It generally isn't fair to compare other engines results with that of second life, and I don't think it ever will be fair to compare results, or how it looks.
The fundamental differences are too large. Most graphics engines deal with optimized static geometry that has specially designed textures that can be mapped onto them in clever ways, and an optimized pre-computed tree is formed to occlusion, so that you can obtain very high framerates and good looking results, even from very very modest hardware. This however is not the case with second life, where there is NO static geometry that can be optimized or merged, the textures cannot be applied in clever ways or mapped efficiently, and those using them generally do not know how their use of textures slows everything now. I hope to see a lot of this change with the introduction of mesh. Second life current has a trade off between simplicity of data transfer and polygon count and complexity, by over generating its geometry for each primitive, it allows for simple building blocks that can be used for construction. The trade off is that a great number of them go unused or are never visible, hidden inside intersections of other prims. Sadly this case cannot be optimized, as the system is entirely dynamic, where any given primitive or object can change or move at any time, leaving little room for clever programming to fill in holes and optimize away pieces that cannot be seen. Currently the second life system does a fairly good job of creating a semi decent performance scene out of all this chaos, but I am sure there are ways it could be further improved. Suggesting a move to another graphics engine that is developed and designed for use with static optimized geometry in a controlled environment would provide poor performance, likely far worse than what is currently offered by the tuned system that current exists. This is particularly true for the number of unique textures that are often visible within a scene at any time. Sometimes counting in the thousands. In most games you have maybe 200 textures visible at any given moment, and its careful tuned to stay as low as possible to achieve the good performance you are used to. I hope that we can continue to watch the engine used for second life change and evolve in ways that increase this performance and lower the bar of entry, but it will never be something that the programmers alone can do, it takes the coordination of everyone involved, content creators and users included. _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/OpenSource-Dev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
