Second Life Avatars Have More Way More Triangles Than AAA Games Like Elder Scrolls Online, But Gain Little More Detail -- And Much More Lag

Pictured: In-game shot of an Elder Scrolls Online avatar from 2013 (video below)

Adeon Writer puts it succinctly:

For what it's worth, VRChat has a rating system of "Excellent, Good, Medium, Poor, Horrible"

Any avatar above 70,000 triangles is considered Horrible.

For reference, most Second Life avatars are about 200,000 to 300,000 triangles.

Many Second Life avatars use more triangles in a single shoe that most AAA games use for an entire map.

People wonder why 20 FPS in SL is sometimes considered unusually smooth.

20 FPS is laughably bad. Compare with, say, Elder Scrolls Online, which has high quality avatars (see above and below) that are also highly optimized, so the MMO seems to be in the 40-60 FPS range. More from Adeon:

You don't need triangles to make things detailed. Maybe in Second Life, because Second Life doesn't have custom shaders or a proper material system, so throwing raw triangles at it is all you can do.

But in AAA games you don't. That's why they look so much better than Second Life, at only one tenth of the triangles.

At the end of the day, SL will be used for the way it's already currently being used, and nothing is ever going to change with it. If you don't like it, you could leave, but you already would have, so if you haven't, you won't, so no need. Status quo lives on.

I'd say he's partially right on the last point: Most SLers haven't left the virtual world, but they have largely given up on large group events beyond shopping extravaganza, and now spend much more time taking solo screenshots of themselves. And so a virtual world designed for several dozen people to be in the same space together at the same time effectively becomes a solo world for the most part.

But Adeon is right the status quote will live on, because when I pointed out this problem to Linden Lab's CEO, he literally shrugged and said "Users are going to do what users are going to do."

Hat tip on the Elder Scrolls Video: This Kotaku story by Mike Fahey.

Comments

[Alicia]

20 FPS being bad is actually right on the money. It's not even smooth as you can literally see the framerate your avi is moving at. I remember playing World of Warcraft with around 20 FPS, and I was raiding mind you, so that was extremely bad.

Now, going back to that 20 FPS, and especially when you're on a sim with a whole ton of people, you will notice the entire sim lagging immensely as you get closer to that massive crowd of people. That's all because of the poorly optimized mesh that creators in SL continue to put in. All because the users want to look good, while at the same time killing overall performance.

And Wagner, you may be right as SL is becoming nothing more than a "look at me" photo program for avatars.

[Pulsar]

Even worse, 200k triangles is just the body, then you have to add the head that is another 50-150k. Then most new female hair is over 150k, often 200 and even 400+, also because of being multi-style, but still they could be less. Then clothes, shoes and accessories that can be a load of triangles as well each piece. So it's not uncommon to see avatars with over a million triangles.

[simon]

It's hardly surprising considering elder scrolls online was made by a professional game development studio, whilst SL content is made largely by amateurs. Also I think Linden Lab have made a rod for their own back with this one by not providing a mesh system avatar that anyone could skin and customise. As a result we have mesh avatars that use an onion skin system with multiple layers. It would be interesting to know how many tris were used if these were single layers. I couldn't agree more with Alicia, SL needs a proper material system rather than creators relying on baked textures and dense meshes.

[Alfie Hart]

Sad

[Chanele]

THIS IS FAULSE. Ive played both elderscrolls and secondlife for many years and I am big on my charater customization. Elder scrolls is much more grainy then smooth, it has glitches as well especailly when u are adding mods to make things look better, where as with Secondlife I could customize mods all day long into the game and have no issues. I love both these games but to say their graphics are the same is silly. My sl charater has custome everything smooth, shiny, Ive even scripted my own AO that runs smoothly and looks wonderful, my hair can flow in The wind or Simply Stay still look like actual fibers of hair instead of A mess of blur. The skin can look like porcelain Or like Ive just come back from a run on a sandy beach or like a shiny soft runway model. To say sl has the same if not less options then elder scrolls is ridiculous. IVE PLAYED FOR 10 YEARS SECONDLIFE. 4 YEARS ELDER SCROLLS.

[AR]

@Chanele Idk if you're trolling, but on the offchance you're not...no one is saying SL doesn't have choices for how you *look*. Yes there are more options for that in SL because it's open for content creators to add to it in a way ESO isn't built for.

