✨ Feature Requests

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.

The ability to assign an object as a volume to either be a mass of water, or remove water, this could work in the same manner as reflection volumes, but would allow builds to be able to be in a body of water without rendering water inside, or using the underwater shader, an inverse would also allow expanded creation of areas with sim matching water in builds that are above the sim water level

Terrain height maps use lossy compression, which causes land spikes around sharp slopes of terrain. The amount of data for the land height must be minuscule compared to all the other data in the scene these days. Make terrain lossless, and allow true WYSIWYG editing of the terrain height. Notes: This would require a server component for physics as well. This would require a step where the current lossy height map is baked down to a lossless height map.

I have noticed that the moon shares the same color value as the sun. This makes day cycles particularly when the sun is near or crossing the horizon near impossible or very difficult. I would like to see the Sun, and Moon both have independent color values. I currently have to keep the moon in the sky after the sun has already set so the moon does not end up with wacky color values which is not exactly realistic. I would love to make a fully realistic day cycle.

Currently, if you try and set a PBR material on an old build, you get an awful blueish hue reflected on the reflective parts (e.g. metal), due to how the sky gets reflected on them, even from inside a building. For now, the only solutions are to: Enclose the building with a reflection probe primitive. Fine, when you can do it, and when the building is less than 64m large in any of its dimensions... Add a reflection probe primitive to the linkset of the object you use PBR materials upon to enclose it: fine, if you can modify it, and if it is not scripted in such a way that would break its scripts when adding a new primitive to it (sadly, a common occurrence). Add a stand-alone reflection probe prim and place it (without linking it) around the object(s) you want to shield from the sky. This will work almost always, but supposes that you move or resize the probe manually when you move the objects, and that the objects themselves are not moving on their own (scripted objects, vehicles)... All of the above is rather user/builder unfriendly . A simple alternative would be to add a property to the root objects for any existing linkset, that would flag the whole object as needing an enclosing reflection probe; the server would then transmit this property to the viewer among existing object properties, and the viewer would compute (it already does anyway) the bounding box of that object and automatically add a matching reflection probe (of the "box" type) for it. That property would then be made available as a check box in the build floater.

Right now clouds are a 2d map that gets manipulated by sky settings. It has been this way for 20 years? The current state of the art is Volumetric - Using this for clouds would enhance skies, and could be used to overhaul the billboard 2d particle system as well.

As it stands, Second Life (secretly) supports global illumination via reflection probes. This is confusing to users - as we only really specify it as part of the reflection probe. In reality, there's often a need to have more light probes for GI than there is for reflection probes. This change means that: Probes can have three modes. Reflection, light, or both Existing probes would be both for reasons of content compatibility Potentially, changing how we store light probe data (using spherical gaussians or spherical harmonics or some such)

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.

Vehicles are typically shiny, highly reflective objects. The go-to method for a very long time in game dev is to attach a reflection probe to the vehicle itself. It has been so successful of a solution that it's only now being replaced by raytraced reflections in ultra modern games. I feel Second Life could benefit from a similar system. How I envision the probe system working for SL is that when a linkset is being acted on by the llVehicle system and the agent is sitting on it, the viewer will place a probe at the geometrical center of the object. This probe will ignore rendering the linkset (including agents) and only have it's influence affect the linkset. There could also be an additional probe parameter as part of this system called Blending. This would control the blending between probes and the Hero Probe: 1.0 = Overrides Manual Probes 0.0 = Blends with Manual Probes -1.0 = Overridden by Manual Probes I envisioned this system having two important controls: a llVehicle parameter (defaulted off as to not change existing vehicle behavior) and a Viewer toggle for the system. I feel this would contribute greatly to the driving, flying, and sailing experience on SL as more PBR content makes its way out there. I've linked an example of a game that uses this hero probe system, BeamNG. It has several novel features regarding reflection probes and mirror simulation, but this video only focuses on the primary hero probe system: https://youtu.be/fUrOGDQ8nnY

At present, lights are clamped to an "imaginary" range of 0 to 1 that have no basis in physical reality. The GLTF spec defines a physically based light falloff and specifies real world radiometric units - which is aligned with most major game engines and 3D modeling applications. This change should apply to all sources of lights - point lights, projectors, and the sun/moon. Sun/moon would be easiest to support first.