The Snow Globe Effect

One of those things that really bug me in MMORPGs is the snowglobe effect. This is very prominent in worlds where 2D and 3D are mashed together such as Second Life. The problem with this? The imagery that you see is on a flat plane but the world you’re is in three dimensions. This isn’t as apparent for skinning avatars, but it is definitely more so in weather and landscapes.

Let’s visit an old friend that began many of the look and feel of MMORPGs. Quake. While Quake was not the first FPS, it was one that was wildy popular and one that incorporated the use of skinning for the models that was eventually open to the rest of the world. This was very apparent in modifications later on when you looked at the layouts of skins and found that what you were seeing in 3D was actually a 2D layer that was draped over the 3D body. These days, practically all 3D engines skin models as such. The more the polygons to fill out the skin, the more realistic. Still confused? Let’s bring it down a notch in terms that everyone can understand. Think of it this way. Take a bed sheet and drape it over you. Now if someone were to trace your features on the bed sheet, then take the sheet off and lay it flat, then that would be what a skin is like in a game.

Caption: Note that the moon doesn’t change from different angles, it just elongates like a flat image laying inside a curve. So back to the 2D and 3D mashup. Most online games do not use the 2D on 3D for weather. Mainly because it’s sort of a cop out on realism. When you look up at the moon, everyone doesn’t see the same angle. But in Second Life, everyone does. It’s just an image that moves across the screen to simulate the moon moving across the sky. The sky is usually like a desktop wallpaper. If you look around yourself in Second Life, you find that it’s basically like looking at the inside of a snow globe. Even the cloud effects look strange. This is probably due to the fact that in reality, clouds move with wind but here it changes configuration without wind pattern. So you can have different clouds moving in opposite directions without fear.Strangely enough, even with a virtual world, the immersion of subtle realism can make a game experience all the more addictive. The whole idea of virtual worlds is to do things that you cannot in reality and be whom you’re not in reality.