Second Life Mobile 2023 - First Look

Unity build wow,  ya'll pulled out the stops.

I am curious to know if some of the basic functions of SL will be available in this viewer. Like: sitting on an animated item and using it's menu, camera movements of the kind that are usually made in normal viewers with ctrl , alt , shift and mouse, without using those arrows on screen, zooming in and out with ctrl+ 8 or 9 or 0 (which is similar to an optical zoom instead of a digital zoom), Phototools, Cameratools, WIndlights, the menu on top of the viewer, info about permissions on the land you visit, "about land" info, left click, right click with menu, etc.

well done Lab Rats on the mobile project. you earned your weight in Gold. (fingers crossed)

omg wow love it

It's really that mobile hardware is at last good enough for SL. High-end phones now have more CPU and memory than low-end desktops. You can get 8 CPUs and 8-12 GB of RAM in an Android phone. Phones now have GPUs, too. That's at last enough to run SL well.

The user interface for the small screen will be tough, but it needed attention anyway.

Will it be open source eventually?

Congratulations with a beautiful graphics and fully-rendered avatars! Great work!

Finally, SpeedLight viewer is not so lonely on mobile platforms

Congrats!

Excelente!

Wow 👍

20 hours ago, Mony Lindman said:

Tengo curiosidad por saber si algunas de las funciones básicas de SL estarán disponibles en este visor. Como: sentarse en un elemento animado y usar su menú, movimientos de cámara del tipo que normalmente se hacen en espectadores normales con ctrl, alt, shift y mouse, sin usar esas flechas en la pantalla, acercar y alejar con ctrl+ 8 o 9 o 0 (que es similar a un zoom óptico en lugar de un zoom digital), Phototools, Cameratools, WIndlights, el menú en la parte superior del visor, información sobre los permisos en el terreno que visita, información "sobre el terreno", clic izquierdo, clic derecho con menú, etc

20 hours ago, Mony Lindman said:

Tengo curiosidad por saber si algunas de las funciones básicas de SL estarán disponibles en este visor. Como: sentarse en un elemento animado y usar su menú, movimientos de cámara del tipo que normalmente se hacen en espectadores normales con ctrl, alt, shift y mouse, sin usar esas flechas en la pantalla, acercar y alejar con ctrl+ 8 o 9 o 0 (que es similar a un zoom óptico en lugar de un zoom digital), Phototools, Cameratools, WIndlights, el menú en la parte superior del visor, información sobre los permisos en el terreno que visita, información "sobre el terreno", clic izquierdo, clic derecho con menú, etc

Tambien quiero saber 😮

On 3/10/2023 at 12:36 PM, Kadah Coba said:

Will it be open source eventually?

If it uses any code from the existing viewers, it has to be. They are LGPL licensed.

11 minutes ago, animats said:

If it uses any code from the existing viewers, it has to be. They are LGPL licensed.

Considering it's Linden Lab, I think they'll make it open source. But LGPL doesn't mean you *must* release any proprietary code.

6 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Considering it's Linden Lab, I think they'll make it open source. But LGPL doesn't mean you *must* release any proprietary code.

If the new code is integrated into the old code, yes, they do have to release any new proprietary code. The existing viewers are LGPL licensed. This is unusual for an executable program; LGPL is usually for libraries that you link into a larger program. If LL creates a viewer based on pieces of the existing viewers, they're stuck with licensing it under LGPL and making the code available.

Here's library code of mine licensed under LGPL 2.1. That's a little library for reading and writing LLSD (Linden Lab Serial Data). It supports the XML and binary representations of LLSD, but not the "notation" format, which isn't used much. Anyone can use that library freely. But if someone were to add support for "notation" format (which puppetry is using), they'd have to release the code for that. Preferably as a Github "pull request" to merge it into the main branch, which is how this is normally done today.

This is all pretty much settled and noncontroversial today. The open source enforcement lawsuits were years ago now.

This is fantastic. And I hate to get too far ahead of myself but great job going with a standard game engine. Unity can also work on Windows, Linux, WebGL, PS4/5, Xbox one and X|S, Oculus, Android TV, tvOS, Switch, etc. This could be huge for reaching new markets and it could easily be the biggest thing to happen SL since mesh.

If SL can run on iOS, does this mean the Lindens might, soonish, be able to deliver a native Apple Silicon viewer for Macs?

On 3/10/2023 at 3:26 PM, animats said:

It's really that mobile hardware is at last good enough for SL. High-end phones now have more CPU and memory than low-end desktops. You can get 8 CPUs and 8-12 GB of RAM in an Android phone. Phones now have GPUs, too. That's at last enough to run SL well.

The user interface for the small screen will be tough, but it needed attention anyway.

I do hope though that the minimum requirement will not be 8-12 GB Ram as it is difficult to find a tablet with that much for a reasonable price. The 4 GB Huawei I have runs pretty good with the Lumiya I have on it so hoping it would be around that as a minimum requirement. I don't mind upgrading when the time comes but just feel it would leave a lot out who might not be able to do so.

14 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I do hope though that the minimum requirement will not be 8-12 GB Ram as it is difficult to find a tablet with that much for a reasonable price. The 4 GB Huawei I have runs pretty good with the Lumiya I have on it so hoping it would be around that as a minimum requirement. I don't mind upgrading when the time comes but just feel it would leave a lot out who might not be able to do so.

If it doesn't work out, you'll always have Lumiya.

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

If it doesn't work out, you'll always have Lumiya.

I already answered you on that in another thread.

1 minute ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I already answered you on that in another thread.

I am offering you encouragement. 

Most people don't have Lumiya to "fall back on" if the new Second Life mobile viewer does not work out for them. You do!

As someone who has known the founders of Unity since there were only three of them in a Copenhagen basement, this is pretty darn cool.

1 minute ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

As someone who has known the founders of Unity since there were only three of them in a Copenhagen basement, this is pretty darn cool.

I hope they get a Licensing Fee or residual payments, or something!

It will be really interesting to see the impact that this mobile viewer will have as far as attracting new folks to SL. I think there's going to be a lot of people just discovering our favorite virtual world...20 years after it began!

New user experience/onboarding will become even more important if that's the case. Some of that will need to be tailored to the first-time user arriving on a mobile platform. Maybe they will be familiar with something like The Sims or Fortnight, and will need to adjust to the free-form nature of SL.

Since it's likely the early releases of mobile will have a reduced feature set, it will also be important to show mobile users how they can do what they can't do on mobile -- on their personal computer -- whether it's editing a shape, or adding textures to a mesh,, or whatever.

As far as hardware, I can't imagine that it's going to be so high-end that you'd have to have the best and the latest. I imagine stock Apple iPhones/iPads released in the last few years will run it (likely recent Samsungs and Google Pixels, etc.). You might need some good storage capability. But if you have a very low end Android phone that is from a lesser-known brand, don't get your hopes up.

And yeah, it would be nice if this all lead to a native Apple (M chip) viewer. But the performance of the current viewer on the M series Macs is so much of an improvement over the Intel Macs, so I'm not complaining.

I also think the possibilities of running SL with a controller on AppleTV, Amazon Fire, and game consoles would be really, really cool!