See the region in 3D

Render and Derender

Geometry storage now respects the graphics device buffer limit as more meshes arrive, preventing a crash in busy scenes. Geometry that exceeds the available storage may still be omitted.

Walking follows the reported speed between position updates for up to half a second. Releasing movement is sent at the next movement tick. Attachment updates retain previously received mesh and texture data when those blocks are absent. The copied diagnostics report now includes loading counts for each avatar, helping distinguish missing appearance data from queued or failed mesh downloads.

Mesh bodies can appear when attachment details arrive late. Keyboard turning starts gently and reaches full speed after a quarter second.

After teleporting, the view uses the destination region for asset loading and makes room for new assets when its cache fills. Avatar textures can recover through an alternative download route, and damaged cached animations are fetched again. PBR surfaces preserve scripted rotation centres and non-metallic materials receive environmental reflections. Animated mesh objects now play the animations sent by the region using their own skeletons. Interior reflections and advanced animesh constraints are still incomplete.

The viewport forward and backward bindings have been swapped. Geometry storage now grows for the visible scene and clears stale geometry before it crowds out current objects. Texture orientation and rotation are corrected, filtered 256-pixel surfaces replace the old 128-pixel samples, and diffuse textures remain visible on faces with material metadata.

Pressing a movement key in the captured view stops following and patrol playback, then gives you manual control. Automation, Python and AI can do the same with take_manual_control. Diagnostics and Options scroll within the screen; Copy this report is above the text and copies the entire report.

Hovering over the view leaves keyboard navigation in the interface. Click to take control, then click outside or press Escape twice to return it. Keyboard turning keeps its speed when you lower the frame limit. Failed shapes and surfaces are retried after a pause. Automation can report keyboard capture and shared loading counts with get_world_render_status.

Open the 3D World tab and press Render. The view fills the tab and follows the window as you resize it. Press Derender and it closes again: nothing is drawn and your graphics card goes back to doing nothing for NeuraCore. The choice is remembered per avatar, so a window you left rendering comes back rendering.

The view you are looking at draws continuously, at the frame limit you set. Only one view draws at a time, whatever you have open. Drawing a region is the most expensive thing NeuraCore does, and two windows doing it at once would compete for one graphics card to show you a picture you can only look at one of. The others say Paused and keep their place; click one and it takes over.

This is a picture and nothing more. There is no sound of any kind: nothing here is heard by your avatar, nothing is spoken from it, and no voice, gesture sound or media is played.

Taking the controls

Click inside the view to take the arrow keys, Page Up, Page Down and Escape. While the view has them, they work there and nowhere else: the same press cannot walk your avatar and move a selection in a list at the same time, which is what it used to do. Everything else keeps working normally, the pointer included.

Click anywhere outside the view to give them back, or press Escape twice. Once is deliberately not enough, because Escape is also how you dismiss whatever you were just doing and one stray press should not quietly hand the keys back. The line above the view says which state you are in.

Moving about

The arrow keys move your avatar in the world, exactly as the Movement tab does: up and down walk forward and back, left and right turn. Page Up takes off and climbs, Page Down descends. Drag with the mouse to look around your avatar and use the wheel to bring the camera closer or push it further away; neither of those moves the avatar or is seen by anybody else.

Options

The Options button under the view holds the draw preferences, and they start at values chosen to keep a modest machine comfortable: a draw distance of 128 metres, 2048 objects drawn, avatar detail 1, detail factor 4, a 60 degree field of view and 60 frames a second. Shading, the ground reference grid, the resident name tags and Surfaces are there as well, and Restore defaults puts every one of them back.

Lower the draw distance, the object count or the frame limit if the view is not smooth. Raise the detail factor for finer models and rounder curves. Turn Surfaces off on a metered connection: objects are then drawn as tinted solids and nothing is downloaded, while their shapes stay exactly as they were. Every choice is kept per avatar and is there again the next time you open the window.

Light: the sky and the water

Beside Options there is a Light button, and it holds the same environment presets Firestorm offers. Sky can be Default, Shared Environment, Nam's Optimal Skin 1 or Nam's Optimal Skin 2. Water can be Default, Shared Environment or Glassy. Whatever you pick applies to the whole view at once and straight away: the objects around you, the residents, the newer shiny materials, the sky behind everything and the sea are all lit by it together.

Default is the light NeuraCore has always used, so nothing changes until you choose otherwise. The two Nam presets are what photographers use to look at a skin: they are nearly all soft light coming from every direction and hardly any sun, so a face keeps the same tone whichever way it turns. Glassy water is almost flat and mostly a mirror, where Default water is darker and choppier.

Shared Environment is the region's own. Where the region publishes one, NeuraCore draws it and follows its day cycle as the region's hour turns, so a sunset happens while you watch. Where the region publishes none, and many do not, the Default preset is drawn in its place and the panel says which of the two happened, so you are never left wondering whether it worked.

Day Cycle and Personal Lighting are listed but greyed out: they are not built yet. Your sky and water choices are kept per avatar and are there again the next time you open the window, and Automation, Python and the AI controller can set them with set_world_render_preferences.