What people *are* saying is that ESO runs better despite the avatars and graphics looking great because the avatars (and frankly, most of the game) are better optimized so they use less triangles for a high level of detail. That's not the case for SL where creators tend to be very, very bad about not optimizing their mesh which is a huge factor in why SL becomes a lag fest when more than a couple people are in the same place at a time.

To give you a concrete example, go to any given high traffic area and 99% of the time you'll end up lagging. Most of this is due to unoptimized mesh. By the same token, if you went to a high traffic area in ESO with the same number of people and (provided your settings are the right ones for your hardware) it'll still run just fine.

[Adeon Writer]

> It's hardly surprising considering elder scrolls online was made by a professional game development studio, whilst SL content is made largely by amateurs.

It does not take a professional game designer to make a nice looking optimized mesh.

The difference is that in Second Life, a well optimized mesh doesn't look good with their default shader. It outright encourages triangle spam to smooth out the lighting.

[Mondy]

People do love to look pretty and enjoy their shiny don't they?
Perhaps it's not just the unoptimised mesh that's the problem but their settings that's part of the problem. We're so used to lag that everyone forgets a lot of lag is client side! Setting things to ultra, turning draw distance way higher than it needs to be for example, I've no idea why people have a draw of 256 inside a club!, and wanting to render every person in a room even if you're not focused on them. Which the viewer WILL try to do even if they aren't in view. People also need to adjust their settings, fine tune for their own hardware and perhaps they would get a better overall expereience from Secondlife.
Yes, there's far too much bad mesh, but it takes more than a couple of avatars to lag you down, way of an exageration. Even on just an intel i5 with nvidia 940mx gpu I don't expereince major lag unless there's more than 12 complex avatars around me, and only if I'm trying to cam on them at the same time. FPS only dips to slideshow staus with over 40, but hey, how often do you get over 40 these days?(shopping events and club competitions?)

[caliandris]

It's not surprising that SL isn't optimised in the same way as games. For starters, the extent to which one can change the background is very limited in games and unlimited in SL as long as you have build and terraform privileges on the land.

What IS surprising is that LL do not follow their own rules for optimization of objects and avatar additions themselves - and have put little or no effort into persuading the many creators in SL to do so.

They also do not educate the creators and users of SL at all. Many creators focus solely on the look of their products and not at all on the performance of them in the world. I've been banging on about the use of enormous textures for years, and yet new LL premium content invariably contains lots of 1024x1024 textures. Now, if you have all the textures for an object optimized into one 1024, maybe that's fair enough (although usually 512 would be fine) but they don't do that.

Given the number of people who scatter content with poorly optimized mesh or lots of huge textures on their land, or wear massively high-impact clothing and hair, you have to assume that people enjoy taking selfies on their own, rather than enjoying things in a group.

[Evie Boleyn]

Comparing SL to a game with a contained story area is a little unfair. It's the fact that you have no limits on creativity that makes it unique and special. There's no story except the one you make for yourself.
Sure, amateur mesh creators could do a better job with optimization, but the key word here is amateur. It's a wiki-world that improves over time as people develop their skills. There will always be noob creators, everyone has to start somewhere and everyone's first snowman is going to have more triangles than it really needs but there's always more to learn and that's the beauty of it. It is for me, anyway. And it isn't as if LL don't provide ways to avoid lag, like impostor avatars and jelly dolls. You don't need to fully render people you're not looking at, let them be impostors. I generally keep non-impostors to about 8. And if you set the maximum complexity to no limit, then you can't really grumble when someone with a complexity of a million lags you to death. It's that person's own fault if they make their avatar look fabulous and all anyone else sees is a jelly doll. I set the maximum complexity to 350k, which is more than enough to render most people. Anyone who's a jelly doll above that limit stays as a jelly doll. We can all do more to keep complexity down, like removing attachments that are hidden under clothes, for example, detach it if you don't need it, don't just hide it.
It's in the nature of SL that most of the content is made by amateurs, that's kinda the whole point of it. It also has a very old engine that gets patched instead of being replaced by a more up-to-date and efficient one, but that would mean everyone starting again with an empty inventory. They tried that with Sansar but no one wants to start again from scratch. Maybe some day LL will come up with a new engine and some kind of content converter so that we don't lose all of our stuff, but I'm not holding my breath. SL is what it is.