High Fidelity Adds New Mesh Compression System to Speed Load Times -- Should Second Life Adopt It Too?

Interesting new update to High Fidelity for speeding up mesh load times:

As part of this [new] release, each High Fidelity server now provides two forms of compression, an open source solution for converting and compressing asset textures to the KTX format, and an implementation of Google’s open source Draco format for mesh compression.

To see what that means in real (virtual) terms, watch the impressive video demo above. Read more about it here.

Of course an obvious question many NWN readers are asking is, "Can Second Life get this too?" I asked Philip Rosedale just that:

"SL uses a bunch of different compression techniques," answers Philip, "including progressive texture compression which is similar to KTX, and specialized techniques for compressing primitives very efficiently.  Mesh objects I am not sure if they do anything yet, Draco would help in that case."

Draco would help in that case. Just a thought for any Linden staff reading this now and preparing for SL's big upgrade.

Comments

[Medhue]

When I talked to Phillip, it sound like this unique data compression format might also help with better securing the content. If it's not a common format, there is no point in stealing the content to use elsewhere.