[opensource-dev] Draw Distance

[Henri Beauchamp]

On Sat, 21 Aug 2010 13:29:12 -0700 (PDT), aklo at skyhighway.com wrote:

> There was some talk lately about draw distance.  i mentioned that from my
> place if i have my draw distance turned up over about 150 i can almost
> count on crashing when i tp.  i'm really sorry i can't describe the
> problem any better than that.  If someone wants to tell me how i could
> understand it better, i'd love to listen?
> 
> Anyway, i mentioned in mail to this list that it would be really cool if
> there were an onscreen widget like the movement & camera controls that
> made draw distance a lot easier to change.  Please forgive me for not
> having already figured out how to do that myself.  Just sayin' tho, it
> would be really nice if, like for instance, Snowglobe had either a mouse
> gesture, keyboard short cut, or onscreen widget (all three?) for rapidly,
> easily changing draw distance,  i think it's a function that lots of
> people would use heavily.  i know there's performance concerns, but if,
> for instance, the onscreen widget included a simple performance bar
> indicator that went down as the draw distance was turned up, that would
> communicate pretty well to all the people who didn't know better for
> whatever reason.
> 
> The tp crash i get is just one more reason to make the setting easy to
> deal with.  Besides, to me it seems like such a natural part of camera
> controls that i don't know why it's not there already?  If it was me
> adding the feature i'd put it in the camera controls widget.  i'd been
> using SL for several months before i even realized that draw distance was
> configurable.

You just described what already exists in the Cool VL Viewer (which v1.25
branch is also based off Snowglobe v1.5): http://sldev.free.fr/

Henri.