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just a thought


LifeofZenith
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Hi there!

Just a thought from a newbie about a thing that I have been recently thinking about:

 

Why have LL not upgraded the graphical engine to modern day standards?

 

I might be chasing shadows here, but their rendering engine feels cumbersome and resource-squandering compared to a .. Let's say CryEngine? They are making more than enough money to fund a project to update the whole rendering engine to newer standards and then the whole game would not look like 2004'. It may sound utopians, but I think that more players would be attracted to the game if it would look and feel better.

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LifeofZenith wrote:

Hi there!

Just a thought from a newbie about a thing that I have been recently thinking about:

 

Why have LL not upgraded the graphical engine to modern day standards?

 

I might be chasing shadows here, but their rendering engine feels cumbersome and resource-squandering compared to a .. Let's say CryEngine? They are making more than enough money to fund a project to update the whole rendering engine to newer standards and then the whole game would not look like 2004'. It may sound utopians, but I think that more players would be attracted to the game if it would look and feel better.

They could but then they would alienate the people who cant afford computers that can handle those graphics.

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You're missing a lot of the technical details of how the Cry Eng works and how SL works. If you want to know what is happening with SL upgrades follow Inara Pey's or my blog.

The biggest challenge is in regard to who is making the content for Second Life. Those using the Cry Eng are mostly professionals. Yes some hobbyists do use it, but even they are advanced hobbyists. In SL we have a large number of novice modelers. The SL system is designed to handle poorly designed models and handle them well.

Also the Cry Eng usually displays worlds previous downloaded. All the content is on your hard drive. SL currently consists of more than 200 terabytes of data. We can't download that. So, the SL world is generated on the fly as needed by the individual.

If you are looking for high frame rates, you can get those in SL. But, you need to find regions that have been well designed.

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LifeofZenith wrote:

Hi there!

Just a thought from a newbie about a thing that I have been recently thinking about:

 

Why have LL not upgraded the graphical engine to modern day standards?

 

I might be chasing shadows here, but their rendering engine feels cumbersome and resource-squandering compared to a .. Let's say CryEngine? They are making more than enough money to fund a project to update the whole rendering engine to newer standards and then the whole game would not look like 2004'. It may sound utopians, but I think that more players would be attracted to the game if it would look and feel better.

What you were proposing has actually been done, right down to CryEngine. It's called BlueMars. Check it out - you won't have to worry about crowds, that's for sure.

As far as making major upgrades to the graphics engine, there are people on SL who are upset now because they can't run it on their tablets or on PowerPC Macs running OSX Tiger. That's the way things roll around here.

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  • 4 months later...

Finally got access to this part of the internet again. :P

So, I think I need to clarify a bit: I do not want SL to become a game or a shooter. I only say that my 4core, 4gig ram PC is having a hard time pushing frame rates up to 30 per second, while other games speed along at 60 and at a much higher detail.

SO I guess some optimization would be needed in this regard in the code, or some corners could be cut.

 

I am no expert on this by far, I can only say what I feel and that is minecraft with a better resolution. 

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You misunderstand how Second Life works and make the common mistake of comparing SL to games that are loaded onto your hard drive. Everything you see in SL has to be streamed to your computer and rendered by your cpu and video card second to second. The only thing on your hard drive from SL is the viewer which is the conduit from LL to your PC (and some texture cache). Most other games (for instance World of Warcraft) are loaded on your hard drive and your computer has access to everything it needs constantly with very little additional data streamed to your PC (mostly position information for the people you play with). So 30 fps for a quad core computer with 4GB RAM (sounds like a laptop)  is actually fairly good performance. In fact your video card is likely your most limiting factor after your RAM, but you didn't give it's specs. 4GB of RAM is not a lot.

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And even beyond Cincia's explanation for why SL runs slower, if you watch other virtual world systems closely, you'll see a remarkable amount of reuse of both textures and geometry. Two buildings in a scene may look quite different on cursory examination, but upon closer inspection, you'll see they're sharing quite a bit in common. A couple years ago, the neighbor kid was showing me some game, I think it was "Call of Duty" and I noticed a lot of reuse of textures in the scenes. There were trees with leaves that looked exactly like the leaves on the flowers growing in the desert. That rarely happens in SL. Trees may come from one creator, flowers from another.

Efficient re-use of resources requires central planning and design that simply doesn't exist in SL. I have looked in the SL viewer cache after clearing it, then TPing into a fairly simple sim, and found in excess of 5000 texture files. Many of those are progressive resolutions of the same texture, but even 1000 textures is a heck of a lot of information to manage for the display of a simple scene. I can imagine Call of Duty having less than 1000 textures for the entire game, with no scene ever requiring more texture RAM than the console or PC is likely to have.

SL is a hot mess of individuality built on a dozen year old foundation that can't be changed like the underpinnings of a game designed by a self contained development team.

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The biggest bottleneck for folks living in big cities with modern broadband infrastructure (ie, fiber) isn't the streaming of objects, it's rendering the scene.  Preboxed games, even open source games, have standards for maximum polycounts, verticies, and texture sizes that are far and away more conservative than Second Life's, keeping performance in mind.  The more verticies, the more polys, the more and larger textures, mean more lag, whether or not you have the ability to prerender it before it goes into the box and gets shipped out static.  SL's environment is largely designed by amateurs, who largely don't give a **bleep** about how hard it is to render something (hair and fashion "designers" are, far and away, the worst offenders on this).  SL also changes potentially in real time, so it's not like things can be prerendered cheaply; everything's rendered realtime more or less from square one every frame.

You have two options:  Convince your fellow residents to start playing polygon and texture golf for the lowest score, or throw hardware at the problem.  Good luck with the former.

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