WoW, I just got blown away

I've been purely delighted with SL in the three weeks I've been a member -- it's terribly addicting!! I've become quite a fan! My son, on the other hand, is a big World of Warcraft fan and he showed me what that MMORPG can do. Man! I'm not here to knock SL, but I sure hope we will one day be able to enjoy a level of graphics and animation similar to what Blizzard has produced in WoW.

Again, I'm not trying to be disrespectful to Linden Labs, not by any stretch. But I wonder if there are plans to ratchet SL up to that level. I guess it just made me wonder how far the fidelity of the graphics in SL will go in the next few years. What I saw in WoW made me hopeful.

Some of the things I found very impressive:

1. animals move with more realistic movements, not looking like joined-together prims moving against each other.

2. stunning landscapes with lighting and shading.

3. trees and plants that are more than two intersecting planes.

4. Extremely fast rezzing. You never see objects materialize right in front of you as you walk around.

No flames, please. I'm not knocking SL. I love SL!! Just hoping... that's all.

Slim

Well, things will always appear a lot faster in WoW or similar environments, because the assets required are already on your hard disc. (Which is why it occupies such an enormous amount of space.) There really is not an awful lot that SL can do on that score.

And I would also think that those assets never change much, where in SL people are creating and deleting things at all times. SL's flexibility comes with a price.

On other issues:

#3: atmospheric effects will improve significantly if and when Windlight finally appears.

#1 and #3: these are really issues with content creators rather than SL itself, though granted, if the facilities existed, content creators would be able to do an awful lot more. One has to remember that WoW has built-in facilities specifically dedicated to certain tasks and not to others. There is no facility in SL for animating anything except avatars, except by complex scripting, for instance, and animals must be built from prims and their limbs moved about, which is why even the most sophisticated look a bit rubbish compared to the fluid moving animals in some MMOs. But that same technology in SL can be used to create giant transforming robots, or flying cars, or intelligent touring vehicles, or dragon avatars, or... well, many things that you would not find in WoW or in fact anywhere else.

I would certainly support more _tools_ for creators in SL - that is the area which needs looking at. Improvements on that score do come, but are rather slow in arriving. Sculpted prims was the last one, which was significant, but before then, I suppose, flexiprims....

WoW is not that resource hungry in all reality, which is rather impressive. I've just been on there corrupting the enemy.

Or, whenever they do, players must spend hours downloading an enormous update package... not a popular pastime!

WoW is certainly very good technically.

What particularly impresses me is that it works with pretty much any hardware, degrading gracefully rather than just saying "no, go away". That is a design imperative with which I greatly agree.

For eq2 I used that time to pay the bills

No flames at all, or none that would be appropriate. Thing is, you are talking about two different animals. I am an emigrant from and immigrant to SL, so I understand the comparison, a little - not being a techie.

In WoW, ALMOST everything you see - the landscape, the monsters, the NPC's - are already stored on your hard drive, because they are fixed items that do not change until Blizzard chooses to update them. What is downloaded is mainly the individual WoW avatars and their actions - a very small fraction, actually, of what you see on your screen. (Oh, and many of the effects on you of the monsters and NPC's, but still.)

In SL, EVERYTHING on your screen has to be downloaded. That means EVERYTHING. Not only the other avatars - there almost are no NPCs in SL - but every building, every object, every landscape item, every combat effect, every particle effect (meaning many decorative displays of all kinds like light beams, car exhausts, etc., etc.). Big load on the SL servers, your ISP, and your Internet connection and video card. It has to be this way because almost everything you see can be changed at any time in any way by any avatar that has the powers to do it, starting with but not confined to the creator of the object. This puts a limit on how high-resolution a downloaded object can be, how many can be brought to your screen, and how many people can be getting downloads from the same server at one time.

In WoW, each "Realm" - meaning server - can accommodate something like 12,000 players at a time because of these arrangemernts. In SL, each server can handle one "region" = 4 "sims" and can only accomodate approximately 20 avatars per sim at a time because of the extremely heavy load. It is possible to "borrow" from neighboring, emptier sims on a server, so it is possible to get a sim up to 80 avatars before it crashes.

These severe limitations are inherent in the design of SL, compared to the design of WoW. But they have advantages too. For instance, you can tp to any other sim almost instantly (when things are working right), and you can in principle meet and interact with any other person on SL very quickly when not immediately. No need to move to another "realm" for that, as you would have to do in WoW.

I am a great fan of WoW. I still maintain my account there; but I only log on there to say hello to old friends any more. WoW is a game. It is a great game. It may be the greatest game ever up to this moment in human history. But SL is a world. And it's potential - or the potential of worlds like it, at any rate - is IMO beyond our present imagining.

Depends on what you want.

I was toying with making a wisecrack here - You want good graphics, or good sex? - but SL, as you undoubtedly already realize, goes way beyond the rampant sex you see in it. The sexcapades are, I think, a small hint of the possible global interactions between any persons in the world with Internet access and computers that can handle SL. A very small hint of the things to come, I think.

Linden Lab needs to grapple somehow with the limitations of its SL construction, and make it MORE STABLE FOR CHRISSAKES (hint, hint, any passing Lindens). But these are growing pains. It is like comparing a year-old cat or dog, which is nearly an adult, to a year-old human infant. The potential of the latter is not remotely close to being realized.

