[Video + images + text] Tips on increasing immersion on Second Life and how it can be on-par with triple A games, without lag, on all viewers (if you feel like it)

[lucagrabacr]

Hey guys, so made an in-depth and rather long video on how you can make SL look and feel on-par with a lot of triple A games out there (if you feel like it)   

I've posted this on other places and some of these in some threads here as well, but figured it would be  better if this has its own thread just so everything's in one place and people can refer to this easily if they need it. Also to help erode the myth that SL's rendering engine limits it to the point of making it can only look as good as some old game

I went through not only graphics, here's a list of the things I adjusted in the video, some through debug settings, to make SL feel more modern overall

• Camera
• Graphics
• UI
• Environment

And while it is true that SL's rendering engine is rather old compared to modern game engines and lack some modern rendering features, a lot of what make good games out there look as good as they are goes beyond graphics, camera, UI, object & environment design, and quality has a lot to do with it as well, and in that regard SL can compete, I even manage to get a "bloom" effect for the viewers

All this can be achieved with very usable FPS on rather budget systems too, so it's not like a photo mode where everything looks good but you're getting 10 FPS

Screenshots comparing SL to GTA V / online in term of environment / object quality, showing that it is possible for SL to look just as good;

Screenshot showing bloom effect, check how the lights and lighted surfaces give an impression that they reflect the lights back to the surrounding airspace, and how it gives a more sense of being / immersion and a more modern look / composition overall (not how my adjusted camera look, in case people think it is, camera is like that just for screenshot);

The video;

Some debug settings for the settings if you're on a viewer where the settings aren't available on pereferences;

CameraOffsetRearView - adjusts rear view camera offset

FocusOffsetRearView - adjusts rear view camera focus offset

CameraPositionSmoothing - adjusts camera smoothness

RenderGlowX/Y/Z - adjusts glow settings for "bloom" effect

I hope it's useful! c=

[Drayke Newall]

7 hours ago, lucagrabacr said:

Hey guys, so made an in-depth and rather long video on how you can make SL look and feel on-par with a lot of triple A games out there (if you feel like it)   

Whilst I agree Second Life can look good and thanks for the helpful tips I am sure people will find them very useful, I'm going to play devils advocate and say I disagree that SL can be comparable to similar modern AAA games.

Quote

 Also to help erode the myth that SL's rendering engine limits it to the point of making it can only look as good as some old game

Whilst yes, looking at your screenshots I would agree with you that SL does look good when comparing it to GTA V but, using that game as evidence "to help erode the myth that SL's rendering engine limits it to the point of making it can only look as good as some old game" is not going to be in your favour. You fail to mention that GTA 5 is a very old game dating back to 2013.

Lets compare some more recent modern games:

MS Flight Simulator 2020 - Graphics are 100x better than SL both externally and internally with the outside world being generated for miles from actual aerial photos with 3D objects generated with LOD variations depending on height and distance. Cockpits are life like with maps that dynamically show your location in the world and also track weather and altitude with dynamic imagery of surfaces. All of which are impossible in SL.

Cyberpunk 2077 - Whilst it may be plagued with bugs and missing promised features the world itself is visually stunning. Modern raytracing allows reflections on the ground to look ultra realistic, lighting and materials are realistic, dynamic weather with rain drops splashing on the ground etc. Second Life cant even compare and many graphic details features are impossible to do in SL flawlessly such as light reflection, atmosphere and model detail. Try getting a perfectly blended low laying fog effect that looks real. These images have film grain on therefore don't do the graphics justice:

Cyberpunk  2077 Apartment detail - Tried to find an image but couldn't. Keep close watch on the glass in the apartment which shows reflections of the world around, something not possible in SL as reflections are not even possible which are prevalent in all AAA games leading to have to do duplication tricks to get the same effect impacting performance. Not to mention I wish we could have grass like that that allows blood splatter to appear on single blades of grass.

So whilst yes I do not deny that SL can look good. Saying that it can look as good as modern games (even if you say some, if you compare apples with apples as far as atmosphere goes) is not accurate. At best SL is comparable to as you have mentioned an old 2013 game which shows that 'myth' you claim is wrong to actually be correct.

If anything can be garnered from the above and especially in relation to cyberpunk 2077, SL is severely gimped due to Linden Labs somewhat weird idea that they need to pamper for people that still use computers from 2010 era. Cyberpunk is a prime example of this as most of their refunds requested and turmoil in their release wasn't due to the bugs but from console players not being able to run the game due to old hardware making it look terrible where on modern hardware it has the best graphics seen in a game to date environment wise.

