✨ Feature Requests

As we hide SL water using the Exclusion layer, it would be a great idea if particles could be hidden too using this layer. Perhaps particles would need a flag to allow them to be hidden or not. This couild be used in boats, where we want to hide water and water spray from entering the hull.

I just tried the HDRI Preview feature. I did love the effect it had on the environment light, but using the HDRI I tried with (the one initially recommended by you at LL for PBR work) did cause a field to be drawn on the sky dome, which looks really funny and out of place... screenshot attached with a view from an unenclosed skybox. In my case, a simple sky-and-maybe-clouds texture there would probably be better. I'd love to see this feature evolve to where one is able to upload an EXR or HDR file and apply it to the environment. I'd also love to see the feature evolve such that... The light from the HDRI is kept but the rendering of the image on the dome can be disabled. This effect is possible to set in both Blender and Substance Painter for example, also an option to blur it. In conjunction with the above feature, combining the use of an HDRI and the animated cloud texture we already have today, and the clouds should of course cast shadows! This would be great especially when you have very small or no clouds in the HDRI texture when you choose to keep it rendered. I'd love to be able to have one HDRI above, and another one under sea surface. Combining this with the previous mentioned features could allow for really cool effects under water! The ability to set one HDRI for environment light, and a separate HDRI for "texturing" the dome. Setting this texture to a built-in Transparent texture (or a new one like that for HDRI) could be the mechanism to cause the first-mentioned feature of hiding the image of the HDRI on the dome, only keeping its light. Without the above few features, I wonder if this feature would end up only really being good when you're taking photos. Hope this makes some sort of sense... Thank you! =)

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.

Creating an environment means you have an idea how of the sky, lighting and colors of the scene look. By adding a tonemapper to the mix, which is hidden as an advanced graphics setting and defaulting to a different one than we have been using to build our PBR content in the past year feels counterproductive to the effort put into said content. The tonemapper could instead function as a parameter of the EEP sky. Default all legacy settings that have not been resaved under PBR to Khronos, default ones that HAVE been saved under PBR to ACES-linear mix, and make them all editable to whichever mapper+mix level as desired after the fact. Additionally, add a feature to override the EEP tone mapper to use a fixed one instead of environment-based, giving the functionality that exists right now in viewer 7.1.11 - one tone mapper to rule them all. Discussion on the subject and source for the idea: https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/517003-khronos-tone-mapper/

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.

Add a toggle to allow PBR emissive to be full bright or non-full bright . This would be good for small applications of glow that one wouldn't want to also full bright, but also for using the emissive layer as a non-glowing overlay layer, reducing the need for onion layers for various applications. In addition, add said full bright toggle to the PRIM_GLTF_EMISSIVE function in llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast and llGetLinkPrimitiveParams. Alternatively: Allow the normal SL full bright to affect PBR emissive, that way we already have all the options for toggling it normally.

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.

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.

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)