Just posted by Linden Lab: This long-awaited update to the Unity-based Second Life app for smartphones project teased back in March. In all honesty that early preview seemed a bit pokey, but the current build being unveiled now is much more impressive.
"It looks like they're greatly limiting the texture resolution, which makes a lot of sense," expert developer Kallisti tells me, approvingly. "It looks like they have some very good framerates, much better than I expected for the amount of stuff they're showing, and I'm very happy that they're making the progress they are." (Kallisti, of course, is the dev behind Crystal Frost project, converting Second Life to Unity for PCs/VR, so knows from Unity.)
Some screengrabs below. Even more important to me than the graphics: Greatly simplified and much more intuitive user interface. When I talked to Philip for the book, he strongly suggested that an SL app for mobile should have most/all the features of the standard viewer, but this demo suggests they're going for simplicity.
In other words, this could be Second Life's first chance in a long time to actually grow its user base! The only drawback is Grumpity Linden suggests the Beta version won't be available until late this year/early next. It would be kinda ironic if VRChat's mobile viewer came out first.
Anyway, click for screenies!
I wouldn't doubt it if the mobile viewer came out first. They have a larger team that has a better understanding of how the network works, while I have to reverse engineer everything that isn't already supported by LibraMetaverse. I've basically hit a wall where development has slowed down a lot because LibreMetaverse does not really support very much and so everything from here on out requires reverse engineering, and in come cases integration of that into LibreMetaverse which means its dev has to accept the code submitted by my team.
Posted by: Berry Bunny / Kallisti | Tuesday, June 27, 2023 at 11:11 PM
I like what they are doing here and I can't wait for the beta. I hope eventually we get also an alternative Unity desktop viewer, optionally also with the more immersive and not webbrowser-like interface (I don't mean to just hide it) or that LL cooperates with Kallisti & team somehow, since Kallisti has good ideas too.
Posted by: Nadeja | Wednesday, June 28, 2023 at 12:37 PM
Incredibly exciting.
Not sure it will grow the base. We may still see many folks who sign up, login to a noob space and decide (quite mistakenly) that there's no there there.
Hope I'm wrong in that assessment
ElectricSheep Expedition
Posted by: Dana Lambeau | Friday, June 30, 2023 at 12:36 PM