3 ms·
A. Second life has not failed. From what I hear about it, it is actually a pretty lively community and it makes plenty of money for Linden. Actually even the au
by hristov 15y ago
A. Second life has not failed. From what I hear about it, it is actually a pretty lively community and it makes plenty of money for Linden. Actually even the author of the post admits that SL has not failed.
B. The writer completely misses the point when comparing SL to a video game. The entire point of SL is that the users should be able to build the world. Yes, this results in less than ideal environments, yes if an engineer designed the world there would be less polygon popping, better cache utilization, better hidden loading times, etc., but you would get a video game. Not the crazy world that second life is.
From my very brief foray into it, I have to say that SL has completely succeeded in doing what it aimed to do. It has grown a very involved community and they have built their own world or worlds. And of course most of second life is beset by weird and bizarre things and people, but then again, if you think about it, that was to be expected.
The above being said, it is actually a very interesting technical problem to do the optimizations you usually expect in video games for a completely user designed world like Second Life.
In a video game when you have something seen from far away (for example a city seen as you approach by air) it is usually specifically hand designed by artists to be seen from far away. Once you come close, you will see what seems to be the same buildings but they will be different renderings designed to look good up close.
Of course Second life cannot do that because people create and break down buildings all the time, so they cannot have artists render the town from far away all the time.
But what could be done is to have an engine specifically blend details and combine polygons in a way similar to the way objects blend in distance as seen by the human eye. This would make both the world more realistic and the networking load lighter as fewer polygons need to be transferred.
This is an interesting possible improvement that SL does not do. But to the best of my knowledge no other computer game does it either, so you cannot blame SL for this.
- ImperatorLunae 15y ago"The entire point of SL is that the users should be able to build the world. Yes, this results in less than ideal environments, yes if an engineer designed the world there would be less polygon popping, better cache utilization, better hidden loading times, etc., but you would get a video game. Not the crazy world that second life is." You haven't seen Minecraft then, have you? The users, in fact, can build the environments on their own, and the game loads and runs at a playable speed. Perhaps Minecraft has greater "video gameness" than Second Life, but couldn't the designers of Second Life have focused on user experience instead of delivering laissez-faire, polygon jungle? Although Second Life wouldn't fare well reverting to voxels, there are other approaches to optimize a user-developed game experience and maintain flexibility; it seems the developers aren't looking hard enough, if at all.
- hartror 15y agoYou are comparing apples and oranges. The canvas in MC is very limited, whereas SL has a broad tool set with a large amount of user customization.
- hristov 15y agoI have seen Minecraft, but it's graphics and detail are nowhere near to what second life has. Again some people like video game like responsiveness, some people like better graphics. It would be ludicrous to design and shop for clothes in minecraft, for example, but a lot of people enjoy doing that in SL.
- vilya 15y ago> Of course Second life cannot do that because people create and break down buildings all the time, so they cannot have artists render the town from far away all the time. Actually they can. It's entirely to generate levels of detail automatically and get good results. The open source program MeshLab, for example, (http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/ http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/) includes code to do this.
- jmervin 15y agoAh, but that would require support for mesh-built objects, no? Second Life mesh support is promised RSN. OpenSim has some mesh support, but is I think, somewhat hobbled by SL compatibility concerns.
- vilya 15y agoI've never tried Second Life, but I'd be very surprised if they're not representing shapes internally as some kind of 3D mesh: it's an important technique for getting decent performance on modern graphics cards. If they are doing that, then that's sufficient for them to be able to do automatic LOD calculations too.