Like the signs say in British pubs: Courage.

(Yeah, it's advertising a brand of beer, but still.)

Brenda got the point. The thing is that:

1 - Second Life is not a game
2 - Second Life allows you to create new content

Take in count that let's say...90% of objects you see are "created by it's own residents". So that 90% is not in your hard disc, it doesn't come with the SL client.
Games like WoW have different purposes than SL's ones.

SL only has limited occlusion culling because it treats the whole world as dynamic and nothing is pre-calculated so it ends up rendering far more than it actually has to (even though most content probably stays static once it's rezzed and positioned).

Most people also aren't 3D designers so they slap a 1024x1024 texture on a 20cm by 20cm prim without knowing/realizing it's a (potential) problem, so there's an large amount of texture data for any given SL scene (sculpties only made this worse).

The demographic of SL probably doesn't compare to anything else either. If you're a video game fanatic you might think it's normal to spend several hundred US$ on a new graphics card every few months, but most of the people I know simply make do with whatever's in their puter and expect LL to make SL work proper on "outdated" video cards (that includes me ).

Add all of that up and you have a visually disappointing 3D environment that seems to run a lot more slowly than it should.

On the other hand, your avatar can make the WoW Avatars look pretty lame.

I enjoy blowing stuff away in WoW myself. But a comparison to SL is an apples/oranges thing. Both are played on a computer screen, thats about it. Ive downloaded everything there is to see in WoW, and it takes a long time. Every wild boar, every dragon whelp, and their flightpaths, its all on that download. SL is gonna download everything there is to see, ON THE FLY. We can cache content to an extent, but not to the extreme that WoW can. We fabricate stuff constantly, Wow will give you a BEERFEST once in awhile and make you download that in advance of playing it. SL will never be as fast as WoW, but I would think there would be ways to speed things up a bit.

More like 99.5%.

P2

The next time you're in-world press ctrl-shift-3 for the texture console. I think it shows you each texture being downloaded to the client. There are A LOT of textures.

I'm tempted to go through and correct the technical details of your thorough response (ie. you got wrong some of the things that do or do not have to be downloaded by both WoW and SL,) but that's not really important here. Her (and others') overall point is exactly correct, that the graphics in SL are severely restricted compared with WoW because a lot more must be downloaded on the fly, as opposed to being prepared ahead of time and already built into the client that you install.

That said, most of what you listed can be improved with current technology:

1 - This could be improved with current tech, but I imagine animals are a much lower priority compared to other things. This could be done, but LL has bigger fish to fry.

2 - Yeah this would be nice. Although the land can't be updated to quite the extent of the landscapes in WoW, it can be better than it is.

3 - Actually the built-in trees provided by LL are much nicer than just a couple of intersecting flats. Thing is, people want more variety than just those several trees, and making anything from scratch eats up prims. Making a tree with more than just a couple intersecting planes would be way too primmy.

4 - This cannot be fixed. It's a direct result of things taking time to download. One could imagine that in the future, with faster connections, things will download faster, but you have to keep in mind that as connections get faster people will simply demand more content to be piped. Thus, time to rez will always be an issue.

I was in the Tabula Rasa beta, which uses the "store it all on your hard drive" approach. It used, if you wanted, a background incremental download for updates - essentially eliminating updating time so far as human waiting time was concerned. Hence it's not always the case that such a system involves having to wait.

That`s because our animals *are* joined-together prims moving against eachother. And that's what makes SL so wonderful...The ability to create.

Absolutely, I see people moaning that WoW graphics aren't edge of the seat impressive but it plays well on older machines and that's something to be commended.

Thus making it a doubly unpopular pastime.

If one could just work a root canal in during this time... get all the bad stuff over with at once.

We *could* move to a faster WoW-style network. Just imagine... Every time someone uploads a texture, everyone needs to log out and get an update.

Yes I wonder if we would have been better just to have Textures all cached to our hard drives with new textures submitted to LL for inclusion in updates.there really must be thousands of identical textures about and 10,000's of thousands that nobody would pick the difference between. Limit people to choose from the 10,000 brick wall textures on file or make them pay $100L to submit it to the list.
Though I guess this hurts current texture artists business models, but maybe the sorting and selling of them would be a resident function instead, charging more as the texture resolution increases.
I mean how big will we let the texture library get and there would be 1000's of textures stored by LL that will never be rezzed again anyway because they are in inventorys of long gone residents.
Perhaps we should go a step further and have 10mx10m flat panels cached. think of it if most walls and floors were on your harddrive already and we only downloaded the odd sized bits, furniture and avatars, that must be better, you could see most of a new location instantly, most people have large hard drives and they are cheap to buy, it could be set up to add them as it finds them.

Why would it log out? Everytime you encountered a new texture it would just add to the cache. We have too many new textures I think, especially the ones that to 99% of residents, look the same.

Well, you can stop there - there's no need to have any sort of added draconian restriction. Better caching would help us all. There is a cache, but I am always amazed that I spend most of my time in a small number of areas - my cache does not seem to be all that relevant. I have plenty of space to store a huge quantity of textures, animations, sound files....

Hmm 99% of WoW and other platform users don't see texture cacheing as draconoian I suspect.