RIP Secondlife or get a move on ;)
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Thili Playfair
Registered User
Join date: 18 Aug 2004
Posts: 2,417
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03-13-2007 07:00
Yes i know this isnt the place to post, but there isnt anything left on this so called "forum" to post anything anymore  Time to get those monkies working LL, you will be history when this one comes out (in like..years ~.~) Avatar Reality, Inc. Licenses Crytek’s CryENGINE2 to Develop New MMVW (massively multiplayer virtual world) This one beats your engine by lightyears, wonder if they will have the same issues with asset : p , steeper system req i bet, hirrr. Secondlife is showing its age, a gui that looks like its from dos days, a chat that cant even do basic irc/colors highlighting, not very userfriendly, live help/forum help absolete outdated, rarly ever availible, physic engine that should been long gone, lod thats uglier and uglier every update, myriads of bugs. Keep adding new stuff, and not fixing, ~ bad bad bad idea ~, nothing but new bugs, theres months old bugs that been pushed back for to long now. You might been the first with "Secondlife" , but now the competition are comming, are you ready?  , 2 others are trying it to, i forgot who ~.~ ("There" dont count they lost the race : p )
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Element Smirnov
Registered User
Join date: 13 Oct 2006
Posts: 108
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03-13-2007 07:16
anyone who has played FarCry can attest to the quality of the crytek engine. and its also one of the first, if not the first to offer 64bit versions. who knows how it will play out as a virtual world, but you can bet your ass i'll be keeping an eye on this one. 
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Nicole Tani
Registered User
Join date: 20 Jan 2007
Posts: 36
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03-13-2007 08:09
hmm, if you want to do some research on it, it looks like it will be a space based world, mainly based on Mars, im not into being a Martian hehe
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RobbyRacoon Olmstead
Red warrior is hungry!
Join date: 20 Sep 2006
Posts: 1,821
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03-13-2007 08:46
Both of those links are dead.
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Rotary Fan
Registered User
Join date: 23 Jun 2006
Posts: 190
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03-13-2007 08:54
"months old bugs" years
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Thili Playfair
Registered User
Join date: 18 Aug 2004
Posts: 2,417
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03-13-2007 09:11
No dead links, but its something to do with us->german that totally borked right now -.- works for euro's. ae-1.gw-prtr-r261-a.bad.oneandone.net might be the cultprit, its insane slow right now
Avatar Reality, Inc. Licenses Crytek’s CryENGINE2 to Develop New MMVW [07 Mar, 07] Recently Announced Virtual World is First Online Development to License New Engine; CryENGINE2 Debuts at GDCSAN FRANCISCO – March 7, 2007 – Avatar Reality, Inc., a new development entity dedicated to the advancement of online community building, today announced that they will become the first company to license Crytek's new game middleware, CryENGINE™2, for use in creating their recently announced massively multiplayer virtual world (MMVW). Set in Terraformed Mars, Avatar Reality’s MMVW will allow players to live their fantasy lives by creating personalized characters, or avatars, in a beautiful environment. "CryENGINE2 is able to render the most beautiful images, in real-time, that I’ve ever seen in my 20 years in the computer graphics industry," said Kazuyuki Hashimoto, president of Avatar Reality, Inc. "We are certain that the quality of these stunning, realistic images stemmed from the technology and not just talented artists. After viewing the images, there is no question that CryENGINE2 is the perfect engine for us to use to build our massively multiplayer virtual world." First demonstrated to the public today at The Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, CryENGINE2 provides multiple state-of-the-art features including a next- generation real-time renderer, multi-threaded physics engine, character animation system, integrated WYSIWYP sandbox editor, sound editor with interactive dynamic sound system, advanced AI system, resource compiler and a network client and server system. "We are very proud to have been chosen as a technology partner for Avatar Reality," said Cevat Yerli, president and CEO of Crytek. "They possess creativity and talent that is extremely rare for our industry and combining that with our technology, we are sure that the new MMVW will be a huge success!" About Avatar Reality, Inc. Founded