Water textures/animations need updating

[Exavor Diesel]

I remember when I first joined in SL, I didn't hang around because the water textures looked like a swimming pool. A year or two later it was completely overhauled and looked stunning. Now 10+ years later it looks more or less the same as it did then and is starting to look a little dated. 

I also play Sea of Thieves (pirate game, nothing like SL) but the water textures/animations on that are amazing in comparison to SL. I think it's about time SL looks to adopt something similar!

 

Edited July 2, 2021 by Exavor Diesel

[Zoxin UwU]

That's a huge ask for the current viewer and I have severe doubts it'll ever actually happen - even current, 'more modern' platforms similar to SL tend to err on the side of caution when it comes to heavier graphics.

 

Sea Of Theives is an extremely controlled game environment with content that is vetted only by its dev team.

Second Life is a wildly *unrestricted* game environment that is ONLY reactionary to the word lag and it still befuddles me how I manage to see more than 1 multi-mil triangle character at a time and have the viewer not even flinch.

 

The best we might get is a modifiable, pre-determined set of shaders in the far flung future for use on objects, much like how Windlight has worked forever with water normals etc.

 

p.s. LL pls add the ability to change the environment shiny cubemap

[Coffee Pancake]

SL's water still isn't that far adrift from what's used in games, making it better and more interactive isn't beyond the realms of possibility and it wouldn't take that much work.

We (Catznip) have played with this a little, but stupid RL limits things to weekend tinkering and we have enough trouble making the time to finish off our actual viewer releases. 

[Doris Johnsky]

Additionally water textures alone account for some issues people have being in SL. This in according to people I know in the Firestorm Help group.  The more you put on your graphic card, the harder it has to work.  If i turn off or tune down water textures alone my FPS increases by 100%.

 

When people complain about lag or poorly operating SL, I ask them to make changes in Prefs to water textures. Almost every one said it improved.

I have been in SL for 11 years. I listen to what people who are smarter than I  tell me.

[Exavor Diesel]

19 minutes ago, Doris Johnsky said:

Additionally water textures alone account for some issues people have being in SL. This in according to people I know in the Firestorm Help group.  The more you put on your graphic card, the harder it has to work.  If i turn off or tune down water textures alone my FPS increases by 100%.

 

When people complain about lag or poorly operating SL, I ask them to make changes in Prefs to water textures. Almost every one said it improved.

I have been in SL for 11 years. I listen to what people who are smarter than I  tell me.

While this holds true it is no reason not to improve the graphics on SL. - People can always tone down the settings as you allude to and if they don't know how to then frankly that is their problem. - Thankfully there's people to help them like people in the FS group you mention.

There's a lot of people who are avid gamers and have suitably specced hardware and imo LL should also cater for these people as well. Technology is always evolving, no point standing still.

Edited July 2, 2021 by Exavor Diesel

[Doris Johnsky]

I don't see myself as a "gamer  because I don't see SL as a "game".  It's an extension of me   I do SL for the social aspects.

[Janet Voxel]

I use an EEP water setting that looks fantastic.

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/JuicyBomb-Right-Water-EEP-Settings/20909133

[Exavor Diesel]

8 minutes ago, Doris Johnsky said:

I don't see myself as a "gamer  because I don't see SL as a "game".  It's an extension of me   I do SL for the social aspects.

I don't either but that's not the point I'm making. SL is in many ways more akin to The Sims than it is Facebook, or at least in terms of technology. What I mean by this is that SL makes use of computer hardware just like games do. To get the most out of it in terms of 3D rendering etc etc you ideally need a computer designed or at least capable of running games. No point running it on a integrated GPU etc although I am sure many do. Anyway I'm digressing. 

Edited July 2, 2021 by Exavor Diesel

[Doris Johnsky]

4 minutes ago, Exavor Diesel said:

I don't either but that's not the point I'm making. SL makes use of computer hardware just like games do. To get the most out of it in terms of 3D rendering etc etc you ideally need a computer designed or at least capable of running games. No point running it on a integrated GPU etc although I am sure many do. Anyway I'm digressing. 

A lot of people can't afford or are unwilling to purchase a gaming platform PC just to run SL. I SL on an off the rack HP lappy with the biggest concession to SL was 12GB of RAM. Which FS help says makes no difference.  BUT my SL run 200% better on this lappy than my old one did.

[Kathlen Onyx]

2 minutes ago, Doris Johnsky said:

A lot of people can't afford or are unwilling to purchase a gaming platform PC just to run SL. 

A lot of people can't afford a lot of things. That doesn't mean that technology should be stifled in a game or social platform or whatever you want to call it.  If people are unwilling to keep up with technology perhaps they should be playing other things rather than SL.

[Doris Johnsky]

Wow.  Condescending much?

