Update: New Avatar Bodies, Selfie Camera, Doubled Voxel Performance

Great news everyone! Your own avatar now shows up in selfies! We also breathed some life into your avatar bodies. As an added bonus, they look a lot better in selfies than the old bodies did :-) Also, hot damn we doubled the performance once again! The SculptrVR engine can now handle about 12,000 sphere place/delete actions per second on an i5. That's a lot.

New Avatar Bodies

The old avatars were kind of lifeless. We took a bit of inspiration from Rec Room and made our bodies torso-only. They also get thrown around by head movements, so they feel alive! Also, we leave them on while flying hang gliders, so your body floats behind you like a cape in the wind!

Selfie Camera

We fixed taking selfies, so now your avatar shows up in the screenshots! To encourage this self-centered behavior, we added a selfie stick mode to the camera.

Here's the first group selfie ever taken: I was surprised by how much of a presence multiplier posing for selfies is. Both of us smiled for the picture. Both of us have strange memories of posing together on the wing of a mountain-sized flying turtle.

Improved Performance

No picture here, but here are some statistics: Speed:

• Load times reduced by 25%

• Sculpting compute times reduced by 50%

• Undo/Redo times reduced by 25%

• Read-only Actions reduced by 5-10%

Memory:

• Sculpture Memory usage reduced by 50%

• Peak total memory usage (during level load) reduced by 50%

• Typical total memory usage mid-game reduced ~30%.

The source of all this speed and memory reduction is that we no longer compute two copies of voxels. We used to make a copy and do everything twice so that we had a read-only copy of voxels that was safe to access on the game thread. Now all CPU cores share one copy of the voxels and we use deferred garbage collection to prevent invalid memory access. We also no longer need any locks to ensure thread safety! Anyway please build some bigger worlds to help stress test ;-)