Graphics quality in SL

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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Penny Patton wrote:

SL has abysmal framerates even in the most hideous or plain looking environments, even on computers that can run Crysis at a smooth 60 frames per second. Why? SL is pushing millions of entirely unceccessary polygons, often because the tools encourage low-prim over low-poly. There's no incentive for users to create objects with smaller, more efficent texture maps so SL eats up texture memory and there's another damper on framerates!

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Why do I get the feeling I am quoting myself here?

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Bigger avatars with cameras hanging another meter or two above and behind them require much bigger buildings than little old 5'7"/173cm me with my game-like custom camera! Those bigger builds eat up more sim space meaning less room for content. Those builds also eat more prims, meaning more polygons being rendered despite less detail! Up until the recent upgrade to 64m prim sizes prims were limited to 10m to a side, so older builds cover SL, eating up even more prims for little return in detail or content!

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Size doesn't matter I'd like to say, regarding graphics quality. Imagine the avatars are 10 times smaller than yours...(or mine for that matter, I'm not quite as small as you I think, but my avatar height is set at 31) Then the sims would be 100 times bigger, with the same 15 000 prims available. We could have more houses, more trees, more whatever on the same sim, but we'd also need them, to make the sim look like anytjhing besides a desert. So there wouldn't be a single prim left for any details.

10 meter prims? Yes that's the way it was, but not anymore. If people use two 10 meter boxes now instead of a single 20 meter one, that's their mistake, not LL's. For existing builds which aren't mod, again, builder's mistake not to set them mod. That's the biggest nono in my book. I only use no mod permissions on items that are likely to be broken when the shape is altered, maybe 1% of my objects.

I'm not expecting all residents to rebuild their old homes in a more efficient way, or even the builders, but in a matter of time the 10 meter limit will be forgotten.

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An uglier SL becauseo f poor design, not a lack of capability.

 Women avatars have freakishly short arms, why? Because once you go over about 6' tall it becomes impossible to stretch a woman avatar's arms out long enough to be proportional. LL then starts all new women avatars off at about 6'4" or taller.Avatars pushing 9' are more common than avatars around 5'. The lack of consistency even at that extreme scale means animations will almost never line up properly, either. Another hit to SL's graphics quality.

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If graphics quality includes animations, appearance, proportions etc. I agree. I read the OP once more and that was indeed included in the question. Graphic quality to me means the technical part, sharpness, framerates, anything that involves putting the given data from the servers onto your screen. The rest is aestatic quality to me. So I can't argue with you on this.

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All of this is avoidable. Sure, you can blame some of it on user generated conent being made by people with enthusiasm but no skill, but it's silly not to point out that the tools LL provides make creating better quality visuals in SL an up-hill battle even for those of us that are professionals and know what we're doing, let alone the casual users just banging prims together for the first time.

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I love the fact enthusiastic noobs can build anything they like. I just hope the now optional calculations on weights will at some point be mandatory on new objects. I think LL is very well aware of the issues you describe and with mesh they made a huge leap into something more fair.

 

On a sidenote, thanks for figuring out those camera settings (that WAS you right?) Makes my SL experience a lot better, not my graphics quality though:)

[Penny Patton]

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Kwakkelde Kwak wrote:

Size doesn't matter I'd like to say, regarding graphics quality. Imagine the avatars are 10 times smaller than yours...(or mine for that matter, I'm not quite as small as you I think, but my avatar height is set at 31) Then the sims would be 100 times bigger, with the same 15 000 prims available. We could have more houses, more trees, more whatever on the same sim, but we'd also need them, to make the sim look like anytjhing besides a desert. So there wouldn't be a single prim left for any details.

10 meter prims? Yes that's the way it was, but not anymore. If people use two 10 meter boxes now instead of a single 20 meter one, that's their mistake, not LL's. For existing builds which aren't mod, again, builder's mistake not to set them mod. That's the biggest nono in my book. I only use no mod permissions on items that are likely to be broken when the shape is altered, maybe 1% of my objects.

I'm not expecting all residents to rebuild their old homes in a more efficient way, or even the builders, but in a matter of time the 10 meter limit will be forgotten.

