Can You Guess Which Screenshots Are From GTA Online or... Second Life?

Quick: At a glance, which of the screenshots above was taken in Grand Theft Auto Online, the massively popular open world MMO launched in 2013, and which was shot in Second Life, the niche sandbox construction MMO launched in 2003? (Click to embiggen!)

Not sure? OK, try this one:  

This should be easier because Grand Theft Auto Online is all about racing and heisting in vehicles on land, air, and sea -- right? So which is from GTA, and which from SL?

Answers below, and a conversation with the online game explorer who shot them:

• Top set of pic: Left is GTA Online, right is Second Life.
• Bottom set of pics: Left is Second Life, right is GTA Online.

Even if you guessed correctly, I bet you still needed to squint a fair amount first. That's more or less the point being made by online world explorer Luca, who created this comparison demo to demonstrate that SL can indeed look as good as a "modern" online game world:

"While it does lack modern render features," as Luca puts it, "a lot of what makes good games look and feel good depends not solely on them; object and environment quality [and] design has a lot to do with it and Second Life can compete [there]."

To create the SL pics, Luca used the third party Alchemy viewer, running on a mid-level PC with these specs: 6GB GTX 1060, 16GB of RAM. (Luca's also a proponent of Alchemy for improving SL's graphic performance.)

Of course, "look" is not the same as "play" because as any SLer can tell you, recent improvements notwithstanding, you can't exactly engage in GTA-type gaming in Second Life without a lot of sputtering, especially with many multiple NPCs and other players in the same scene. Luca acknowledges that, but argues that Second Life can and should still be marketed with images of this quality:

"SL as a whole won't ever get the sort of visual cohesion GTA V's world has as well, no matter how good the rendering engine is, because it's a mostly user-created world with user-generated content, but all other games / virtual worlds that are user-created with user-generated content have the same issue or quirk so it's not really a downside of SL in that sense." (That last part probably isn't completely true, as next gen virtual worlds like Core and Dreams come with creation tools that optimize user-generated content.)

Notwithstanding, Luca continues, "[I] believe there are ways Linden Lab can offset this common perception and misconception that SL 'just looks old' especially to non-users and new users, and that is by adjusting default viewer settings, perhaps some UI adjustment, and making the initial impression and experience of SL to new users better and more modern overall, which is very, very possible. By modernizing the graphical and UI elements, and initial welcome area environment, [the] new user experience can be made many-folds better in my opinion -- like way better."

Sounds like a New Year's resolution for Linden Lab. More on this Reddit thread on on Luca's Twitter (embedded below).

Here's some screenshots from when I first logged in on a fresh install of the SL viewer earlier and after I adjusted it, just moving it down a little makes it feel less awkward and more modern imo pic.twitter.com/BbbYH1Yeiz

— Luca (@lucagrabacr) December 20, 2020

Comments

[weekend ruiner]

you can make SL look a lot better if you put in a bit of time and effort or at least you could until EEP but we don't talk about that.

You can have tinsel that looks like tinsel, environmental reflections, metal that looks like metal details and atmosphere.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrlawnmoer/50559884923/in/pool-crazydragona/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrlawnmoer/50565808826/in/pool-crazydragona/