in December of 2006, Avatar Reality, Inc. is developing a new massively multiplayer virtual world (MMVW) featuring stunning graphics, realistic characters and endless social bonding opportunities. The Honolulu-based company consists of multiple well-known and award-winning game developers including Henk Rogers, founder of Blue Planet Software, Blue Lava Wireless and The Tetris Company and Kazuyuki Hashimoto, former vice president of technology at Electronic Arts (EA) and chief technical officer of Square USA. Prominent members of Avatar Reality’s advisory board also include: Minoru Arakawa, former president of Nintendo America and Alexey Pajitnov, creator of Tetris. For more information about Avatar Reality, please visit www.avatar-reality.com. About Crytek Crytek®, Best Independent European Studio 2004 and Best Independent New Studio 2004 worldwide, creator of the multiple awards winning true next-generation first person shooter Far Cry and the upcoming blockbuster Crysis, is an interactive entertainment development company located in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. Crytek is dedicated to create exceptionally high quality Video Games for PC and the next-generation consoles, with their proprietary cutting edge 3D-Game-Technology CryENGINE® # # # # Crytech tech Real time editing, bump mapping, static lights, network system, integrated physics system, shaders, shadows and a dynamic music system are just some of the state of-the-art features the CryENGINE™ 2 offers.  The CryENGINE™ 2 comes complete with all of its internal tools and also includes the CryENGINE™ 2 Sandbox world editing system. Licensees receive full source code and documentation for the engine and tools. Support is provided directly from the R & D Team that continuously develops the engine and can arrange teaching workshops for your team to increase the learning process. The engine supports all video and hardware currently on the market. New hardware support is constantly added as it becomes available. - Polybump™ 2: Polybump™ 2 can be used as either as a standalone utility, or fully integrated with other tools such as 3DS Max™. This tool creates a high quality surface description that allows quick extraction of surface features like normal maps (tangent-space or object-space), displacement maps, unoccluded area direction, accessibility and other properties. The extracted information can be used to render Low poly models with surface detail almost making them look like the high-poly models but it will render much faster. The data is stored in a intermediate file format so it can be exported in different ways without doing the computation again. Very high polygon counts (e.g. 10 million triangles) are processed quite quickly.
- Next Generation Real-Time Renderer: Our renderer provides seamless support for both indoor and outdoor environments on DirectX9 and 10, as well as support for next generation consoles such as the Xbox360 and PS3 (under development).
- Real Time Lighting and Dynamic Soft Shadows: CryENGINE™ 2 features natural looking light sources, and creates soft shadows that dynamically respond to natural movements. It includes high-resolution, perspective correct and volumetric smooth-shadow implementations.
- Volumetric, Layer and View Distance Fogging: Create clouds or fog banks which can hug the ground and realistically reduce both visibility and contrast, and properly interact with both dynamic lights and shadows, add depth and dimension to a landscape by reducing scene contrast and clarity for distant landmarks
- Terrain 2.5D Ambient Occlusion Maps: On a per pixel level, approximates the amount of ambient (fill) light reaching an object (static or dynamic) depending on the amount of ambient occlusion created by the surrounding foliage and structures.
- Normal Maps and Parallax Occlusion Maps: Normal maps are used to project the contour details of a highly detailed object onto a low polygon model by using a high frequency compressed (3DC/BC5) texture in place of the polygon’s surface normal in lighting calculations. CryEngine2 also supports parallax occlusion mapping to give a greater sense of depth to a surface texture applied to a polygon, such as could be used to realistically emphasize the relief surface structure of a brick wall, for example.
- Real Time Ambient Maps: Pre-calculate the amount of ambient (fill) light which will be applied to indoor surfaces, to improve the quality of lighting when applying real-time per-pixel lighting and shadows. This means the current light position and color can be dynamically added to the fill light intensity applied to illuminate surfaces in interior spaces.
- Subsurface Scattering: Simulates the diffusion and diffraction of light transmitted through translucent objects, like ice and jade; it can also be used to create natural looking skin or vegetation.
