S24 DirectX Status Part 2!

 

Another week, another round of progress (and mild self‑inflicted suffering)

The latest snaps show S24 DX running side‑by‑side with the LL latest, and for once the comparison doesn’t make me want to crawl under the desk. We’ve got avatars, water, shadows, nametags, the manipulator tool (WIP), and a client that is slightly more usable than last week’s experiment.

If you’re eagle‑eyed, you’ll spot the usual suspects: glow still doing my nut in, and my particle beam/line offset doing its best impression of “modern art.” I know exactly why it’s wrong, which somehow makes it more annoying.

Since the start of this DX migration, I’ve carved through 196 specific problems, with the current tally sitting at 17 or 18 stubborn to-do's. Shine has been… fun. If your definition of fun involves calculus, coordinate transforms, and staring into space trying to imagine impossible geometry.

DX Cubemap Transposition: A Three‑Day Fun Parade

The math required to take a DX cubemap and transpose it into something the viewer can actually use is two to three days of pure torture (so far) . The kind where you start questioning your life choices, your sanity, and whether you should have become a gardener instead.

Along the way I’ve wrestled with:

• Degenerate shadows on meshes

• Missing alphas

• Hardware light culling that thinks it’s doing me a favour

Every time I fix one thing, another pops up like graphical whack‑a‑mole.

Pre‑Alpha: The “Does It Explode?” Phase

Despite all this, I’m still on target for a pre‑alpha. You’ll get the joy of trying out the client soon, and honestly the first round of feedback will be extremely scientific:

“Can I log in without the viewer imploding?”

If the answer is “yes,” we celebrate. If the answer is “no,” we pretend it’s a feature.

The End Game: A Second Life Viewer Without OpenGL

I have to keep my eyes on the prize: a version of Second Life divorced from OpenGL. Once that happens, the possibilities open up in ways I’m not even ready to talk about yet. I’ll leave that to your imagination—and a quick Google search.

For now, it’s back to the trenches: shaders, cubemaps, offsets, and the occasional crisis. But progress is progress, and S24 DX is slowly turning into something real.

Much Love, KL