[Exavor Diesel]

11 minutes ago, Doris Johnsky said:

A lot of people can't afford or are unwilling to purchase a gaming platform PC just to run SL. I SL on an off the rack HP lappy with the biggest concession to SL was 12GB of RAM. Which FS help says makes no difference.  BUT my SL run 200% better on this lappy than my old one did.

Well there's a saying that you can't have your cake and eat it. Although many people don't see SL as a game, (incl. myself) your computer certainly does see it as a game! The reason your new laptop probably outperforms your old one is because the CPU and GPU (even if integrated) is probably better than what you had before, hence you see an improvement. I have my settings nearly maxed out with draw distance realistically set to 192m and SL is only consuming 2GB of RAM. As such, having all the RAM in the world isn't going to help if things aren't using it. It's the graphics cards that take the biggest hit. 

 

6 minutes ago, Sam1 Bellisserian said:

A lot of people can't afford a lot of things. That doesn't mean that technology should be stifled in a game or social platform or whatever you want to call it.  If people are unwilling to keep up with technology perhaps they should be playing other things rather than SL.

I don't think he/she intended to be. - It's true.

Edited July 2, 2021 by Exavor Diesel

[Coffee Pancake]

43 minutes ago, Doris Johnsky said:

The more you put on your graphic card, the harder it has to work.  If i turn off or tune down water textures alone my FPS increases by 100%.

SL is naturally CPU bound. The processor has to do all the heavy lifting. Graphics performance only impacts performance on the low end (especially older laptops).

If graphics hardware is the bottle neck (being GPU bound) then SL is going to chug. The time that could be spent decoding more textures or calculating avatars is lost while the processor waits around for the graphics to finish its job.

Water, which uses a shader (not a texture), is expensive to render in SL (Mirrors if we get them will make this doubly bad). This is why on your hardware turning the water off provides a disproportional boost to performance as it allows graphics hardware to complete it's job faster. Water is so bad that switching it off does boost performance on new hardware (although not by 100%!), but for different reasons.

 

In your case I would strongly advise you to add the cache folder as an exception to windows defender / whatever AV software you have. (Firestorm provide detailed instructions on how to do this - https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/antivirus_whitelisting). It might not boost your frame rate as that's already a hard limit in your case, but it will allow more work to be done each frame and make things rez a lot faster.

As for ram .. 12GB system total is barely enough for the OS to run comfortably and a SL client with a minimal workload. Do not run other software like a browser at the same time. There are times when the SL viewer can consume more than 12GB all by itself (which in your case would practically mean game over). The event stage at SL18B routinely did this in our testing due to the number of avatars in the scene (which are still consuming ram even if you turn them all off).

 

If SL is a primary activity, I would urge you to consider upgrading to something with modern graphics and at least 16GB of ram, simply for quality of life reasons (same reason as owning a comfortable bed rather than sleeping on the floor).

 

[Coffee Pancake]

23 minutes ago, Sam1 Bellisserian said:

A lot of people can't afford a lot of things. That doesn't mean that technology should be stifled in a game or social platform or whatever you want to call it.  If people are unwilling to keep up with technology perhaps they should be playing other things rather than SL.

There are people who can't upgrade due to cost or availability, certain parts of the world are stuck a few generations behind. Keeping SL viable for these people is important.

There are also people who wont upgrade, I can only assume this is down to a special kind of self loathing. It's like owning a bike without disc brakes or eating peas.

[Exavor Diesel]

11 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

There are people who can't upgrade due to cost or availability, certain parts of the world are stuck a few generations behind. Keeping SL viable for these people is important.

There are also people who wont upgrade, I can only assume this is down to a special kind of self loathing. It's like owning a bike without disc brakes or eating peas.

Yes but that's why presets (below) exist so that people can find a balance to suit their hardware specification. My gripe is that the water quality (even on the highest setting) leaves a lot to be desired.

 

[Coffee Pancake]

12 minutes ago, Exavor Diesel said:

Yes but that's why presets (below) exist so that people can find a balance to suit their hardware specification. My gripe is that the water quality (even on the highest setting) leaves a lot to be desired.

 

I think you're putting too much faith in a 10 year old slider.

[Exavor Diesel]

Just now, Coffee Pancake said:

I think you're putting too much faith in a 10 year old slider.

More the concept. Most games provide the ability to customise graphical settings to suit computer hardware.

I don't buy the argument that SL should sit dead in the water just to accommodate people who have outdated hardware when it's possible to address this issue while still implementing improvements. 

[Solar Legion]

Ah yes, another "Think of Teh Gaemerz!" thread.

No.

Further - if you go looking - there is a litany of other things that ought to be tackled first. Yes, I am among those that remind that Linden Lab can work on more than one project at once ... This, I'll make a hard turn on.

