Graphics & Performance in our 3D worlds
Almost all “virtual worlds” lack the rich beauty that we’ve come to expect from 21st-century visual effects, and we believe this is one reason why more people don’t play in 3D worlds.
Many of them look (and taste?) like cardboard. For instance, we don’t feel that Second Life’s Welcome Island seems like somewhere you’d enjoy a vacation, or an adventure, or a dance. (What exactly are you supposed to do there?)
Recent personal computers are perfectly capable of delivering a richer, live, immersive, and interactive 3D experience over the Web. They just need someone (that’s us and you!) to create a 3D world to make them sing.
We’ve been at this for the past year, trying to balance graphical quality against accessibility and performance. This post is about what hardware you need to see Just Leap In at its best.
To push the boundaries of what’s possible in a web-delivered 3D World, you’re going to need a fairly modern computer. This doesn’t mean that you need the absolute latest, fastest, meanest, game playing machine out there (wouldn’t hurt). But it probably means if your machine is older than 2-3 years, it may not have what it takes for you to enjoy our Just Leap In world at its best (though we encourage you to try it out: you may find your hardware to be perfectly acceptable, and we’d like to hear how it works).
Our world requires fairly high-powered machines. We could pursue a lower common denominator, but doing so would mean you, the Explorer, wouldn’t experience the visually rich world we know we can bring to life.
The bottom line: if your computer is a few years young, belonging to the 2004 era or later, our 3D spaces should look beautiful (at least in the eye of the beholder). If your computer was already “old” a couple of years ago, you’ll still be able to explore our universe. But it won’t be as pretty – there will be fewer visual effects, as our engine will ‘fall back’ to simpler rendering techniques.
As we get more data, we’ll be describing detailed specs on our webpage. We need to gain more real world feedback from our beta testers, so we can be precise and give better advice. Whatever your hardware is, let us know how we perform for you. We would really appreciate your feedback as a beta tester.
Welcome!
Hey, reader. Welcome to the Leap In blog!
There’s a lot of wet paint around here, in case you hadn’t noticed. We’re just getting the website up and running (except for the splash page we’ve come to know and love). But behind the serenity, we’re pretty furiously developing, drawing, and testing (and recruiting).
We can’t say much about our precocious brainchild for a little bit longer (until we send you a beta invite – more on that in a minute), but during the next few weeks we’d like to use this space – a newfangled Typo blog – to share a bit about ourselves. (We’ve been hiding out for a long time).
So who are you, anyway?
The JLI Team, circa December MMVII
Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll invite the crew here at Leap In Entertainment to post a little about themselves – who they are, what they’re up to, and why we’re lucky enough to have them on the team. To protect the innocent, we’ll start out posting under the names of our avatars. And the first of these posts is coming up next (now who shall we volunteer?)
In the meanwhile we hope you’ll keep up with us here, where we’ll be humbly introducing ourselves and unveiling a little more of what we’re trying to do. More website updates coming soon, too. If you’re professionally interested in the idea of social networking in 3D, you might want to check out our recruiting page. And if you have any questions, feel free to email us.
Thanks for checking in, and keep in touch!
