[Opensim-dev] textures not appearing in client

[paul at triadalliance.com]

We talked a bit about this at the Saturday meeting. Textures don't seem to be sent to the client consistently. Based on my interpretation of the DEBUG texture console, one of the issues seems to be that the client is requesting smaller sized versions of textures and the sim isn't sending them. The client seems to have the ability to request smaller sized versions of textures when, for example, a texture is far away from the avatar. It makes sense that the client would fetch a smaller version of a texture in that case. 

The explanation of the texture console: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Texture_Console calls this the "discard priority." Discard priority 0 is a full sized texture. Discard priority 1 - 5 are , it seems, 256x256,128x128,64x64,32x32,16x16. I've also seen a discard priority of -1 in the texture console. I'm not sure what that means.

I'm speculating that the region server or the asset server needs to be able to honor these discard priorities and send a resized version of a texture and we are not currently doing that. It doesn't seem likely that LL servers store 5 different versions of every texture. I imagine that textures are resized on the fly by the server when requested. On the other hand, I understand (maybe incorrectly) that the JPEG 2000 format supports multiple levels of detail for images. Maybe images are stored with these LOD in the texture. Any JPEG 2000 experts in the house? 

Another stat I'm seeing is textures stuck in the NET state. The console explanation offers no mention of that state. It may point to a comms error or timeout.