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

Argent Stonecutter secret.argent at gmail.com
Mon Jul 9 14:03:37 PDT 2007


> In order to improve the quality of textures without an increase in  
> cost
> on the sims, we need to use P2P Web textures.

I don't agree.

There are a number of ways we can improve the quality of sculpted  
prims without a corresponding increase in cost to the sims.

1. Support PNG as well as JPEG2000 in hosted textures.
2. Create a new texture type for sculpt textures that is a lossless  
format (such as PNG) but limited to 64x64.
3. Support a non-texture format for sculpted prims, such as zlib- 
compressed obj or a more compact format than obj.
4. Support PNG as well as JPEG2000 in hosted textures, but only have  
the client use PNG for sculpt textures... have it display the  
lossless format as "MISSING IMAGE" when applied to a prim surface or  
particle texture, etcetera...

Most of these would actually *reduce* the cost, since a 64x64 PNG is  
smaller than a 256x256 JPEG2000.

1 might lead to a few people uploading PNG where it's not needed, but  
the increase in size would be relatively small, and owuld be offset  
over time by the effect of smaller sculpt textures.
2 and 4 are equivalent, but 4 is easier to implement, and would  
reduce the total cost of textures to the sim due to the smaller  
sculpt textures.
3 has the potential of significantly decreasing the size of sculpted  
prim data, while increasing the quality of sculpted prims more than  
any image format could.

Also:
5. With or without any of options 1, 2, and 4, use the high six bits  
from the Alpha channel as two additional bits each for X, Y, and Z,  
increasing the range of each coordinate from 8 to 10 bits (0..1024  
instead of 0..256).


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