What is drawn, and what is not

The view shows what the region has told NeuraCore about: the objects around you at their real position, size, rotation and shape, and every resident it can place, your own avatar included. An uploaded mesh is drawn as its mesh and a sculpted prim as its sculpt, both fetched in the background at a level of detail chosen for how large they look, and each face wears the texture, tint, repeats and glow it really has. A region arrives over a few seconds: an object is a plain shape until its own arrives, and the line under the view says how many are still coming.

Transparent surfaces now blend with what is behind them, and cutout masks use the material threshold. Region water appears at the reported sea level. Avatars use Linden body meshes, baked skin and clothing textures, and worn mesh attachments, including Bake on Mesh. Avatar detail selects mesh detail rather than placeholder figures. Land geometry is visible, but land materials are still unfinished. The sky, the light and the water now come from the Light button, and can follow the region's own environment. Diagnostics and get_world_render_status report water height, materials and avatar appearance availability.

Up Arrow moves forward and Down Arrow moves backward. Avatars now play the animations reported by the region: native bodies and rigged attachments bend with their joints, while rigid attachments follow their attachment bones. Clips load in the background, preserve their playback time across repeated updates, loop and blend by priority, and fade when stopped. Playback continues with a stationary camera and respects the frame limit. Diagnostics and get_world_render_status include playing animations and animation loading counts. Body shape sliders and animation foot-contact constraints are not yet applied.

When the region has named no animation a resident can be drawn with, NeuraCore plays a built-in one instead, so nobody is ever left standing with their arms out and sliding across the ground. Which one comes from what the resident is doing: standing, walking, running, hovering, flying, rising, descending, turning or sitting, read from the seated state, the height above the ground and the speed the region reports. A real animation takes over as soon as it has loaded. Diagnostics and get_world_render_status say how many residents a frame drew this way.

The built-in animation now runs underneath whatever the region has named, rather than only when the region has named nothing. A resident wearing an animation overrider therefore keeps walking, running and flying while the overrider changes between its own animations, instead of freezing for a moment with their arms out. A real animation still takes over every joint it moves, and the built-in one fills only what is left. Skin, hair and eyes are also drawn as a cutout rather than as a curtain, so the inside of the head no longer shows through the face and clothing no longer flickers against the body.

Animations started by a script, which is what a worn animation override does, now play. NeuraCore was asking the region for them under a name the region does not answer to, so every one of them was refused and every resident, yourself included, fell back to the built-in walk and stand. A resident wearing an overrider now moves the way they do for everybody else, and so does anybody else in view. An animation that still cannot be fetched is written to the log the first time it happens, and the diagnostics count them.

Residents are now drawn in the shape they are actually wearing: their face, their build, their height and their proportions, instead of the blank figure every shape is made from, which is a figure with its mouth hanging open. This matters most for a resident in a mesh body, whose whole shape comes from the skeleton underneath it. The hover setting a resident uses to stand at the right height is applied too, to them, to what they are wearing and to their name tag. Transparent surfaces are judged the way the official viewer judges them, so glass is see-through rather than solid and a faint surface stays faint rather than disappearing. If a resident is still drawn in the default shape, the Diagnostics section says how many residents in view have sent one.

Surfaces built with the newer materials, the ones with a shine and a texture to them rather than a flat picture, are now drawn that way. NeuraCore reads the whole material: how metallic and how rough the surface is, the fine detail its normal map describes, and any light it gives off by itself. It applies wherever such a material is used, on the world around you and on what residents are wearing alike. Older surfaces are unchanged.

A surface built with the newer materials is now drawn with the settings whoever built it actually gave it, including its transparency. Those settings are not part of the material itself, which is shared and fixed; they are sent separately, per face, and NeuraCore reads them now. A pane of glass made half transparent is half transparent rather than solid.

Objects a script animates now move: a sign that scrolls, a screen playing its frames, a display that turns on the spot. Walking is smooth as well, because the figure now follows where the region says it is instead of jumping there several times a second. So does a resident's own body, which is now posed by your graphics card rather than by the processor, so a busy region costs far less than it did and everybody in it moves smoothly. Started with --headless there is no window, so there is no view either: the tab does not exist and the Automation actions that control it refuse and say so.

When the view is empty or slow

Under the Options button there is a Diagnostics section. Open it and it tells you, in one block you can copy, which renderer and graphics adapter are in use, how many frames a second the interface is actually managing, how much of the region was drawn and how much was left out, how long the scene took to build, which asset services the region published, how many shapes and surfaces are ready, still on their way or refused, the last refusal in the service's own words, and who currently holds the keyboard.

That is enough to tell the usual cases apart. A region that published no asset service can fetch nothing at all. Surfaces that are all refused are a service turning the requests away, not a slow connection. Objects drawn as plain shapes with nothing waiting means the region has sent no shape for them yet. And a low frame rate with a fast scene build is the rest of the interface, not the drawing.