New World Notes

Does This Open Source VR Viewer for Second Life Make the Virtual World Look Better Than VRChat?

There's a new update to Firestorm VR, a Second Life viewer for virtual reality headsets, from developer Peter Kappler (links available here on his YouTube page). It includes some fixes and improvements to the open source project from since I first blogged about it last month; specifically new mouse and keyboard controls (as you'll see in the video above) plus better performance: "Stereo should look smoother now", Peter tells me.

And while Second Life is over 15 years old, he believes the VR experience his viewer offers is better than what you'd get in leading social VR platforms:

"Honestly if you go to other VR worlds you will find out that the worlds and avatars are not so complicated," as he puts it to me. "I bet if you build a sim properly and use proper avatars you can make SL look like VRChat -- even better. I saw some avatars that were looking pretty realistic in Second Life which I've never seen in VRChat."

How accurate that is, I leave up to brave early adopters who want to give Firestorm VR a try -- here's some instruction tips and advice from Peter:

Firestorm QA: Yes, It's Possible to Use Debug Settings to Get Super-High Quality Second Life Images -- Here's How

Last week's post on improving SL image quality via a workaround from SLer Frenchbloke Vanmoer caused a lot of skepticism, mostly due to some poor technical wording on my part. (My bad and mea culpa!) However, Firestorm support and QA volunteer Whirly Fizzle came by Comments, and confirmed that this does, indeed, apparently work:

When I first read this blog post I thought it was a load of cobblers. But Frenchbloke is actually correct! The blog post just explains it badly. [Sorry! - ed]

This will also work just as well on the Linden Lab viewer & probably every other viewer. Those debug settings are from the Linden Lab viewer, they are not Firestorm specific.

It's easy enough to test for yourself. Get hold of a super high quality 8192 image with lots of fine detail & make sure it's saved in a lossless format - I used PNG in my test.

Set the debugs max_texture_dimension_X and max_texture_dimension_Y to 8192.
Upload your 8192x8192 image.
This image will upload and the uploader will resize the image to the maximum allowed size of 1024x1024 - this limit is enforced server side, there is no way around it.

Now open your 8192 PNG in Photoshop & reduce the image size to 12.5% using the Bicubic Sharpen (best for reduction) & save this image.
Set the debugs max_texture_dimension_X and max_texture_dimension_Y back to default & upload your image.

More from Mr. Fizzle, including a sample comparison images they took:

How to Display Extremely High-Res Textures In SL's Firestorm Viewer

Click to embiggen: Catwa head texture displayed in normal, 1024K, and 8K (pics via M. Vanmoer)

UPDATE, 2/13: In Comments, some readers have pointed out that this hack might not necessarily work as described, or could cause performance problems for users -- so caveat SLer. (Then again, the top avatar mesh bodies sold in Second Life already have major performance issues.)  Also be sure to read Vanmoer's responses in Comments.

SLer "Frenchbloke Vanmoer" recently told me about a cool Debug setting in the Firestorm viewer that enables extremely high resolution textures to be displayed, with far more detail than is seen by default. (As seen above, and after the break.)

"It's not a bug as far as I know," he tells me, "just that it's hidden away in the Debug settings -- nobody looks in there properly... Some [creators] I have talked to were unaware it existed and were making all their textures for upload from up to 8K sources as 1K uploads."

He says making the change doesn't cause much viewer-side lag: "They are just the usual 1024 x 1024 textures as far as your inventory and viewer is concerned. The main difference is that it looks a lot nicer. It's the same principle as photo resizing as well as audio for broadcast -- the better the quality in, the better it will be when compressed. It's one of the first things you learn when using images -- best to start big and then scale down, than the other way around. I'm curious to see what mesh creators can do with this on uvmapped mesh."

As with any debug adjustment, user beware! Here's the Debug setting Vanmoer is talking about:

Coming Soon to Black Dragon SL Viewer: Full Camera Animation Editor With Keyframing (I.E. Major Feature Machinima)

Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer with a cult following among hardcore graphics fans (Discord channel here) has an upcoming features that's ideal for YouTubers, Twitch streamers, and machinima makers: Full camera animation editor with keyframing.

"It will allow you to record, edit, delete, move camera animation keyframes," Black Dragon creator NiranV tells me. "The controls will immediately preview what you are doing as shown in the [video above]. They can also be abused to precisely control position and rotation at any time for a snapshot. Later i'll also add field of view. All if which will be animated from keyframe to keyframe."

This is designed to be far superior to the existing recording options in the official Second Life viewer -- and the biggest update to Black Dragon in awhile:

Open Source VR for Second Life Gets Up to 100 FPS, Reports Developer, Who's Seeking Vive & Oculus Users to Help Optimize for Those Headsets

Quick update from Peter Kappler, a dev who quietly created code to run Second Life in VR via Firestorm and Steam VR, and then posted the source code online. First off, he tells me, it can get quite good performance running in Second Life with great hardware: "On GTX 1080, non-stereo, around 60 to 120 frames per second; with stereo, half of that," he tells me. 60 FPS would still be pretty impressive, at least by Second Life standards, especially as the virtual world has a massive amount of content and social activity already built in.

