✨ Feature Requests

A parcel setting that would derender all objects and avatars outside of the parcel boundary. I believe this setting would be welcomed by many particularly on mainland parcels. It would be entirely optional to use but would make mainland parcels a more viable option for every resident. I also believe a side effect of a setting like this would be to "clean up" mainland in general, reduce the use of ugly privacy screens, inappropriate skyboxes as ground level etc as the need for them would be lessened. This setting would also improve performance within parcel boundaries due to lower render load and not require residents to manually adjust draw distance to improve performance. This setting would be entirely optional and disabled by default.

Please introduce a new set of HUD attachment points with perspective rendering capabilities, allowing for HUD objects to have depth and Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) lighting effects on HUD elements. Current Situation: At present, Second Life offers a series of attachment points for the HUD (e.g., bottom, bottom left, center, center2, etc.). These HUD elements are rendered as though they are attached to the view camera using an orthographic perspective. This limits the ability to incorporate depth and advanced lighting effects into HUD designs. Eg, if I want to draw shiny spinning gold coins on a game interface, they look flat and solid yellow. Proposed Enhancement: Add a new set of HUD attachment points that prepend "Perspective" to their names (e.g., Perspective Bottom, Perspective Bottom Left, Perspective Center, Perspective Center2, etc.). These attachment points will render HUD elements in a perspective frame, enabling designers to leverage depth and PBR lighting effects. Positives: Allows for more immersive and visually appealing HUD designs by incorporating depth and realistic lighting. Provides designers with the option to choose between orthographic and perspective rendering based on their specific needs and creative vision. Makes HUD elements in 3D Secondlife look like 3D things!

Enable a Wind Actor for Mesh, so vegetation and soft body rezzables can have realistic weather movement. Right now the current solution most people use is texture animation which leads to a very outdated look to SL. Alternatively, the current wind and flexy paths could be optimized for lower lag, so they could be used with mesh.

I would like to see a region wide probe feature that does not require the use of multiple probes or mega prims. I am currently using a mega-prim to achieve a sim-wide sphere probe that improves sim lighting, gives environmental shine a dynamic reflection map of the sim surround and sky, and still allows the use of other smaller probes within the region. There are a few issues with the method I am using: * Reflective surfaces inside of smaller probes will still show reflections from the large probe in addition to the small probe (Maybe rejecting the probe reflection from the larger probe could be a fix) * Probes do not mix well when intersecting or within each other. There's also occasional flashing as the probes fight for priority(Maybe?). There needs to be better probe blending, and some form of hierarchy based on size or manually configured * I noticed when using near clip which is a necessity for a sim-wide probe set at 128 that the projection does not include any terrain which gives the projection a bright floor. (Check snapshot, there needs to be some sort of floor added to projections that is the same texture as the sim terrain, or we need a proper region-wide probe)

The mainland is cluttered with skyboxes, and private region owners may be miffed to discover that putting something at 1000 m is no guarantee that it won't be visible from the ground by someone with a very high draw distance. A possible solution: culling surfaces. Whenever the viewer is asked to render a pixel with TEXTURE_SKY assigned to it, it should simply render the sky buffer instead of showing anything behind that surface. (This would also be handy for making magic portal effects.) For bonus points, implement this as a prim flag (like reflection probes) that actually causes anything inside it to be forcibly culled from the outside, unless the camera is inside a linked culling prim. Implementing this detection test doesn't need to be very sophisticated; nearly all use cases are covered by scaling, translating, and rotating cubes. A creator-centric solution to these two (very similar, possibly should be merged) requests for blocking the display of skyboxes: - https://feedback.secondlife.com/feature-requests/p/have-a-sl-viewer-option-to-derez-contiguous-parcels-above-1000m-in-spite-of-havi - https://feedback.secondlife.com/feature-requests/p/disable-render-other-parcels-above-a-certain-height

It would be nice to have a toggle option when building that disables an objects ability to cast shadows, particularly in sunlight. Use case: I spend most of my time in a skybox. The skybox is large enough that I have a house and garden area inside it and for privacy reasons it is surrounded by walls that are opaque on the outside. Because the walls are opaque on the outside they cast shadows on everything inside the skybox. Lighting is therefore slightly overcast even if the environment is otherwise set to be bright and sunny. It would be nice to set the surround to not cast shadows so that I can enjoy proper day / night cycles in my skybox without having to derender or otherwise do away with the surround. From a purely VFX standpoint I'm sure there are other reasons you might want an object that's visible but does not cast shadows - giant holographic statues, ghost ships, etc.

Loading into a large event, or a well-decorated region can be a hassle, especially for those on low-end computers. It is not uncommon for vendors to use high resolution textures that seem to load after everything around you has loaded first. This often forces users to idle for long periods of times in shopping event regions and stores, just waiting to see the things they might want to buy. In the early days of an event's opening, this often means jam-packed regions for multiple days straight. This request will help ease this bottleneck, and allow those on lower-end machines to shop with ease. I am suggesting an optional setting in the edit window that pushes an object's textures to the front of the rendering queue. This option would only be enabled for objects a user owns, that are modifiable, and that are set to sale, or have their "click to" setting set to "Buy" or "Pay". By default, with this setting enabled, a user would see these priority objects' textures load in first, before anything else, with all other objects displaying the unloaded grey texture until the priority objects are finished. In addition, there should be an option in preferences to ONLY load textures on priority objects, leaving everything as untextured mesh shapes, and one to IGNORE priority and render objects normally. In any case, avatars, terrain, and environments would be unaffected by this setting, since they have their own optional rendering settings already. It's kind of a "show friends only" but for vendors!

There are items in Second Life that are spawning quite massive temporary prims (looking at you Plant Pets) that may be near me, I don't own, but I'd rather not waste render cycles on them. As of now there is literally no way to stop these items from appearing and chewing up cycles when nearby, would it be possible to make a way that they can't be seen at all?

Now the mesh in sl has no physics at all, you wear stiff clothes, with stiff hair, as you walk, the fabric stretches against your body into strange shapes, when you sit down, your long hair will bend 90 degrees to fit your legs. everything is very stiff. When i see those long flowing hair and those fluttering gorgeous skirts, i miss the good old days. Even though they look messy sometimes, but that's intuitive. But the prims is behind the times, everything is in mesh now. Why not give mesh physics too! Mesh greatly improves the quality of props in sl, but it loses the most intuitive physics, they just look good, but once they move, they will reveal their flaws. This is just like how people used to paint gloss on textures, only viewable from the front, otherwise it will be a mess. Now we have the advanced lighting, PBR, make objects looks more and more real, there's one step left, that is mesh physics! Imagine a cute girl with long flowing golden hair, wearing a flowing dress, dancing gracefully, her hair and clothes fluttering with dance, how beautiful! You must watched MMD dances! fluttering, inertia, collision, make MMD dances lifelike! SL need mesh physics, we can dance in sl like MMD! Many similar games already have these physics effects, but sl has not yet, please! If we have mesh physics, how to deal with rigged object is a problem. Could we make old items physics-enabled with edit? Or only the authors can handle it to release a update? What tools could authors use? There's really many problems.

SL has for a very long time supported dynamic shadows for up to two projector lights. This requests asks for: A viewer-controlled count of shadow casting lights Shadows on point lights Note that this has technical implications in the viewer, namely how shadow filtering works. The shadow filtering in the viewer is handled as a post process that can filter up to four shadows in the viewer - ambient occlusion, sun/moon, and up to two projectors. This change requires changing how shadow filtering and sampling works, which in turn changes how shadows will look.