Second Live 2.0 in Unreal engine

[Naiman Broome]

Would that even be possible?

Edited January 25, 2021 by Naiman Broome
Typo

[Fritigern Gothly]

Give it a try and tell us what you found 🙂

[Lillith Hapmouche]

Gotta be named "Unreal Life"...

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

I'd suggest searching for Magrathea, they should be able to customise a world for any millionaire with a desire for something a little bit different.

[animats]

UE4 was looked at, but it didn't look promising. Too much of UE4's performance depends on preprocessing the content with UE4's offline tools. UE5, though, is supposed to be able to deal with high-poly content better. That comes out later this year.

[Naiman Broome]

46 minutes ago, animats said:

UE4 was looked at, but it didn't look promising. Too much of UE4's performance depends on preprocessing the content with UE4's offline tools. UE5, though, is supposed to be able to deal with high-poly content better. That comes out later this year.

Was looked at by who?

[Alvina Nova]

Have a look at the game "Tera" made with Unreal engine. It is available on Steam for free. You find there very complex avatars, with scripted flexi mesh clothes, landscapes with a quality and a fantasy rarely seen in SL, and all the structure of SL components: local inventory, tough permission system, trade, chat, banking, NPC's of the Animesh kind, Huge cities , villages; road, fly and flying vehicles, non buggy teleportation, no sim borders. Of course it is a game as a whole. Which means all ressources are game-oriented which also explains the following. What is missing, because it is locked, is access to the building editor, elaborated chatting system similar to SL, but most players join discord groups, or individual discord room, what many SL resident do too.
Really, if you visit the game, keeping SL ressources and structures in mind, Unreal offers an amazing potential. I often thought Tera has exploited a lot of Second Life ideas. These two worlds are so not hermetically closed to each others: some Tera avatars and NPC's are found on our Market place ...

[Chic Aeon]

One very important thing to consider -- well two.   As someone mentioned in another thread recently folks in SL do NOT want to leave their inventories behind.  

The second thing is that SL creators would need to learn Unreal or Unity or whatever platform came with the new world.  Some, like Cloud Party and Sansar weren't too difficult to learn and transfer items into (with new rules of course) but others are super painful and many to most creators aren't going to spend the time and effort. I know because I talked to a lot of them LOL -- and was one.  So there is THAT part of the equation. 

 

And, more importantly I am guessing that our new owners just want SL to pay the bills so that they can go forward with Tilia, so I don't expect many changes here. That is fine with me. Rolling back EEP would be a glorious move but I don't expect to see that either.  Typically "rulers" don't pay a lot of attention to what their subjects want.  

[Coffee Pancake]

If the solution to all of SL's problems were as simple as "remake it in a game engine", it would have been done already, you would be using it right now, and it would be wonderful.

People have been helpfully suggesting this for as long as SL has been a thing.

Game engines are designed to fulfill a very specific set of needs, that's fine for games, but far too narrow to encompass half of what SL does. Remove all the stuff that SL needs and a game engine can't provide, and it's not SL anymore. It's Sansar, and that went well.

SL does a lot of very weird, unoptimized stuff, it has to in order to facilitate the free form content creation SL depends on.

While it might be technically possible to remake SL in Unreal (or Unity, or Godot ... ), putting in all the stuff that makes SL work and the performance would probably be worse than it is now, and that's not really considering all the unusable "game engine" additional baggage that would be along for the ride.

Keep in mind that If game worlds (like Tera or WoW) could do everything you needed, you wouldn't be here.

[DNArt]

Hello Coffee Pancake 

I know you know very well what your talking about. 

Do you have any suggestions what should be done by LL (and can we, the users, speed that up) to make sure the viewer doesn't run at just 6.1 fps and lets our computers sleep? 

 

[Gage Wirefly]

10 minutes ago, DNArt said:

Hello Coffee Pancake 

I know you know very well what your talking about. 

Do you have any suggestions what should be done by LL (and can we, the users, speed that up) to make sure the viewer doesn't run at just 6.1 fps and lets our computers sleep? 

 

You seem to have a very top end pc, but that draw distance is going to be an issue I would think. Have you tried lowering it?

[Solar Legion]

You can start by not setting your Draw Distance to the equivalent of four regions in a single direction. There is no need for it in general use.

Some of your LoDs could stand to be turned down as well.

Even if the Viewer leveraged more of the CPU (and more modern features) those settings would still be a hindrance. Second Life isn't filled with pre-rendered content nor with any form of curated/standard meeting content either - it is unwise (to be polite) to treat it as such.

[DNArt]

Hello Gage thanks for your reply,  sure i can lower that and  its the main thing that will help. 

I did put it at 1000 to make the point the viewer could use so much more of the computers power.  its such a waste it just sits unused. 

Whit what the users could do .. i was more referring to a partition to motivate LL . Or other ways to make them clear the gap between gaming computers capabilities and there viewer is getting huge and growing by the day. 

 

 

[DNArt]

Hi Solar 

Yeah i understand it can never be as effiicient as pre-compiled stuf.  But than still i would expect in someway the bootleneck would end up to be in hardware.

