[Opensim-users] some questions

[Lúthien Athariel]

Hi LaeMing

thank you! This is very helpful.

On 9-May-09, at 10:59 PM, LaeMi Wang wrote:

> Hi Lúthien,
> 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.

If that were possible, it would already be very useful (except for the  
Laburnum which should have lots of flowers :).


> 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.

I wonder if it is possible to import a tree built in Blender as such a  
collection of sculpties: I will look at that (I have seen some info on  
creating sculpties in Blender)

> 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

Thank you! I missed that one, it seems to cover all I need.

> 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.

that need not be a problem if I could, say, make the sun and/or moon  
invisible and yet leave the lighting intact. If I then create a light  
source and arrange things so per region that the sun- or moonlight  
seems to originate from the direction of the new light source, that  
might work - except that the light direction in the region where the  
source resides would seem off.


> 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.

Yes. I payed closer attention to this, and it looks as if it is indeed  
connected with this level of detail.
When I log in and there are these tears all over, it is also the case  
that there is much less detail in the shape of the terrain. Then at a  
given moment, the details will suddenly snap into place and the tears  
also disappear.

> 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).

I would certainly be more than happy with the "just terrain" option,  
because I do not intend to build structures that would be visible over  
that distance.
Maybe I'll  have a look at the code to figure out whether this is hard  
to do - (I am a dev, though a java one - I never worked with dotnet).

> Hope this helps

it certainly did!

thank you
- l