unity or Maya or some other high end creation tools to be done outside of the world.

You can also use free tools like Blender to do a lot of things that unity or maya does.

[Chic Aeon]

They tried what you are suggesting (at the OP obviously). It was called Sansar. In many areas it outdid Second Life by miles. 

 

And you know what?  It didn't work. Why? Because the PEOPLE LIKE IT HERE.   Personally I have no needs that aren't fulfilled. 

NEWER and UP TO DATE isn't necessarily better. 

[EmpressLuna Starchild]

well I was reading some forms claiming that if SL dose not find a way to upgrade the cost of running the older engine will over time make SL non profitable ... with I dont know what to believe but ontop of that the newer generation of mesh creators have no interest in SL because of how far behind it is 

[Mollymews]

17 minutes ago, Tresia Beck said:

well I was reading some forms claiming that if SL dose not find a way to upgrade the cost of running the older engine will over time make SL non profitable ... with I dont know what to believe but ontop of that the newer generation of mesh creators have no interest in SL because of how far behind it is 

while is interesting to consider what the future, any future, might be (something I do often myself) I think  hat is best to dream/wonder/consider the future and live in the present. The present meaning in this case, SL as it is, and make the best of it as it is and for what it is

sometimes we can overly-project what the future might be and end up not enjoying the present as much as we could otherwise

living in the future.  Lets go out for dinner.  While eating the starter: What shall I have for main? Hope my main will be nice. When eating the main, start thinking about dessert. Eating dessert: Hope the heater works in the car on the way home because seems like is cold outside

[FairreLilette]

49 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

They tried what you are suggesting (at the OP obviously). It was called Sansar. In many areas it outdid Second Life by miles. 

 

And you know what?  It didn't work. Why? Because the PEOPLE LIKE IT HERE.   Personally I have no needs that aren't fulfilled. 

NEWER and UP TO DATE isn't necessarily better. 

Yeah, basically this.  Plus I'm not going to put a thing on my head and block my view.  What if an intruder came into my home?  I cannot risk such a thing.  Plus, I've heard those head things hurt your neck and cause sea sickness and I am very prone to sea sickness.  So, Sansar or VR for me, no.  Plus, about 9 maps to upload for some things...that would cost a fortune in upload feeds.  If people begin to use 24 megapixel cameras with the details already baked into the photograph, it might be worth building such a place as it would be cost efficient.  Nine maps, forget about it.  It's amazing what a 24-megapixel camera can capture.  Then you just meld the photo onto an AO.  

So, I agree with what you wrote pretty much.

However, SL may have to change "some time" as, logically, most things do advance eventually.  Since the cloud and BOM my ffs jumped up about 11 to 13 which is great but I still have some jelly dolls at times but it is running better for the avatars yet kind of a little quirky for building.  I've had to send a report to LL about it.  I pay money for the stuff I build.  I don't want it ruined.  

[Lewis Luminos]

They did this. It was called Sansar. (And someone else did it independently too, with Sinespace). Both of them failed because there's something that SL needs much more than it needs fancy graphics.

People.

Without people, it was nothing more than a few pretty 3d pictures.

[Evah Baxton]

 You'd have to impose rules on the people before you could move to a new engine.

[Conifer Dada]

Even though Second Life struggles to give decent performance whenever more than 10 or 15 people are gathered in one place, no other user-created virtual world has come along that provides a better all-round experience.  

What I guess most people want is an improved version of the existing SL.  One where there's almost no lag and where we have additional features that make the experience better.  I don't mean like what Sansar was, I mean improvements to the existing SL world.

As I've said before, I'd like to see improvements to the system avatar, with better joint articulation and additional adjustments and the ability to apply a realistic sheen to the skin.  I'd also like to see an expansion of the in-world building tools.

Edited October 9, 2020 by Conifer Dada

[animats]

20 hours ago, Tresia Beck said:

I ask again is it even possible for SL to upgrade to unreal engine 5?

That's a good question. UE4's optimizations are mostly in the developer tools. Trying to do an SL viewer in UE4 has been looked at both by LL and third party viewer developers, and it didn't look promising.

UE5 is supposedly doing more at run time, in the GPU. In particular, they claim to be doing mesh reduction for lower levels of detail in the GPU. The initial public release of UE5 ships in 2021.

The big-world MMOs now have to load content dynamically, so they hit most of the technical problems SL does, and have to solve them with AAA title quality. They also have to automate content optimization, because it's too expensive to hire armies of artists to do entire cities by hand. So the bigger engines are getting much better at dynamic content.