- Eye Adaptation & High Dynamic Range (HDR) Lighting: Eye Adaptation is used to simulate the human eye’s adaptation to sudden or extreme changes in lighting conditions, like dark indoor environments suddenly transitioning to bright sunny outdoor environments, while HDR allows scenes with extreme brightness and contrast ranges to be more realistically rendered.
- Motion Blur & Depth of Field: Motion Blur is used to simulate the visual effect of using a slow shutter speed when tracking fast moving objects or making quick camera movements. Blur can be applied both to individual objects (object based motion blur), and/or to an entire scene (screen based motion blur), while Depth of Field can be used to focus the viewer’s eye on a nearby object while subtly blurring objects in front or behind the point of focus.
- Light Beams & Shafts: These are used to create visually stunning light beams and shadows when light intersects with solid or highly detailed geometry, and can generate “godray” effects under water.
- High Quality 3D Ocean Technology: Dynamically modifies the ocean surface based on wind and wave direction, generating shoreline soft-clipping breakers automatically where the ocean meets the shore, depending on the shoreline contour and ocean depth, while our caustic simulation creates realistic looking moving shadows and highlights in underwater environments.
- Advanced Shader Technology: A script system used to combine textures and math in different ways to create unique effects such as cloaked, wet, muddy, and/or frozen surfaces which can be layered together and combined with more basic shaders such as metallic and glassy and other visual effects. Supports real time per-pixel lighting, bumpy reflections, refractions, volumetric glow effects, animated textures, transparent computer displays, windows, bullet holes, and shinny surfaces. Included are many unique new shaders which take advantage of the efficiencies of the unified shader architecture of DirectX 10.
- Terrain LOD Management Feature: This feature allows optimal usage of CPU and memory to display closer objects and terrain at a fine level of detail while enabling long view distances of over 8 kilometers.
- Integrated Multi-threaded Physics Engine: Can be applied to almost everything in a level, including trees and vegetation, to realistically model reactions to forces like wind currents, explosions, gravity, friction and collisions with other objects, without the need of specialized coprocessing hardware. Also allows for character to ragdoll and ragdoll to character transitions.
- Advanced Rope Physics: Bendable vegetation which responds to wind, rain or character movement, realistically interactive rope bridges, and physically driven creature tentacle animations are just some of the uses to which we’ve put our rope physics technology.
- Interactive and Destructible Environments: Dynamically physicallize (using previously defined breaking or shattering characteristics) any arbitrary environmental object or shape, in order to destroy buildings, trees, or other objects, and then further interact with the resulting pieces.
- Character Animation System: Our new character animation system considerably advances the state of the art in real-time human, model and vehicle animation. A fully integrated character editor allows animations to be previewed inside of CryENGINE Sandbox2, while our extremely powerful animation graph allows an animator to visually define the animation states of a character, and the allowable transitions between those states.
- Character Individualisation System: The character pipeline uses a robust character attachment system which allows for attachment of skinned, animated, or physicallized attachments to the skeleton or polygonal faces of a character, to the extent you can even replace entire body parts such as heads, hands, or upper and lower body. A hardware based shape deformation system allows flexible variation of the character meshes. The system supports manually and even procedurally generated examples to ensure a small memory footprint. An additional variation system based on shaders is use for dirt, decals for clothes, and camouflage shaders for the skin.
- Parametric Skeletal Animation: By blending example-motions based on user-defined parameters, we obtain responsive interactive control over a character with a focus on believability and the ability to adapt automatically and naturally to the changing circumstances of a game environment. This enables the character to travel at different speeds, follow paths where the direction changes smoothly or suddenly, move uphill or downhill, dynamically blend in varying amounts of hit reaction animation, and/or change the style of locomotion.
- Procedural Motion Warping: Procedural algorithms like CCD-IK, analytic IK, example-based IK or physical simulations are used to augment pre-authored animations. All procedural methods have in common that a computer procedurally follows the steps in an algorithm to generate artificial motions. To avoid the typical computer-generated look when combining artificial and captured animations, we use a warping technique that can preserve the style and the content of the base motion, despite the transformations needed to comply with the constraints.