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Let me see if I can rephrase this in a way that is more understandable.

Your whole argument is based on the notion that land is not a static size.

But that's not the case. So if we make everything larger we need more land to hold it in, that's more money spent on tier right there. Building larger costs you more money. This isn't an opinion, it's not how I "feel", it's cold, hard geometry.

 

Second, think of how making everything larger affects Level of Detail. When objects are far away the engine renders them with lower detail models to save processing power. Smaller objects are downgraded to lower detail models more quickly than larger objects, because you will notice it more in larger objects like buildings if they suddenly drop to a lower detail model.

 If everything is larger, it's being rendered at higher detail, more polygons, over greater distances. Right there is a hit to your framerate.

 

 Second, if everything is scaled larger you need to up your draw distance to see the same relative distance, meaning more polygons in your draw distance, a second major hit to your framerate.

 

 The argument about avatars being 10 times smaller is a strawman, we're working with SL's tools as they are. Which means there is a sweet spot for detail versus area. That "sweet spot" is right about 1=1 scale with the SL metre. 

 

 In SL you can see examples of this here! 

(These are all from the same quarter sim build that has been frequently mistaken for a full sim builds Even Hamlet mistook it for a full sim build when he wrote about it on New World Notes!)

Here's another example, believe it or not the following is from a 2048sq.m. parcel that only supports only about 400 prims!

All of the above fits into the blue area in this overhead view. 2048sq.m. The orange are additional off-sim prims hosted from my 463prim parcel. I showed these very screenshots to a Linden once and they said, "What game is that from?"

 

Ever hear of Doomed Ship? The 1=1 scale RP sim? People say you can get lost there for hours, and they're right! Nearly the entire sim is the detail of this screenshot, yet if it were built to typical SL sizes it would require four sims to hold it all.

None of these builds would be possible if they were built to typical SL scale unless far more money was spent on sims to host them. The average SL builder cannot afford to buy more land whenever they want more area and detail, so the scale issue affects their ability to create impressive graphics.

 This is precisely because land is static in SL and we have minimum and maximum prim and avatar sizes.

 That last one, Doomed Ship, is a full sim build, meaning even the 64m prim limit would be hit many times over if the sim were up-scaled to typical SL sizes. That means more polygons that need to be rendered, which means less detail and lower framerates.

 

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Kwakkelde Kwak wrote:

If graphics quality includes animations, appearance, proportions etc. I agree. I read the OP once more and that was indeed included in the question. Graphic quality to me means the technical part, sharpness, framerates, anything that involves putting the given data from the servers onto your screen. The rest is aestatic quality to me. So I can't argue with you on this.

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Aesthetics are always tied to the technical side, and visa-versa. A large part of why SL appears so ugly to many is LL failing to understand that basic truth. My position will always be based in that when the topic of SL's graphics comes  up, especially as framed by the OP of this thread.

 

 All of SL could look like the above screenshots. They're not prettied up in Photoshop (aside from the adition of the SL logo in that last screenshot), they're unaltered! Unfortunately, working to that level of quality requires not only the skill necessary to create the models and use of textures, but also an uphill battle against SL's tools to squeeze the most detail and space out of a set area of SL land and that's even before you consider efficiency in polygons and texture maps.

[leliel Mirihi]

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Penny Patton wrote:

Second, think of how making everything larger affects Level of Detail. When objects are far away the engine renders them with lower detail models to save processing power. Smaller objects are downgraded to lower detail models more quickly than larger objects, because you will notice it more in larger objects like buildings if they suddenly drop to a lower detail model.

 If everything is larger, it's being rendered at higher detail, more polygons, over greater distances.

Right there is a hit to your framerate.

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LOD has to do with the amount of area an object takes up on the screen, not how large it is or its distance from the camera. The reason being that micro and degenerate triangles are very costly to rasterize and cause a large amount of over draw in the fragment shaders. A large object at the highest LOD actually cost slightly less to render (relatively speaking) as it gets closer to the camera due to less over draw in the fragment shaders.

