[#VWR-13609] Never draw sculpties as big grey balls

1. Second Life Viewer - VWR

Never draw sculpties as big grey balls

Created: 20/May/09 09:23 AM Updated: 21/May/09 10:00 AM

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Component/s:

None

Affects Version/s:

1.23 Release Candidate

Fix Version/s:

None

Environment:

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Second Life 1.23.1 (119104) May 4 2009 17:22:43 (Second Life Release Candidate)
Release Notes

Built with GCC version 40001

You are at 189935.4, 260080.6, 501.1 in Vodou located at sim5359.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.49.106:13002)
Second Life Server 1.26.3.118673
Release Notes

CPU: Dual i386 (Unknown) (2000 MHz)
Memory: 2048 MB
OS Version: Darwin 9.6.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.6.0: Mon Nov 24 17:37:00 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.9.59~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon X1600 OpenGL Engine
OpenGL Version: 2.0 ATI-1.5.36

libcurl Version: libcurl/7.16.3 OpenSSL/0.9.7l zlib/1.2.3
J2C Decoder Version: KDU
Audio Driver Version: FMOD version 3.750000
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.24042 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.21_0000000000)
Packets Lost: 4976/146644 (3.4%)

Issue Links:

Duplicate

This issue duplicates:

VWR-1153 Sculpted prims show before their shape is known

Relates

This issue Relates to:

VWR-1153 Sculpted prims show before their shape is known

VWR-7228 Particles should be invisible until texture is available

VWR-5647 Meta-Issue: Sculpted Prims Need More Linden Lab Development

Description

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1. When an avatar wearing sculpted attachments teleports in to an area, they appear to be wearing lots of big grey balls.
2. When I teleport to an area built with many sculpties, it is full of big grey balls.

Why draw big grey balls? If the viewer can tell that no sculptie map or texture has arrived for a prim, do not draw it at all.

More details. Sculpties are very slow to load (https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3798) which means that you see unloaded ones a lot. And they have very aggressive LOD, which means many creators make small sculpties on large prims to try to force the LOD outwards. This means the grey balls are BIG! Unless the LOD is fixed soon (and Qarl Linden seems to say here https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2291 that it won't be changed) then the world will fill up with this kind of content, especially attachments.

So, I propose that sculpties are not drawn until at least one pass of the sculpt map has arrived.

(But of course this should be a debug setting in case someone needs to debug sculptie map download.)

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Comments

Change History

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Harleen Gretzky added a comment - 20/May/09 09:50 AM

What should be drawn in their place?

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Mimika Oh added a comment - 20/May/09 12:32 PM

Nothing. They should not be drawn at all until they have one pass of sculpt map downloaded. Can you think of any reason to see them before that (other than debugging)?

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Harleen Gretzky added a comment - 20/May/09 01:11 PM

If you are wearing a total sculpted avatar, you could end up naked in a PG region while your sculpties are loading.

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Mimika Oh added a comment - 20/May/09 01:48 PM - edited

That is a fair point. But that already happens whether or not your attachments are sculpted. Many times I teleport or log in and my attachments don't appear for a minute. Anyone worried about this already has to wear underwear under their sculpted avatar. I don't think it's a good argument for big grey balls all the time for everyone else.

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Lex Neva added a comment - 21/May/09 08:27 AM

I was just thinking the other day that this is how sculpties should work. After all, normal prims aren't rendered if their primitive parameters haven't reached the viewer yet; they simply aren't visible. Wouldn't SL look ugly if prims were always shown as default 0.5m cubes before they loaded fully?

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Mimika Oh added a comment - 21/May/09 08:59 AM

Exactly Lex.

And big grey balls are the "Ruth" of sculpties.

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Tali Rosca added a comment - 21/May/09 09:32 AM - edited

I am a little on the fence on this one. While it is true that normal prims don't render as .5m cubes first, the normal prim parameters are generally loaded a lot faster, and they then are grey blocks until the textures load. (Though this also relates somewhat to the reported extremely slow loading of sculpt maps, VWR-3798).
Something grates a little on principle in hiding something which actually has an inworld presence and is meant to be seen, though I do agree that the big, grey balls don't really give you a lot of useful information.

When talking specifically about avatars, I don't think there is a point in showing the grey spheres. They are part of the avatar bounding box, which isn't affected by attachments anyway. Is it worth differentiating between attachments and in-world builds, or would that only cause confusion?

This report could be seen as a duplicate of VWR-1153, but I am linking as "related" for now, so as not to close the issue if there is a slight variation in intention. Should that one be re-opened?

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Mimika Oh added a comment - 21/May/09 09:58 AM - edited

Closing as duplicate of VWR-1153. This has been discussed before and then deferred. Please see that issue and especially the question from Erica Linden 15/Dec/08 03:11 PM