- High Quality Animation Compression: Using our adaptive key frame compression technology, we can adjust the compression level to match the fidelity needed for any given animation while saving at least 90% of the RAM that would otherwise be consumed, without significant loss of motion fidelity.
- Integrated CryENGINE Sandbox2 Editor: Run time engine is fully integrated into the CryENGINE Sandbox2 editor to give designers “What you see is what you play” functionality
- Embedded Facial Animation Editor : The powerful new Facial Animation editing tool uses audio waveform analysis technology to automatically extract phonemes and other key features of speech in order to animate facial features and provide convincing lip sync. The sophisticated and convenient multiple joystick-based user interface allows expressions to be defined and combined in many powerful ways, then animated quickly and intuitively. Expressions and animations can be created once, and then seamlessly applied to multiple models. In conjunction with this system, a video tracking tool can be used to capture movements from an actor’s face using a standard video camera, and these movements transferred directly to the desired facial model in the editor, where the expressions and movements can be combined with the lip sync and/or further edited by an animator.
- Integrated Vegetation and Terrain Cover Generation System: Allows procedurally placed vegetation to behave according to natural rules about the desirable and allowable ground slope, surface altitude, and allowable plant density to create believable natural environments at run time without requiring the level designer to custom place every blade of grass or tree. Vegetation can also absorb some color from the underlying terrain texture, to fit more naturally into the environment.
- Advanced Terrain System with Integrated Voxel Objects Technology: Allows designers to place overhanging cliffs, caves or tunnels in their levels, and allows them to adjust the terrain detail on a per-sector basis to reduce overall polygon counts.
- Flow Graph: A visual editing system which allows designers to set up events, triggers, and other game logic by connecting various logic boxes to each other with lines between their input and output gates, and defining their properties and state changes. This allows designers to build complex levels without needing to write C++ code or LUA scripts.
- Advanced Soft Particle System and Integrated FX Editor: Simplifies the creation of extremely complex explosion, fire, smoke and other special effects using next generation soft particles, which in turn can be affected by collisions with any other objects, apply or receive forces such as wind or gravity, and can interact with lights and shadows.:
- Dynamic Time of Day Settings: Change the time of day dynamically during a game mission to reflect lighting conditions and sun/moon positions over any predefined 24 hour cycle, from a blue and foggy morning sunrise to a fiery orange sunset to a clear cold moonlit night.
- Road and River Tools: These integrated tools greatly simplify the process of locally smoothing and leveling terrain and applying a tiled texture for the creation of paths, roads, or rivers through rugged landscapes.
- Vehicle Editor: Allows designers to setup a vehicle’s damage system, including defining component damage and damage effects, define passenger seats and their connection to such vehicle features as the ability to control tank turrets and/or attached weapons, and provides full control over engine and physics parameters. It also exposes control of a vehicle’s exhaust and surface particle effects.
- Sound and Music: The sound system in CryEngine2 introduces many new features and improvements with its data-driven concept. Each sound carries its own specification with it, so sound designers are in full control of the final quality of the sound, and sounds are used consistently throughout the game.
- In Game Mixing: Integrated editor functionality and advanced sound specification tools provide efficient mixing by connecting to a running game instance on various target platforms. This constantly guarantees a well mixed game in every development stage by allowing review of the results in either the game itself, or in other editor modes, such as sounds triggered by animations from within the character editor, for example.
- Data-driven Sound System: Complex sounds can be easily created and delivered with studio quality while supporting any available surround sound speaker configuration. Multi-platform compatibility is guaranteed by FMOD’s included sound library.
- Interactive Dynamic Music System: Improved playback of music tracks by specially defined logic that reacts to any desired game event in order to give the player a movie-like sound track experience.
- Environmental Audio: This feature allows a sound designer to achieve a dense sound impression by accurately reproducing sounds from nature, with seamless blending between different environments, for example the effect of moving from an interior to an exterior location.
- Dynamic World Sounds: Any physical contact can spawn a unique sound controlled by various parameters such as material type, object type, mass, and speed. This technique provides non-repetitive and responsive audio feedback to movement in an interactive game world.
