Subject: [mmox] Cryengine 2 screenshots from Extropia

From: William George <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2009 09:54:15 -0400

Shows what a more advanced environment engine can provide. Anyone seen any
from Blue Mars?

http://planetcalypso.com/news/pages/2009/04/09/7346/index.xml

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From: Dan Olivares <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2009 10:21:28 -0400

More advanced then what?   What are you comparing it to?

Best Regards

Dan

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 9:54 AM, William George
<[email-masked]> wrote:
> _______________________________________________
> mmox mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/mmox
>
>

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From: "Meadhbh Hamrick (Infinity)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2009 10:18:52 -0700

oooh.. john bates is gonna hate me for saying this... but...

fwiw... i think we're all (all of us who make virtual worlds) in an  
era where photorealistic rendering is more or less cheap and readily  
assessable. the thing i noticed when following john in world was that  
virtually _all_ the plants looked identical. we sometimes get the same  
effect in second life when you build an area with a limited number of  
"stock" shapes / textures. in SL, there's a tradeoff between texture  
load time and visual diversity. on one hand you could have every  
virtual object have it's own shape / prim, and every prim have it's  
own texture. this would enhance visual diversity. but it would  
probably be dog slow to load and who knows... you might even make low- 
end systems with not quite enough texture memory barf. on the other,  
you could have a set of stock shapes / texture and reuse them. this  
would load quicker, but it would be a challenge to make it visually  
appealing. i don't know that it would be impossible, only that it  
would be difficult. and... different people have a different idea for  
what "visually appealing" means to them.

so... i finally saw a blue mars demo at GDC. it looked a bit less well  
rendered than either entropia / cryengine or second life / windlight,  
and ACK! the jerkiness! but... it definitely WAS visually diverse. my  
ideal world would be the blue mars designers working on user generated  
content for second life residents in a system rendered with either  
windlight or cryengine enabled clients.

and if we do things right here... who knows... maybe something like  
that would happen.

On Apr 13, 2009, at 6:54 AM, William George wrote:

> Shows what a more advanced environment engine can provide. Anyone  
> seen any from Blue Mars?
>

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From: Jon Watte <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:53:48 -0700

Blue Mars looks fantastic. Of course, they are cutting out pretty much 
their entire addressable market by requiring a GeForce 9800 or higher to 
run... I think that mass products like the bigger MMOs and VWs are 
actually not friends of the graphics vendors, because the big trend is 
towards cheaper rendering, to be able to address more consumers. You may 
think that a $300 graphics card is dirt cheap and well worth it, but the 
average consumer couldn't care less -- he'd rather make an additional 
car payment, and stay with Intel GMA graphics.

Sincerely,

jw

William George wrote:
> Shows what a more advanced environment engine can provide. Anyone seen 
> any from Blue Mars?
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>

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From: William George <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 10:11:23 -0400

You might want to check prices on that. I have a 9800 gtx+ I purchased
(without much shopping) for $160. I agree with your statements about the
average consumer, but I also feel that that Intel chip is way underpowered.
I've heard that the Nvidia ION chipset will be a more powerful alternative

I also noticed that Blue Mars is requiring Vista

waka

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 6:53 PM, Jon Watte <[email-masked]> wrote:

> run... I think that mass products like the bigger MMOs and VWs are actually
> not friends of the graphics vendors, because the big trend is towards
> cheaper rendering, to be able to address more consumers. You may think that
> a $300 graphics card is dirt cheap and well worth it, but the average
> consumer couldn't care less -- he'd rather make an additional car payment,
> and stay with Intel GMA graphics.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> jw
>
>

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From: Gareth Nelson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:14:09 +0100

Ultimately, graphical rendering should be based upon graceful
degradation, so that lower-powered hardware simply shows the graphics
at lower quality.

SL has this to an extent, and the web has had it from the start.

More to the point, aren't we here to work on such protocols?

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 11:53 PM, Jon Watte <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Blue Mars looks fantastic. Of course, they are cutting out pretty much their
> entire addressable market by requiring a GeForce 9800 or higher to run... I
> think that mass products like the bigger MMOs and VWs are actually not
> friends of the graphics vendors, because the big trend is towards cheaper
> rendering, to be able to address more consumers. You may think that a $300
> graphics card is dirt cheap and well worth it, but the average consumer
> couldn't care less -- he'd rather make an additional car payment, and stay
> with Intel GMA graphics.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> jw
>
>
> William George wrote:
>>

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From: Infinity Linden <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 08:50:17 -0700

yup. that's what i'm hoping.
personally... i'm thinking rendering issues are sorta out of scope.

but that last statement comes with the big "HOWEVER"... we totally DO NOT
want to specify a wire protocol that makes any kind of rendering difficult.
and it's a popular thing for protocol designers to make assumptions about
what participants are going to do with the protocol they consume.

which is probably why there's such talk of people saying... "oh! we should
support meshes!" and "oh! we should support NURBS!" and ...

-cheers

On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 7:14 AM, Gareth Nelson <[email-masked]> wrote:

> their
> any

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From: "Hurliman, John" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 11:14:28 -0600

>-----Original Message-----
>From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
>Infinity Linden
>Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 8:50 AM
>To: Gareth Nelson
>Cc: [email-masked]; Jon Watte; William George
>Subject: Re: [mmox] Cryengine 2 screenshots from Extropia
>
>but that last statement comes with the big "HOWEVER"... we totally DO
>NOT want to specify a wire protocol that makes any kind of rendering
>difficult. and it's a popular thing for protocol designers to make
>assumptions about what participants are going to do with the protocol
>they consume.
>
>which is probably why there's such talk of people saying... "oh! we
>should support meshes!" and "oh! we should support NURBS!" and ...
>
>-cheers
>

It could also mean that some people are confused about the scope of the MMOX work or the roadmap to complete the scope. If someone didn't know better and simply visited the MmoxCharter page at http://trac.tools.ietf.org/bof/trac/wiki/MmoxCharter and saw "February 2010 Progression of OGP Virtual World Primitive Object Format to Proposed Standard" on the roadmap, they might think that defining a transport format for 3D virtual world content was on topic.

John

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From: Gareth Nelson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:58:43 +0100

Which is why that needs sorting out - can someone with the correct
access please update that page?