Above: Improved water physics and in-world chat
It's finally here: Next week Friday (March 3), people will get their first chance to try out Crystal Frost, the upcoming Second Life viewer that runs on Unity 3D. To be among the very first, become a "Jacked In" or "Snowcrashed" level member of the project's Patreon here.
After I wrote about it last week, Crystal Frost developer Berry Bunny (Kallisti#2038 on Discord) has added a number of enhancements that will be available in this test build:
"Being able to send chat, click objects, and display and respond to IMs."
Yes, she means IM and chat through Crystal Frost on the main grid.
"I'll try but don't think I'll have group chats ready. Also I have the display of adjacent sims turned off at this time. Crystal Frost is receiving data from other sims but currently discarding it until I figure out how I want to organize it. Sim border crossings are likewise untested. So patrons should only cross sim boundaries at their own risk."
And yes, it's very much an early test build: "It won't be anywhere near finished," as Ms. Bunny puts it but it'll give people something to make YouTube videos showing."
This is not just a "port" to Unity, because Crystal Frost actually includes enhancements to the existing Second Life experience, including what you see in this video below:
Yes, much better water graphics:
"It has waves, goes on forever, has real time tesselation, and reduces in detail with distance, making it very performant for having physical waves. Also, it decreases in visibility with depth, giving that nice depth fog effect that water has in the real world, where the color of the water gets deeper blue, and less transparent with depth."
Another cool enhancement depicted in this video below:
"Normally when an object is derezzed, viewers will just immediately remove it. What Crystal Frost is doing is applying a dissolve effect on the object. And only removing it after it's completed."
Much more immersive than what we currently have.
Join the Patreon to get test builds first, and the Crystal Frost Discord Server here for more updates.
See also:
Crystal Frost should (eventually) work on mobile, displaying Second Life on a smartphone. Crystal Frost SL dynamic local lightingIf she succeeds, Crystal Frost would also offer a substantial leap in graphics quality for Second Life. (See the images in this post, courtesy Bunny, including the comparison with Firestorm below.) But Bunny has even greater ambitions than better graphics: "Having a modern graphics engine that's multi-threaded, easier modability, implementing ray tracing and proper VR is super easy," as she explains. "I have ideas about how to implement VR and make it feel like VRChat. But I need to make the client stable and get rigged meshes working before I even attempt it. Also, theoretically better performance than the Linden Lab-based viewers, if I do it right."
Veteran Developer Creating New Second Life Viewer... For Unity!
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