jon1 said:
In the metaverse, though, there aren't just 30 different vehicle meshes to choose from; everyone wants to make and sell their own mesh, and on a typical road, almost every single mesh will be custom.

Exactly. Which is what that video above is about. That's displaying content which is un-optimized, was created independently by several hundred different people, and has almost no instancing. Frame rate is about 50-60 FPS.

Operating with that kind of content hasn't been addressed much. Game creation tries to avoid it, and to optimize as much as possible during the level-building process. In a big virtual world with user-created content, we don't have that luxury.

If you don't solve this problem, your world has to be dumbed down to cartoon level, like Facebook Horizon, or whatever they're calling it this week. Or limited to small disconnected rooms or areas.

What I'm doing is roughly this:

I'm using Rust→Rend3→WGPU→Vulkan. This stack lets you change the render state in the GPU from multiple threads while rendering. So one thread is just endlessly redisplaying the scene, maintaining a relatively constant frame rate, while other threads asynchronously make changes.

As the camera viewpoint moves, once a second, the desired resolution and loading priority of each textured face is recomputed. The goal is one texel per screen pixel. If there's a resolution or priority change, a request for the new resolution of the texture goes on a to-do queue at the computed priority. There are multiple threads taking requests off the queue in priority order, fetching textures from the cache or network, making resolution changes, and loading them into the GPU. Doing this keeps several CPUs busy, mostly decompressing images coming in from the remote asset servers.

The priority queue has to support dynamically changing the priorities of already-queued requests. Otherwise, when the viewpoint moves, you're stuck working through a queue of stuff that's now less important.

What you see in that video above looks like you're viewing static preloaded content. In fact, the system is working frantically behind the scenes trying to get the right stuff in VRAM before the viewpoint gets close enough to blow the illusion. We must run very hard to seem to stay in the same place.

This is to mip-mapping as paging to disk is to having more memory. If we had 30-40GB of VRAM, instead of 4 to 6, we'd just dump in all the mip-mapped textures.

So, this is a way to work with metaverse-type content at scale, with the detail and frame rate expected in games today. There have been people saying that is impossible. It's not.

MassiveLoop_Metaverse said:
Can you build VR into your viewer even though they are not?

Visually, it could probably be done. But Second Life's synchronization of avatar movement with display is inherently always one round trip trip to the servers behind real time. They just forward the arrow keys to the server, which handles all movement. It would take a redesign of the avatar movement system to make VR work.

Since Facebook's announcement, not much seems to be happening, other than about one new NFT-based virtual world announcement per day of something that doesn't exist yet, and about ten “My First Metaverse Articles” per day. Did I miss anything that actually works, or is likely to?

There are working projects making progress. I'm sure they're just busy in engineering like we are.

But realistically today, any real progress is going to get drown out by the following types of projects (because they're 100% marketing without the burden of engineering). So they can deliver a cool

trailer without having to back it up with anything.

1. Projects that are just trying to sell tokens ("Buy our token now and then we'll build you a metaverse later…promise!")
2. Projects that are just website selling virtual land to feed speculator interest
3. Projects that have no idea what a metaverse is, but it's buzzy so they suddenly are one. “Check out my website, mobile game, YouTube channel…It's now a Metaverse!…it's also an NFT and blockchain!"

Pretty funny, but also sad. It's like people have lost their ability to be skeptical. They just trust a trailer as fact.

MassiveLoop_Metaverse said:
It's like people have lost their ability to be skeptical.

Yes.

My own take is this:

• Second Life / Open Simulator pretty much implement the metaverse feature checklist. They're just too sluggish, hard to use, and not immersive enough.
• All of those problems are fixable. I've made some progress on fixing “sluggish”.
• VRChat has made much progress on the “hard to use” and “not immersive enough” fronts.
• If you got all that stuff working well together, you'd be pretty close to Ready Player One.
• So, technically, we kind of know how to do this.
• But, after you get it all working well, a good virtual world is still a niche product. There's still a “fun” problem.

Yeah. Not all worlds will be fun. But not all Roblox worlds are fun. The platform as a whole is still useful.

Aside from the SL social experience, do you like any of the (specifically multiplayer) games in there? What are your favorites?

MassiveLoop_Metaverse said:
Pretty funny, but also sad. It's like people have lost their ability to be skeptical. They just trust a trailer as fact.

Which is intended and even encouraged by companies such as facebook, i guess.
The plan: By making everybody a content creator we replace expertise with noise and knowledge with confusion. As a result, consumers take ads more serious, because they just blend seamlessly with all the other bullshit content i see on fb newsfeeds. While seeing mostly ‘bullshit’ even increases my personal skepticism, the end effect is the same as with loosing it completely: I'm confused and distracted, no longer sure what's conspiracy theory, fake news or truth, and there is no authority left to trust for answers. From here it's only a small step to become unsure about reality as well, so AR and Metaverse should extend the mechanism nicely, explaining Zuckerbergs interests and vision on the topic.

We probably all have the same dream of an artificial universe created by ourselves to our liking for fun, but our dream is older an still wip.
Contrary to that, any recent hype about Metaverse clearly is about money, built around worthless properties like ads or virtual items. This can't work, at least not for long.
I clearly distinct between those things: We want big online games, immersion, option of user generated content. They make promises about earning real money from content generation, while offering a new world for free just by watching ads. Probably.
Considering games industry is already in some trouble regarding progress and innovation, i'm afraid there is no good influence to expect from all the investors money. :/

MassiveLoop_Metaverse said:
Aside from the SL social experience, do you like any of the (specifically multiplayer) games in there? What are your favorites?

I've done some of the combat sims. Bow and arrow works well. Second Life is too slow for guns.

JoeJ said:
By making everybody a content creator we replace expertise with noise and knowledge with confusion.

On Second Life, everyone can potentially create content, but most people just buy furniture, buildings, and clothes, rather than making them. Just as in real life, most people buy furniture, buildings, and clothes rather than making them.

There's an argument that too much visual quality is bad from a gameplay perspective. Minecraft is very blocky, but anyone can build. Second Life can reach AAA title quality with good content. Ready Player Me deliberately backed off from photorealistic avatars. Roblox, though, is gradually pushing forward towards photorealism, moving from blocks to mesh items. Facebook and, today, Microsoft have both gone with cartoony legless avatars. The VR headgear people still have framerate trouble with photorealistic content. So does mobile, and people with $200 Walmart laptops.

Someone pointed out that this is the era of the $1000 phone and the $200 laptop. This is a problem for Metaverse devs. The target hardware is way below gamer level. The typical Steam user has at least a 5 year old NVidia 1060.

Yes, Roblox has one side of the equation (gameplay). SL has another (general shopping and high quality renders). Neither are particularly good at immersive. That is why we are learning and working to bridge those gaps.

It's pretty difficult to get everything, which is why we focus specifically on immersive right now.

There are actually some good reasons for legless avatars. It's not that VR people (altspace, horizon) don't like legs. For example: the vast majority of people don't have full body tracking and

animated legs feel strange and less immersive unless done very well (You're controlling your upper body, but not your lower. That's a little weird). I'm sure that will improve.