If LL decided to just develop for PC's from 5 years ago and forgo all the old hardware, they could have graphics on par with modern games.

Edited December 23, 2020 by Drayke Newall

[animats]

Luca's done good work here. Viewer defaults for "High" quality should be much closer to Luca's settings. No reason not to do that.

16 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

(Flight Simulator) Graphics are 100x better than SL both externally and internally with the outside world being generated for miles from actual aerial photos with 3D objects generated with LOD variations depending on height and distance.

Distant content is a big problem in SL. There are no impostors for distant objects, the quality of low levels of detail is terrible, and if you turn up the draw distance, the viewer chokes. That's a big job to fix, but not impossible.

[Lucia Nightfire]

18 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

If LL decided to just develop for PC's from 5 years ago and forgo all the old hardware, they could have graphics on par with modern games.

I would estimate 95% of their paying customers are on hardware older than that so it would be biting off the hand that feeds them.

[Janet Voxel]

It always cracks me up when people try to compare Secondlife to a "Modern" AAA game. It started in, what? 2007? Mesh was introduced 2009 or 2010? Wouldn't it be more fair to compare it to a game from that era? No? I would say its even fair to compare it to GTA V (even though the last time I saw someone compare it, it was to a version that was modded up the wazoo) since mesh was hitting its stride by 2013. 

Comparing it to a game that can't even run on last gen consoles and struggles on current gen consoles? Nah....don't do that. It's showing it's age, but 17 years will do that. Most users are running SL on a Dell or a laptop with an integrated graphics card. Loading up Flight simulator or Cyberpunk 2077 wouldn't even be possible

[animats]

58 minutes ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

I would estimate 95% of their paying customers are on hardware older than that so it would be biting off the hand that feeds them.

LL has data on this, collected by the viewer. Vir Linden indicated that about 80% of SL users have hardware capable of running Vulkan.

[lucagrabacr]

19 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

Whilst I agree Second Life can look good and thanks for the helpful tips I am sure people will find them very useful, I'm going to play devils advocate and say I disagree that SL can be comparable to similar modern AAA games.

Whilst yes, looking at your screenshots I would agree with you that SL does look good when comparing it to GTA V but, using that game as evidence "to help erode the myth that SL's rendering engine limits it to the point of making it can only look as good as some old game" is not going to be in your favour. You fail to mention that GTA 5 is a very old game dating back to 2013.

Lets compare some more recent modern games:

MS Flight Simulator 2020 - Graphics are 100x better than SL both externally and internally with the outside world being generated for miles from actual aerial photos with 3D objects generated with LOD variations depending on height and distance. Cockpits are life like with maps that dynamically show your location in the world and also track weather and altitude with dynamic imagery of surfaces. All of which are impossible in SL.

Cyberpunk 2077 - Whilst it may be plagued with bugs and missing promised features the world itself is visually stunning. Modern raytracing allows reflections on the ground to look ultra realistic, lighting and materials are realistic, dynamic weather with rain drops splashing on the ground etc. Second Life cant even compare and many graphic details features are impossible to do in SL flawlessly such as light reflection, atmosphere and model detail. Try getting a perfectly blended low laying fog effect that looks real. These images have film grain on therefore don't do the graphics justice:

Cyberpunk  2077 Apartment detail - Tried to find an image but couldn't. Keep close watch on the glass in the apartment which shows reflections of the world around, something not possible in SL as reflections are not even possible which are prevalent in all AAA games leading to have to do duplication tricks to get the same effect impacting performance. Not to mention I wish we could have grass like that that allows blood splatter to appear on single blades of grass.

So whilst yes I do not deny that SL can look good. Saying that it can look as good as modern games (even if you say some, if you compare apples with apples as far as atmosphere goes) is not accurate. At best SL is comparable to as you have mentioned an old 2013 game which shows that 'myth' you claim is wrong to actually be correct.

If anything can be garnered from the above and especially in relation to cyberpunk 2077, SL is severely gimped due to Linden Labs somewhat weird idea that they need to pamper for people that still use computers from 2010 era. Cyberpunk is a prime example of this as most of their refunds requested and turmoil in their release wasn't due to the bugs but from console players not being able to run the game due to old hardware making it look terrible where on modern hardware it has the best graphics seen in a game to date environment wise.

