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0 pointsAnimats4y ago0 comments

Unity and dynamic asset loading are not happy bed fellows.

Not Unreal Engine 4, either. UE5 has "asset streaming" and "open worlds", but mostly static and loaded from a local SSD on a Playstation 5. That's working nicely.

Asset management from the network is the real difference with seamless, modifiable virtual world systems. Otherwise, it's a minute of "...LOADING..." when you move to the next area. You need clients, servers, file formats, and protocols designed for it. It's a moderately hard engineering problem, and, as yet, there are no good off the shelf solutions.

There's a "check out, check in" approach. Decentraland uses that. You check out your parcel into a local Unity environment, edit, and check in the whole parcel to make it visible to others.

The Spatial OS people, Improbable, did some of this, but their solution cost so much to operate server side that all four of the games that used it went broke. So Improbable is trying to pivot to military simulation.

Probably by UE6 this will all be standard. It's one of those things that has to be done to move the metaverse from hype to usefulness.

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bullen4y ago

But why does it have to load dynamically, when you can just package releases instead?

sbierwagen4y ago

For Second Life at least, it's hard to package stuff. World geometry, player models, lighting and props can all be edited in realtime. You can't use most of the tricks that video game devs are used to: no simple way to prebake lighting or reflections, no occlusion culling or binary space partition. The asset base is enormous: hundreds or thousands of terabytes. You can bet that every player character will have a completely unique set of textures and models, very little is shared between characters. This is why long time SL users tend to stick to one location, because actually exploring is painful-- move 100 meters, then stand still for a few minutes as your framerate plummets and everything slowly loads in. Many clubs or hangout spaces are on islands or boxes in the sky high enough that nothing else loads in. This reduces the problem just to rendering avatars, which is hard enough by itself.

It's also very hard to depreciate old systems. The game is 18 years old, but there were real money transactions from day one. If a user bought something ten years ago, they expect to still be able to use it!

You can imagine a clean-sheet design that does away with all this. Make the world static, player avatars pre-baked. Most SL competitors do this. (Facebook Spaces, Playstation Home etc) This gives you better FPS and a much more consistent aesthetic, since all the assets are made in-house. But now what? The classic Metaverse problem, there's just not that much to do. Cutting features from SL makes this worse, not better.

AnimatsOP4y ago

Which is why I'm working on a multi-threaded Second Life / Open Simulator client in Rust. The frame rate problem can be overcome. Another example of mine:

https://vimeo.com/640175119

Runs 55-60FPS in a crowded area.

Over-complicated avatar clothing is a separate problem. This is a huge deal in Second Life, because it's the greatest dress-up virtual world ever built. Users expect a lot. The tattoo layer has to show through mesh stockings, for example. I have some ideas on speeding that up but haven't implemented anything. What's needed is an optimization step that takes place when an avatar changes clothes. All the layers of meshes need to be crunched down to a simplified game-type combined mesh. In a game, that would be done during asset building. In a world where you can change clothes, mixing and matching items, it has to be done somewhere near run time. But not on every frame, just at clothing changes. This is already done for textures; all the texture clothing layers of an avatar are baked down to one. Roblox does something like this in their experimental mesh avatar system.

There's a mindset that this is impossible, shared by the low end of metaverse developers. It's not shared by Roblox or Epic or IMVU, who are busy solving the problem. This is a moderately hard problem, but it's not impossible.

Linden Lab staff had convinced themselves that it was impossible to speed up the viewer. After some people in Linden Lab management saw what I'd done, somehow there suddenly was much more effort going into improving the viewer FPS in their C++ client.

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AnimatsOP4y ago

Because, in a real metaverse, everybody can make changes to their own stuff. That's the difference between a metaverse and an MMO.

moron4hire4y ago

I'm actually really curious to see how streaming video might work for things like light maps. You could have a beast of a machine, or a cluster, performing real-time raytracing on light and environment maps that then get streamed to the user. Sort of a hybrid approach between on-device rendering and remote gaming systems like Stadia where all the rendering takes place remotely. I think Ben Nolan was working on something like this for CryptoVoxels, but I stopped following him when he went full NFT crazy.

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0 pointsAnimats4y ago0 comments

Unity and dynamic asset loading are not happy bed fellows.

Not Unreal Engine 4, either. UE5 has "asset streaming" and "open worlds", but mostly static and loaded from a local SSD on a Playstation 5. That's working nicely.

There's a "check out, check in" approach. Decentraland uses that. You check out your parcel into a local Unity environment, edit, and check in the whole parcel to make it visible to others.

Probably by UE6 this will all be standard. It's one of those things that has to be done to move the metaverse from hype to usefulness.

0 comments

bullen4y ago

But why does it have to load dynamically, when you can just package releases instead?

sbierwagen4y ago

AnimatsOP4y ago

Which is why I'm working on a multi-threaded Second Life / Open Simulator client in Rust. The frame rate problem can be overcome. Another example of mine:

https://vimeo.com/640175119

Runs 55-60FPS in a crowded area.

1 more reply

AnimatsOP4y ago

Because, in a real metaverse, everybody can make changes to their own stuff. That's the difference between a metaverse and an MMO.

moron4hire4y ago

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse