Crystal Frost Viewer

[Gusher Castaignede]

Crystal Frost, the crowdfunded project to convert Second Life and OpenSim to Unity for PC and VR. The good news is it's still chugging along, with a usable version targeted for a Spring 2024 launch. What makes this viewer so special? It brings the most needed modern enhancements to catch up with today's modern graphics, better lighting and user experience! Please consider supporting this project at patreon..
https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2023/11/cryst ... pdate.html

This viewer will help bring in more potential members to Kitely and other grids..

[Gusher Castaignede]

....what's cool is that it's Unity based, that means it will be capapable to modify it for full cross-platform Interoperability between Sansar and other Unity based social vr platforms such as vrchat, sansar, Somnium Space and others...

[Gusher Castaignede]

The developer for Crystal Frost viewer is one talented gal and said majority of
support is coming from opensimulator grid owners... if your interested joining
her Discord channel it's free, just join her patreon which is also free and get access
to her Discord channel.... join for free at the bottom of the page..https://www.patreon.com/CrystalFrostViewer/membership
Keep in mind those who are paying to support the project have access to early builds of the viewer
to help her test and refine it through the feedback and suggestions she's getting..

[Tess Juel]

The developer for Crystal Frost viewer is one talented gal and said majority of
support is coming from opensimulator grid owners...

So this is a brand new project and not a continuation of Melanie Thielke's attempt to make a Unity based viewer?

Does she know about the OS dev team meetings on Tuesdays? I don't think I've seen her there.

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In any case it looks like a great initiative but I can see one problem right away. Opensim inherited a very dark color palette with limited dynamic range from Second Life. That's a flaw of course but content creators over the years have adapted to it and adjusted to make the most of the situation. The result is that textures made for SL/OS tend to be too bright for Unity so we get that "washed out" look you can see in the picture in the original post. I noticed the same when I visited Sinespace, made in Unity by content creators with lots of experience from opensim and SL but not much from Unity. (Not sure if it still is that way, I haven't been there for ages.)

It's a bit of a dilemma because ideally we do want the better dynamic range like Unity's of course but we also want backwards compatibility and it'll make so much of the existing content look bad. I don't know what is the best thing to do here but it's definitely something we need to be aware of.

[Gusher Castaignede]

....was looking at latest release, impressive... the lighting is super, much clear to see...

[Luna Lunaria]

Berry Bunny is the primary developer for Crystal Frost and she's been working with the NGC group most of this year now. She has a region on Wolf territories for testing since that grid is the most compatible with Second Life at this point. Here's an example of how water behaves with this viewer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXexg5TLtME That's world water placed on a prim by the way.

[Kimm Starr]

Well isn't that purdy!!!