Crystal Frost Update: Unity’s SL/OpenSim Viewer Playable Build Targeted for Spring 2024, Needs More Patreon Supporters to Speed ​​Up Progress

This post is brought to you by New World Note sponsoring partner Bad Unicorn, creator of the new combat UFO beamer!

It’s been a while since I blogged about Crystal Frost, a crowdfunded project to convert Second Life and OpenSim to Unity for PC and VR. The good news is that a usable version is still a work in progress, aiming for a spring 2024 release.

The less good news is that lead developer Berry Bunny (High value#2038 on Discord) and her team are fixing a few hurdles (more on that below) and she’s had to slow down development to work on other contract projects. But if she can grow the project’s Patreon, development will likely accelerate.

"There is little free time," As Berry said, "And every little bit helps me get more done."

With that in mind, consider contributing to Crystal Frost’s Patreon.

Berry shares some technical details about the latest work the team is currently working on. It’s good to know that OpenSim grid is powering Crystal Frost and a mobile version is still available.

Many optimizations have been made and some bug fixes have been made. I’m hoping a new Patreon will be created tomorrow evening. Most of the changes focus on optimizations needed to work properly in Open Sim, and with any luck, memory usage will be low enough that mobile won’t be an issue.

I also solved some of the puzzles to get the rigged mesh to work (but not the default Ruth avatar).
In theory it should also support Bento rigging, but the problem is that I haven’t figured out the blend shapes, so the shape sliders don’t work out of the box even if I’m correct in how I read the armature weights. Open Simulation Grid has also hired several programmers to work on this full time, but one of them is not familiar with Unity and needs to be familiarized with Unity first.

The latest build has better terrain texturing in 256×256 regions (non-VarRegions in SL and OpenSim).

Prims are no longer displayed as one mesh per face, but as a single mesh with multiple sub-meshes, which actually significantly increases performance and memory usage on servers with many prims. Once your code is perfect for this (currently textures aren’t applied properly to sub-meshes), you can apply that code to your mesh objects to better optimize them.

Additionally, frustum culling should work better in OpenSim to prevent objects from being decoded if they are not within camera range.

This means that Crystal Frost should not attempt to create an object when the server sends an object that is outside the camera range, which is what happens to the OpenSim server, which should greatly improve the stability of OpenSim.

Join our Patreon for more updates!

Before:

• Watch: Video preview (FEB) from Unity-based SL viewer Crystal Frost
• Crystal Frost, a Second Life for Unity project, focuses on PC/VR viewers while Linden Lab is working on a mobile version.
• Crystal Frost Update: Customizable avatars for your SL-On-Unity 3D projects are coming soon!

Thanks again to Bad Unicorn, creator of UFO Beamer, now available on the SL Marketplace. Equip it to fly (you can ride it anywhere), shoot anywhere (no rez required), and have particle and sound effects enabled. Discover 6 color options for your laser beam now..