I appreciate all the work that has been done to fix
VWR-3172, but it's only been fixed for property lines... other layers are still blocked by windlight water, and the fix ONLY applies if you're using a special editing mode because of the problems documented in
VWR-4580.
Please revert to the original behavior before the VWR-3172 fix. It would be simpler to simply move the special layers to a different part of the pipeline ONLY while in the special editing mode than to create a complex "pretzelled" (to use Ramzi Linden' words) pipeline to emulate the original behavior imperfectly. This would also allow other special layers to be rendered properly.
The behavior prior to the VWR-3172 fix rendered special layers early enough in the pipeline that objects in-world obscured all special layers such as property lines, beacons.
The reason this was seen as necessary is that the Windlight water is rendered in a separate pass and treated as an opaque surface in the normal rendering pipeline. The result of this was that it completely or partially hides wireframe mode rendering, property lines, beacons, and even avatars in some cases.
It's like there's a huge invisiprim at the water level.
This even has weird effects like in my attachment to VWR-3172 at http://jira.secondlife.com/secure/attachment/15702/Water+Culling.png
where you can see the prim floor of the lagoon is completely missing because it's been culled by the Windlight water.
The fix for VWR-3172 didn't fix the other problems caused by the Windlight water layer, and it caused the problems in VWR-4580. Fixes subsequent to VWR-4580 have changed a number of other parts of the UI (for example, HUDs), complicated the pipeline (pretzelled is such an evocative word
), and left the other problems caused by the WIndlight water layer intact.
As written this issue is less than clear and therefore unactionable-- the issues VWR-3172 and VWR-4580 are complicated ones, of course, and both are marked Complete internally. Therefore let's clarify with the desired behavior you are seeking, and re-start tracking here.