Crystal Frost Update: Playable Build of SL / OpenSim Viewer on Unity Targets Spring 2024, Needs More Patreon Backers to Speed Progress

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

It's been awhile since I've blogged about Crystal Frost , the crowdfunded project to convert Second Life and OpenSim to Unity for PC and VR. The good news is it's still chugging along, with a usable version targeted for a Spring 2024 launch.

The less good news is lead developer Berry Bunny (Kallisti#2038 on Discord) and her team are fixing some roadblocks (more on that below) and she's had to slow down development to work on other contract projects. If she can grow the project's Patreon however, development will accelerate.

"I have very little free time," as Berry puts it, "and every little bit helps me work on it more."

That in mind, consider contributing to Crystal Frost's Patreon.

As for the latest tasks the team is working on now, here's the tech-heavy details from Berry. Good to know an OpenSim grid is helping with Crystal Frost, and a mobile version is still a possibility:

There's been a lot of optimization being done, and some bug fixing. I'm hoping to have a new patreon build tomorrow evening. Most of the changes are focusing on the optimizations needed for having it work properly on Open Sim, and with any luck the memory use will be down low enough that Mobile won't be out of the question.

We've also cracked some of the puzzle for getting rigged meshes working (not the default Ruth avatar though).
In theory it should support Bento rigging as well, only issue is we don't have blend shapes figured out so even if we're right about how to read in the bone weights, appearance sliders won't be working right away. Also an open sim grid has hired some programmers to work on this full time, but one of them isn't familiar with Unity and has to familiarize himself with Unity first

Latest build though has better terrain texturing on 256×256 regions (SL and regions that aren't VarRegions in OpenSim).

Prims are no longer being represented as one mesh per face, but rather as a single mesh with multiple submeshes, which should actually greatly increase both performance and memory use in prim-heavy servers. Once we have the code perfected for that (currently textures are not being properly applies to the submeshes), we'll adapt that code for mesh objects so that they'll also be able to be better optimized.

Also we should have frustrum culling working better for OpenSim to prevent objects from being decoded if they're not within the camera's range.

That means that when the server sends objects that are outside of the range of the camera, which happens on OpenSim servers, Crystal Frost shouldn't be trying to create any objects, so it should be a huge stability boost on OpenSim.

Join the Patreon for more updates!

Previously:

Thanks again to Bad Unicorn, creator of the UFO Beamer available now in the SL Marketplace. Wear to fly (so you can ride anywhere), shoot anywhere (no rezz required), particles & sound effects enabled. With 6 color options for your laser beams, check it out today.