SLUniverse Forums

WarKirby Magojiro

An interesting issue came up at a triage meeting yesterday.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3798

It covers one of hr most annoying problems with sculpt maps. They load WAAY too slowly. While everything else is already loaded, you're left wandering among a sea of floating balls waiting for the sculpt geometry to load. Hell, half the time, the texture on those balls even loads first.

This issue proposes to change that, quite simply. By putting sculpt maps to the top of the interest list, and making them download before other textures. Sculpt maps are generally much smaller than most textures, usually being 128x128 at most, and often more like 64x64. And they generally make a huge difference to the environment, much more so than most standard image textures.

The issue is bein passed to the devs for discussion, but I think they might need some convincing. So I ask you all to leave votes and comments on the matter : )

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BEARintheMorning

Voted. I always thought that was dumb too.

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Khamon

voted

The bestest new feature of realXtend is proper mesh collison.

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Cocoanut Koala

Sounds good to me!

On a related but entirely unrelated question, can someone explain to me why they can't fix the problem with alpha textures canceling out each other and letting other alpha textures show through?

I mean, can't this be fixed?

coco

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Screwtape Foulsbane

The alpha texture bug is in OpenGL, not SL so there's nothing they can do

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Io Zeno

I thought that was a problem inherent in the rendering engine and there is nothing to be done about it, really.

Other than making one prim larger than the other. That will give it priority. If they are exactly the same size, next to each other, they will both render, like my clocks. But they have to be the *only* alphas there because if there is another, larger prim with alphas in the object, it will take over priority and start "swallowing" the others.

It's a pain in the ass.

Cocoanut Koala

What is "open GL"?

Io Zeno

I could write an explanation but this is better:

Joannah Cramer

It's difficult to solve. Short answer is 'no'.

Things in SL are made of triangles rendered one after another (you can see these triangles in wireframe mode) When it comes to alpha-mapped bits the program usually handles it by drawing the triangles farthest from camera first, then going progressively closer to the viewer.

This works reasonably well, until you run into triangles that intersect one another. For these to be drawn properly the program would need to split the triangles into smaller bits in accordance with intersection lines, and then draw these individual pieces in correct order. But such operation would be very taxing and the drawing performance would suffer really bad.

Cocoanut Koala

Ok, thanks! Well, someone should fix Open GL then.

coco

Joannah Cramer

Bleh it's nothing to "fix" because it's not actually broken, it's side-effect of typical way things are drawn by applications/games (SL included) ... you are basically demanding to "fix" the issue that is two people cannot simultaneously fit into door that was built to accomodate single person only.

Although just for the heck of it, there's possible ways to work around it with anti-aliasing enabled ( last sample on CodeSampler.com - OpenGL - Page 14 shows such application ) ... but then you run into entirely different mess that's lack of support on number of computers that currently run SL okay, and other funny stuff.

Verkin Raven

Thank you WarKirby. Voted.

Mecha Dinosaur

A long time ago I made a post on the official forums about end user bandwidth allocation and prioritizating of types of content.

Still.. I would much rather walk through a gray world with primless gray avatars then knocking people over as my client rezed some adfarm at the edge of my draw distance first.

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BEARintheMorning

Then we should expect that to be announced in an SL release candidate soon?

Jus' sayin' is all.

They blew prioritized rendering in this platform big-time. It's one of the things that made me question the coding abilities at Linden Lab when I first joined SL. To this day I shake my head when I have my draw distance set to 512 for taking pictures or whatever and I'm seeing everything on the horizin rezzed and still waiting for things within 20m of my avitar to rez.

It's not as bad for me now with the graphics setup I have. At least it's faster but I still wonder "wtf where they thinking?" when things hundreds of meters away are fully rezzed while objects continue to pop into view nearby.

Joannah Cramer

It takes priority cues from where you put your mouse pointer and the area a texture takes on your screen at given moment. Beyond that it's hard to say.

BEARintheMorning

I sat here for a good 3 minutes trying to make sense out of that and failed miserabley.

I need to go lay down now.

Verkin Raven

Reminds me of how webpages seem to load the advertisements before the actual web content.

Joannah Cramer

Sorry

in simpler words, the bigger the stuff appears on your screen (usually when your AV is close to it and/or you have camera aimed straight at it) the more likely it'll be loaded first. If you place your mouse pointer over a prim, that will prod the viewer into loading textures for that prim before others, too. Just small insight into "wtf were they thinking?"

Mecha Dinosaur

But there is no way to do that if the prims are not shown. This is not a chicken/egg thing, this is a chicken/egg/four fundamental forces of the universe thingy.

Joshua Nightshade

If you have a series of fuzzy textures and want them to load faster, focus your viewer (alt and click) on something that hasn't loaded, and SL will prioritize it so whatever you clicked on gets downloaded ahead of the others.

BEARintheMorning

Right, so, in the nutshell it's prioritized rendering but as usual, LL has their priorities fucked up.

What you say may be what they implemented and intended but it doesn't work that way - not by a long shot - with any object and certainly not with sculpted prims.

In my experience at least, simply moving your pointer over something has little or no effect on making it rez faster than others. Right clicking on it may speed it up a bit and right clicking and selecting edit [Edit: Yes, alt click too Joshua, I forgot that...lol] may speed that process up a little faster but under normal circumstances, just for fun, clear your cache, set your draw to 512 teleport to a the edge of a random sim with another sim beyond that (meaning, you're at 256 on the sim you teleport to), move your cursor off of SL completely, and watch how things come into view. There is no rhyme or reason other than perhaps some textures are of lower resolution than others and they will obviously load first.

This is not how true prioritized rendering is supposed to work and unless I'm mistaken (I'm waaaaaaaaay behind on the Havok engine ) there is a controlled function to allow for objects to appear in a set order regardless of the resolution of a texture (relative distance, etc.). If this is the case, I don't think LL has used this function correctly and it could also have something to do with the way the asset server handles passing the information to your client which should be controllable (shouldn't it?).

Joshua Nightshade