Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Here's a pretty major new update to Crystal Frost, the Patreon-funded project to port Second Life to Unity 3D: Not only has lead developer Berry Bunny (Kallisti#2038 in Discord) uploaded the default SL avatar to Unity, this month she's going to make that avatar freely available for other Unity projects.

"I'll be releasing it as a separate thing, entirely open source, for people to use Second Life Linden Lab avatars in Unity projects, under LGPL same as the avatar files themselves," she explains.

"I figure it'll make a great resource for small time indie devs. I mean, the mesh isn't the best. We all know that. It's why almost everybody covers it up with something more modern like a Maitreya or a Jake or something else. But it's very mobile friendly and extremely flexible.

"Also it would be hilarious if someone used the package to replicate the Ruth avatar that's in the SL library in the inventory and raided VR Chat with it." ("Ruth", of course, is the SL community's nickname for the ancient female avatar model that usually resides deep beneath many layers of mesh enhancements, like in that giant mutant fly hidden beneath a layer of Jeff Goldblum.)

"But anyway with the flexibility of the asset, small, independent developers could easily churn up unique characters for their Unity games." 

I suspect this could be a big boon for indie devs in need of a basic avatar model. It could even become a way for SLers to "export" (kinda sorta) their avatar into other Unity-based worlds:

SL's Bento avatar skeleton in Crystal Frost

"I mean I suppose it could be used to allow people to have a unified character appearance in Unity games," Kallisti allows, not entirely convinced, "but it'd only be games that support it, and the player would have to supply their own stuff."

This is, after all, Ruth and the avatar meshes included within the Indra reference viewer and its progeny like Firestorm.

"Indra is the reference source code for Second Life, both viewer and server. Though only the viewer is publicly exposed. The server code is entirely internal to Linden Lab. The files that make up the avatar meshes for the base Linden avatar as well as the skeleton data are distributed by Linden Lab on the Indra Github repository under LGPL.

"So to honor that the license and also ensure perfect compatibility with all avatars on Crystal Frost, I'm rolling a stand alone library to load the Indra avatar files into Unity and for use in any Unity project. Then I'll be incorporating that package into Crystal Frost. Getting this working will allow me to do many important things for Crystal Frost, such as support Second Life animations, as well as get attachments to work properly."

Oh yeah, there's also Unity-based exploding particles:

The particles work slightly differently on Crystal Frost than on LL based viewers. Since I cannot isolate JUST new particles for updates, all particles in a system are updated at the same time. The system being used for testing here constantly cycles its colors through the hue and updates the particle system accordingly. You can see that on Crystal Frost they all change at the same time where on Firestorm old particles stay their original color.

Follow Crystal Frost's progress on Patreon. People who subscribe to the "Snowcrashed" level of Crystal Frost, by the way, also get access to snapshots to the viewer's source code.

SL creators can then load it into their Unity editor to tweak it and make improvements, as desired, for potential integration with Crystal Frost:

"If it's good, we'll merge it into the main project, and possibly offer them a seat at the developer's table."