Hello everyone!
I've got another chunk of Gaussian Splats support work for you, significantly improving their performance! Resonite and the asset variant system now supports generating VRAM compressed variants - these use significantly less VRAM (up to 18.62x times less), load faster (the files are smaller) and render faster too (less memory bandwidth usage on the GPU).
This also means that you can now import bigger splats than before without them killing your VRAM and performance as a result. My own 3 million splats render quite noticeably faster with this and make my computer die less.
And the best part, it all fits into our asset variant system - you don't need to do anything extra! Any already uploaded gaussian splats benefit from this automatically as well as any new ones you upload - our system will generate the variants as needed.
You can select the quality of splats (and how much VRAM they use) in settings - the system should pick a good value based on your VRAM amount by default though, so most of the time you might not need to change anything at all.
There's some other extras! Because some of the compression variants use k-Means Clustering algorithm, I've also adapted it as a texture processing method! You can paletize/stylize your textures with a new processing option as a small bonus!
There's also some privacy oriented features - you can now selectively disable/allow platform interfaces like Discord/Steam thanks to @probableprime's work.
New Features:
- Added support for VRAM compression for gaussian splats to improve their performance
-- This is a lossy compression that reduces the size of the gaussian splats in the VRAM (as well for download)
-- This also significantly improves rendering performance at lower quality levels due to less GPU bandwidth usage
-- Quality levels are: Very High (uncompressed), High (2.94x smaller), Medium (5.14x smaller), Low (14x smaller), VeryLow (18.62x smaller)
-- You can set your quality level in the Graphics settings
-- Default is automatically determined by amount of available VRAM in your system
- Added "Minimum locally compressed quality" setting
-- For locally imported splats, the quality will never go lower than this setting
-- This is due to the very low qualities being very heavy and time consuming to compress and they should only be compressed in the cloud
-- The VRAM compression implementation is a port based on this project:
- Added GaussianSplatAssetMetadata for providing stats for a Gaussian Splat assets (requested by @raidriar796, issue #3871)
-- Those stats are visualized on StaticGaussianSplatProvided in the inspector for currently loaded splat
-- This currently provides: Number of splats, VRAM usage (raw value + formatted) and actual loaded variant
- Added KMeansCluster method for processing textures
-- This will cluster the colors/pixel positions using K-means clustering algorithm.
-- This can be useful for stylizing & creating various effects
- Added `disallowedPlatformInterfaces` and `allowedPlatformInterfaces` to Config.json (requested by ko-tengu, issue #3780, implemented by @probableprime)
-- This allows disabling/allowing platform interfaces by name
-- This can be used to completely disable Steam and Discord related functionality by specifying the value `["Discord", "Steam"]`
-- The disallow list will specifically block particular platform interfaces, but allow all others
-- The allow list will disable all interfaces other than specified ones. Specify `[]` if you want to disable all of them. Specify `null` to allow all of them (other than explicitly disabled ones)
- Provide `universePublicDashOnly` which allows universes that only want to use the default dash layout
Tweaks:
- GaussianSplat Quality Settings is now per-machine
- Rendering Quality Settings are now per machine
- When in a Universe, the Universe's primary group ID is used in the world browser for filtering (implemented by @probableprime )
- When in a Universe, the `appName` in locale strings now uses the universe name (implemented by @probableprime)
- Added filter preset name to buttons' slot name within the filter facet (implemented by @probableprime)
- Renamed GlowingSphereToggle to LegacyGlowingSphereToggle (based on report by @dustysprinkles, brecert, issue #3886)
Locale:
- Merged French locale update by @j4.lc
- Merged Chinese locale update by modimobeikete
- Merged German locale update by @muppeq
- Merged English locale fixes by @muppeq
- Merged Japanese locale update by @.aesc
Fixes:
- Fixed SPZ gaussian splat imports being inverted on the X axis (reported by @shininghero, @anquietas_sys, @bredo, @dustysprinkles, issue #3872)
- Fixed SPZ files not being decoded fully in some cases (e.g. when running under .NET 9)
- Fixed bug that prevented worlds from being opened when in a universe and not using port restrictions (fixed by @probableprime)
- Fixed deleted user accounts not being removed from groups on wipe (reported by @ardescar, @dantetucker, issue #3867, fixed by @dantetucker)
- Ensure that additional metadata (supporter, entitlements, old username changes) are wiped when accounts are deleted
-- All previously-undeleted data for wiped accounts has now been deleted with the above changes