SO.. the graphics of SL vs. other 'games'?

OK.. I remember a thread not long ago complaining about how SL has such bad graphics compared to other games (I think WoW was used in that?) or something similar.. so I'm here to ask, how true is that?

With sculpties, we can have animals that move at least semi-realistically, and aren't made up of spheres and ellipses.

Our trees are more unique and often realistic (IMHO) than most MMO's I've seen have.

Our flexis allow for more natural movement then alot of things have (Such as in Everquest 2, cloth move horrible, and sometimes iron armor even moves)

Our lighting is quite simply amazing if you really stand back and take a look..

Our graphics, if set to the higher ends allowed in the normal viewer truly do look quite good, and things can look photorealistic if done right.

SO.... how are we worse off in the visual aspect?
AND
Is windlight bringing us to the front of the visual world? So far every shot I've seen (Mostly Torley's), windlight makes SL look like Oblivion (Readtunning)

How do we fare against other 'virtual worlds', whether they be things like SL, Kaneva, etc, or games like EQ2, WoW, etc.

All I know is that Second Life's graphics is way better than Runescape!

especially before Runescape 2.0 lol... completely 2d.... wow....i remember that....its been a while o.o

Windlight looks spectacular, but it still lacks quite a lot of things. Most obvious is the fact that there is still no genuine lighting or shadows... WindLight applies lighting to every surface, but it applies it as if that surface was individually standing on its own outside, freely exposed to the atmosphere. This can produce some rather odd effects inside.

I know that residents can add their own light and shade using shadow textures or texture baking, but those aren't really what I'd call part of SL's graphics system. Things can look photorealistic if you just scan a photo as a texture but I have a feeling that doesn't really count

Thats the same as the 'normal' client too though.. maybe they'll get that fixed at some point.. but it would take alot of data I'd think to distinguish between opaque and not opaque object.. if every prim cast a shadow we'd have glass boxes that are pitch black inside

A photo as a texture is plain wrong and if I had one thing I could enforce it would be no real world pictures unless they had been made to blend into this reality.

ACTUALLY I'd say it as "Don't break my immersion" as that covers a number of sins.

Indeed it does.. RL photos as textures can look amazing however, if a whole sim is made using just RL photos. The avs might look like crap comparatively, but I think it'd be one of the most visually impressive things in SL if done right.. but in general, pseudo-realistic textures look amazing without your av's looking like lego's or something ^^

And by the whole-sim-photo texture thing.. I mean everything.

Buildings made with photo-textures of the iron, glass, chrome, bricks, cement, wood, everything, sidewalks made with photos of cement sidewalks, the terrain using photos of grass, rock, etc... trees are sculpties texture with photos of the bark and leaves.. everything is photos made seamless essentially (If seamless is needed that is, some things dont need it)

Your graphic settings can only be set as high as your system will allow and still be stable. There are 3 things to consider when adjusting your graphics settings, Rez times, Visual Quality and System Stability. If you are willing to suffer longer Rez times and a nominal number of client or system crashes you can usually get a little more visual quality, but it is a trade off and should be considered carefully.

I know (and I think the real reason why we don't have shadows is to stop griefers building 40ft high monoliths next to your house), but you asked for comparison against other games.

The real question is, what are you considering to be the "game" part of Second Life? Are we judging on whether a plywood cube created in a sandbox looks convincingly like a playwood cube in a sandbox, or are we judging on the appearances of the best professional-level builds? Is the "game" of SL about interacting/exploring the existing world or creating your own? It's difficult to know where to compare for this, because while games like WoW and Oblivon, etc, are entirely about that, they're also calibrated to deliver a more coordinated experience for doing so than Second Life is.

I'm talking about the graphical capabilities, not necessarily any pecific thing you can explore in SL, but what its capable of.. obviously a crappy build is going to look like crap anywhere... thats just cause it is lol...

And. maye they could set it so shadows only affect things if.. umm... iono.. they aren't super tall lol

EDIT:: Holy crap I'm over 1000 posts now o.o

Wait... you mean.... there are *other* games?

In all seriousness, there's a fundimental difference between Second Life, and other mainstream games that makes it very difficult to make an apples to apples comparison on graphics & performance.

In most other games, such as Everquest or WoW - all of the content in the game is pre-baked and static. This offers huge framerate advantages, among other things.

The *foundation* of Second Life, is dynamic content. The vast majority of in-game content is provided by us, not Linden Lab. Unfortunately, this also makes it impossible to 'pre-bake' anything - so content is rendered on demand.

While SL is certainly frustrating & unstable at times, I wouldn't trade our ability to generate dynamic content for *any* amount of framerate improvement. It wouldn't be SL anymore if we did

OK.. to clarify, I'm not talking framerate, thats client side. You can get tons of frames with the right computer. I'm talking about what is visually possible to achieve in SL compared to how other things look. Yes they are static, I know. But in my opinion, we seem to be able to create things at least on par if not better looking, than EQ2 or WoW are. That's waht I mean

I understand, but "what its capable of" can vary in different circumstances. I wasn't really talking about _design_ of builds but about how their appearances are generated. For example, many professional builders will render their structures in external graphics programs to create lighting effects on them, and then upload the lit textures to SL on their builds. Builds that do _not_ do this are by no means necessarily "crappy", there are brilliant builds that don't use this at all, but the question is, do we count the SL graphics engine as being "capable" of producing those effects because it can render a texture to which the effects were already applied? It might seem obvious, but in fact many other computer games _do_ use this kind of thing for some rendering effects, for performance reasons if nothing else.

