Second Life textures and color compared to World of Warcraft?

I started playing WoW last week (Night Elf and all), and it's pretty impressive. I noticed that the colors and textures are very vivid, three-dimensional, and vibrant. I don't mean to criticize, but it seems to me that WoW is a much more colorful world than SL, and I'm not sure whether it's because of the consistantly excellent design, style, and artwork v. SL's chaos, or whether it's a different media and technology. Shards v. grid, maybe. Anyway, I know they're both different animals, but I wondered if anyone knew enough to comment. Thanks.

Content in SL is made by users, and most users aren't professional graphic artists.

Blizzard has an army of content creators that get paid for this, have years of experience, and have a set design goal in mind.

SL has an army of amateur content generators that sometimes get paid for their hard work, have maybe a year's experience or two, and have 30,000 set design goals in mind.



LF

Second life is user created. World of Warcraft was built by professional graphics designers over the course of 4 years using mesh based tools. Second Life uses parametric primitives and is streaming to your computer. To compare the two is one of the dumbest things every. Second Life is in a class by its own, not There nor Active Worlds can compete.

Come on Ryen, that's a little bit harsh.

Dallas,

It is an interesting question. Certainly the professional art department at Blizzard and the millions in development costs certainly help the quality of graphics. World of Warcraft has an art direction unlike any game I have ever seen, it is almost hypnotic at times. I think in the end it comes down to the rendering engine used, the fact that different quality of textures can be used for different resolutions, and that more sophisticated graphic techniques on higher end video cards can be utilised.

Hopefully the new graphics engine we are ultimately getting will improve the look of SL even more. However, it can never fully compete with professional quality pre-rendered systems.

One great effect WOW uses is a kind of Cartoon Perspective. Buildings, features, details etc. do NOT adhere to RL right angles or proportions. A door in Wow, for example, may be cartoonishly large at the top compared to the bottom. A fireplace may be completely lop sided. This freedom allows the designers to highlight important things and create dramatic effects that would be impossible if they had to design things by the book.

But echoing what was already said, this is the result of great professional designers, not a limitation of the SL engine.

-aimee

Thank you for your answers. My question was this: is the difference solely a matter of artwork and design, or is it a matter of technology, or both? Wasn't doing a this is better than this comparison, but from what I've read on the forums so far, Ryan Jade is being his usual likably-orcish level 62 self.

It seems to be both then. Good design and art, appealing style, a different rendering engine, pre-rendering, parametric primitives, and streaming versus content calls to the hard drive.

Thanks again!

Ha, one thing I like to do in SL is with the Debug menu on, Ctrl-8 or Ctrl-0 a lot -- THAT gives me a nice "Cartoon Perspective"! It'd really fun to take snapshots with those weird angles too. I wish there were more camera angle modes in SL for lens distortion and variable geometry. Hmmm!

*PREENY PREEN PREEN*

It's absolutely possible to emulate WoW's cartoony, off-kilter style, and indeed, even surpass it. Iv'e seen it done, and done a build myself that was like that.

SL's rendering engine actually provides for better effects than WoW's, I think... WoW's stuff is low-poly, meaning you can't get as much detail as you can in SL.

But, it does make it run better...

SL's getting a new rendering engine in the next year or so, too, so it'll look even better!

LF

To make the comparison fair, you could look at the Linden-generated content, like their basic land, trees, rocks, etc., and compare it to WoW's. I've seen only WoW screenshots, but it simply looks better.

Everything in SL always looks to me like it's in an opium haze. And I'm not smoking, and I have a good graphic card that's new and is the recommended although not preferred one. So I have to wonder what they're smoking lol.

Yes, ignore posters who use insulting language. They rarely have anything valuable to say.

As for your question - it's an issue of static versus dynamic. That content is cool, but it doesn't change as frequently as it does in SL, or have the wide variety of concepts, ideas, and interaction.

While some parts of World of Warcraft do indeed look fantastic, I've been sorely disappointed with the quality of texturing in much of the world. The Night Elf forests, for example look attrocious. The ground textures there look incredibly flat, not at all the quality we've come to expect from Blizzard over the years. What are supposed to look like roots crosscrossing the ground look like nothing more than painted lines. Someone dropped the ball there. As I said though, there are places that really do look incredible. Beaches, for example, complete with bump and specularity mapping on the sand, the water, and even the little pebbles, are simply breathtaking.

Anyway, to answer the question of technology differences, SL and WoW are like apples and oranges. They operate on completely different principles. In WoW, the entire world is stored on the local machine, including all the textures. This allows for infinitely more detail which can be accessed in real time since nothing about the environment or the appearance of characters needs to be streamed. The only information that needs to be streamed is data about what the characters are physically doing at the moment, which is relatively small.

In SL, literally everything needs to be streamed because all the content is created by the users. Nothing can be pre-isntalled onto the user's computer. If I make a new texture and upload it to SL, you need to downlaod it before you can see it. That takes significant time. Now introduce custom bump maps and specularity maps for each texture (something SL doesn't allow yet) to bring them up to the quality of some of the textures in WoW and you'd end up having to wait even longer.

Also, as Aimee pointed out, the architects of WoW are not limited to modeling with simple primitives the way we are in SL. The modelers for WoW were able to use "real" 3D modeling applications to construct every building, every tree, every rock, etc. Cusomization of shapes is not a problem in a "regular" video game like WoW because, as I said, all the information about the world itself is stored on your local hard drive. They were able to mold polygons into any shape they wanted and you are able to access those polygons in real time because your computer already has them stored. Your only limitation is your computer's internal processing power.

In SL, on the other hand, we cannot costomize the shapes of polygons. We must be limited to the common set of shapes that all SL users already have stored in their computers (prims). We can combine them into what appear to be all kinds of unique looking objects, but we cannot bypass them to make our own shapes. This is what allows SL to operate as quickly as it does; no information about how to build the prims needs to be streamed. Your computer already knows how to build them so the only information that needs to be streamed is where to put them, how big to make them, which way to rotate them, etc.

So what it comes down to is this: in our current state of technology, a pre-fabricated universe like WoW has the capability look much better than a user-created one like SL, but the pre-fabricated one is fixed, unmodifiable. The user-created world has more flexibility in that is an ever-changing dynamic system, but until communication speed between computers becomes as fast as internal processing, a user-created world won't be able to utilize the technology that makes pre-fab worlds look as good as they do.


edited for typos

Two things that work against SL in this regard are fogging which is used to manage draw distance, and it's lighting system. A game like WoW can use a mich higher view distance so only colors far far off in the background are desaturated by fog. Also, since buildings, trees, and other stationary objects in WoW aren't dynamic it can use a more sophisticated lighting system. SL's has to allow for every polygon in view aside from the terrain to move in relation to nearby lightsources on every frame so it has to use much simpler shadowing. Can't wait til we start to get some sneak peaks at the rendering improvements they're working on for SL
From the screenshots of WoW I've seen the art direction looks spectacular.

Okay, I think this topic has been sufficiently covered.

So, what, you're going to close it?

What the heck does that have to do with anything?

That's the fog LL is using to hide the fact that the draw distance is so short. If you're willing to kill your framerate, set the draw distance to 512 and the fog ratio to 2.0, and you'll get crisp colors out to a reasonable distance. It's why so many of us like new sims -- there's not much built there, so it's possible to set the draw distance far out and still get a reasonable framerate.

Playing SL has opened my eyes a lot more to the work that must go into creating games like WoW. I examined one of the emu type mounts that people can ride one day and noted that there were many many more prims in just one leg then we can do here in SL and still the animation of the emu was great! They must have one heck of a game engine.