[sldev] Hello everyone! - and a question on Ogre3D

Blues Zodiakos blueszodiakos at gmail.com
Mon Jan 8 06:19:52 PST 2007


First of all, I'd really like to say that I appreciate open-sourcing the
client.  This move took me completely by surprise.  I was starting to give
up hope for SL, and this changed my mind.  Reading the open source page on
SecondLife.com, it was quite obvious that this wasn't a spur-of-the-moment
decision, and it looks like LL thought it over, understands the risks and
rewards, and has a relatively clear view of what they are doing.  It's a
pity that some of the more negative people that comment on the blog don't
read it and become educated, but I digress.

One of the things that first came to mind when I thought about what features
would be most important to me to add to the viewer was GUTTING THE CURRENT
3D ENGINE AND REPLACING IT WITH OGRE3D (www.ogre3d.org).

These are the reasons that I suggest this, in no particular order (note that
I have yet to actually view the source code for the client, and thus don't
have any clue of the positive/negative impact on framerates or such this
would have.  I'm basing this entirely on assumption.)

* Ogre3D is cross platform.  I assume the client 3D code is already cross
platform, but there is another reason why I'd like to switch to it:

* Ogre3D is api-agnostic.  It has rendering paths for both Direct3D and
OpenGL.  This is a big one for me, because Windows Vista, like it or not,
will be on A LOT of people's computers in the future because most new
computers will come with it (and is on mine as we speak).  I do realize that
Nvidia already has an Ogl compliant ICD driver, but ATI has yet to release
one and is entirely silent on the issue.  Changing to Ogre3D alone would
solve this issue by using Direct3D on Vista computers, without requiring a
developer to change the underlying code (besides rewriting the 3D sections,
initially).

* Ogre3D is pretty optimized, and has great performance.  Again, I don't
really know how optimized the 3D code is in the client, but why rewrite the
book?  Ogre3D has been around for a long time, is really stable, has all the
features one would expect from a modern 3D engine, and has benefited from
years of optimizing for various platforms.

* Swapping out the code now would mean less maintenance in the future to
provide fixes for various 3D cards, as the Ogre3D team usually already does
it, and duplicating that effort in a custom 3D engine would be inefficient.

What does everyone else think?  Has work on this already been thought of, or
even started?
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