What's going on with the new engine?

That's the one. Got the wrong area of the graph.

So to cut to the chase....things will continue crappy as usual.

Oh boy here we go again with Havok... yea yea

You're right, it does still happen.

On the other hand, the client does know if you're standing on something or not, because after a teleport it plays the falling animation until the prim or ground you're standing on rezzes.

As usual, it's just plain weird.

OK, here is what I'm gathering from the comments so far:

1. The bulk of the data transfer to keep everybody seeing the same thing revolves around the environments, in SL this is constantly changing, in other mmorpgs this is static for the most part and resides on the users computers, in order to keep this quantity of data in sync in SL it resides on the servers.

2. Following the location of the environment objects on the servers, this requires a great deal of the physics to be calculated server side as well. Is this correct?

3. Improving anything would ultimately require major resource increases server side. While getting back to the OP, the bulk of the resources on our client machines is unused.

Well either LL is going to get an injection of MAJOR hardware upgrades, or this is not going to change anytime soon, unless they come up with an innovative way of moving more of the world client side. The only thing I can think of is some variation of p2p distributed architecture, but hell if I know how that would work...

You know what makes SL ugly? The pisspoor terrain textures for one and the lack of proper shadows for another. Remember Chinatown? It looked good because every visual trick you could think of was used to fake what should be part of a rendering engine. Dynamic shadows would help make SL look significantly better and there is technology out there that can render it without grinding SL to a halt but it isn't in there yet.

I doubt very much that a high enough proportion of SL users to make it worthwhile implementing dynamic shadows have the hardware to manage it. The cutting edge rigs that would be required are generally only owned by gamers, who would rather play other things that do far better at providing what they want.

Technology's heading in the right direction for it to work, and when it's there (if SL has survived that long) it will be introduced, IIRC Cory said so himself. What might be nice in the meantime is the ability to bake shadows as part of the client but, unless someone decides as one of those side project things they do in LL, it's not going to get made since there's so many more pressing things to spend development time on.

Yea, this is true too. Fancy graphical features require a computer capable of showing/running them, which only the hard core gamers have (like me! ).

Can you imagine the whines we'd hear if LL said "HEY! You folks gotta upgrade your machines to at least a *insert high end video card & CPU here* if you want to keep playing!" OY! The forums & Blog would meltdown!!

And probably 70-80% of the residents would leave.

Linden Labs has been promising Havok 2 physics for four years now. As far as I know there has been no progress made at all.

Personally, I'd like to see sim crossings and scaling issues (both as old as SL, no progress made on either) fixed before improved physics.

Sim crossing is likely to be with us until they rebuild SL from scratch because now you are basically teleporting between sims. This means there is a second or two of HD read/write and a sizable data transfer to accomplish this at best, longer if the server is busy or internet traffic is high. I found that by putting the Firstlook viewer and cache on a ramdrive, sim crossings are a bit smoother but it really isn't worth the effort to set it up for the marginal gain.

Ok few things. SL is streamed to your computer. While a basic mesh uses some amount of polygons the polygon count is a much lower rate. They use a set of extended extruded shapes (i believe thats what they said..> Adding in higher graphics would require more on the server end of things and much more complex meshes etc and frankly internet connections cant handle it. Remember all this data is being streamed to your computer short of a few things which are handled client side.... Such as ripple water, shiny objects, local lighting etc. The rest is all streamed. Havok 2 wouldnt put a huge straign on the network related stuff however it does require a bit of an infastructure change on the physics end because of the major differences between havok 1 and havok 2....

irregardless it would put a bit more strain on it. And SL graphically isnt to horrid and it doesnt take a geek to change the avatars its relatively simple if the people want to learn (also considering you can buy all the stuff to change the avatar its simple) Sliders arnt that difficult to use really and its more the skisn then anything that dont work with the avatar's (also LL could use a better default pose set but the default is unisex so that may not work that well ^^)

Anyways when the technology to do it is there and the connections to do it are more readily available to everyone we will see more until then something like SL is still going to have the same limitations. And for those saying static enviroment need i point to There? Static enviroments that can be changed per the company loading content made outside up. And lets remember just how horrible a system taht is.

I was playing Hitman Blood Money and got to a level where you're supposed to whack this guy who lives in an upscale neighborhood. The level looked amazing even though the house/grass/street textures were nothing special, it was all about lighting and shadows.

LL should focus on adding shadows/reflections next, assuming they're going to hang on to the current engine. It's true that most PC's probably can't handle it today but that was true of ripple water/shiney/AF and that didn't stop LL from adding those features. If your video card can't handle it, you turn it off.

There are already reflections in SL in first look its just experimental.... and gotten thru debug settings. Shadows you can accomplish thru texture tricks as well...

Such as a prim that has to update its texture once every 6 seconds?
Yeah, that's a wonderful use of 16kb of server memory and processin, PER SHADOW.

I heard about reflections but thought they were taken out a few builds ago. I'll try it out!

I noticed a lot more builders are using shadow textures (particularly with furniture) , and it looks sooooo much better than without.

How about starting with something simple... changing the level of detail of the land mesh based on your detail settings.

Right now you can set the land texture detail up high, but the land mesh gets reduced to pointy blobs as soon as you're more than a few meters away. Current video cards have the ability to render the land mesh at full resolution dozens of meters away, because they're rendering prim objects at higher resolution than the land mesh *ever* gets at that distance, and if the mesh detail is based on the detail settings (or even its own setting) then people with older cards won't be impacted.

Um no you can make an effect for static objects without using scripts by just simply using textures or bake the actualy shadows onto the texture (ala Aimee Weber style )

This has to do with draw distance which you can set up manually all the land will rez but im telling you it lags pretty badly.... Can see up to 512 meters (about 2 sims in most cases) which is utterly pointless unless your taking landscape photos

Actually the look of the world could be improved dramatically by doing a number of changes in support of high-level one-time optimization of objects.

1. Constructive solid geometry of grouped objects using a single GUID
2. Render multiple levels of detail on the object in one shot, and cache all levels
2. Cache the CSG shape for the source object GUID
3. Anytime the source object is needed, load the cached CSG shape based on distance and detail level

4. Support static hierarchical objects
5. Allow one-time CSG processing on the entire object hierarchy, such as an entire house

The trade-off for all this is that your FIRST visit somewhere will be somewhat laggy as the new objects are processed and cached, but after that the loading is quick because the work was already done and is kept around in a long-life cache, where objects don't get purged until perhaps 30 days have passed.


I tend to believe that even shadows could be preprocessed for static inworld objects, such as houses and so forth. Presumably the sun/moon follow the same path through the sky every "day", so you could fake dynamic shadowing by preprocessing shadowcasts along a 180-degree semiccircle that follows the sun's track through the sky, then another 180-degree semcircle for the nighttime moon track.

This one-shot 360-position shadowcast would also be cached and "baked" with the CSG preprocessed shape on your local hard drive.

Good points, but this initial processing seems to defeat the point of streaming the world - if we're going to sit and wait noticeable times for stuff to load surely we may as well be sent ready-processed meshes?

No, I'm not talking about increasing draw distance, I'm talking about increasing the detail of the landscape at the same draw distance.

There's a huge difference when you have landscapes built with prims and the ground mesh, or when you have a build that includes terrain close to water level. Even with my draw distance set to cover the whole sim the landscape at one side of my build is visibly distorted from the other, but the prims are rendered accurately dozens of meters further on.