Effects, we're a bit behind :/

...Water.

Bumpmaps.
http://www.blizzard.com/wow/ScreenShot.aspx?ImageIndex=163&Set=0

Reflections, Ripples.
http://www.planethalflife.com/screenshot.asp?src=/half-life2/screenshots/24.jpg

Beauty
http://www.levels4you.com/download.l4y?showscreenshot=315

Why aren't we there yet? Those games get 120 FPS above us. Why can't we render a reflection too? Mmm? Water with the new renderer!

I've also got a little deal to pick with our sky. Why not spiff it up a bit? Maybe even add a useless little lens flare effect?

Any other effects anyone can think of? I think most of a game's beauty is in the environment-- We lack much of that environmental beauty.

Actually WoW has less bumps mapped than EQ2. EQ2 had massive potential for beautiful terrain and characters. Too bad they messed it up and made everything boring.

I don't really know much about SL's graphics engine, other than we're supposed to be getting an upgrade sometime this millenium...

I haven't seen Everquest 2's water, yet. But at the bare minimum we should be able to handle something like WoW's water. I'm not expecting to see a replica of SOURCE's water or anything, I just don't think LL can handle it.

I have SL ripple water turned off because I do not like how it looks on the whole. While the hypnotic effect is mildly appealing, it cuts into my draw distance and blurs, overlaps, and covers distant buildings. This makes it difficult for me to navigate properly. Which is why I have it turned off.

I have heard anecdotal info that ripple water actually performs and looks much BETTER on ATI cards? I haven't had a chance to see side-by-side screenshots but I am curious about this hypothesis as presented forward.

I thought the reason some of these weren't feasible is the way that SL's graphic engine deals with a changing world.

I may be wrong though.

I am curious the amount of system resources and bandwidth it'd take to deal with a world this detailed. I know a lot of it may be handled on the client side, but since the world is dynamic a lot up updating would have to be done to keep up with so much. Just a theory. Any people familiar with this? I've seen it posted before.

Oddly, under Win98, ripple water worked fine on my GeForce. Under XP, it's greyed out on my card(s) and is unavailable.

beauty depends entirely on who's building something. most people in sl (no offense) aren't as good as professional game artists. the cool thing is that we get to do it at all. go us.

i think one of the reasons sl is behind the bleeding edge of 3D is that it's completely dynamic and streaming instead of sitting on your hard drive and never really changing. it's probably harder to make something like that run fast on a graphics card although that's not my field really.

ps: you only get lens flares if you're looking through a camera lens. that's why they're called "lens" flares. if you're using your eyes or a virtual character's eyes you shouldn't see them.

Newview is a lens into the world of second life.
The 'ripple' effect is about useless, I'm looking more at the idea of pretty. Pretty could range from a bumpmap on the water to make it shine based on the direction of the sun and the camera, to reflections onward to realism. Reflections would only need to be based around the things being rendered. Source has moving objects, nonstatic, and does these nonstatic re-renderings of reflections in the water, even online (Certianly not as many objects being rendered/reflected, but it's still a live reflection). Because they got the algorithm right, and didn't do it half brained.

Second life is not close-ended like most commercial games, we don't have to stick with what we have because it's already there. And we can't think that new things can't be implemented just because you're head is going about how to do it the wrong way. How many people think our skies and seas could use some improvement?

I was expirimenting with how to make a small pond look pretty the other day. I kept thinking rotating prims, adding polys-- But in the end, I just made two layers of it that moved at slightly different speeds and rotations, it made all the difference in the world.

You are correct. The answer has everything to do with pre-processing and static content of the other named 3D environments.

If you ever need an intuitive example, try out one of the level editors that come with some. After the "prim" collection that makes up a level is coded, it is run through a lengthy compile cycle that pre-calculates whether point X can be seen from point Y, creates detailed bounding boxes of the world geometry for collisions, does a form a ray tracing for reflection, etc. I've seen this compile take minutes for levels far less complex than a mid-sized SL build. If you'd like SL play to be measured in frames per minute, this could be done too.

Well, actually, my av has glasses, so if I'm in mouselook, arguably I should be getting lens flares. Not that I want them, mind, I get enough of that in RL. (And I don't spend much time in mouselook because it's so useless... but that's another thread.)

Reflections would be interesting, though probably too computationally expensive to be practical.

neko

you still wouldn't get them because glasses don't have enough lenses and they don't have an iris aperture. that's what makes the little (usually hexagonal or roundish) speck of light shooting out from a light source and it's the multiple lenses inside the camera lens that make a string of them.

now that i've driven that into the ground i'm going away. down with lens flares!