- Advanced AI System: CryENGINE™ 2 has a flexible and easily customizable AI system which handles both character and vehicle behaviors, it fully supports the complex requirements of the character locomotion system to animate bipedal characters in a believable fashion, and is fully integrated into the CryENGINE Sandbox2 editor.
- LUA Script Driven AI System: Allows complex AI behaviors to be created without requiring new C++ code, including extending state machine behaviors from LUA scripts
- Dynamic Path Finding: Advanced 2D and 3D algorithms allow the AI navigation paths to be modified in real time in response to events which create new or destroy existing paths, a critical feature for creating believable AI in a highly interactive and destructible environment.
- Smart Objects: Provides an easy way for level designers to connect specialized animations to particular objects in the level, so that the character animations and objects are properly aligned at the start and end of the animations, and the correct animation sequence plays.
- Resource Compiler: Assets are compiled from their original formats to an optimized platform dependent one by the resource compiler at project build time. This allows making global changes (e.g. mipmap computation, mesh stripification) to the output data depending on presets and target platforms without affecting the final level loading times, or requiring developers to keep multiple versions of assets on hand for different platforms.
- Modular C++ Design: Entirely written in modular C++, fully documented and commented, and divided into logical separate DLL’s, you can use what you need as-is, and modify or replace only the components in our engine that you particularly require to customize for your individual project requirements.
- Multithreading Support: To get the most out of modern multicore processor architectures, CPU intensive subsystems of CryENGINE™ 2 such as physics, networking and sound, have been re-written to support multi-threading.
- Performance Analysis: Powerful instrumentation features allows the developer to analyze engine performance in real time, create detailed memory usage reports, and run automated walk-throughs of each level to get consistent test results from build to build
- Offline Rendering: Creating streaming videos or still images from within the game is made easier by the inclusion of specific console commands which can output a scene at any arbitrary screen resolution and/or aspect ratio, including generating autostitched panoramic views for use on 360 degree projection video displays.
- Streaming System: Assets can be loaded on demand at run time to allow for larger levels and increased complexity, while reducing the amount of available system RAM required.
- Network Client and Server System: CryENGINE™ 2 has a totally new, multi-threaded networking system which manages all connections for multiplayer mode. It features a highly reliable, low-latency, low bandwidth system based on client/server architecture using advanced range encoding based compression algorithms.
right click to download the comlete CryENGINE™ 2 features document in PDF format » here «
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Flash Ferguson
Registered User
Join date: 8 Aug 2006
Posts: 96
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03-13-2007 10:28
It sounds like the company hasn't even written one line of code yet, they've only just licensed an engine. So I imagine they're at least 2-3 years away from showing a demo. By that time, DX10 cards will be a dime a dozen and 4GB PC's with quad-core will be the norm, so maybe the Crysis engine will work out for them. It has insane system requirements right now. I wonder if they will allow players to upload their own sounds/textures/animations. I think that's what separates SL from the others but we've seen from SL how difficult it is to manage such a large database, let alone optimize an engine for it. How will the Cry engine handle that? The other issue I see is that I don't see anywhere that the Cry engine is designed for creating an MMO. Will there be seamless walking/flying around the world, or will it be TSO-style? can the networking code handle MMO? Aren't most FPS engines designed with 32-64 player limit? In any event.. I say bring on the competition! If it helps put a fire under LL to fix these bugs, and give us current gen Havoc, and Mono, etc. then it's a good thing. 
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AJ DaSilva
woz ere
Join date: 15 Jun 2005
Posts: 1,993
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03-13-2007 10:41
From: Thili Playfair  Time to get those monkies working LL, you will be history when this one comes out (in like..years ~.~) Seriously, what're you talking about? There's plenty of MMOs with better graphics than SL out right now and they haven't provided what SL's userbase wants. How is this any different?
