-Moved to general
Hi guys, this is my first post on the forum, after playing my first few hours of Second Life I was completely hooked. The whole platform, ideas and atmosphere is something I was searching for, for a long time. Here a few thoughts I had that I wanted to share.
Losing users vs. Better Graphics
Currently in SL, we can create structures with a limited technicality. The diversity of buildings and props creatable is still incredibly high; thanks to the amount of options we have within prims. This, at present carries over into textures on roughly the same level. With the advent of alphas there are more possibilities but textures in SL are also limited, with size caps at 1024 or more realistically 512. There is a limited amount of detail one can include.
As the platform gets stronger and the engine is further developed (or merged with another more advanced engine), the majority of buildings and textures previously created will begin to look out of place.
The better the lighting and shaders get, with dynamic shadows and more visual feature. The worse the avatars are going to look in their current form.
All this is relatively obvious, but where am I going with it?
With all the new technology, the amount of work going into creating textures to bring those avatars and content to the same level will have to also follow and in a steadily increasing manner.
While Second Life holds a lot of charm in the simplicity of its look. The art of more realistic skins and baking in lighting into maps is something many still do.
Perhaps Spec maps will arrive, Sub surface maps, speciality shaders which require certain maps to take advantage of them. All of this will go hand in hand with the goal of creating a platform to fulfil your desires from a Second Life. Whether that is learning, building, an outlet for your creativity or a place to indulge in fantasies that may otherwise be left brewing. Perhaps the more realistic your avatar is, and the more realistically they move, talk and interact; the further you connect with them and the whole experience becomes a lot more involving and satisfying..
The future could bring better real-time shaders that simulate skin and clothes, and eliminate the need for such a diversity of maps to make our avatars in game look 'the part'.
On the other hand, that time could be far off. And for the moment, as is evident in next gen games, the amount of artists in projects has to be substantially larger.
Coming back to the effect this may have on Second Life, currently we have a large selection of content creators who pursue the time consuming task of creating wonderful designs and art. But the amount of work they put in is nothing compared to the level they will have to work at if the game were on a newer next gen engine.
Will this steer people away from Second Life, or push them into living their experience within the platform, and finding smaller more specific niches to market.
It's my opinion their will still be people developing content, but substantially fewer than before. This may be a good or bad thing for SL which could be discussed to a larger extent.
While this may sound like the future for designers in Second Life may be a harder more labouring job, this of course correlates over to the real world, where clothing has many levels of complexity, from simple t-shirts, to lushly detailed nightgowns, and there is still jobs for everybody. The rewards for the later, may then be substantially larger.
In the future as the development of these new technologies increases and they are released to us, so will be that the possibilities of better, more diverse content will steadily also increase. Perhaps the content developers will evolve with the technologies making new starters without the skills staying away or moving into other areas of SL(Building, writing),The speed that the technology comes will also be a factor of whether users can readily accept their Second Life jobs now require as much work as their real job, and which one is more lucrative?.
What does this mean for us Artist/content creators?, staying ahead of the game, the new technologies and what that offers us, expanding our possibilites every time.
Perhaps toon shadings or an SL hack with texturing and prims may allow us to have anime sections of the world, where manga like av's can hang out and create their world. While the furies colonise another area. The difference between these areas as the technology gets better will almost certainly be super evident when moving between them.
Forming groups of artists to collaborate on fashion lines seems to be in the future a good idea, it's undoubtebly the only solution to producing the same amount of content we are used to.
Thanks for listening
Let me know what you guys think of any of the issues.