Chibi,

To answer your question, it's not that "we" aren't there yet (well some of us, anyway). It's that the internet isn't there yet. Let me explain.

In all of the games from which you posted screenshots, the entire world is stored on the player's hard drive. This makes accessing complex bump maps, reflection maps, specularity maps, and everything else virtually instant, the only restriction being your machine's processing power (which is very fast). In those games, the only information that actually needs to transmit across the internet is what the characters are doing, a very, very, very tiny amount of data. What everything looks like is pre-determined, already sitting on the player's computer.

In SL, however, almost nothing is stored on the user's hard drive. The look of the world cannot be pre-determined because it is, by design, always changing (user-created content). Therefore, literally everything is streamed over the internet. Because of this, accessing information about what the world looks like can only happen as fast as the internet can carry it to you, which is extremely slowly. The only way to keep things up to a reasonable speed is to keep things relatively simple. Were SL to include the kind of maps (and the kind of geometry, for that matter) that those other games include, it would not be able to function in any semblance of real time. It won't be until the internet gets several hundred times faster than it currently is that we're likely to see that change.

That having been said, I do agree that they could certainly imorove the look of SL's water since water is universal to the entire world. It's unlikely it will ever be able to cast reflections like in those beautiful shots from half life and FarCry, but they could certainly bump it and light it better than they currently do. I don't think it looks bad as it is though, fir what it is. (Oh, and by the way, the World of Warcraft water isn't so hot if you look at it from a distance. You can see the tiling.)

Anyway, the bottom line is trying to compare the look of a dynamic world like SL to that of a static world in a game is apples & oranges. They are not the same thing. It's the equivilent of trying to compare the effects in a game to the effects in a big-budget movie. Good movie effects look so real you can't tell where the real footage stops and the effects begin, but even the best of the best of game effects look incredibly fake. The difference is the game has only a split second to render each frame, where the movie renders can take seconds, minutes, even hours for each frame if need be. SL, on the other hand, has the hardest job of all. It has not only to render, but to receive and then process entirely new information about what to render every split second. That's quite a chore.

Torley: ATI Mobility 9700 256 RAM

Movie of rippling water. WMV

I would like, after making a totally pwning island, to lock nearly everything down to make a static map, just so it can render like, at the very least, UT2K4, if not HL2

Not sure that is the entire answer, Chosen.

I've seen dynamic effects in these games which were not pre-built, but rather sent over the internet.

LL is just behind on certain things.

Got any evidence to back up that statement? World of Warcraft requires a 6-8 hour download every time they change the slightest thing. Same with Final Fantasy XI, Starwars Galaxies, basically every online game I've ever seen. They may not all be as painfully slow to update as WoW, but every one I've seen ALWAYS requires everyone to downlaod a new patch whenever anything is changed.

If I'm wrong, please explain. As someone currently starting up a new 3D animation company, I'd love to hear all about whatever marvelous technology these games are using that I've never been told about. To what effects are you referring?

He lies not. Half Life's SOURCE engine does live reflections of every bit of Havok 2's objects being blasted around everywhere. Yes, those object's peices are static, the objects themselves are recieved ahead of time-- However, Second Life's objects are also recieved before the rendering begins, which is why objects only slowly start to appear.

A reflection effect isn't nearly impossible, and as I said before, you're just thinking about it the wrong way. Even /real/ bumpmapping would be possible. What's tough about adding in an extra 128x128 greyscale texture? Especially considering the bumpmapping is already there, and even using algorithms to calculate new bumpmapping for the textures it has. We have clientside lighting, as well. That's a bitch to calculate, which is why a lot of people turn it off. Have we forgot about having these effects optional to view?

Yes, I can see the tiling in Warcraft's water. I can also see that the texture is no more that a 32x32 square that gets stretched, blurred, tiled, and has a bumpmap that gets hit with light-- However, it /still/ looks good. It doesn't reflect or anything. o_O

Is in really necessary to bash down ideas and call them impossible just because you're looking at it from the wrong angle?

(Games like Warcraft and Final Fantasy have large patches because they tend to send an entire data package, rather than a single peice to patch in-- If you give someone a way to patch a compressed data file, they're bound to go in and figure out a way start making changes. Not giving binary patching tools slows the speed of this drasticaly. It's also easy for a tool like that to fuck up and break something under certain circumstances)

I think the one looking at things from the wrong angle is you. I never bashed down any ideas, and I never said anything was impossible. As a matter of fact, I specifically said that once internet speeds increase to the necessary levels, everything we're discussing here that is not currently in SL will most likely be there.

