[Opensim-users] some questions

[LaeMi Wang]

Hi Lúthien,

I'm a tinkerer rather than a dev., so anything a dev. says different to me, 
believe the dev. ;-) But I think I can answer a few of those.

> - The first is - I would like to have some other trees than the ones
> that are available now. Is it possible to create one in, say, Blender,
> and import that (b/c I know how to make trees in Blender)? So far, I
> have found no repository of objects to use in Opensim (apart from the
> discussions about importing SL stuff - but I have never been in SL).

Trees in SL are a special object made from a simple algorithm and a special 
texture. I am not sure if these can be changed without altering the viewer. 
Might be possible to change the texture.

However, trees can also be made out of clumps of sculpties or from flat prims 
with pictures of trees on them (3 such flat prims together, rotated at 120deg 
to eachother will give the tree some 3D body and doesn't look bad from mid-to-
long distances. Custom trees like these won't bend in the wind though.

> - Another, similar one .. did any of you ever create rocks or
> boulders? Would a "sculpted prim" be the way to go here?
> I find building more or less geometric forms very easy with the Build
> tool - including more complex things. But it is indeed hard to create
> anything naturally - looking, irregular.

Natural shapes are exactly what sculpties are for :-) While you CAN make 
complex regular shapes too, it often doesn't look so good to my eye.

See: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims:_3d_Software_Guide

> - is there a way to use larger region texture files than 512 x 512? I
> find these smaller ones to make mountains look not that natural. Most
> textures give a rather unnatural repetitive effect.

I think this is currently fixed in the viewer. Can't use greyscale textures 
either (which 3 of my 4 textures are and would save memory and bandwidth).

> - is it possible to create another global light source, other than the
> Sun or Moon? Like a large beacon with a bright light, illuminating one
> or more regions?
> The light-emitting prims don't reach very far.

Another viewer limitation - IIRC, SL has a limit of 8 active light sources (1 
for sun/moon, 7 for prims), presumably because of limitations of graphics 
cards at the low end.

> - there are sometimes cracks or tears in the ground; even outside of
> the region seams (which are indeed sometimes hard to match up).

Sounds like a bug in stitching the regions together, likely when the two 
regions are being rendered at different LODs (Levels Of Detail). I suspect 
this because of the way the gaps disappear - if the regions suddenly start 
displaying the same LOD, this is what would be expected.

Not sure about the associated crashing, if it is LOD stitching issue, I would 
suspect the client, however some weird interaction between the client and 
server when things leave the realms of expected behaviour is also on the cards 
(ie, the client starts sending position information to the server that the 
server thinks impossible and the error isn't caught). That is all guessing, 
remember I am not a dev.

> - and the last one - is it possible *in principle* to see further than
> the current "max viewing distance" setting of 512 meters in Hippo?

LindenLabs (who's viewer Hippo is extended from) have been talking about 
terrain-to-the-horizon for over a year. I am pretty sure it is possible to do 
but would require some reworking of the viewer and possibly the server. 
Normally the viewer is only plugged into its current sim and the 8 adjacent 
sims. To render further would require plugging into more sims at once, which 
becomes an exponentially increasing load on both the viewer and the sims. 
Rendering only terrain (and not objects) to the horizon is the compromise LL 
is thinking of as it loads up the viewer more (but only if the user turns it 
on) and only minimally increases load on the sims (fetching height-maps, but 
not the rest of the sim contents).


Hope this helps
(hope this info is correct)

LaeMing