Things like my GPU running out of memory to keep all that stuff or my CPU being busy to try to do something to speed things up but non of that 

My internet speed is not used at all but still you have to wait for minutes for textures to load. 

The only thing that keeps popping up in my mind is that the viewer is just very bad at using modern hardware (lots of cores) 

Dont get me wrong i love this amazing game.

I just fear it will become harder and harder to sell to new users who have modern hardware.

Most of us are used to these low frame rates and learned to accept it.

But that was in the days SL would fry our hardware gaming PC or not.     

Edited February 3, 2021 by DNArt

[Solar Legion]

That's just it - even if it did leverage modern hardware, you still have to contend with the utter lack of content optimization (in general).

Would it help? A bit, possibly.

Many of those sliders only go as high as they do - at present - for the express purpose of taking nice looking snapshots. They're really not meant to be used or seen as a "what could be" type of thing.

[DNArt]

Its stays hard to accept the viewer could not potentialy run much faster on modern hardware for me still.

Because when i run multiple viewers simultaneous frame rates stay sort of the same and i feel more the drop that is noticed is be cause of lack of focus of the program then limitations in the hardware.

Those other viewers do each use additional computer power (cores) of course and plenty of power and vram on my graphics card stays unused by a single viewer . 

 The development of hardware is to more and more cores. it feels our viewer is missing out on the changes the industry made to add more power to programs.   

Edited February 3, 2021 by DNArt

[Solar Legion]

It doesn't seem as though you're quite understanding ...

CPU Core use is only a part of the picture. Even if the Viewer made proper use of modern CPUs, you would still have to contend with the other issues - which will not be solved by simply making proper use of multi-threading.

Using multiple Viewers at the same time is a somewhat different kettle of fish and should not be mixed into this.

To be very clear here: I am not saying that having the Viewer making proper use of multi-threading would not increase performance. I am suggesting that you're expecting a performance boost on a magnitude that might not be reasonable owing simply to the nature of the system.

[DNArt]

You are right about me not quite understanding the other issues that are fundamental on a technical level (i do understand the practical problems a little,  things like many libraries would probably have to get rewritten for using multi treading in a proper way).  Mayor work. i don't expect LL looking forward to that.

and i really do appreciate your effort to enlighten me in this. 

I'm not expecting 60+ frames but i do hope it will use more of the computing power that is at hand. At least that would make me feel the viewer is trying its best.

The alternative would be that our beautiful game would stay unrivaled in concept but feel outdated in implementation of that concept. 

I just started this post because i hope more users ( hopefully some of those work for LL) wonder why it starts to be useless to get a faster computer when it comes to playing SL.  

My previous computer did run the viewer at a similar pace.          Using 11% of CPU and 15% of a GPU, while running at ultra on 4K,  is a bit underwelming for a  graphical 3D game. don't we all agree on that ? 

Edited February 3, 2021 by DNArt

[KjartanEno]

1 hour ago, DNArt said:

Hello Coffee Pancake 

I know you know very well what your talking about. 

Do you have any suggestions what should be done by LL (and can we, the users, speed that up) to make sure the viewer doesn't run at just 6.1 fps and lets our computers sleep? 

 

I'm curious to know what location you took that screenshot.

[DNArt]

Hello KjartanEno

Mainland.    Svalbard i think or Erle ..    those fps are extreme low for me and i just looked for a location to make a point.  i generally have something much more expectable and a CPU use is than even more down and peaks at 7.5 %. my GPU can get up to 50%  

Thinking of it i should have opened the statistics window to better see why it only did get 6.5 fps  

 

[Solar Legion]

It would be nice, yes.

Something else to note though is that 4K as far as second Life is concerned is a bit of overkill. At least at the moment.

[MoiraKathleen]

2 hours ago, DNArt said:

I just fear it will become harder and harder to sell to new users who have modern hardware

I just want to present an "on the other hand" part, because I think this really is a balancing act that needs to be done between two extremes.  The  "on the other hand" part is that there are many existing users who do not have the most modern hardware, or gaming setups, or a separate graphics card.   SL also needs to remain accessible to it's existing user base and to those who cannot justify the expense of buying a gaming ready PC or notebook, or may not have the technical ability to build their own.  

 

[DNArt]

sure MoiraKathleen

the nice thing about multithreading is that it could be made scalable and adopt to the hardware at hand. and even low end portable CPU's have multiple cores now. 

adding more cores is the modern way to keep CPU's an increasing overall speed boost with each new generation for a while already 

  So its a bit of a win win. lol i feel like a salesman now  

 

Edited February 4, 2021 by DNArt

[animats]

2 hours ago, DNArt said:

CPU use is than even more down and peaks at 7.5 %

With how many CPUs? SL viewers normally use 100% of one CPU, plus a little bit of time on a second CPU for image decompression and such.

[Gage Wirefly]

5 hours ago, Solar Legion said:

....

Many of those sliders only go as high as they do - at present - for the express purpose of taking nice looking snapshots. They're really not meant to be used or seen as a "what could be" type of thing.

I run SL at Ultra settings same as the OP but with a much lower draw distance and max avatar complexity . I average 100+ fps on empty sims and around 40 on busy ones.  I'm not sure where you're getting that from, unless it's just your opinion.