So it's  time to be thinking about Viewer 3. I know some of the graphics Lindens would like to get going on that.

[ChinRey]

20 hours ago, Tresia Beck said:

I ask again is it even possible for SL to upgrade to unreal engine 5?

It depends on what you mean.

If you mean performance, there isn't actually that much difference when it comes to the software. If you transfer an SL scene to UE or Unity, it'll just as heavy to run both for server and client as it is here. If your computer have more problems handling SL than it has handling a fairly complex Unity or UE online scenario, it's because you're surrounded by poorly made mesh and textures, not because the software is significantly worse.

But then there is surface maps and shaders and that makes it a lot more complicated. You can't get that photorealistic effect in those demos without PBR and and more advanced lights and shadow effects. This would take a bit of developing work to implement and it would also make all the "modern" (by SL standards) textures with AO and/or static lighting effects baked into them obsolete.

[EmpressLuna Starchild]

what he means is that Engine 5 is the prefect engine to fix all the problems SL currently has you could go stupid on mesh creation and texture creation and engine 5 would not even blink! If SL was on engine 5 I could upload an item with over 10,000,000 triangles and it would probably register as 1 land impact LOL but the # one thing engine 5 will do for us is better lighting you could make avatars that look real like your standing in the real world... 

More or less with engine 5 we could have so much more on are sims Land impact would be a thing of the past because with unreal engin5 there is more or less no limitations to the artists or creators 

Un real engine 5 would also draw in allot more people to SL including game creators, amature movie creators, and businesses

to better understand what it can do watch this YouTube link 

Now when it comes to VR Just because a game takes on VR dose not mean you need VR to play and if SL did incorporate VR it would be as a supported device (Optional)

Edited October 9, 2020 by Tresia Beck

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Ewwwww. I prefer game engines that don't feature swarms of cockroaches.

[Sabrina Tamerlane]

Unreal Engine is an engine for AAA games. Since many SL users have potatoes as PC I think that adopting UE5 would leave a lot of them behind.

Edited October 9, 2020 by Sabrina Tamerlane

[EmpressLuna Starchild]

not true the unreal engine should put less stress on older PC's seeing a PS 5 can run this engine it would not take much to get a potato to run it 

also like anything it would be a slow transition 

Unreal Engine 5 System Requirements:

Minimum Recommended Hardware:
Operating system: Windows 10 64-bit
Processor: Quad-core Intel or AMD, 2.5 GHz or faster
RAM: 8 GB
Video Card/DirectX Version: DirectX 11 or DirectX 12 compatible graphics card

Edited October 9, 2020 by Tresia Beck

[Sabrina Tamerlane]

When I say potato I mean a 32 bit machine not even able to run Windows 10. I think SL runs in 32 bits?

[Mollymews]

11 minutes ago, Sabrina Tamerlane said:

When I say potato I mean a 32 bit machine not even able to run Windows 10. I think SL runs in 32 bits?

the Linden viewer comes in both 64 and 32 bit versions

[Mollymews]

Sabrina, is not a simple task to port the viewer to another render engine. If it were simple then any number of TPV devs would have done this already, just because they could

the viewer codebase has been opensource for over 12 years now and in all this time nobody has done it and released their effort publicly, not even a port to DirectX

[FairreLilette]

6 hours ago, Tresia Beck said:

what he means is that Engine 5 is the prefect engine to fix all the problems SL currently has you could go stupid on mesh creation and texture creation and engine 5 would not even blink! If SL was on engine 5 I could upload an item with over 10,000,000 triangles and it would probably register as 1 land impact LOL but the # one thing engine 5 will do for us is better lighting you could make avatars that look real like your standing in the real world... 

More or less with engine 5 we could have so much more on are sims Land impact would be a thing of the past because with unreal engin5 there is more or less no limitations to the artists or creators 

Un real engine 5 would also draw in allot more people to SL including game creators, amature movie creators, and businesses

to better understand what it can do watch this YouTube link 

Now when it comes to VR Just because a game takes on VR dose not mean you need VR to play and if SL did incorporate VR it would be as a supported device (Optional)

I watched some of it.  There is no real originality in this video and it looks like the avatar just keeps walking aimlessly.  It's not original enough to be a Second Life.  It looks like VR stuff to me really which doesn't have much artistic value but is just to look "real" walking aimlessly.  How do you see a creative platform fitting into something like that, and, especially when 'that' already exists?   Not to mention most highly creative people would not be interested, it's too blah, just walking aimlessly in caves and rock bridges or whatever it is supposed to be.  

Edited October 10, 2020 by FairreLilette