State of our Union: Second Life

i really wanted people who had experience creating answer the thread..about different engines..and the possibilities of doing more in sl. Does anyone else have any experience with different engines and what would be involved in doing more with SL?..maybe making it a bit more dynamic?

~Lana

Ok, I do. Also have an associate degree in Industrial Design, a Bachelors in Computer Animation & Multimedia, and I'm 2 tests away from my Microsoft System Engineer cert (which then I start working on my Cisco).

So yea, I have a nice understanding of what would or wouldnt work.

I've been making maps using the Unreal Engine (not the new one tho). Gotta start learning the CryEngine next!! Also made some maps for EA's Battlefield series.

Havok 4 will be a BIG improvement for performance. I've been to the Beta Grid & messed around. Oh yea, its gonna be great!! They might have some bugs to fix, and as usual, some things may no longer work.

One thing I noticed, SL is unique. Nothing on my hard drive. Everything streams in. And that is also the problem.

Alot of these other game engines may be dynamic, but all that stuff is stored on your hard drive.

User Content- The problems I see is with allowing certain functions, like Booleans (adding/subtracting 2 or more shapes together, or another name CSG) is messy enough in a 3D App (it tends to create alot of extra faces). Bring that to SL and we'll see more lag as your client tries to render an extra hundred useless faces on a an object that didnt need them.

Certain lighting & rendering conditions are impossible- raytracing, HDR, soft shadows, etc. Very intensive.

One thing I would LIKE to see: User created Bump Maps. Small grayscale 32x32 or 64x64 images. We already have brick, stucco, suction, shingles, etc. Sure, we can use the Light or Dark ones too, but they're not good in all situations IMO.

More formats would be nice- Quicktime IS nice, but what about Flash video? Surely they can code it to not activate a webpage?
It'd be nice to link to some cool Flash games or videos!

I know scripters want Mono (I dont script so I cant say much about that). I DO know that more efficient scripts would be a good thing. Maybe add some of the functions people are asking for? I forget what the one is that LSL doesnt have.

Windlight is already a nice step up. One thing I hear on other forums about SL is: "The graphics suck!"

I usually find that these people didnt use the WIndlight Client.

And the last thing- People need to quit expecting a 10 year old computer to run SL like a new modern system. GeForce 2 and 4 were really great cards..... years ago. So were the original Pentiums. The difference in running SL on older hardware and on newer stuff is VERY obvious.

Isnt this partly LL's fault?

http://secondlife.com/corporate/sysreqs.php

They advertise it as functional on older computer systems, after all.

Hard to blame people for expecting their computer to run SL decently when it meets all of the recommended specifications.

Interesting to note that a couple of years ago Second Life touted the fact that it ran on systems that were not up to date .. they actively claimed flexibility as a selling point.

I have found very few people who expect SL to run on computers 10 years old, but many who expect it to run well on computers 2 years old.

so isn't there a way to store more on our own HD?. Id be willing to lose alot of objects and take only my knowledge with me for a newer better stronger engine.

~Lana

Yea, thats part of LL's fault. Compared to what we have now vs. 2 years ago, it's still quite a difference. But that 2 yr old system is usually able to be upgraded a bit more- RAM, video card, etc.

Heh! I used to run SL using the Integrated Intel Video Chipset on my old laptop w/ 512 MB of RAM.

Looked like crap, but it ran..... slowly.

I thought that'd be pretty cool to do that, but think of the possibilities.

* We already have folks giving Debit Permission to total strangers when they rez any "mysterious" object they were given.

* There's an easy open-source way to steal textures, widely available.

So- How hard would be to find an easy way to re-code stuff in your inventory if it's stored locally?

You'd need some kind of security check of some sort. They'd have to have a quick yet secure way to ensure that what's in MY inventory is SAFE. This wouldnt even have to apply to SL- We could recode Items to steal personal info, steal email addresses, maybe sign you up for more Viagra Emails, or turn your machine into a "zombie" to do some spamming.

So, we can have our inventory stored locally but risk "who-knows-what" kind of security risk,

**OR**

Rely on LL servers to keep our stuff safe from tampering, and not throw a hissy fit & delete our stuff.

I can already easily find Hacks for any online game. Been on servers where players were using hacked accounts, using glitches or more hacks just to improve their rankings on a score board. See past history of EA's Battlefield 2 series.

If People do stupid stuff like this in games, there's no way I'd want the same people to have access to the code for their Inventory.

Ok, there's also the whole "Server Hard Drives are meant to last longer, and have more recovery options than Home User's Hard Drives", but thats something else to consider. Servers are meant to have redundancy, spanning multiple hard drives. I'd say most people with computers arent able to even locate their hard drive, let alone know how to set one up for redundancy.

And yet because our physics and graphics suck so much, we barely keep ahead of TSO and Active worlds, people don't comehere to create because the performance isn't here to match the content they could create on the platform.
Things like paying huge internet fees each month because we download again and again the same textures we saw yesterday also restrict performance, to the point the reaction time between moving 10 feet forward and getiing there is abysmal.

It would be nice if there was a standard LL graphic set on all our hard drives that covered 50% of objects we encountered, like 10x10x.3 red brick walls instead of a system now wehere there are probably 1000's of red brick wall textures half of them the same texture and most of the rest not dicernable by eye as to their differences.