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Vale Vieria
The Devil Herself
Join date: 8 Feb 2007
Posts: 228
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03-13-2007 10:46
A bleeding edge engine as all well and good, but nothing's going to overthrow SL unless the users have the same create/buy/sell powers they do now. A virtual world entirely thought up and created by pros would look very pretty but when the novelty wore off it would be as dull as dishwater IMO.
Vale
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Element Smirnov
Registered User
Join date: 13 Oct 2006
Posts: 108
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03-13-2007 11:25
From: Flash Ferguson The other issue I see is that I don't see anywhere that the Cry engine is designed for creating an MMO. Will there be seamless walking/flying around the world, or will it be TSO-style? can the networking code handle MMO? Aren't most FPS engines designed with 32-64 player limit? In any event.. I say bring on the competition! If it helps put a fire under LL to fix these bugs, and give us current gen Havoc, and Mono, etc. then it's a good thing.  the 32-64 player limit is because of server and bandwitdth limitations, not the engine. same reason SL only allows about 30 avatars per sim.
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Rotary Fan
Registered User
Join date: 23 Jun 2006
Posts: 190
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03-13-2007 11:40
I wonder how a system like CryEngine 2 would serve as a 3D conferencing system as compared to SL?
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Thili Playfair
Registered User
Join date: 18 Aug 2004
Posts: 2,417
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03-13-2007 11:59
Seriously, what're you talking about? There's plenty of MMOs with better graphics than SL out right now and they haven't provided what SL's userbase wants. How is this any different? SL a MMO ? since when? ,its a MMWV,not a game wich has everything put in by whoever made the game, SL is diffrent cause we are dependant on scripts working, prims rezzing, getting inventory and textures send to us so they actually appear, care to mention one game that have this , and must have scripts working that other people made not the developer But yes i wont expect this to be out for ages, but any competition to SL i'll welcome, one thing to watch :>
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AJ DaSilva
woz ere
Join date: 15 Jun 2005
Posts: 1,993
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03-13-2007 12:14
From: Thili Playfair Seriously, what're you talking about? There's plenty of MMOs with better graphics than SL out right now and they haven't provided what SL's userbase wants. How is this any different?SL a MMO ? since when? ,its a MMWV,not a game wich has everything put in by whoever made the game, SL is diffrent cause we are dependant on scripts working, prims rezzing, getting inventory and textures send to us so they actually appear, care to mention one game that have this  you really need to spend more time doing something in SL, this is not even comparable to a MMO. What? Huh? I'm really failing to follow your reasoning. FYI, I spend more time in SL than any other virtual 3D space and am well versed in all sorts virtual world stuff. Firstly, SL would classify as an MMO (okay, in some places the term's interchangeable with MMOG, but surely here of all places it shouldn't be). Secondly, you were the one that compared SL with a more standard (read: game-like) MMO, the fact that it's not comparable in this way is why I brought the issue up.
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Takeshi Kiama
Registered User
Join date: 8 May 2006
Posts: 23
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03-13-2007 12:21
Mars? Well that doesn't appeal to me in the least. I'm sure some will like it, but it certainly won't knock SL out. SL is unique.
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Tod69 Talamasca
The Human Tripod ;)
Join date: 20 Sep 2005
Posts: 4,107
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03-13-2007 12:22
*After cleaning off my jeans  * That would be some tough competition if it comes to be! BUT, the only catch I see is "Ease of Use". Not many are willing to sink the time into learning how to build/texture/script. And some SL Users are just barely able to get the hang of Photoshop so I doubt they'd be willing to learn the complexities of using a Game Engine, whereas in SL I can produce something in an hour, something like this would take you several or even days, till you get the hang of it. It'd still be really really cool though! Farcry was just bee-yoooo-tiful to play!! And as someone said, the system requirements for CryEngine2 are a bit steep for some. Thats part of the appeal of SL also- you dont need bleeding edge computers to run it (yet)
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Argent Stonecutter
Emergency Mustelid
Join date: 20 Sep 2005
Posts: 20,263
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03-13-2007 13:41
From: Thili Playfair Time to get those monkies working LL, you will be history when this one comes out (in like..years ~.~) Not unless I can get Thili's Round Stuff for it. And in Earth Green, not Martian Moss Red.