In the mean time, the question that you originally asked was why do certain graphics technologies that exist easily in other games now not exist in SL yet. I answered that question for you, as did a Pleze, Zuzi, and Malachi. All of us responded with the answer that the ever-changing dynamic world of SL must be kept simpler than the static worlds of other games in order to stream in decent time across the internet.

Later, when a claim was made that my answer was not satisfactory (which it was), I asked for an explanation why not (an explanation which still has not come). I see nothing wrong with asking for someone to validate a claim with factual data, especially when they are challenging facts presented by someone else. That's elementary. You, however, seem to think asking for validation means "bashing down ideas".

It's becoming clear, Chibi, that perhaps you are not really interested in the answer to your question. Looking back over the history of this thread, I notice you accused the people who responded before I did of thinking "that new things can't be implimented just because your head is going about how to do it the wrong way", in the same manner as you now accuse me of "looking at it from the wrong angle", and "call[ing] them impossible". You seem much more interested in the fact that you have found something to complain about than you do in actually learning why SL behaves differently from other games. Surely, you've been around long enough to know that this question comes up alot, and the answer is always the same.

Anyway, since we are where we are, let me address some of the things you just said. First of all, in regard to what you said about things getting knocked around in Half Life and having reflections, I fail to see how that changes anything that's been discussed. None of those objects are created on the fly on a remote server and then broadcast over the internet to the player, as is the case in SL. None of the textures involved are not already on the client machine. Even if the objects in question were not visible in-game before the event in question, they are simply being pulled from a pre-existing library of objects and textures. In other words, nothing can exist that the client machine hasn't seen before. In SL, however, all kinds of things exist that the client machine has never seen before. As I said, apples & oranges.

As for custom bump mapping, yes it's possible. No one ever said it wasn't. It would, however slow things down. Even if all bump maps were kept to 128x128 as you suggest, you're talking about potentially quite a large amount of streamed data when you add up all the maps for all the prims. The reason the existing bumps work easily is because everyone has the same ones. They are already on the client machine and do not have to be streamed. Now you might say, "what about the lightness and darkness bumps," which are obviously not pre-existing? Well, quite obviously those are created in direct relation to the specific textures they affect, so again, only one texture file needs to be streamed for each uniquely textured surface, not two.

As for client-side lighting, yes, it's a bitch to caclucluate, and yes, that's why many people keep it turned off. So what? Again, you are bringing up things that change nothing. Your original topic was about how the worlds of other games are lit and textured better than the world of SL. Well, again, that is because those worlds are static. 99% of the information is already present on the client machine and it never changes. All the textures already exist on the client, almost all of the light sources, all of the bump maps, specularity maps, etc. are already there. And once again, that's not how it works in SL. SL is an ever-changing world so almost nothing can be pre-existing. I don't know how many different ways I can keep saying it.

Finally, my point about large patches in other games was to emphasize the point that in such games the client is provided with all content ahead of time. If those games were systems where content changes could be made on the fly and then simply streamed to clients during gameplay like in SL, that's how they would do it. The fact is though, for at least the tenth time now, those games don't work that way. Any new content and/or changes to old content needs to be delivered to the client all at once in a patch BEFORE the client engages in any further play. That is what allows those games to operate so fast and to be so visually complex.

Is there room for improvement in SL's viewer? Absolutely. Is it currently incapable of displaying scenes equally as beautiful as those you posted? Absolutely not. The bottleneck is connection speed, not the viewer, and it will (unfortunately) remain so for some time.

So if you need to complain, complain to the internet people and get them to beef up the speed.

Connection speed has very little to do with this: http://solar.vortx.net/sl/SL_043.jpg

Quite possibly the number one thing holding back SL's ability to look more modern than Doom2.

please don't use me to support your position. i don't really know what i'm talking about.

except lens flares. that was gospel.

I totally understand the arguments saying "SL is a totally dynamic world" and lighting computations/reflections etc. are harder if not impossible to do.

But... as a 3D programmer myself; my main occupation when playing a game is... "seeing how it's made".

SL can be optimized; when you go to someone's house, a club, ... anywhere. Most things are static! Sure, the owner can go in at any time and tear a big hole in the wall, or remove the floor; but it could be done in a "edit" mode.

When you are owner of a terrain patch, and you are in "edit" or "no lighting" mode; the display would revert to what it is right now... i mean "midly shaded with distant lights"

But when the edition is done; we could say that the "static" objects of the buildings are fixed and then, a BSP/Lightmap/whatever computation could be done. Enabling to:
- Sort the prims by priority. This way, house walls could appear before the furniture; and... furniture would not be loaded if you cant see it anyway.
- Have _way_ better framerates; as SL would more easily know "what is visible, and what is not". Relying less on a brute force approach
- Precompute lightmaps and light directions... hey! lightmaps were implemented in the original Quake!!!
- And... like in HL2; defining a cubemap for a area enables flashy reflections; but defining a cubemap can be the builder's job.

yeah... dynamic/moving objects. but these would be imposed the current lighting settings, and would not have an effect on lightmaps. (Like in HL2 ... shadows are then very very primitive)
and yeah.... BSP/lightmap/etc computations are not lightweight; LL would have to have servers dedicated to that. But I'm sure land owners wouldnt mind using that "service" by paying few 100L$ to have their land with flashy lighting pre-computations. that would help the inflation problem! another L$ sinkhole!

But... as a programmer... I totally see the technical challenge here; the way the innards of SL are organized may absolutely not make that easily doable without a full-rewrite. The whole way the data is sent to the client would have to be changed.

And yes... everything seems clearer when you are in front of a existing product with issues; than... in front of the drawing board 4-5 years ago.

(but BTW, many aspects of the SL graphic engine rocks too... the avatar customization; the totally dynamic world, etc. whoa! )

if you're talking about kind of compiling everything into a package wouldn't you have to download that whole package before your computer could know if it should load that furniture or not? or what the priority of prims is? this is a lil bit over my head so sorry if those are ignorant questions.

as far as light maps go.......i'm not a big game head but if i understand them correctly you can do light maps in sl now. my current house isn't very good for them but i have a couple i could show you or ask Spider Mandala (sorry Spider)

well chibi they *ARE* going to overhaul the graphics engine supposedly at some point this year (lookin like SL 1.7 or mebbe 1. and it probably will include vastly more shaders (per pixel post geometry/texture effects added in, like cool water)

But part of the problem with SL currently has been that people have no idea what does or does not lag, entire buildings are set light, to make a picture frame brighter on the wall, there are people with more geometric complexity in their hair, than entire SCREENS of farcry/hl2 have believe it or not

(one of the more onerous 'curly hair' extentions has, i kid you not, about 340,000 polygons rendered on the client, when fully zoomed in, to give ya an idea of that, the latest unreal engine bragged it would draw 50,000 polygons per frame smoothly, this person's HAIR put the entire computer through SEVEN TIMES as much work, as an entire unreal tournament 2k4 scene... yes, that lags to hell)

there will be better things eventually.. but i think alot of people are mistaking just where beauty in games comes from... sure soft glow lights, and rich saturated sunlit beaches look good, but only part of that is the graphics engine.. alot of the rest comes from just having talented, professional design... SL as a whole is not there yet... there are some areas that are not that far behind... but its going to be a long while before a few lindens, and a rag tag crew of random players is going to be able to top a professional large company design team.

Yeah, many items in what I said would require a more lenghty analysis.

However... from my user-perspective the current SL graphic engine looks currently as a "brute force" approach; almost all things in our field of view are rendered. Things must be optimized a abit in order to be able to implement more complex lighting effects, or our computer will melt

[ Maybe I am wrong, but that is the impression I get when I move around, see the things appearing in mid-air, and... the FPS drop on my 6800GT when displaying a scene with... lot of junk I cannot see; but having a FPS hit anyway. Or maybe this is just the server lag causing that. ]

I mean... i dont care if I had to load a "house" or a "mall chunk" in one whole bit (mini BSP/hierarchical map/whatever...); it would be a lot more natural than having the toilet of the neighbor pop up in the air before the enclosing walls

Each of these "chunks" would have a precomputed lighting/cubemaps/... ahh... lot of work...



True true... most of the time, the performance on my "good" video card is decent... but those curly hairs.... damn!

The basic design of having "a world of prims" is cool, extensible and all that... but... having some "textured meshes" prims would be great too.

hear hear, rock on, amen etc.

still it's fun to try. one nice thing is that sl is flexible enough to fake alot of the cool effects in other games. just got to use that ol' imagination and be willing to try things again and again. i guess that works if you like sl because you can build and such. if you just want sl to look nice so you can hang out in it then it doesn't help much.