[sldev] P2P/Squid Web Textures: Enabling Greater Quality Images - draft 2

[Simon Nolan]

All this talk of Squids and Amazon S3 stores and Torrents is nice,  
but why? Each viewer instance already has a texture cache. Instead of  
mucking around with external services, can't our viewers just talk to  
each other and share the textures in our caches?

Why do we need a tracker? If you're in a sim, you already have a list  
of others who have the textures that you need -- though I'm not sure  
about how to go about resolving that list of residents in a sim into  
P2P connections. The only use for external services/caches would be  
for when you're the only person in a sim, and that's usually when I  
*don't* have a problem with textures.

Why are we talking about Torrents? It appears to be suboptimal for  
small files, particularly sculptie textures. Should we consider our  
own p2p protocol, or basing it on something that avoids the ramp-up  
issues (and avoiding "tit for tat") in BitTorrent? (And I think part  
of the reason Torrent keeps coming up is that's what was in Dzonatas'  
original post.)

Since DSL and other internet services are asymmetric, if I go to a  
busy, complex sim, what's to prevent my uplink from becoming  
saturated with texture sharing, lagging my client because it can't  
squeeze in a message to the sim?

Why do we need lossless textures for anything except sculpties? Not  
to sound like I'm saying, "Textures are good enough for me, and dog- 
gone it, they're good enough for you," but really, the textures I  
upload look fine. The only problem I have is not that they're lossy- 
compressed, but that they're not big enough. I can easily see pixels  
on low-resolution textures on large objects, and even some not-so- 
large objects. It has nothing at all to do with compression.  
Honestly, though, I'm not crazy bout lagging my viewer client-side  
with huge textures, regardless of where they're downloaded from.

Dzonatas said that artists want lossless compression for their work,  
but I wonder if they're double-compressing their images on upload. Do  
they save them as JPEG from their image editor, then upload them  
which compresses them again? I only ever upload Targas so that  
there's only one round of lossy compression, and I get excellent  
results.

In all honesty, I'm not sure that P2P and larger/lossless images need  
be tied together. In fact, if we could just get web textures, then  
people would be free to host their own Squid caches with Dijjer  
enabled and off we go. Of course, if someone stops paying their  
hosting fees, their stuff goes buh-bye. LL-hosted textures would then  
benefit from a custom client-side P2P that shares textures between  
residents visiting the same sim.