I can use my poor photoshop skills to whip up some illustrations if you want.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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Penny Patton wrote:

Let me see if I can rephrase this in a way that is more understandable.

Your whole argument is based on the notion that land is not a static size.

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I thought I was pretty clear, obviously I wasn't. My entire point IS based on the fact a sim has a certain size.

If your avatar is 10 times smaller, a sim is no longer the current 256x256 meter, but 2560x2560 meter, that is 100 times bigger. Where one would currently feel at ease with 4 houses (or trees or rocks or whatever) on a sim, they'd need to build 400 houses now to get the same density. Yes there would be more houses, but only a hundredth of the prims for each of them. No room for detail left.

 

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Building larger costs you more money. This isn't an opinion, it's not how I "feel",

it's cold, hard geometry.

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If you want the same amount of houses on a plot this is true yes, then you'd need more land. But you would have more prims for detail if you kept the same plot with houses just as big, but less of them.

 

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Second, think of how making everything larger affects Level of Detail. When objects are far away the engine renders them with lower detail models to save processing power. Smaller objects are downgraded to lower detail models more quickly than larger objects, because you will notice it more in larger objects like buildings if they suddenly drop to a lower detail model.

 If everything is larger, it's being rendered at higher detail, more polygons, over greater distances.

Right there is a hit to your framerate.

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Sorry, but to me this sounds like complete nonsense. Everything is relative.

If I set the draw distance, I look at my framerates. That is determined on how much geometry is on my screen and how many textures. If everything has a certain size,  I set the draw distance to a factor something times that size. If everything is twice as big, I set the drawdistance twice as far and get the exact same things on my screen with the exact same framerate. Even the LODs would be similair, afterall the bounding box is a factor in the algorithm and things would be twice as far if they were twice as big. Everything twice as big? Then LOD kicks in twice as far. Twice as small? same thing.

 

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The argument about avatars being 10 times smaller is a strawman, we're working with SL's tools as they are. Which means there is a sweet spot for detail versus area. That "sweet spot" is right about 1=1 scale with the SL metre. 

In SL you can see examples of this

here

! 

[couple of nice pics}

(These are all from the same quarter sim build that has been frequently mistaken for a full sim builds Even Hamlet mistook it for a full sim build when he wrote about it on New World Notes!)

Here's another example

, believe it or not the following is from a 2048sq.m. parcel that only supports only about 400 prims!

[more nice pics]

All of the above fits into the blue area in this overhead view. 2048sq.m. The orange are additional off-sim prims hosted from my 463prim parcel. I showed these very screenshots to a Linden once and they said, "What game is that from?"

Ever hear of

Doomed Ship

? The 1=1 scale RP sim? People say you can get lost there for hours, and they're right! Nearly the entire sim is the detail of this screenshot, yet if it were built to typical SL sizes it would require four sims to hold it all.

[and yet another one]

None of these builds would be possible if they were built to typical SL scale unless far more money was spent on sims to host them. The average SL builder cannot afford to buy more land whenever they want more area and detail, so the scale issue affects their ability to create impressive graphics.

This is precisely because land is static in SL and we have minimum and maximum prim and avatar sizes.

 That last one, Doomed Ship, is a full sim build, meaning even the 64m prim limit would be hit many times over if the sim were up-scaled to typical SL sizes. That means more polygons that need to be rendered, which means less detail and lower framerates.

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I used a factor 10 because exaggerating is the best way to prove a point in most cases.

The only thing you show here is that there are some excellent builders in SL, not the stated fact 1:1 is a "sweetspot".

Most SL builders can't make so much of so little prims. Most people run into the prim limit before they have half the looks of that and even if they had twice the prims to use it wouldn't look that good. That's about talent, not about size or scale.

Even in a full sim most prims won't be bigger than 64 meters and I don't see how a factor 1.25-1.5 would have a great impact.  If you build 1:1 instead of the current 1:1.4 or so, the biggest prim would be virtually 90 meters instead of 64, so to stretch a sims length you'd need 3 instead of 4. Anyway, we have megaprims at almost any size.

