Voxel + marching cubes terrain in Second Life?

[Mircea Lobo]

Since Linden never listens to major features, this will not happen for at least 5 years to come. But I still wanted to ask what people think and hear opinions on this.

Second Life uses a heightmap based terrain system. It's very nice and excellent at what it does... but as with any heightmap you cannot create things like overhang cliffs, digging holes through, and if you lower / raise your terrain too much it stretches visibly.

Other engines got past these limitations by implementing voxel terrains with marching cubes. This allows for fully constructible / destructible terrains in any direction, while avoiding texture stretching. It's basically the same terrain system in MineCraft, but smooth and properly textured instead of using cubes and pixelated textures. Here are some nice videos from a bunch of OGRE implementations I've been poking into:

As you see, this can be done smoothly and easily without any visible performance loss (FPS doesn't drop below 200). The latest Cryengine has the feature natively also. Do you think a similar system would be nice and useful in Second Life someday? Personally I think it would be awesome if region owners could dig tunnels or sculpt cliffs in realtime, without having to mesh the whole thing and import it or do it with primitives.

[161488303349]

i vote for that

[Nalates Urriah]

I'm not sure why you think the Lab doesn't listen. They have been going through cleaning up the JIRA and are in the process of adding a number of things people have been asking for.

As to changing the terain model... I agree, not any time soon. But, the basic SL terain can be flattened and Mesh used in its place. That is not as interactive as most would like, but it is an option. 

Pathfinding is adding Navmesh and will soon be moved from Beta only status to release testing in the release channels. The biggest difference in status is probably the removal of most of the debugging code and the improved performance.

The complexity of terrain and interaction with the physics engine is improving.