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

[Phoenix]

Thank you. :)

We considered ogre many years ago, but it was long enough ago that  
information about the decision has been purged from my mail archives  
and does not appear on any of our current issue and knowledge  
tracking systems.

Though I forget the specifics, it was almost certainly rejected for  
the same reason as every other graphics engine we have tested --  
memory management of the scene is much more complex than pushing the  
triangles through the card. If ogre has a d3d/ogl abstraction layer  
which gives us a low enough level api to actually specialize where we  
need to work, then maybe. We have spoken with commercial engine  
developers, and none of them can match our framerate without heavy  
modification.



On 2007 Jan 8, at 06:19, Blues Zodiakos wrote:
> 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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