And Peter thinks he can greatly improve that performance:

Text-Based Viewer for Second Life & OpenSim? There's an App for That

Linden Lab may be finally ready to release an iOS "companion" app for Second Life, but reader "Saga" points out there's already a third party SL app in the App Store: "There is another app for SL chat/inventory for iOS. I use it now and then, it’s called MetaChat!" And so there is:

MetaChat is a text-only viewer for all Virtual Worlds based on the OpenSimulator software for 3D worlds.

iOS apps CANNOT RUN IN THE BACKGROUND !

There is no 3D view, this is a text-only viewer.

Add accounts from different worlds with different start locations.,
See your friendlist, read messages or write
Chat with groups, see group infos or write group notices
Chat in open world 
Move around a mini-map, teleport to landmarks
See your inventory/worn, preview textures or pictures, send items
Attach/Wear/Detach/TakeOff Clothes
Enter/leave groups
Add friends/invite/pay/remove

So about the same feature list as the late-lamented Pocket Metaverse, but updated more often (check the developer blog here). But caveat emptor, my dude: MetaChat's user reviewers are pretty middling. However, even most of the critical reviews still suggest it's worth considering as a purchase:

Watch: Virtual Reality Version of Second Life for Firestorm & Steam VR -- With Open Source Code!

OK this is pretty amazing: Someone named Peter Kappler quietly created code to run Second Life in VR via Firestorm and Steam VR, and then posted the source code online. "It's not a fully working Firestorm," he allows on his YouTube, "there is still a lot to do. The file I posted is a source file in C++ for coders that wish to maybe work on a VR version for Second Life."

There have been at least two other attempts to create a VR port for Second Life, but performance has not been impressive -- Linden Lab had an experimental client of its own, but discontinued supporting it due to lack of decent frame rate. The demo video above suggests Kappler has come up with a fairly decent port; better yet, by open sourcing his code, he's encouraging other developers to improve it further.

 

The specific demo above is running SL through the Windows Mixed Reality headset, but it should be possible to create clients that run with Oculus and Vive:

Want to See How Resource Heavy SL Mesh Bodies Really Are? Use Black Dragon's Advanced Complexity Tool

Above -- human avatar with Maitreya body, polycount total circled

My report earlier this month that some of the top-selling mesh bodies in Second Life -- such as Maitreya, Belleza and SLINK -- are extremely resource heavy, and degrading SL performance for everyone around them, has caused a lot of conversation. Many readers claim the polycounts being reported can't possibly be that much. So here's an easy way to check for yourself:

Download the acclaimed, graphics-optimized Black Dragon SL viewer, then select Dragon > My Useful Features > Performance Tools > Advanced Complexity Window. As you can see above, the Maitreya body here uses well over 100,000 polygons.

How much is that? By contrast, a character in Red Dead Redemption 2, the latest AAA hit, has polycounts estimated in the 40,000-60,000 polygon range. (Here's a handy site showing character polycounts for other top AAA games with high-end graphics.) 

You want to see something insane? Here's a Belleza body with over 500,000 polygons:

Open Source VR Viewer for OpenSim in Development -- Low Cost Alternative for Social VR Projects?

Interesting project now in development within the community of OpenSim, the open source/reverse engineered version of Second Life:

OpenSimulator core developer Melanie Thielker — also known as Melanie Milland in-world — announced that she is releasing her virtual reality OpenSim viewer to the open source community, available here via GitHub. The new viewer uses the Unreal Engine to display OpenSim regions, such as areas from the grid Thielker founded, Avination.

While OpenSim never took off as a consumer-facing project, it counts thousands of developers and dedicated members, many within the education community, and counts thousands of regions/3D experiences. So this could potentially be a good, low budget/low frills alternative for indie social VR projects. Though the technical effort to make this possible seem fairly daunting -- porting OpenSim content into the Unreal engine:

Black Dragon Update: Control Multiple Animated Avatars at the Same Time

Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer with a cult following among hardcore graphics fans (developer NiranV estimates about 3000+ downloads), has a new version available for download: "Animating Dragon".

As that suggests, the latest updates enables this: "The ability to use poses to animate not just yourself but also Animesh now. Previously I added posing for Animesh but you could still only animate either you or them [Animesh-based NPCs) and only one at a time," as he explains to me. "Now you can animate everyone independently and/or at the same time."

So basically, this is a major boon for machinima makers and fashionistas who want to take supermodel shots where they want to control the supermodel too. (Just for starters.)

Video of Animating Dragon in action below. More about it on NiranV's blog (where you can also get the download link). 

Niran, by the way, has a Patreon for developing Black Dragon, and donations sure seem well-deserved. I mean, just look at what he's doing all by himself on his viewer: