News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The failure of Second Life. Parent comment

Re:The failure of Second Life by vilya on Monday May 23, 2011 @08:30AM (#2575719)
> Of course Second life cannot do that because people create and break down buildings all the time, so they cannot have artists render the town from far away all the time.

Actually they can. It's entirely to generate levels of detail automatically and get good results. The open source program MeshLab, for example, (http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/) includes code to do this.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The failure of Second Life by jmervin on Monday May 23, 2011 @01:41PM (#2576776)
Ah, but that would require support for mesh-built objects, no? Second Life mesh support is promised RSN. OpenSim has some mesh support, but is I think, somewhat hobbled by SL compatibility concerns.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The failure of Second Life by vilya on Tuesday May 24, 2011 @04:26PM (#2581492)
I've never tried Second Life, but I'd be very surprised if they're not representing shapes internally as some kind of 3D mesh: it's an important technique for getting decent performance on modern graphics cards. If they are doing that, then that's sufficient for them to be able to do automatic LOD calculations too.
[ Parent | on HN ]