IF YOU ARE IN A HURRY, JUST READ THE RED TEXT!

The viewer must support Concealing Fog. For instance, buildings and trees that are not loaded yet must be covered in a fog that hides their absence and the unrealistic way they pop up when they load.

THINK atmosphere, fantasy, mystery, multicolor fogs and steams, atmosphere, fairy tales. Oh, and atmosphere. Even stupid nightclubs use fog! Some surrealistic fog would make the experience much more fascinating than houses and woods popping up into existence like silly popcorn. Of course, many people hate fog, no matter how rainbow-like it looks. That's why I proposed a lot of alternatives to Fog (as you will see below). Or they can simply uncheck this "Concealing Fog" option. But many of us would find happiness with this feature, overwhelmed and surrounded by the steams and rainbows of paradise. And it's the future of failsafe distance handling in virtual worlds anyway, as I will prove below.

I wanted to label this feature as a showstopper because this is what it is. Literally. It makes SL look toyish and unrealistic. Even theaters use curtains, FFS! (And what's more "unrealistic" than theaters?)

Does this sound familiar: first I see the blue sky (the horizon) then some buildings show up that make the horizon invisible again. This is outrageous! And, by the way, neither does the Distance Fog (which SL already supports) seem to be able to cover the beautifully blue sky that, well, Should. Have. Been. Invisible. This bloody SL sky is everywhere! I even dreamed it in the night. Eight times. Seriously now, not everybody loves horizons so much as to enjoy seeing them from, say, a very large cave or hall (distance set to 128 or 64 for economical or aesthetic reasons). It's (multicolor/customizable) fog that I would love to see in a large cave or hall! You know, like in a nightclub. And when I teleport and nothing's loaded in that region yet, let there be Fog all around me! I won't mind! And then let the region realistically show its marvels little by little as more of them load (in-world language: "as the fog thins out").

Nobody is interested to see retroactively-invisible horizons, skies, and seas. Period.

And the SL viewer can't fool/please us by making them look beautiful.

You might reply: "But you can simply set distance to 512". Well, I don't care if the distance is 512 meters, 1 meter, or 512000 meters: because I am talking about SOMETHING ELSE. I am talking strictly about utterly inconsistent and totally unaccounted-for behaviors. Magically appearing houses are stupid and inconsistent (tell me one in-world story/reason why they appear like that!?) no matter if they are one meter or one million meters away or if they load in one second or 72 hours. And this stupid behavior is easy to prevent. I want to see Fog thinning out (or a (sur)realistic wind carrying it away) more or less quickly (depending on bandwidth) and letting me see the world, as though it'd been there all along just that I couldn't see it because of natural reasons. Emphasis: "natural reasons". Not "technical issues" (like with the current viewer).

Indeed, the (quickly) vanishing fog could sometimes look just as stupid as the (quickly) popping popcorn! Yet, the former is still (sur)realistic and epic/lyrical, while the latter is freakish/alien and robotic. Multicolor Fog is tonic and artistic, popcorn is moronic and autistic (puns/rhymes intended).

Wouldn't a radio-button menu like this look fantastic:
When object load, they:
( ) pop up
( ) fade in (just for fun)
fog off

I am sure you're already working on improving distance "drawing" and prioritization, which you may think supersedes my suggestion. You're wrong. Your work is important, but totally irrelevant to my suggestion. The viewer will have to be redesigned to implement Fog as its default/base state, an always-available background failsafe. All objects should be born out of the Fog, if you know what I mean. Houses don't blink when you fly around them. Blinking houses are NOT clumsy, artificial, glitchy, and toyish. They are worse: they don't exist. Maybe you won't redesign the viewer tomorrow all right, but at least cut your way to better performance through Fog rather than popcorn!

Actually, a POPCORN CONCEALING (TM) or a CONCEALING FOG or an OBFUSCATION MANAGEMENT feature, supporting a number of methods (like "swarms" (see below!), "steam", etc.) should be a ubiquitous feature in virtual world viewers (unlike games, with their static "worlds" that afford cheap distance handling tricks). And Concealing Fog must become Law and a "mass phenomenon". A symbol of the Metaverse. A Metaverse leitmotif and stereotype. If not because of the paradisiacal atmosphere it inspires, at least because we have no choice.

