New World Notes

Crystal Frost, Second Life on Unity Project, Focuses on PC/VR Viewer While Linden Lab Works on Mobile Version

In case you missed it amid last week's hoopla over Linden Lab's announcement that they are (finally) developing a native mobile for Second Life built on Unity, there already is a user-run project to bring Second Life to Unity.

It's called Crystal Frost, and it's still going full-guns. 

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"It's not going to change," as lead dev Berry Bunny (Kallisti#2038 on Discord) tells me today. "Linden Lab is taking it in a different direction, and they're unlikely to use it for their desktop viewer. If anything it just means I won't have to worry about making a mobile version."

In other words, the era of Second Life on Unity is here.

Berry's original idea is to create a version of Second Life that's optimized to run in PCs and VR, and that remains the goal. Yes, Second Life in VR, with hands-on prim-based creation, a version of SL that can compete with VRChat.

"I'll have the 2D user interface pop up as a holographic display in front of you and can be pulled up with a customizable gesture," Berry explains. "If possible I will be tapping in to the puppetry system that Linden Lab is developing, and barring that I'll be using an LSL bridge to transmit IK targets for hand and full body tracking."

As for Linden Lab's SL on Unity/mobile project, Berry tells me from painful personal experience that they are going to hit some huge challenges:

BREAKING: Official Second Life iOS/Android Mobile App on Unity Revealed "With Joy & Trepidation", Starting With Avatars & World Display. UPDATE: Community-Driven Crystal Frost Unity Viewer Project Will Continue

UPDATE, 9:00PM PT: Updated for weekend viewing fun!

BREAKING NOW: A prediction of mine that's coming true this year sooner than I expected -- an official native Second Life app for iOS and Android mobile devices.

Watch the announcement above, made "with joy and trepidation"! The latter probably because the project has been in the works for years and was unexpectedly postponed last year.

Curiously, an earlier version of this project was going to focus on chat and other utility functions, but now Linden Lab is focusing on avatar and beautiful scene rendering. (Though on this video, at least, the world's draw distance appears quite low, and textures are similarly low res.)

However, Linden Lab says they intend for the mobile version to have "pretty much" all the functionality of the desktop version -- eventually.

"Last half of this year" is the target release date for a limited beta which will also have avatar chat.

As regular readers know, Linden Lab's SL viewer for Unity is actually the second one to be announced. For the last couple months, community creator Berry Bunny has been showing off her Crystal Frost project running on Unity. (I even wonder if Crystal Frost put a fire under Linden's own project!)

In any case, Berry tells me, Crystal Frost development will continue:

How Second Life on Unity Can Improve the Virtual World's User Interface as Well Its Graphics (Comments of the Week)

Above: Current version of Chat/IM user interface on Crystal Frost

Many SLers are excited about Berry Bunny's Crystal Frost, the Second Life-on-Unity project, because of graphics enhancements like physics- enabled water. In Comments, veteran metaverse developer Gwyneth Llewelyn notes how this will also enable the community to improve the user interface:

By pushing the rendering part out of Linden Lab's code, Bunny is also able to tackle the interface part of it — and work on both as separate projects, something which currently cannot be done in the existing codebase.

It'll be interesting to see what her approach will be. Unity, of course, can also handle all the interface bits — but then it's just really replacing one source of trouble with another.

We'll see if Bunny realizes that, and places the UI completely outside the viewer, running separately from it — possibly on a platform-neutral framework which strong support which can easily be expanded with the kind of tools that SL needs: its strong and solid inventory support (I mean, what kind of virtual world platform out there expects users to have hundreds of thousands of items in their inventory, with a complex permission systems on top of each and every one, multiplied by the million active users that SL still has?) but with terminally flawed UI.

The way groups, chats, objects and land management is closely tied together (with the permission system and the group roles!) — making Linden Lab opt to develop everything from scratch and giving us just the bare minimum (chat looks and feels like IRC from the late 1990s at best — I mean, we don't even get emojis and/or bold/italic!).

I actually think improving the UI/UX is even more important than updating the graphics, at least in terms of having any chance at growing SL's user base.

As for the launch of Crystal Frost last weekend, the viewer's Patreon now has over 40 members, and their reaction with the first Alpha is pretty positive, Berry tells me:

"People are amazed, but their expectations have also been pretty well tempered by my being transparent and communicating what to expect... a severe bug has been found but it's already been isolated and will be fixed by the next release." They're planning that release for March 17. 

As for Gwyn's thoughts on the UI, Berry's also replied in Comments, with some hints around how Crystal Frost might work as a mobile/tablet app:

It's Here: Crystal Frost, Second Life's First Viewer Running on Unity, Available Today in Early Alpha Featuring Live Chat/IM & Water Physics

Starting in a few hours, members of Crystal Frost's Patreon can finally get their hands on Second Life's first viewer running on Unity.

