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by sbierwagen
1655 days ago
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For Second Life at least, it's hard to package stuff. World geometry, player models, lighting and props can all be edited in realtime. You can't use most of the tricks that video game devs are used to: no simple way to prebake lighting or reflections, no occlusion culling or binary space partition. The asset base is enormous: hundreds or thousands of terabytes. You can bet that every player character will have a completely unique set of textures and models, very little is shared between characters. This is why long time SL users tend to stick to one location, because actually exploring is painful-- move 100 meters, then stand still for a few minutes as your framerate plummets and everything slowly loads in. Many clubs or hangout spaces are on islands or boxes in the sky high enough that nothing else loads in. This reduces the problem just to rendering avatars, which is hard enough by itself. It's also very hard to depreciate old systems. The game is 18 years old, but there were real money transactions from day one. If a user bought something ten years ago, they expect to still be able to use it! You can imagine a clean-sheet design that does away with all this. Make the world static, player avatars pre-baked. Most SL competitors do this. (Facebook Spaces, Playstation Home etc) This gives you better FPS and a much more consistent aesthetic, since all the assets are made in-house. But now what? The classic Metaverse problem, there's just not that much to do. Cutting features from SL makes this worse, not better. |
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https://vimeo.com/640175119
Runs 55-60FPS in a crowded area.
Over-complicated avatar clothing is a separate problem. This is a huge deal in Second Life, because it's the greatest dress-up virtual world ever built. Users expect a lot. The tattoo layer has to show through mesh stockings, for example. I have some ideas on speeding that up but haven't implemented anything. What's needed is an optimization step that takes place when an avatar changes clothes. All the layers of meshes need to be crunched down to a simplified game-type combined mesh. In a game, that would be done during asset building. In a world where you can change clothes, mixing and matching items, it has to be done somewhere near run time. But not on every frame, just at clothing changes. This is already done for textures; all the texture clothing layers of an avatar are baked down to one. Roblox does something like this in their experimental mesh avatar system.
There's a mindset that this is impossible, shared by the low end of metaverse developers. It's not shared by Roblox or Epic or IMVU, who are busy solving the problem. This is a moderately hard problem, but it's not impossible.
Linden Lab staff had convinced themselves that it was impossible to speed up the viewer. After some people in Linden Lab management saw what I'd done, somehow there suddenly was much more effort going into improving the viewer FPS in their C++ client.