1.8.0(3): "Fixed various ripple water issues" - understatement

I am a perfectionist, and the visual artifacts sadden me deeply. There are actually several more things wrong with it that no one seems to have noticed yet. THEY STAB ME IN THE EYE LIKE NEEDLES EVERY TIME I SEE THEM. But you're right. Words of wisdom: EVERY SINGLE REAL-TIME RENDERING TECHNIQUE IN 3D GRAPHICS IS FLAWED! It's all smoke and mirrors, folks. We've been faking it since day one, and you wouldn't want us to do it any other way. For interactive stuff (like games, Second Life [SECOND LIFE IS NOT A GAME]), speed wins out over quality most of the time, so if you look real close at your favorite games, you can see the holes. It's why games don't look like Real Life (tm). The best we can do is work with what we've got the best we know how.

The whole sim-edge problem is an old one. It's day of reckoning will come, eventually. I think being able to tag a primitive as being made of water would be REALLY COOL, but the implications of that are pretty severe, so it's not like throwing a switch and watching awesomeness fly from the ether.

Oh, and I noticed some people in another thread complaining about how we're working on shiny features and not fixing bugs. After working on nothing but bugs for 3 months (since I started, for people keeping score), my brain was about ready to make a break for it. The ripple water didn't take very long (probably 2 work days total over the span of 2 weeks) and kept me sane enough to keep bug fixing with great zeal!

Seriously, though, you guys are great.

Wow, that has to be the most accurate, honest statement a Linden has made in a long time.







I'd say that definition is a winner on both counts.

By that logic you could wrap your sandwiches in Reservoir Dogs.

And I've got to say, every time I've spoken to a Linden I've found them to be both helpful and friendly, I don't think I've ever got an answer to a question I've asked them that I haven't been satisfied with or had one go unanswered.

Let's not have this fight. There are games in Second Life. Some people don't use Second Life for anything BUT games, but that does not make Second Life a game in and of itself. You could just as easily use Second Life for anything else. It's a game like Firefox is a game. A postmodernist would say something asinine like "to some people it's a game, but to others it's a platform, and still others, a way of life, all these meanings are at once correct and incorrect and all participants are subject to the farce that is meaning as there is no truth but many tr--" [insert sound of brick hitting face].

Although I must say 2b is my favorite definition of game ever. It doesn't suprise me that the definition for game is completely devoid of fun, either.

I absolutely love the new water effect, bringing Shiny to water is the greatest thing since... shiny itself.

It's a shame that the fix for that ripples around the avatar would be a hit on the FPS. But hey, it's not that big of a deal and something thats livable with.

I also noticed that transparent objects totaly ignore water volume and appear "flat" on the water, i.e. they totaly ignore it all together. This however is kinda a cool effect, heheh.

It would also be cool if the rippling you see from looking down into the water, or up from above it, carried with you if your camera was down under the water too. So that when you're underwater everything ripples. I've always been a bit bummed at how little being underwater matters to SL.

The only problem with this is for people who have builds underwater and don't want water throughout the build, and they can't do anything about it and then their whole build is all ripply and stuff.

So perhaps cool underwater effects like effecting your weight and prims floating should wait untill we can block out water with negative prims.

the new water effects devaluate textured prim water!!

WE DEMAND COMPENSATION!

Funny I say that - and I don't think its assinine nor am I post modernist

Just slightly more tolerant of others points of view.

But eh - if you want to be a condescending jerkoff thats your biz.

"I think being able to tag a primitive as being made of water would be REALLY COOL, but the implications of that are pretty severe, so it's not like throwing a switch and watching awesomeness fly from the ether."

So....ahhh.... fake it

Hmmm... I mean can you create a bump map and a water texture that could be animated somehow perhaps? I am pretty clueless for the most part but SL could really really benefit from little things like that..