"The project is currently still in Alpha stage," lead creator Berry Bunny (Kallisti#2038 in Discord) warns, "so there are some performance issues, a number of bugs, and other issues. So anybody signing on to the Patreon for early access should know to temper their expectations." (Join at the Jacked In/Snowcrashed level of her Patreon for access to the download.)

That warning aside, this early Alpha comes with some features to play with now:

 

BREAKING: First Test Viewer of Crystal Frost, Unity-Based Second Life Viewer, Available for Patreon Members Starting March 3!

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:

WATCH: Video Preview of Crystal Frost, Unity-Based SL Viewer -- Test Client Available in 2 Weeks!

Well this is exciting -- the first video preview of Crystal Frost, the upcoming third party viewer for Second Life that runs in Unity. Created by SLer and longtime developer Berry Bunny (Kallisti#2038 on Discord), the frame rate is a bit slow, but the graphic enhancements are pretty clear. And yes, the wandering cube is the avatar.

"Rendering avatars requires decoding rigging data from meshes," Kallisti tells me, "and I currently have not looked into how to do that just yet."

She tells me a playable version will be available "in a couple of weeks tops", first for people who are members of her Patreon.

Unity for Second Life Project Launches Discord Featuring Live Dev Streams - Starting Today at Noon PT!

Click here to join the Discord server for Crystal Frost, the Second Life viewer on Unity project I blogged last week and the brainchild of longtime dev Berry Bunny (Kallisti#2038 on Discord). Starting today at Noon PT, Bunny's going to livestream her development of Crystal Frost there, an eventually announce the release of a usable client:

"I will be posting screenshot highlights to the public areas of the Discord after I finish each coding session," she tells me. "Basically the Discord will have daily updates and screenshots Mondays through Thursday, and once I get a somewhat usable client going (even if it's not ready to replace other viewers), which I hope to do by the end of the month, I'll be posting weekly binaries."

She also launched an optional Patreon for the project:

 

BREAKING: Veteran Developer Creating New Second Life Viewer... for Unity!

Above: "Vastly more realistic lighting. This is a sunset in Crystal Frost."

SLer Berry Bunny (Kallisti#2038 on Discord) is a longtime developer who's been working on various Second Life projects for well over 15 years. Along with some impressive in-world games, she's done mixed reality projects for Italia Telecom and a nursing school experimenting with Second Life as a distance learning tool, among others.

Her new project, however, is somewhat more ambitious:

Crystal Frost, a new third party Second Life viewer that runs on Unity.

Yes, that means Crystal Frost should (eventually) work on mobile, displaying Second Life on a smartphone. 

If 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." 

VRChat is actually a large part of her motivation for taking on this project: "'[I'm] wanting to see SL become better, and wishing that VRChat had something comparable to SL's robust inventory and modular avatar system." (And also she's bored and wants a fun challenge.)

Above right is a pic via Bunny showing off another feature: "Local light support, translating SL's old school lights to real world physically based material type lights, specified by lumens, via Unity's HD Rendering pipeline." 

How is this even possible, and what does Bunny need to get this project hopping along faster? (Sorry.) Read on:

Watch: How to Install & Run Second Life on Your Steam Deck

As promised last week, here's video of /RealEvilInd running Second Life on Steam Deck -- on Firestorm, specifically, the most popular 3rd party viewer for SL. Framerate looks quite good, and most of the basic activities in SL (walking, interacting with store items, etc.) look fairly easy. You can even use the Steam Deck's touchscreen to text chat (6:35), but that looks pretty aggravating to actually do on a regular basis.

  As for doing this on your own Steam Deck, they tell me it's quite easy:

Run Second Life on Steam Deck? This Redditor Says It's Possible Through Firestorm & Gets Good Performance

SL Redditor /RealEvilind recently posted this tantalizing image, showing Second Life running on Steam Deck, the handheld videogame console from Valve, and they report it gets pretty great performance:

This is Firestorm running on the Steam Deck pretty well. It pulls off 30 - 40 FPS in a normal crowded area, on high, with ambient occlusion on. It runs on Linux, and it's very easy to install. All I had to do is customize the controller, so that I could move and manipulate the camera. The device's trackpads can be set as mouse with click and right click.

We finally have a pretty cheap, truly portable solution for Second Life.

Maybe so! If you have a Steam Deck and the patience to set it up to run SL. As I'm not a Steam Deck owner myself, I'm talking with RealEvilind now, and will hopefully get a video to show their demo in action. 

As for the setup, here's their notes on that: