Rendering

After chatting with live help they suggested I posted here...

We were talking about the speed of the graphics in SL and the need for realtime rendering as things are changed in areas all the time.
However its only going to be a small number of tiles that are being editted compared to the total number in game.
Would it possible to mark the tiles that are being editted when someone starts making changes to it and then force those types of tiles to be realtime rendered until the edit finishes and any tiles that are not being editted can be pre-rendered possibly speeding the game up?

Or have I got the way it all works wrong?

As a side note, any chance that when you are in a group you can specify whether or not you are currently wanting to receive messages from the group, as its annoying when you get im through from a group message that has nowt of interest for you.

Starfury

Another feature idea.... you know the way people can stream music into their plot of land.... has anyone in dev looked at the possible of streaming audio to the character object to allow voip comms via the game? so we could actually talk in game too..... that would be so cool....

bah, no replies?

What do you mean by "tiles"? Are you talking about a better caching system?

As for VoIP, the official Linden statement, more or less, is that they'll look at it when the technology is better. Currently, it's not very good, if you hadn't noticed. Until voice masking, voice recognition and text-to-speech improve somewhat, VoIP would likely detract from SL.

I never understood that position... VoIP is making leaps and bounds... Skype is a wonderful program, and is infinitely clearer than cell phones.

Text to Speech is probably 5 years away from soudning "real", and voice masking is a silly toy; if you're suffering from "guy-posing-as-girl" syndrome, you just say "sorry, i don't have a mic". Problem solved.

LF

Yeah it would be completely optional, if you wanted to talk to people in game instead of typing you could do....
I use Ventrilo, Teamspeak and Skype, whilst playing online games such as Freelancer and have no bandwidth problems on broadband. So as long as SL grid had enough bandwidth I dont see how it could detract from the game really... You would limit the range like is done with the typing what exactly would cause it to detract from the game.

Was going to stick a vote up about it.

--------------------------------------------------------

As for the rendering thing. Not a better caching system no. I was comparing games like Half Life 2, Doom 3 and Far Cry as they all run at full quality with zero stuttering and at full speed on my system. Yet SL doesnt look as good yet and my system struggles with it.

I was told by some Lindens in live help conversation that those games were prerendered and thats why they were quicker. Where as SL need to do live rendering as things in the areas of the game that people own (tiles) change at random times as people add and remove items etc. This means it needs to be streamed.

So I was thinking, the number of places that are actively being edited compared to the number of places that exist in game is likely to be a low percentage, (unless I misunderstand the concepts of the rendering engine here), so wouldn't it be possible to mark the areas being editted to the SL program so that it live renders them and everywhere else that isnt being changed can be prerendered therefore reducing the amount of live rendering needing to be done. Also reducing bandwidth maybe?
If someone starts editting a tile thats marked as pre render it can change to live render mode and vice versa if someone stops editting a tile it can go back to pre render mode.

I am not even sure if this would be possible but if it is it could help the performance issues regarding the rendering...

Bumping

The problem is, there are hundreds of gigabytes of data in SL that would need to be cached on your client in order to render at the same level as FPS games do.

That's the key to FPS game rendering speed -- all the landscape and almost all the object data for the entire level you are playing on is cached on your local HD.

With SL, that just isn't an option. Its a fundamentally different paradigm.

- Jon

Hmmm good point.... didnt think about that. But still, there has to be a way to laterally think around this problem rather than say thats the way it is.

Text-to-speech has been "5 years away" for decades. I really don't understand the Lindens' position on voice masking, either, since it so blatantly sucks. What I do care about is voice recognition.

Personally, the longer the Lindens care to put VoIP off, the happier I'll be. Why? I have a pretty severe hearing impairment, which mostly affects my ability to hear speech. I have a really difficult time understanding what other people are saying, particularly when I can't actually see them. I read lips a lot of the time, when I can. For me, voice chat has been a really isolating technology, since I can't participate. I realize not everyone is in the same boat as me, and nobody is complaining about SL being inaccessible to BLIND users, but it would be nice if there was some way I could at least "hear" spoken words. Unfortunately, the technology simply isn't there yet.

Well, that's true to a point, but SL isn't constantly downloading all the data from the area around you. After everything rezzes, it's cached on your hard drive, yet it still renders slowly. Even if all of SL were cached, it would still render as slowly. There are ways the Lindens can improve their renderer, but one major it renders so slowly in some areas is simply because SL has potentialy hundreds of megabytes of texture data in every scene, depending on draw distance.

The main reason that FPSes outperform SL is because of, as you say, a fundamentally different design. SL draws scenes using what's called the "painter's algorithm". Objects in the distance are drawn first, then closer objects are overdrawn. The downside to this is that SL spends time drawing things that eventually get occluded by nearer objects. A game like Quake, on the other hand, still uses the painter's algorithm, but it also employs something called BSP (Binary Space Partitioning) to first divide up the space to be rendered.

Quake maps are precompiled to divide up the space into chunks, so as to not waste time rendering objects that will be overdrawn later. This can take several hours to do, so it's not practical for something with streaming data like SL. It's not that the data is cached in an FPS; rather, it's that it's preprocessed.

I've raised the issue of SL accessability to blind users. I proposed a solution, too. Didn't seem to gain any traction, even though it incorporates external chat, which many people say they want. Oh well.

It'll be interesting to see how the majority react when more non-English-speaking users arrive. We'll all be in the same boat then... unless LL wants to incorporate babelfish into SL.

neko