Decentraland (DCL for short) is launching its public beta at the end of this month, and more details are coming out about the platform and how it will work. Carl Fravel reports:
DCL just released SDK v6.1.1. By default it now uses the Unity rendering engine, performance is better. I see FPS of 120 to 160 on my GTX 1070 laptop. There are now shadows, [and] HUD UI elements.
When asked why they decided to move the project to the Unity game engine, which is not open source, Carl replied:
They were seeing such poor performance and severe scene limits with both WebVR and BJS [BabylonJS, an open source webGL engine] that they opted for a higher performance rendering engine. The rest of the stack above that remains open source, and they will be catching the open source BJS client up to the SDK 6 version, which means that if some wizard is able to come up with an open source rendering engine that performs well enough then they can work it into that environment in the future. Nobody seems to have an open source rendering engine that is fast enough to make scene devs and users happy yet. One can clone their open source reference client that uses BJS and deploy it on one own servers. That sounds pretty open source to me.
And on their Instagram channel, they have released some more pictures of what their avatars are going to look like. They’re looking pretty good!
I’m looking forward to actually getting in-world at the end of June!