What I actually (and most passionately) stand for is a new paradigm. A BETTER STORY. Users would love to think of the SL developers as making the SL universe "less and less foggy". Not "less and less laggy". Not "improved cache support". Not "better prioritization". Not anything geekish or ridiculous. Let only geeks see what's behind the scenes (they can even disable Concealing Fog as residents)! Why should the viewer coercively expose us all to such gross geekish/intestine details? Why should we continuously witness their obsessive parade but pretend we aren't noticing it? And why pretend at all, when some Concealing Fog could easily do the pretending for us? Why wouldn't we improve immersion? SL is all about immersion! Don't you see how obviously flawed the current loading model is?! (Re)developing the viewer within the context and the specifics of a fog/concealment paradigm may influence some design decisions for the better and for the love of Cthulhu.

NOTE. Some people might just hate fog. For aesthetic reasons. Or because it's depressing. I sympathize with that, but Fog is obviously the least of two evils: depression and headaches are still more human and immersive than a schizophrenic popcorn universe. Alternatively, while fog is the most common and efficient method nature uses and therefore most recommended as a failsafe and neutral default, you may feel free to come up with some other (sur)realistic effects to cover the popcorn. (Customizable) local / isolated / region_theme-attuned / exceptional / additional / alternative / accompanying phenomena/effects like: sand storms, "clouds" of flying birds, leaves, flower( petal)s, ghosts, swarms, spores, butterflies, snowflakes, (heavy) (acid) rains, all locally-generated by the viewer, can complement the Fog here and there or everywhere. Or flying penises. Or all of them in a soullifting blend. Let our viewer have some autonomy and play the artist. I'm certain it will amaze us.
 
 
 
 
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Now some of the same ideas viewed from other angles (to convince even more voters):
(actually editorial leftovers)

For instance, I imagine a future Metaverse where everything is visible that would naturally be visible, even when using binoculars. No need for fog. But that's a Utopia: incidents and failures always happen. Stuff will fail to load. Some servers crash. Client-side fog will always be our reliable failsafe and best friend. And a perfect quick fix. Here's another example: when you move too fast you are implicitly surrounded by Fog***. Can you imagine any more realistic and (programmatically) simple way to solve the high-speed in-world transportation problem, implementable any time soon? Whatever it is, it should definitely involve Fog as a preliminary/default/failsafe principle/quick_fix. Although nature needs no concealment, often nature itself gives us Fog (clouds) when we travel by plane! That's how usual and unintrusive Fog is! Think in-world train travel: the best solution today would involve fog, motion prediction (trivial with regular transportation), fog again, statistics (objects distribution/frequency, therefore caching eligibility/priority), some more fog, and caching. Of course, we can't develop this within the next couple of hours. So let's just start with Fog.

***A student once objected: "I don't like to be surrounded by fog when I fly fast". Well, even though there's no fog, there's still nothing to see, because nothing is loaded yet, duh! At least the Fog lets you know it [that you don't see anything] in a natural and realistic (or at least surrealistic, i.e. still human) way. With the current viewer you can't see... that you can't see (the sky, the horizon, or the sea) before the interposing objects (oh,-so-magically!) appear. And it's terribly difficult to imagine something more stupid than this.

As I said, even theaters use a curtain while the scene is "loading". Why shouldn't SL?! Just because it doesn't need 15 minutes to "load the scenes"? As I said, even half a second matters! Quick popcorn looks just as ridiculous as slow popcorn. Plus that's not even true: SL needs even more than 15 minutes to load! SL loads and unloads all the time. And no matter what the distance is set to (reasonably), you still get the popcorn effects! (And, remember fast travel?) And the bandwidth or caching don't (and can't) work well enough to cope with this. And they will never do, this will always be an issue. Fog is the future of virtual worlds. It will never stop haunting us.

Indeed, it may be very difficult to add Concealing Fog support in the current viewer and to do it properly. That's because it wasn't developed with it in mind. Please redesign it from scratch with "fog management" in mind. Concealing Fog is essential and should be the underlying principle of anything SL. It may need low-level implementation. It may change the way everything is handled (including megaprims, terrain, sky).

To conclude, nature couldn't support a better way to emulate a curtain than FOG. Neither could I.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I propose Fog! Please vote for my proposed feature.
 
 
 
And here's a comment from my first voter (Charles Dickens, UK):

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.