At today's Apple event, some folks from Epic Games introduced a free app to preview an upcoming title, Epic Citadel, for iOS devices (Web). It is is what Second Life (SL) should look like. To the left is a screen shot from my iPad and it barely does justice to what you really see. As amazing as Windlight is on my 27" iMac, it is shamed by the dynamic lighting and atmospherics in Citadel running on a mobile processor. Motion is flawless and everything is rezzed the instant it comes into view. I know, I know. Streaming versus local storage. But aren't some or many textures stored locally for SL? I'm no technical whiz, but I think it comes down to mesh versus prims.According to information given at the Second Life Community Convention last year (Web), mesh, the same rendering tech that gives our avatars but is not accessible to users for creation, is coming to our world for everyone. And it looked to be on track as late as June 2010 when noted Resident Dusan Writer blogged about it (Web). But with T Linden gone and now Qarl Linden (the mesh magician behind the project), our world isn't likely to look like Citadel anytime soon.
I love my iPad. The Lab keeps giving me reasons to love it more.
2 comments:
Qarl (while brillant) was only one of several amazing Linden developers working on Mesh. It is still coming and it will still look amazing. It should go into open beta in about two weeks. As a closed beta tester, I've outlined some of the features/details of mesh on blog.
http://changingworldsbuildingdreams.com/the-status-of-mesh-support-in-second-life
Thanks for the previous link and I hope you find this information useful.
Thanks. Insightful post. I appreciate the update. I'll have to dig into Blender tutorials again and see if I can catch up.
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