S24 DX Pre Alpha 0.4

 

Warehouse 21 texture torture test!

Welcome to 0.4 This test release marks another milestone, as the DirectX version now has all the same rendering features as the old GL client. :)

The biggest highlight — apart from fantastic‑looking SSR and mirrors — is the inclusion of a new texture compression system. Gone is the GL era, replaced with an async, compute‑shader‑based BC7 compressor. This essentially means you can render Second Life while saving around 60% of your VRAM with little, if any, loss of detail.

The system has been tested in some really heavy situations. The example above was Warehouse 21 — 92 avatars on an 8 GB VRAM GPU — and this resulted in near‑zero texture thrash.

Obviously, if you want all of that, it does come at a cost. Max detail, shadows, 92 avatars, unlimited animation, and unlimited complexity can push system RAM usage to nearly 32 GB, with around 30–40 FPS. But hey, it’s an extreme test!

Peaking on Peak :)

Lookin Good KL :)

So what else for this round?

Space Navigator and controller support has been rewired, edit beams and HUD issues have been fixed, inventory repairs are in, SSAO now uses temporal reprojection, shader caching with async compilation has been added, new tone maps (ACES Fast and AgX), enhanced jelly dolls, and many performance tweaks and patches.

At the current rate, we might even make it out of pre‑alpha by mid‑October. It also pleases me to say that the first sections of GL drawpools and legacy code have started to be removed.

Anyway, I love the feedback and the general positive messages — I appreciate your kind words and support.

Hope you enjoy testing 0.4 this week!

Much Love,

KL