SL 2.0 Preview Image

This image is a preview of what SL Rendering 2.0 is capable of.

I thought this was too cool to have buried in the depths of some thread.



Though, you got to wonder.

If you've got a cut distance like that, are you connecting to other sims in order to get their objects? Or are they summarizing at the edge what it looks like and you just have to download that?

The software behind this could be uber cool.

Woo.. looks like the arcology in gibson is the largest structure in SL.

All the original full-quality renders are here: /3/82/40805/1.html

What I want to know is, now that we can see everybody's sex boxes from miles away, what will happen to them? Will they go away, now that nothing is going to "hide" in the sky? Will they stay but get dressed up a bit? To me the presence of these things makes the sky look incredibly cluttered, and they are mostly just plain flat colored boxes. Not like a floating city or anything, just flotsam.

What will new users think when they teleport into the world for the first time and see the skies full of these things?

I had a funny idea about curving the visible distance by altitude, so you wouldn't really see the air-flotsam until you got good and close to it. But then that would also mess up the coolness of a true floating city.

It will be interesting to see how this fundamental change in the environment impacts the society. I am hoping that within a month, the sex boxes will either go away or get gussied up a bit on the outside.

THATS WHAT THOSE WERE!

I have a skylab (no sex though) and the point of it is privacy. If everyone can see it then there will be no point to it and I will figure out something else. Though I like having nothing on the ground so I can build houses....hmmmmm...anyway, I am sure most the sex boxes will go once the privacy goes, we will just make basements.

I think the render code is simplying (ie: boxified) the builds in order to render them in an optimised way.

So, the 'sex boxes' aren't necessarily boxes, it's just the optimised rendering that's making them look that way.

Someone correct me if I am wrong.

They still look like featureless boxes from the outside even up close.

But yes, what you are seeing - as far as I can tell - is a sort of interesting level-of-detail (LOD) priority system, where the following rules apply:

1. Anything too far away is not textured, you just see the prim's base color.
   
2. The closer a prim is, the smaller it can be, and still be visible.
   
3. Conversely, the further away you get, the fewer prims are visible, to the point where eventually nothing less than 10 meters across in at least two dimensions will show up.
   
4. There may be some messing around with "shadows" such as we see in the map to draw stuff that is really far away but I am not sure.
   
5. The "fog" is set to tint everything closer to the base color of the atmosphere as you go back to the very end of the far plane, which is the absolute distance limit of what you can see (except the skybox which is effectively infinite.) It looks like they are still playing around with it at various sun angles. In some cases the tint seems too aggressive on near space, but on others it looks just right. The trick is, more or less, to figure out the vertical ray of the sun, and determine how much atmosphere is between it and the surface of the world.
   

It will be interesting to see if they fisheye it just a little to make it look like we are on a globe rather than a big totally flat plane. It wouldn't be necessary at ground level but as you get higher up (a few thousand feet above ground, as on a mountain) you start to see a hint of curvature.

If they do this, it will be possible to take measurements at altitude and determine the circumference of the planet.

It could also form the foundations of "outer space."

I canny wait, we need a national part with mountains. and rivers and a forest. so you climb up and see the views.

I wonder though if they have to connect to all the sims in order to get that info, or if they can grab it locally.

Hmmm, perhaps smarter caching might make this more workable. Maybe after a certain cut you only dig into your local cache and no where else!

who cares how it works as long as it works.

Thanks for the bump, Karma

This is fantastic. It looks like how I i imagine a Cyberpunk world to look, a real metaverse. In my opinion, there should be a huge sprawl in the theme of Nova Albion Now i'm happy. I'm a bit worried it might just be an April Fools thing though :/ But if it's real, i'm uber-excited!

My time has come! I urge you all to dig holes in the floor, cover them with large pieces of metal with trapdoors, (Black, foggy, industrial looking metal) and live inside! All my life i have dreamt of a society based below the surface of the ground, but only oxygen problems have stopped me from living in a hole in my backyard! Now I, and all else,may happily live underground!

I know what you mean.. My wife was discussing with me today what I'd like to do if I became a quad or something (ala million dollar baby)..

.. and I couldn't stop thinking "hmmm, more time in SL...."