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Drake Eilde
Registered User
Join date: 6 Feb 2007
Posts: 12
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03-13-2007 15:10
Not sure if anything can beat SL, since you know, when you have that level of insanity in a game, you become addicted, and no other game can duplicate that part of the human brain XD
Though I wholly agree that second life needs to update some stuff BADLEY. They have a nice, giant list of video cards that do no work with Second Life. The phyisics engine could use an upgrade, graphics upgrade would be pretty awsome, more advanced building options, as well as scripting, Things like that. Though somehow I think that even while LL very, very slowley updates everything, they will still come out on top in a few years.
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Heather Rau
Registered User
Join date: 7 Feb 2007
Posts: 100
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03-14-2007 10:52
At this point the technology is almost irrelevant. SL has the critical mass in terms of players, content, and ability to build in a pretty intuitive way that is from my perspective impossible for anyone to catch up to, short of some paradigm that is brilliant and transformative. The Crytek engine is not that. And SL is a whole lot more than 3d rendering and a physics engine...think of all the building tools, all the systems that are in game that any competitor needs to create.
Everyone goes on about how this and that is broken, but this is cutting edge stuff. I'm always amazed that SL works as well as it does. Don't forget that Linden is running a company and needs to allocate resources accordingly. We'll see improvement as resources and time permit no doubt, but I would expect most of it to be mostly incremental punctuated by bigger initiatives like voice.
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Crash Pointe
Registered User
Join date: 26 Aug 2006
Posts: 14
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03-18-2007 17:40
I would certainly fall in love with the features provided by this engine. I have played Far Cry on a AMD XP ~2GHz system and a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro spec'd system and it was playable. Although, in a metaverse sense I wonder how well it will handle with the graphics, bandwidth, network infrastructure, etc. It has its own little network code but also consider the network infrastructure supporting the back end of it. Hopefully all for the better.
Otherwise, I am all for this. Mars, huh? Hmm. Well, I will wait and see.
Oh, I see no mention of OpenGL in the CryEngine2 specs so I guess Mac folks are SOL? Hehe. Seeing how the mass majority of SL users (shoot me if I am wrong) are Windows users I always wondered why LL never created a DirectX capable build.
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Tegg Bode
FrootLoop Roo Overlord
Join date: 12 Jan 2007
Posts: 5,707
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03-19-2007 00:04
They have demo's online somewhere I've seen them and they are sweet, perhaps they may even make sims with 5-10 times the prim limits and higher avatar limits, simpler building system to SL, perhaps, a real organised world layout with planning & zonning perhaps? Vehicles that work? Avatar name take changing? FPS integration that works, with a worldwide combat / spells / powers engine? Customer support & global quality management with international resources & financing? There are so many ways to kick SL's butt. City of Heroes just annouced user buildible powers/items using salvage. It's just a matter of which big duck hits SL best. I'm fuly expecting to change to something else completely in the next 12 months. So no plans to buy big real estate here.
