[Opensim-users] Google stadia game changer for opensim?

[Ethan Gardener]

On Wed, Mar 20, 2019, at 6:56 PM, Dr Ramesh Ramloll wrote:
> ' Aren't viewers built with SDL for display?  There's an SDL library for
> Android.  OpenTTD is a C++ program built with SDL, and has an Android port
> which plays just the same.  It has some extra UI options to facilitate use
> with a touchscreen and no keyboard.  I don't know how much other work they
> had to do to port it.'
> 
> This would have been great except that this is not a simple UI problem that
> can be ticked off through a selection of UI options. Half of the
> optimization problem involves in world coding that does not touch the UI
> aspect.

That was the moment I forgot about the difference between 2D and 3D. ^.^;;;  OpenTTD's graphics are rooted in 1992.  It's had some additions, but still doesn't even have full scaling, only 2x, 4x, etc.

I'm not sure it's possible to optimize a SL/OS viewer enough for tablets.  Viewers are already capable of extremely heavy LOD-culling as an optimization, but it ruins builds.  For a few months, I tried to explore with a rather unsuitable computer: decent CPU but Geforce 9500 graphics card.  With viewer preferences set to try to cope with all the high-lag mesh around, I went to a big, nice, low-lag mesh build, and it looked *terrible!*  I could see that there were buildings, but I couldn't see the facades even at a moderate distance, they were *destroyed* by LOD-culling!  I suppose the viewer algorithm of when to apply that optimization might be improved.

I'm concerned about caching too.  It's needed, but how well is it going to work with the slow write speed of Flash memory?

A cheap work-around for both of these problems would be to eliminate mesh objects, (no mesh uploads, no connection to the OpenSim hypergrid,) maybe restrict texture sizes too, and stop sending meshed prim data from the grid to the viewer.  Yay, it's 2006 again! ^.^;  It could be somewhat better than old SL, but still... "I'd play it, thousands wouldn't," perhaps? :)  Actually, I wouldn't play it, I get enough neck pain without using tablets and phones.  "Thousands" would play it who wouldn't play SL/OS because they don't have a gaming computer -- compare Minecraft & Roblox.  Less cheap would be building into the viewer a mesh editor which can't produce high-lag meshes, but that would be quite a challenge just to design.  A built-in texture editor would perhaps be even more desirable.  But I digressed, I believe the original point was business rather than pleasure?