And since we are talking a switch being thrown and awsomeness squirt from the other end, how about caustics? You know, the light pattern on the ground underwater... the awsomeness would be overwelming I have seen some pretty low rent games with it so it can't be too terribly hard to do I suppose.

Thanks for explaining, and so clearly, too! Yes, I believe I determined yesterday that I have a GEForce 3 and said so in another thread. It is also true that I would not have purchased her the graphics card for gaming, but the best graphics card available in a non-gaming version. (I think the computer cost something over 2k at the time, all told.)

Not being able to see shiny, I believe, is at least first due to having only 256 memory, and maybe secondarily to having not a good enough card. I imagine 256 memory would also knock a person out of being able to see ripples, even if, for some obscure reason, they had 256 memory and a GEForce 3 card (which is may be impossible, since the GEForce 3 card may insist on more memory).

So I'm like two generations behind the FX line, with GEForce 4 line coming in between it and mine, and apparently GEForce 3 line being unable to render ripples as well. (I don't know if it could render shiny.) And you're like way ahead of everybody, lol.

This doesn't bug me any, though, as this is the sort of thing that's kind of an extra for those with the proper card, and doesn't affect game play (like textures not rendering does, for instance). Eventually, more and more people (maybe even myself, if lightening strikes) will get caught up to it.

Seems to me like if and when I ever did get a new computer (or a new video card plus more memory), from what you've said, one should get at least the FX line. And if one could afford it, a card like yours - which I imagine is the current thing for serious gamers - would be preferable.

I believe I have learned all the above from your post, if I don't have anything wrong.

coco

I tell ya who's great, it's Runitai Linden! Some great communication here!

coco

Being able to use custom bump baps at all would be nice...

Yay Runitai!

I love the feedback and have often seen runatai in preview hovering over the water as he did in 1.7 when looking around his shiny, certainly puts alot of dedication into his work and tweaks it to the best of both sides

Shiny started out like that they listened to feedback and went back tweaked it up some more.

Now ripply water, well from what i know about cg which is very little, he's added as much functionality as possible without knocking out the lower band of users, the easy fix would be to remove the underwater reflections, as all its basically doing is taking a sampleof the screen and applying a ripple effect at the same position on screen and only rendering that over the water.

Perhaps there will be a possibility in the furture to have multiple shaders and it detects your card and uses the one more appropriate, and if he wants to he could write the one with depth perception and just release it as a non supported toy etc.

I like you. You're silly.

You know, I think it would be entirely possible to build a dedicated massively parallel GPU made up of thousands of individual processors that just did simple mid-80s (think Sculpt-3d, not Toy Story) raytracing in small (16x16) patches... and it wouldn't cost any more than today's graphics cards if you made it in bulk. The hard part would be fan-out feeding them the scene geometry and textures from the video RAM.

With a radiosity front-end generating real-time shadows and hilights, you could get pretty close to Toy Story in real time for a few hundred dollars a pop... and a few billion in front end because you'd have to redirect the whole indistry away from laying down kludges for a while if you were going to have any content for it...



That's why there's no awesomeness slider in the appearance editor. Damn.

How about a preferences option to nerf shiny? I can't stand having shiny on because EVERYONE TURNS IT ON MAX and I can't see what anything really looks like. Range from "subtle highlights" to "STAB ME IN THE EYE LIKE NEEDLES"?

What, that the whole computer gaming industry has been faking it from day one?

Hell yes.

The only computer game to even try and honestly give you the best possible rendering available was Myst. Everything since, including the followons to Myst, hasn't even tried.

I haven't checked for myself, but I've been told there is reasonably priced realtime raytracing hardware available. There's also some software for doing it on surrent graphics cards somewhere.

But... but... Myst was prerendered... loads of games have done that.

Providing the best possible graphics requires prerendering, and Myst is the only one I've seen where that pre-rendering was actually close to the state of the art at the time it was done.

Heh. Didn't we already have the raycasting vs raytracing discussion?

Another that instantly pops to mind is Blade Runner, that was amazing. Some of the Resident Evil games didn't look too shabby either, and of course there's the Final Fantasies.

It does really limit what you can do if you use prerendered graphics though, and the latest engines are fast approaching prerendered quality - have you seen the latest Unreal engine?

I do believe we have, just dropping bits of information where they seem relevant. I had a great link that explained what I was talking about with regards to the Doom engine's limited raycasting implimentation (and it talked about Wolfenstien's too - the whole thing was grid based!) but I can't find it now.

Uhhh.. the only Myst game I ever played used pictures, not 3d rendering. Of course it was state of the art back in 1993 or so.

The rendering Argent's talking about is used to generate those pictures, hence the 'pre'.

LOLEX... don't forget Myst V!

No, and there is no way that any real-time game today can possibly produce images of the quality of the ones in Myst. They can't, because they can't do the raytracing. It's not just "prerendered quality", it's the fact that the prerendering was done with then-current state-of-the-art graphics. I haven't seen that kind of thing anywhere else.

Final Fantasy, maybe in the cut scenes, but those were rendered for TV resolution and I really couldn't tell if they were fully raytraced.

Of course there's no way realtime graphics are going to be on par with the latest rendered graphics - that wouldn't make any sense. Still, they are getting very good at faking it, here's some pictures from Gears of War that's using the Unreal 3 engine:

http://www.gearsofwar.de/assets/screenshots/045.jpg
http://www.360updates.com/1120956asdf2935.jpg
http://www.360updates.com/1120958ixgfh776.jpg
http://www.360updates.com/11209569aaegf334.jpg
http://www.360updates.com/11209569adfgfdhg36.jpg
http://www.360updates.com/11209569vvadnbm33.jpg
http://www.360updates.com/11209587dfgret77.jpg
http://www.360updates.com/1120955676h8779.jpg
http://www.360updates.com/1120958780.jpg
http://www.unreal.fr/images/galeries/gearsofwar/gearsofwar_1.jpg
http://www.unreal.fr/images/galeries/gearsofwar/gearsofwar_2.jpg
http://www.gamestar.hu/apix/0505/gears_of_war_6.jpg
http://img157.echo.cx/img157/185/010620050040jd.jpg

I'm confused by what you mean by "fully raytraced" in your last paragraph.

Might wanna edit that post thurr.

I don't know how many of those pictures are pre-rendered and which are real-time, but some of them are clearly in-game shots rather than cut scenes... and those pictures all show what Runitai would call STAB ME IN THE EYE flaws. Dark scenes with lots of complex patterns on smooth objects are really popular for these kinds of demos, because the eye doesn't expect compex shadows or a lot of contrast due to shadows and hilights.

Also, what's state of the art for 10 or 15 years ago and what's state of the art now are quite different. The images in Myst were top of the line for the time. The best shots in your list look good, but you can do as well using readily available open-source tools.

Here's a raytraced image. This one's interesting because the texture maps applied are so simple, so the objects don't look real but the scene looks more like a photograph of plastic food than a computer generated image. And it's really not that sophisticated a raytrace, even for 10 years ago.



Notice that the view of the blinds behind the bottle bend down, because the optical properties of the glass and the liquid in the bottle are simulated by the raytracer.. and you can see both the blinds refracted through the glass and reflected in the bottle. Notice all the reflections in shiny objects. You can see the lemon reflected in the bottle, the light refracted through the glass, the light reflected off the bottle and glass lighting up objects around them.

You can simulate each individual effect in a game, by adding light sources, precalculating texture maps (for example, generating an image of the scene at the optical center of the bottle then UV mapping it to the surface of the bottle, so it looks like it's reflective) but it's impossibly time consuming to get all the details right. So they just do the stuff you notice most, and then use dark backgrounds to fool the eye.

[PS: look at that bottle, and look at a shiny object in SL. Sorry, Runitai, but until shiny can do that I'm still going to want Diet Shiny if I'm going to drink Shiny at all.]