Better Graphics - Future of SL

In my dreams!


Drools.

It'd be nice, but the render times on those are measure in minutes to hours, I'd bet.

Not if they use much faster render speeds to make it all seamless. Seamless rendering means that when you tp into a place, you do anything to rez. It's all rendered in micrononosecs. Wow! I wish!

Are they using super slow primitive computers or something?
Why can't they use such graphics as shown above, and make it all seamless so we don't have to wait a second for rendering?
Either way, I guess no matter how fast they make it, if the internet connection is limited, there will always be a wait in the resolving.

Well, it isn't the question if SL (or others) ever comes to this, but when. With cpu-speeds going faster every day, you might imagine that in 10 years from now we will all look at the current SL as if it were Wolfenstein 3d.

I'm convinced that games like SL will be lifelike in about 30 years from now.

- Graphical detail.
- Render time.
- Price.

Choose two.

Speed price quality, pick any two, indeed. It's just the Law of things.

Essentially yes, it's called having to communicate via the internet, which is slow =P
Those kind of scenes may work dandy on a computer where the bandwidth from memory to processor is 8gb/sec, but when you have to download it all from the internet at 2mbps (more than 8000 times slower) it just isn't going to happen unfortunately.
Add to that the fact that those scenes look very pre-rendered, it just isn't something that's attainable in SL for a long while yet, as everything in SL is dynamic and changing, no room for prerendering there.

30 years seems an extraordinarily conservative estimate. Look at what's happened in the last 10.

Because technology isn't that advanced yet.

Even games that seem to render spectacular graphics really fast use all kinds of tricks to speed things up. They have lots of critical values calculated in advance; they have several different versions of the objects and swap them in or out based on how far away you are; and so on. Unfortunately, SL can't do any of that, because it only takes someone to drag and drop a house from their inventory for the entire environment to change completely.

So let me clarify, the conversation went something like:

Nase Sleeper: Why can't they make graphics better?
Draco18s Majestic: They could but it would be much slower.
Nase Sleeper: Not if they made it faster!

Not sure it quite works like that...

That looks about right to me.

Yes I think the problem is not necessarilty the graphics, but the speed.
Rendering not just in SL, but in game dev in general probably takes a crapload of time. I hear that some people hook up multiple pcs to one computer just to speed up the processing.
I wonder if a Blue Gene type supercomputer would be available soon for the game hosting market so that. I'm not sure how much a difference it would make.

We have to start upgrading out technological hardware. It's way too primitive for our demans. There are 2 main things. Processing and data transfer.
How can we improve processing speeds?
What technologies for data transfer could improve internet communication speeds. I have heard a rumor that even our regular lines could go much faster, but do not because the government does not want to take security risks, so they impose sanctions on bandwith to prevent faster rates. Not sure if this is true.
What about fiber optics? Could that speed up transfer reates?

Sure those graphics look nice becuase they are prerendered. What if we improve our hardware so that we could acheive those graphics with virtually instantaneous render.

SL doesn't even have lens flaring. If it does then i never saw it. Those images and video even made ME awww.

Enabling light glows somewhere under the Client menu aren't quite flares, but they are a nifty effect. ;D

Like I said earlier.... speed, quality, price - choose two. How much do *you* want to pay for SL?

IMO all SL needs is speed. Sure things don't look perfect, but they look plenty good enough to be identified as what they are (fox avatars, skyscrapers etc).
But none of it's any good to me if I can't play at any faster than 5 fps.

Yes I forgot about that.
When I mention all of these things, I would hope they could keep the fee scheme the same. If it was a software thing, than this would be no prob. But it is true that hardware does cost, and improving hardware cost more money.
In the long run, improved hardware could eventually keep costs down. Being able to do much better graphics with much faster superhardware while at the same time improving the hardware energy consuption and software development interface.

With newer versions of development software such as 3DS Max, developers are able to do much more in less time because of improved tools and inteface. Then present a much better result everytime a new version is released. If we could develop our own content within SL in a similar interface to apps such as 3DS Max on top of improved superhardware discussed in the above posts, we could develop much more intricate shapes and scripts. The beauty and realism as well as the functionality could be much more advanced at much lower cost. The prooverbial getting the cake and eating it at the same time.

Even better, if we end all wars, establish world peace, eliminate plutocratic stratification, and become caretakers of the earth environment under a global pacifist community of progress, we could well divert all the effort we are putting into destroying the earth and eachother for the sake of frivolous matters into more progressive technogies.

a lot of the fault of "why" sl has sucky performances is also to put on the user.

-Most sl users are totally clueless at how a 3D game work and how to speed thing up.
-We still have morons that model every rivets on their armor.
-The hoochie/flexi hairs are a perfect example of peoples that have no clue , or don't give a shit about other's experience.
-We can't have performances and "count every little rhinestone on my earrings" at the same time, one always equate to loss of the other.

Money is only a mild factor because we can't always go higher, we have to wait for better hardware to come out.

I say it again, SL's sucky performances is vastly caused by bad content design.

Lets face it most designers in SL have extremely bad building/scripting/texturing habits that also explain why they prolly will never ever be hired by a game company.

SL is built by a bunch of clueless amateurs.

Wow! That's posh! My Mac mini gets less than 1 FPS most places now.

Those links that you put up.... are NOT real time rendering...

Sir, you are an idiot.

Go look at Unreal Engine 3, it's the latest top real time rendering engine on the market.
http://www.unrealtechnology.com/html/technology/ue30.shtml

Thank god.

I think it'd be neat, if optional. That and bring back the shaders we had that got yanked out in beta grid of 1.9.

True alot of the designs use too many prims and the scripts are the worst in terms of lag.
However, I would disagree that "SL's sucky performances is vastly caused by bad content design".
If SL had better hardware/software, bad content design would be irrelevant. SL sucky performance is caused by SL's sucky technology which is caused by 2007 sucky technology of today which will hopefully improve within the next few years as people on this thread have been projecting.

It's totally doable in the HUD you know...

well this is more what its going to be in a year..........

http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q56/usagimusashi/SecondLife_of_the_future1.png
see the person to the right? its a linden explaining what the game is down for repairs.