I suppose it comes down to what you see the goal of improving SL's graphics engine as being. Svarga and Curious Kitties look awesome under WindLight but 99% of the population will never be able to build that well. Is that a problem? If the goal is to just create the best possible graphics, of course not; if the goal is to make good looking virtual worlds accessible to more people, maybe.

WoW has great graphics?? Go to Google, type in "crysis" and view the image results for the latest in PC Game Graphics. Very Nice!


The only reason for the lack of SL's cutting edge graphical features (tho Windlight is a giant leap) is as others have said: Nothing is stored on the hard drive. Its all Streamed over the Internet.


I'd hate to see the attempt to stream the entire game of Crysis, or Half-Life 2, over a decent internet connection.

I really need to get home to try windlight out lol...is there a windlight SLeek? =P

Well... I suppose that's true that most people can't get that kind of quality.. but again, I'm not exactly asking how *will* SL look once everything is done and such, but how it *can* with this new client. So I suppose I am asking about the super-hig end builds, I'm wondering if SL is capable, at all, of the graphics that so many people in SL seem to envy, even though.. I still think we're on par.

After 3 years of EQ2, and two months of SL, I feel completely at home in SL, and don't think the graphics are bad at all.. for such an endeavor they are, in my mind, amazing. ANd now WindLight's coming out and its getting even better.. but is it as good as say Oblivion? Or Final Fantasy 11? Or DnDO?

WoW in my opinion looks horrible.. but I think a recent thread used it as an example...ino (Did they get better or something?)

And sure HL2 and Crysis might look wonderful, but there is no reason to stream the whole thing. Sure there are multiplayer parts of it, but they are much much smaller than SL. In SL we're getting a ginormous space all at once (SOmetimes...), but in those we're getting a relatively small and simple space, even though it looks better. But I do agree... streaming those would suck....

And I use Oblivion simply because it was touted about a year ago for its 'extreme' graphics, and that level of graphics seems to be the benchmark these days

Ok, well, in that case, I believe that - given sculpties, high end texturing and texture baking, scripted texture shifting and WindLight - if WoW's or Oblivion's art team was set to work in SL, they could produce something that looked extremely close if not equal to those games. However, that said, it's only because sculpties and texture baking let you effectively push 90% of SL's graphics engine out of the way. Whether that is satisfying to the "resident in the club" is another question.

But would those sculpties and textures be lit as well as they would be in Oblivion or WoW or w/e, and would the surrounding environment (Not the objects people make, but the terrain and water and such) look as good, or would it look like someone photoshopped an awesome item into a lego world? (Exaggeration is your friend =P)

There are two other big differences. The other games have all graphics created by professional designers, and they are all working on a team so they can streamline and integrate their work.

I haven't looked at Windlight yet. I think it's nice that Linden Labs is trying to expand the graphics capabilities of Second Life and giving content creators more tools with which to work. Of course, it will also take much more skill for content creators to use the new tools, and then there is the question of whether most users have the hardware to run a more sparkling Second Life.

There's always going to be a tradeoff though between a nice, polished look of a game like World of Warcraft, and the ability for any user to create their own content in an environment like Second Life. I don't think that makes one better than the other, they are different things. Giving up a little bit of graphic polish for the control of "your imagination, your world" seems like a more than fair trade.

http://maxygames.no.sapo.pt/Crysis.jpg
I normally include images instead of links but this isn't my image, and can't resize the picture.

Well.... Try relogging without a cache clear and seeing how long it takes for it to draw your area then clear the cache, relog and time it again.

A virtual world consisting of user generated content is ALWAYS going to fail when compared to professionally generated ones. Comparing SL visually to games like WoW and the like is silly. With games such as these there is a level of consistency that SL will never be able to achieve.

Sure there are some fantastic builds in SL, but they are swamped by thousands of really bad ones, and this is something that you have to take into account when making these sort of comparisons.

I think what your seeing is a difference in artistic expression mostly

WoW is well WoW and all its designs are cartoon like in nature to fit with all the games they made before it (sorta). Graphics per say in WoW are good and sharp and it all fits together. I dont like WoW graphics however but it has nothing to do with quality it has to do with the style of the art. I also pretty much hate eq2 art but again its not the actual quality or graphics engine its the concept art and the people behind the picture making.

The graphics and art in Vanguard is great I like it a lot and again the engine well it maybe makes a difference but its the actual artist behind the art that i am liking not the graphics themselves

an older game Lineage 2 the graphics for most of their stuff (save some of the female models gah whomever designed their females needs to be shot) is excellent but the engine used is not much different then the engine used in SL its the actual artists' are I am liking and how they fiti t together not the quality etc

This is the same with SL. Some stuff is wonderful and some stuff is not so wonderful the engine driving it etc is not relevant the artist who made it is.

With the introduction of sculpties and regardless of the fact LL is using an older engine if the artist does a good job then its good graphics otherwise like anything else it sucks or if its not your taste it also sucks