Second Life Viewer Basic Mode

[leliel Mirihi]

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Charlie Omega wrote:
Early SL (and I mean beta and shortly after) could run fairly ok on some of the simplest computers. At one point I ran a P1 with about 512 or such ram and an Nvidia G2. Granted SL has come a long way with "features". But what you forget, a client for android can be coded based off the early clients. A tablet does not need all the crazy resource hungry features that have been added to the client over the years. Heck it even ran on a 56k dialup, well kinda. Us beta old schoolers loved our narcoleptic Shebang (the person that to use the dialup quite a bit).

Also, look at some of the graphics that tablets/phones can run. I have looked around in the client code off and on prior to the viewer2. It can and should be doable to have a nice looking and acceptable performing client.

This will take much work, time, and a good understanding of the android code. I have far too little time and working knowledge of coding in android to try this.

The only thing that really blocks an older based client is LL allowing a legacy client to connect.

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Since you were around in the beta days maybe you can answer a simle question for me. Back then did people fill sims up with thousands of high res textures? Because when I look at the sl we have today that's one of the main reason I see preventing an sl viewer from working on tablets and smart phones.

[Cerise Sorbet]

SL has a partial solution to the lots of huge textures problem built in. They used the JPEG 2000 code streams for textures because it allows a form of mipmapping when the streams are partially loaded. So, texture loads can be capped to X bytes, enough to show the textures at a lower resolution, and full loading can be deferred unless really needed, maybe if the user taps on an object to see more detail. The regular SL viewer already does this kind of thing, just in a much less agressive way than you might want for a portable device.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

You can see this on the Lumiya viewer already I think. The textures you can see on Lumiya are of a much lower resolution than the ones in the SL viewer.

Living in the Modem World

[leliel Mirihi]

Jpeg2k causes just as many problems as it solves tho. It's a very heavy weight codec that takes a lot of cpu cycles to decode. The other problem is the number of textures as well. When avatars are walking around sporting 30+ textures each and a furnished building clocks in at a hundred plus. And people wonder why you need a 1GB of vram just to stand around in a small house with 5 people. All those textures eat up massive amounts of memory bandwidth as the gpu tries to draw them. Mobile devices have very slow graphics memory to cut down on power use.

A lot of sl's performance problems are of our own making, literally, user made content and all.

[Cerise Sorbet]

It will be OK. The pace of the Moore's Law phenomenon is gradually slowing, but chips are still regularly shrinking and have a way to go, while batteries keep getting better. High end portables can already handle this stuff fairly well as Lumiya demonstrates, and today's high end will look clunky next to the future low end before we know it.

Even though early desktop SL had modest requirements (by today's standards) early on, it still needed a pretty nice computer of the time to run well. Now, even the current disposable Wal Mart specials can handle it resonably well, except for the fancy shader stuff that came later. That will happen to the phones and tablets too.

[leliel Mirihi]

I know mobile devices will catch up, probably in about 2 years. I wouldn't really say current devices handle sl well tho. My view might be a little bias tho since the main thing I do in sl is wander around and look at the creative sims people make, limited draw distance and down sampled textures isn't really conductive to that.

[kais2410]

Moi ca marche

[Graham Mills]

The latest version of Lumiya will do a reasonable job of rendering a limited number of avatar meshes (5 is the default) but doesn't support mesh clothes or flexies.

[flaviatrust]

Bom dia