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Siria Wilder
Registered User
Join date: 19 Jan 2007
Posts: 15
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04-23-2007 02:17
From: Tegg Bode I'm fuly expecting to change to something else completely in the next 12 months. So no plans to buy big real estate here. Same here. You know, I like SL for what it was in the past and for what it could have been, if LL would have sticked to the original idea of a VIRTUAL metaverse instead of sacrifying the virtuality and the spirit of this world on the altar of comercial mass attraction for gameboy-style players. Since they are changing the world(!) into a game, add ANTI-virtuality and pro-harassment-systems, just to catch a completely different kind of players, it will be loosing a lot of it's magic soon. SL is gonna change with e.g this "newbie world designer madness" called "voice chat" to a completely different platform, loosing its original language (text is a language on it's own as you soon will find out), so this is the perfect time for any competitors to come out who catch up the original dream and prevent those mistakes. Voice is NO improvement, voice is a completely different approach to a world, killing all of it's virtuality advantages which in fact make out what SL is!!! Why I call voice the madness of obvious newbie designers? Here is a good article about this: "Not yet you fools" Read it, if you really believe that voice chat will do any good to a virtual world! The old SL is about to become killed by LL them selfs and replaced by... something else. Many might like this new game and dating platform, for sure. And it will work in the beginning, giving LL a whole lot of new... non paying people invading the grid which have not been attracted by the original spirit of SL. Now guess what this will cause to this spirit you all love and are addicted to... Right, it will change! But very many, who are addicted to the VIRTUAL WORLD "SL" as it is yet, are looking for THE new world to build with their imaginations already, because of these changes to come, And many will follow when the change of the spirit and the world will happen. And... many of those are content creators, the people who made SL what it is now, who lived the dream of a virtual metaverse. What is SL without them? A server park without content and with an overage software engine, And of course people standing around in an empty world, chatting, dating. Oh, I forgot that this new voice chat is a harassment tool against females as I stated in one of the many anti-voice treads, so I expect many girs to leave SL. No dating, sorry. So, just boys who are chatting and who are crowd jumping every girl that may want to stay. Ok, this picture is a bit exaggerated, yes. Of course not all content creators will leave, so many contents will stay, sure, but those who leave will leave empty spaces where content used to be and which I doubt will be filled by the newly attracted consumers at all. And not all females will leave. But be aware that the virtuality and the safety it provided was one of the main reasons, why SL is not just another pure-boys-platform just like most other online worlds are and has this healthy mix.. yet. The competitors only can offer a different world with a better technology... but SL will become very different soon too, and surely not better in the eyes of metaverse livers and lovers, so all have the same start. Except the communities... which are sick of loosing stuff and of completely insecure databases and a company that does not care about belongings in a proper way. And who are sick of a grid that is barely playable in the main times because of the lag that is already there, plus the lag the new features will add. LL should NOW do something to safe the WORLD of SL, should NOW fix those damn database issues, should NOW fix the horrible lag instead of adding new laggy features that draw more non-paying masses of players to the grid which will add even more lag, and should NOW drop the plans to morph the grid in a dating platform and a gameboy-style game. Or the world will die even without competitors which ARE there! Crytek engine? For a virtual world? I just hope their world creators left the newbie state in designing the world and its virtuality. This competitor has just to catch up the original dream of SL and offer a VIRTUAL world with free content creation. A metaverse just like SL had the potential to become before they decided to destroy virtuality. Crytek?? Wow! I can't wait to see THIS! Thank you very much for this information, Thili!
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AJ DaSilva
woz ere
Join date: 15 Jun 2005
Posts: 1,993
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04-23-2007 09:55
From: Siria Wilder Since they are changing the world(!) into a game, There's many, but I'm just going to pick that point for my WTF?
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Psyra Extraordinaire
Corra Nacunda Chieftain
Join date: 24 Jul 2004
Posts: 1,533
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04-23-2007 10:31
I like FarCry and the Crytek engine and all, but... I'm in agreement with some of the previous posters. If we can't build what we've been building in SL... it will feel shallow. Especially after being in SL for 3+ years, it will become stale and boring for me in record time.
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E-Mail Psyra at psyralbakor_at_yahoo_dot_com, Visit my Webpage at www.psyra.ca  Visit me in-world at the Avaria sims, in Grendel's Children! ^^
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Zachary Carter
Registered User
Join date: 25 Mar 2007
Posts: 8
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04-28-2007 08:38
From: Element Smirnov the 32-64 player limit is because of server and bandwitdth limitations, not the engine. same reason SL only allows about 30 avatars per sim. Erm, correct me if I am wrong but does mainland sims not allow 50-100 avatars per sim? I know for a fact on our private island we can allow up to 100. Of course, if you are talking performance wise, that is a different story alltogether.
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Kir Loon
Registered User
Join date: 2 May 2007
Posts: 1
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how about this?
02-18-2008 20:41
heh, LL should be more worried about the chinese game Hipihi - http://www.hipihi.com/english button in the upper right  the game is currently beta testing, english version is planned I realy do hope LL fixes SL quick, and make it more stable or this might just give them some good competition.
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