[sldev] New Feature: Mute Visibility

[Able Whitman]

Rather than trying to make "visibly muted" object invisible, perhaps it
would be possible to  just make them less intrusive? I think it would be
possible, in practice, to have the client do the following for such objects:

* render them with just the default grey texture
* render them at 50% transparency (or perhaps a configurable transparency)
* do not apply any client-side llTargetOmega() effects, so they do not spin
* don't pass on any "touch" events, for ad prims that hand out landmarks or
notecards
* don't play any sounds which eminate from the object

That way you could still see the objects and avoid them while walking /
flying, but at least they wouldn't be as annoying.

One possible downside I can see is that the list of "visibly muted" objects
could grow to be quite large, and it might become a hinderance to rendering
performance to check objects against this list. Of course, one must not
optimize prematurely, so perhaps this won't be a problem. :)

I don't have a lot of familiarity with the rendering pipeline, but it seems
like the client constructs a list of all objects that are within the view
distance. Perhaps it would be possible to modify the code that caches
texture and rotation information from the server such that it marks an
object as "muted" just at the time the object is added to the list, instead
of special-casing the rendering of a "muted" object at every frame that is
rendered.

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of being able to
"visibly mute" objects.

--Able


On 6/1/07, Tateru Nino <tateru.nino at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Physics and collisions all hapen at the server, I believe, so I don't
> believe the option to affect third-party tangibility is practicable.
>
> Nicholaz Beresford wrote:
> >
> > I guess from the gut I'd also say to not extend that
> > on the avatars.  But with objects, I guess a combination
> > of invisible and and phantom would be an interesting
> > thing (dunno if that's possible from the viewer alone).
> >
> >
> > Nick
> >
>
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