Region Imposters

[Naluri Murai]

Since I don't wanna discuss it there, there's a thread on the SL Forums that was started by Animats.

https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/532202-more-region-impostors-now-all-of-heterocera

Essentially, this is something that was discussed in the SL Canny recently and was made tracked - a proof of concept made by them to implement 'impostor regions' that uses the old Bonniebots heightmaps and public LL 'satellite imagery' of Second Life to see mainland at very long ranges without taxing the system to hell and back trying to not just download but render everything on an entire continent.

Whilst as a concept it looks nice, I do think some things need to be done before it can be acceptable for use.

• The impostors look.. very poor, in terms of shading. They look cartoonish compared to actual region visuals. Maybe some color correction can be done?
• Whilst Animats did admit it in the post I'm gonna add here, that we need high resolution, low-altitude imagery.
• It'd also be nice if we could do some virtual photogrammetry as well, to grab a low res mesh of the world as it stands on a monthly basis or so, much like Microsoft Flight Sim has their photogrammetry to grab sort of close replicas of buildings and the environment.
• I'd suggest maybe a user-definable fog? That or a curvature of the earth simulation? You can't see perfectly far ahead forever in RL, and seeing so far in SL is likely to be a bit of sensory overload.

What do you guys think?

 

[Free]

Region impostors

Most big-world games let you see for miles. Users today expect Second Life to let you do that.

They (users today) do?

Has anyone done the work to come up with real numbers about that, or is this one of those "I feel it's true" beliefs?

 

[Naluri Murai]

Region impostors

They (users today) do?

Has anyone done the work to come up with real numbers about that, or is this one of those "I feel it's true" beliefs?

I'd say it's I feel it true vibes. Regardless, the general desire for improved graphics and a more modern feeling for SL to bring in new users is *definitely* an issue with convincing new users to try SL.

There's been and likely still is lots of projects within the TPV and mainline viewer dev areas both at the lab and greater community that are in this vein - Avatar Constraints, shaders, extensions to PBR (Transmission, IOR, Volume, et cetera.), all of these have been worked on over the years in an attempt to bring SL more into line with modern metaverse platforms like VRChat and Resonite. Only reason we've not been able to get it, is because quite frankly, certain traditionalist dipshits at the Lab who left (Oz) and high ranking shitasses of the red-headed variety who have been recently been shown the door were either adamant about retaining the old ways or wasting the money we pay in Premium, Tier, L$ and Marketplace Fees and the sort on dead end projects meant to milk paychecks from the Lab.

We're working our way in that direction again, but we've definitely lost about 3-4 years of progress in that direction thanks to people like them.

 

[Spirits Rising]

Region impostors

They (users today) do?

Has anyone done the work to come up with real numbers about that, or is this one of those "I feel it's true" beliefs?

Like many that are under the impression that Second Life should function like anything else they want to toss at the wall, it is the latter.