If LL decided to just develop for PC's from 5 years ago and forgo all the old hardware, they could have graphics on par with modern games.

Hey  yeah, the upper limits of how good SL can look won't exceed newest things like CP 2077 or MFS  considering the engine and what it is (an interconnected, persistent, mostly user-generated virtual world), I'd also still consider GTA V / Online to be a modern game, R* is still actively developing it and they're still constantly in Steamcharts' top 10

But not all triple A, modern or popular game releases are as good looking as CP 2077 or MFS either, then most people also don't usually put every settings on max in those games, so I'd say saying SL can be on-par with those is not that far-fetched, but I get what you're saying because there's certainly an upper limit to SL which it cannot yet exceed

1 hour ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

I would estimate 95% of their paying customers are on hardware older than that so it would be biting off the hand that feeds them.

Kind of diverting from what you were replying to, but I'd say LL should have more confidence in how willing people are, especially current active users or paying users, to adapt and how much they would tolerate modernization of SL imo, especially if that makes SL even better overall and potentially attract more people. And then there are things they can do what won't impact performance, like modernizing default camera settings (which I'm sure they've tested at some point, maybe test users didn't react well to it? Idk)

[Drayke Newall]

9 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

I would estimate 95% of their paying customers are on hardware older than that so it would be biting off the hand that feeds them.

That may be the case however if they had announced progressive updating of their system specs then people by now would have updated the systems to match gradually. The issue they have now is that because they have not updated their min system specs for close to 15 years hardware wise, they are now at the point where it is a case of to little to late as, like you have stated people just buy older systems.

So whilst you say that it is a case of LL doing as such would be biting the hand that feeds them, I would argue they have shot themselves in the foot over doing as such.

8 hours ago, lucagrabacr said:

Hey  yeah, the upper limits of how good SL can look won't exceed newest things like CP 2077 or MFS  considering the engine and what it is (an interconnected, persistent, mostly user-generated virtual world), I'd also still consider GTA V / Online to be a modern game, R* is still actively developing it and they're still constantly in Steamcharts' top 10

This is not an excuse for LL to not have updated their min system specs over time nor is it an excuse for them not to have implemented features  or graphical improvements within their default viewer to help improve retention of new users and keep older ones.  The excuse used in years past that SL is different because it is a persistent and user generated world is also coming to an end when the likes of NVidea, Amazon, Microsoft and Google are looking at streaming games virtually without having the software or the game assets installed on the end users computer. This meaning it would be no different if LL did it with second life.

We still do not even have reflections in SL on glass despite it being a feature in openGL software for over a decade. LL default viewer is the first viewer any new user will download (unless they have been told otherwise) and for them to solely rely on third party viewers such as BD or posts in the forums no new user will visit for graphical improvements leaving their default viewer stark in contrast just hampers them.

Quote

But not all triple A, modern or popular game releases are as good looking as CP 2077 or MFS either, then most people also don't usually put every settings on max in those games, so I'd say saying SL can be on-par with those is not that far-fetched, but I get what you're saying because there's certainly an upper limit to SL which it cannot yet exceed

Depends on the style and atmosphere of the game. That said, even graphically less demanding games still look far better than Second Life. Lets take Skyrim a game that was released in 2011 prior to your GTA V. It still looks 100x better than SL in all cases and can look 1000x better with mods and runs on relatively low end machines fine. Yes, the same excuse will be used that Second Life is a user generated persistent world however, if the cache was updated to allow for better fetching as well as saving of specific areas, it should be no different to having a game installed on your PC.

SL still does not utilise multiple cores of CPU's or more VRAM. When you think the current average system includes a 8gb graphics card and 4 core min now, yet we can only select 2gb vram as the viewer cant utilise any more. Most people have 100mb download speed now yet SLs viewer only allows bandwidth of 2900kb/s as a transfer rate or it affects the viewer poorly.

For all those that will say oh but SL dynamically shows assets as you are walking around )so downloads and displays assets as you get closer), this is not an excuse when modern games allow me to download a certain amount to play and then downloads what is needed when i get to that area if it hasn't downloaded it yet. How nice would it be if LL made a system where I can download a connected region prior to me even going there. This would allow seamless views like MFS can achieve.

 

Edited December 24, 2020 by Drayke Newall