Raid tracing in SL

[Coffee Pancake]

On 5/10/2020 at 3:40 PM, TristanEverly said:

and i was just talking about upgrading the engine .. 

This has been done to death so many times.

The viewer has been open source for years, there are many great GAME engines about, some even completely free and open source (like Godot), and yet, in all this time no one has managed to produce a single SL client using any of them. That on it's own should be a pretty big hint.

GAME engines are different beasts, sadly the way they work is fundamentally incompatible with the way SL works (or vice versa).

The only thing SL has in common with a game engine is that both render in 3D.

tl;dr - It's not possible, it's been suggested thousands of times for over a decade, if it was this easy we'd be done already.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

3 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

This has been done to death so many times.

The viewer has been open source for years, there are many great GAME engines about, some even completely free and open source (like Godot), and yet, in all this time no one has managed to produce a single SL client using any of them. That on it's own should be a pretty big hint.

GAME engines are different beasts, sadly the way they work is fundamentally incompatible with the way SL works (or vice versa).

The only thing SL has in common with a game engine is that both render in 3D.

tl;dr - It's not possible, it's been suggested thousands of times for over a decade, if it was this easy we'd be done already.

It's absolutely not impossible, but there's a reason why almost every viewer is a fork of LL's code instead of a complete redo from scratch.

All of the technology SL viewers use is available on proper game engines, even texture-streaming. It's just a buttload of effort without tangible payoff to the people doing it. It's a big time/money sink, one that isn't alarmingly necessary. Still, it's nice to see LL bringing back more graphics devs. I can only hope they'll do what's needed.

All that said, yes, this topic has been ran through a billion times every year.

Edited May 12, 2020 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Coffee Pancake]

The source code is right there, I would be deliriously happy to be proven wrong.

Must log in, rez the world, allow avatar movement, cross a region border, accept a teleport.

[Lina Pussycat]

For second life to gain ray tracing it would need to start switching its graphics api around entirely and it'd need to jump to vulkan or directX 12 to be able to do either of them. OpenGL does not and will never support real time ray tracing as the computing power required to do it requires a closer to metal API approach (lower level  api like DirectX 12 and Vulkan). 

[Lina Pussycat]

On 5/12/2020 at 12:35 AM, CoffeeDujour said:

This has been done to death so many times.

The viewer has been open source for years, there are many great GAME engines about, some even completely free and open source (like Godot), and yet, in all this time no one has managed to produce a single SL client using any of them. That on it's own should be a pretty big hint.

GAME engines are different beasts, sadly the way they work is fundamentally incompatible with the way SL works (or vice versa).

The only thing SL has in common with a game engine is that both render in 3D.

tl;dr - It's not possible, it's been suggested thousands of times for over a decade, if it was this easy we'd be done already.

This actually isn't true in the least that no one has managed to make a single client. While there was not stuff that went with the main grid there was things developed for stuff based off of OpenSim. RealXtend's early days come to mind where they build a client off of Ogre3D. It turned into other stuff eventually, but the early stuff was basically SL built on a diff 3d engine that also allowed for mesh import (this was way before mesh was possible in SL)