If this works, you will really feel your land is part of another world. At the moment when I'm at my land, I tend to forget that I'm part of something bigger, thats beyond the fog.

It's scary though to think how long it may take my 700kb internet connection to download all that stuff. Maybe it's time upgrade my speed, after all I upgraded my PC just to make SL look fantastic.

I can tell that not all tall structures were in the snapshop... like the Sky City in Grey

*thinks*

Hmm I may just go take a snapshot of that myself -200 sims

Looking at this is giving me all kinds of wierd ideas. I wonder if they build a lot of the far stuff as a static panorama once you are holding still, and only rebuild it if you significantly change viewpoint. Maybe LL will tell us more later on.

It looks like Lego

hopefully this doesn't sound complainy......i'm just thinkin'.

it's cool to see these images but i dunno if i would have posted them if i was LL. from looking it seems like they're way far away from what it's going to be eventually so seeing them this early might give people weird ideas about where it's going.

interesting how there's only cubes in the pics. i wonder if the renderer can't do cylinders yet or if that's part of the LOD thing Hun's mentioned.

having far away prims be their base color might get confusing since you could see huge white buildings that are really textured dark close up.

did anybody notice how some sims look like random piles of broken prims? you can especially see it on the island sims and i was just wondering what that is. it's almost like it scales prims larger at a distance so you can see them and doesn't look at what they are so you get giant cubes from Linden grass or something. looks like everybody on the islands set their houses physical and unlinked. also anybody notice in the other pics it looks like you can see across the empty "ocean" around island sims? very diffrent.

the big one for me........ in that first pic in this thread i'm guessing that mountain in the distance is in Tethys? that's like only a couple miles from where the pic is taken i think if you actually measure it. for me SL is like a condensed world. it feels alot bigger than it is cause you can't see as far as irl. when i sat down and counted sims and did the math it's smaller than my not-real-big irl town by alot. feels big tho. i wonder if seeing this far will show how small SL really is. you might be able to fly only halfway across the world before you see the far edge coming at you. it's always growing but i like thinking it's really really big behind all the fog hehehe.

ps: for somebody in Gibson, what's the deal with the big arcology? i've poked around it a few times but it seems like it's been empty and unfinished since i started. any plans there? it's wild.

Has anyone taken time to note the date and timing of the SL 2.0 Preview posting?

No april fools Check out the announcements.

It would be nice to fly VFR for once. With a viewdistance like that, and maybe smoother sim border crossings, it would seem more like a flight simulator. A flight simulator with a pretty silly scenery pack, but that's half the fun.

Skydiving with that sort of view would be a lot more worthwhile.

I'm really new to a lot of things in SL still...but what is this pic of? It looks horribly cluttered and not pleasing to the eye at all and all I can think of is massive lag.

The above image was one of a month old early test, the boxification is because they where, at the time, still working out several of the more major graphic bugs, and hadn't yet added the shape interpretations... other images on Ben Linden's thread show more modern images, 1, 2 and 4 are more recent render tests, that take into account what those asset's shapes are.
The image posted by blaze is actually a quarter from the scavenger hunt. Which was a very clever way to let them be released, as there are a lot of people interested in the future of SL, this is a glimpse into it.

It looks amazing. Currently, you just don't notice too many of the sky-builds because draw distance is kept turned down in order to be able to handle the graphics.

Does anyone know what kind of machine these pics were taken on? Will I be able to see this level of detail with a Dell PowerEdge 2.8 ghz and an ATI Radeon 9200 vidcard? Or will I have to splurge and purchase a Cray supercomputer?

If you fly around a lot for the hell of it, like I do, eventually the sense of world size shrinks for you anyway.

I think it would be awesome if LL doubled tier m2 limits(including making first land 1024m2)*, while halving prim counts per m2. They would have to roll out more new sims, faster, but the lag would be vastly reduced, and the density of the world would be relieved. Especially now that they can do draw distances like this.

They might have to move gradually on it, to not dislocate the economy too much all at once, but it could be done and would improve SL in so many ways. In fact, now that we have this new continent, the time to start moving that way might be NOW.

*they could give all the already-landed players one more 512 of first land if they were going to do it.