The hunt is on for the "2.0 renders"!

Still some visual artifacts... a kind of cross-hatching from overlaying the grid-of-circles partial images, I guess.

Looks like they started with a copy of Dore (Shangri-La in the lower right, mountain behind it, road to the city next to it) and started piling stuff in. It also looks like they *way* exceeded the current prim limits for a sim. If so, is this an artifact of Havok 2.0, in addition to the new rendering engine?

Well that looks like a photo taken from Dore, looking east over Ahern to Lusk. You can see the Ahern lake and the Lusk forest.

Yeah, Balance, found it already, that one leads to 2nd look, which leads to Flickr.

Darn, and here I was, happy I could have found one
We should start to post the sources where we found them with the pics, else people will double-search and such.

Point, can anyone get the clue that's in the sponsored links into a photoshopable form?

Yes it is, Robin Linden confirmed it during a chat earlier.

The last one actually kinda adds more noise for being a jpeg and being a different aspect ration... :-/ BUT IT'S DEFIANTLY COMPLETE! >_<

"Just take a screenshot" you'd think I'd be smarter, considering how many of the coords I've decoded so far... x.X

Um.. sorry.. better layer order now.. ^^;;

Aestival, I posted the "untouched" version of that in the announcements forums. /me gives cookie

Heres the completed #2, sorry for the offsets and such but the jpeg/resoultion changes took their toll abit

Thanks Ice! Now the first pic is complete too! =^.^=

Aw... Eltee beat me to it! (;_;) No second cookie!

/me goes to munch on her cookie under the kitchen table...

Thanks Ben! (^_^)

Yeah, no more 'hidden' skyboxes with a view distance as high as that.

Hmm now that Ive been lookin at the clues here
<255414.21875, 255775.53125, 29.96329>
That makes me ponder...
if my first thought is correct and it is XYZ cords we are lookin at eather 1 hellova big sim or a new method of placement. One where sim borders are a thing of the past.... or just spaced much wider.

*drool*
that could mean miles of space between borders

Global coordinates

Edit to add Wiki link

yeah, read up on llGetRegionCorner to figure out global/local conversion, I've been converting then doing SQL queries from my database.

Now that 2 of these have been uncovered could someone tell me, apart from draw distance, what's actually being shown as being any different from the rendering engine we have now? I'm not seeing much difference at all, and these images have some obvious prim rendering problems, so what's so special? If you wanted to show how great the rendering engine for 2.0 is going to be, wouldn't you have images without the rendering issues? I'm curious, I don't understand.

Could someone enlighten me please?

That *is* the arcology in Gibson... as seen from the NW corner of *Barcola*.
With the distance to target broke and having doing it my head thats around 900M draw distance plus a bit.

L8r,
UU

(It's on a old backup of the grid but there's still enough landmarks to see it once you're there.)

Me zoo!

I beg to differ.

I actually think this is superior to any new funky rendering / lighting / etc effect.

Huge cut distances are going to create a very powerful sense of context and opportunity to take on much more ambitious builds.

In a lot of ways, it's kind of like a blind man wandering about in a fog to being suddenly someone who can see for miles and miles and miles.

Why on earth do I care what buildings are 900m+ away from where I am? If I wanted to see them, I'd go visit them. Local rendering, IMHO, is much more important than whether I can see something far away I'm not interested in. Sorry, context is all well and good, but the majority couldn't be bothered with how much they can see "off yonder", they're more interested in how good the local environment they're currently in looks.

If you can't see them, you might never discover that they're there.

But it is a two-edged sword. I always max out the distance at 512 before taking snapshots of lots that I'm selling. Frequently, this gives you some breathtaking views, but sometimes it reveals some eyesore that you had no idea was there.

The problem now is that when you max out the draw distance, you can see it only temporarilly because it's usually too much for the client to handle. Your server/client pings go way up and you start getting packet loss before the client starts gradually dropping the draw distance to something manageable.

But for those few brief seconds, it can be amazing.

*raises hand* me too.

Maybe the nutty draw distance is obscuring the new coolness a bit, I dunno- it will be interesting to see the other snapshots. I just dont see anything different there other than the fact that you can see forever.

After looking at the images again, the sun looks more additive, which is neat.
*anxiously awaiting more snapshots*

Also: holy cow. what exploded in the sky?

Don't get me wrong, I often use 512m myself for pics and things, but the majority of the time most people spend in any 3D system is on a more local level, so why not improve the rendering of that as it's what most people will inhabit - at large distance you could render landscape, that I would understand. In fact I've just been to the area looking towards Gibson to contrast and compare with one of the images and flew towards it at 512m. It gets a bit choppy, for sure.

The problem is one of continuity and the people that would be able to afford large tracts of land or organise a group that could afford large tracts of land in order to make such a view worthwhile are very few. It's true I might never discover something 900m+ away from where I am if I can't see it from where I am, but to be honest 90%+ of what's in SL isn't worth seeing anyway, and I see no reason that this would change. So chances are I really wouldn't miss much at all.

But this is conjecture, and it would be interesting to hear more from Ben about what's different in the 2.0 rendering engine. Is it just draw distance? Or is there more than that that isn't coming across in the stills we've seen so far?