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Aesthetics are always tied to the technical side, and visa-versa. A large part of why SL appears so ugly to many is LL failing to understand that basic truth. My position will always be based in that when the topic of SL's graphics comes up, especially as framed by the OP of this thread.

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You forgot to mention what the truth is.... unless you mean all the above and I really can't agree on that.

Let's say I build a very smoothly animated turd with nice turdy textures and some excellent steam and let's assume I am a good builder who knows how to keep the framerates at a good level. Then compare that to a supermodel which jumps around like a disabled frog because it's animated at 4 frames per second, using 300 1024 textures so the framerate drops to 5.

I would like to state the first of the two results in great graphics, but isn't much to look at from an aestatic point of view. And vice versa.

I thought I made clear what I see as "graphics quality". I can't and won't argue on the fact that supermodel has more appeal. And I cerainly won't argue on the fact you can make that model look just as good graphically as the turd.

This is all about artistic talent and about efficient resource use, two completely different things. If one can combine the two they can call themselves a good builder.... and they can build things like you showed in the pictures. (Assuming the framerates are good in those sims)

 

[Coby Foden]

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Kwakkelde Kwak wrote:

.. I don't see how a factor 1.25-1.5 would have a great impact.

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Surely building oversized has a huge impact how much free land is left.

Let's say you build a house to 1:1 scale. Let's assume it is 14 meters long and 10 meters wide. It has an area of 140 square meters.

Now you build another house 1.5 times larger. It will be 1.5 x 14 = 21 meters long. It will be 1.5 x 10 = 15 meters wide. It will have an area of 315 square meters.

Put the 1:1 scale house in a 512 square meters parcel. Put the 1.5 larger house on a 512 square meters parcel. Compare these setups side by side.

With the 1:1 scale house you still have 372 square meters of free land for landscaping.

With the 1.5 bigger house you have only 197 square meters of free land for landscaping.

Which is better?

My realistically sized avatar surely would prefer the 1:1 scale house, and would be very happy with more free land on the parcel.

:smileyhappy:

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

You're quoting something that has got nothing to do with what you write, the quote is about how much prims it takes to build something.

In some cases, probably a lot, I 100% agree on what you say, but your arguement also means that building at not 1:1.5, or 1:1 but at 0.5:1 would be even better, or 0.1:1, or 0.01:1.

If you want a lot of room to run around, more land is nice, but in an urban sim or a forest you'll find yourself with a lot of space you can't fill because you simply ran out of prims. Unless you free up some prims by lowering your detail, which was what I said:)

More room without the additional prims to fill it up is nice if you don't mind living in a desert (which isn't neccecarily something bad). Islands further apart on a watersim would be nice. Two villages on the outer edges of a sim opposed to one, a nice english hilly grass sim, I can think of plenty of uses. I never said building smaller doesn't have any benefits, I just said it won't have a significant impact on graphics quality.

[Penny Patton]

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Kwakkelde Kwak wrote:

I thought I was pretty clear, obviously I wasn't. My entire point IS based on the fact a sim has a certain size.

If your avatar is 10 times smaller, a sim is no longer the current 256x256 meter, but 2560x2560 meter, that is 100 times bigger. Where one would currently feel at ease with 4 houses (or trees or rocks or whatever) on a sim, they'd need to build 400 houses now to get the same density. Yes there would be more houses, but only a hundredth of the prims for each of them. No room for detail left.

 

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And I've explained why this is a bunk analogy. We're not talking about going to ridiculous extremes, we're talking about working at the ideal scale based on the limits of SL's tool set.

 

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Kwakkelde Kwak wrote:

Sorry, but to me this sounds like complete nonsense. Everything is relative.

If I set the draw distance, I look at my framerates. That is determined on how much geometry is on my screen and how many textures. If everything has a certain size,  I set the draw distance to a factor something times that size. If everything is twice as big, I set the drawdistance twice as far and get the exact same things on my screen with the exact same framerate. Even the LODs would be similair, afterall the bounding box is a factor in the algorithm and things would be twice as far if they were twice as big. Everything twice as big? Then LOD kicks in twice as far. Twice as small? same thing.