Edited July 2, 2021 by Solar Legion

[Orwar]

3 hours ago, Exavor Diesel said:

There's a lot of people who are avid gamers and have suitably specced hardware and imo LL should also cater for these people as well.

   An avid gamer would recognise that Second Life is not a high-performance video game, but a virtual world full of extremely poorly optimised assets created by hobbyists. That's also the beauty of SL - if you want something prettier for the water, go make it.

[Doris Johnsky]

2 hours ago, Orwar said:

   An avid gamer would recognise that Second Life is not a high-performance video game, but a virtual world full of extremely poorly optimised assets created by hobbyists. That's also the beauty of SL - if you want something prettier for the water, go make it.

Bravo

[Kathlen Onyx]

2 hours ago, Orwar said:

   An avid gamer would recognise that Second Life is not a high-performance video game, but a virtual world full of extremely poorly optimised assets created by hobbyists. That's also the beauty of SL - if you want something prettier for the water, go make it.

Yet everyone wants new features and the old features fixed? Do you think that LL is going to fix these things with the customer in mind that lives out in the boondocks, still on dial up who is unwilling to upgrade their computer or internet speed? No, they are going to add new features and fix old features according to the technology that is out today.  I don't think it's a out of reasonable request to see if the water can be optimized to look better. Surely it's possible. and surely this person is a customer just like the person unwilling to upgrade their PC.

[Finite]

I think a lot of it depends on what system you have and the viewer you use and what settings you have for water specifically. I took this picture a few weeks ago in Blackdragon and I thought the water looked amazing and was even reflecting the surroundings. Even as I was setting up the pose in Firestorm I felt it was still amazing and reflected the surroundings. I have a 2080super vid card.

 

Edited July 2, 2021 by Finite

[Janet Voxel]

16 minutes ago, Finite said:

I think a lot of it depends on what system you have and the viewer you use and what settings you have for water specifically. I took this picture a few weeks ago in Blackdragon and I thought the water looked amazing and was even reflecting the surroundings. Even as I was setting up the pose in Firestorm I felt it was still amazing and reflected the surroundings. I have a 2080super vid card.

Y-y-you mean....if you change the settings on things....sometimes they...work better?

[Luna Bliss]

WATER FIGHT !!!!!

 

[Orwar]

1 hour ago, Sam1 Bellisserian said:

Yet everyone wants new features and the old features fixed?

   Second Life is a living thing, it has been continuously developed all these years, and plenty of new features have come throughout the years. It's one thing to want something that would be an improvement for everyone, especially things that would improve the performance in general, and another entirely to say that you want features that push your high end rig to the limits and leave everyone else in the dust.

1 hour ago, Sam1 Bellisserian said:

Do you think that LL is going to fix these things with the customer in mind that lives out in the boondocks, still on dial up who is unwilling to upgrade their computer or internet speed?

   Absolutely. The average Second Lifer isn't a 20-something 'gamer' with the latest PC rig, I've met a whole lot more 50-60-something year olds on laptops with the kit to manage MS word and a browser, than 'gamers'. 

1 hour ago, Sam1 Bellisserian said:

I don't think it's a out of reasonable request to see if the water can be optimized to look better. Surely it's possible. and surely this person is a customer just like the person unwilling to upgrade their PC.

   There's nothing wrong with the water, per se. We 'just' got EEP which made it a lot more approachable for people to design their own sky and water settings, and people have made their own visual improvements for years with things like animated waves etc. 

   Out of a technical perspective, comparing a video game like Sea of Thieves to Second Life is really a situation of apples and oranges. Sea of Thieves is designed within a closed team of developers, with professional asset creators and designers, with the specific goal of a certain type of gameplay - and Sea of Thieves is one of those games that uses fairly low poly models compared to other video games of its generation (and it's a game wherein you seldom see more than 10 characters at any given time, aside from certain mobs), precisely to accommodate such features as the water dynamics and physics in general. The water itself is just textures and materials surfaces, the reason the water looks like it does is due to the shaders - and just like the water can go from pitch black at night to azure in the daytime in SoT, is precisely how EEP works, and how WL water settings worked before it. The only visual differences is that SL water is flat and doesn't sprout particles at the tip of its waves (which, due to being flat, don't exist).

   A better request would be to allow surfaces of prims/meshes to be marked as SL water and be shaded as such. That way people could shape and script it to behave however they'd like, and if a land owner would want to spend that sort of resources on water they'd be free to do so (it'd even create a work-around to accommodate functional mirrors, since SL water is just about the only surface that can be reflective as such).

   But it's also not without its problems; such water may well be completely unnavigable for just about all current water craft on the grid - and suddenly a whole lot of boat enthusiasts would find themselves on square 0, and I don't think LL would want to risk a chunk of those (and they are many) decide it isn't worth the effort of starting over from scratch.