 

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 Again, we're not building in a vacuum here we're talking about SL, an existing tool set. Scale everything up and extend your draw distance in SL and you have that much more geometry and texture information to process. And remember, the amount of geometry possible in a given area does not merely double as you double draw distance, it increases by a factor of four.

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Kwakkelde Kwak wrote:

The only thing you show here is that there are some excellent builders in SL, not the stated fact 1:1 is a "sweetspot".

Most SL builders can't make so much of so little prims. Most people run into the prim limit before they have half the looks of that and even if they had twice the prims to use it wouldn't look that good. That's about talent, not about size or scale.

 

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 What we call "talent" is nothing more than skill, understanding and drive. You need to understand how and why things work the way they do to get the most out of SL's tool set. Most people run into the prim limit before achieving this level of detail because they do not understand how to use prims efficiently. I do, and try to explain my methods in threads like these.

 

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Kwakkelde Kwak wrote:

You forgot to mention what the truth is.... unless you mean all the above and I really can't agree on that.

Let's say I build a very smoothly animated turd with nice turdy textures and some excellent steam and let's assume I am a good builder who knows how to keep the framerates at a good level. Then compare that to a supermodel which jumps around like a disabled frog because it's animated at 4 frames per second, using 300 1024 textures so the framerate drops to 5.

I would like to state the first of the two results in great graphics, but isn't much to look at from an aestatic point of view. And vice versa.

I thought I made clear what I see as "graphics quality". I can't and won't argue on the fact that supermodel has more appeal. And I cerainly won't argue on the fact you can make that model look just as good graphically as the turd.

This is all about artistic talent and about efficient resource use, two completely different things. If one can combine the two they can call themselves a good builder.... and they can build things like you showed in the pictures. (Assuming the framerates are good in those sims)

 

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You seem to keep retreating to a more limited definition of "graphics quality" despite the thread clearly being about the broader sense. In any case, I put my money where my mouth is. You can go to all those locations and see them for yourself. Milk & Cream was more about putting as much detail in an open environment as SL's tools allow for, and it predates mesh import, so the framerate isn't as good. Not as bad as many other SL locations, tho.

 

Doomed Ship consistently has higher than average framerates for SL as it's a series of corridors and rooms, enclosed environments rather than a huge, open environment. 

 The Wastelands build is, of course, a tiny parcel in a larger sim and therefore affected by its surroundings.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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Penny Patton wrote:

And I've explained why this is a bunk analogy. We're not talking about going to ridiculous extremes, we're talking about working at the ideal scale based on the limits of SL's tool set.

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Again, rediculous extremes clearify a point. If you don't understand that, it's your loss.

 

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Again, w

e're not building in a vacuum here 

we're talking about SL, an existing tool set. Scale everything up and extend your draw distance

in SL

and you have that much more geometry and texture information to process. And remember, the amount of geometry possible in a given area does not merely double as you double draw distance, it increases by a factor of four.

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Yes so does building everything twice as small...

 

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You seem to keep retreating to a more limited definition of "graphics quality" despite the thread clearly being about the broader sense. In any case, I put my money where my mouth is. You can go to all those locations and see them for yourself. Milk & Cream was more about putting as much detail in an open environment as SL's tools allow for, and it predates mesh import, so the framerate isn't as good. Not as bad as many other SL locations, tho.

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I never retreated and I don't like that word on a forum anyway, we're not at war.

I see graphic quality and aestatic quality as two seperate things. I haven't changed that point of view during this thread and I won't. Both are needed for a good build. As far as the aestetics are concerned I am in agreement from the get go.

I don't see how your example(s) "put your money where your mouth is". All they show is you can build a pretty, usable environment using a 1:1 scale. It does in no way prove 1:1 scaling is the best thing there is.

[GooglistaCZ]

You can set the graphics option in menu, click graphics or something. And get the HIGHEST POSSIBLE!!!!!!!!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PLAMZ :smileyindifferent:

[Perrie Juran]



[Pamela Galli]

But now we know there is a graphics tab. :matte-motes-bored: