[sldev] Reformatting Textures for the cache

Morse Dillon morse at morsedillon.com
Thu Mar 22 18:14:42 PDT 2007


Jason Giglio wrote:
> One minor clarification, I believe all existing 2048 texture assets 
> have been batch-jobbed down to 1024 by Linden Lab.  I seem to remember 
> something in a blog post about that, or a changelog. 

I remember this as a blog post, and I have to say that it was somewhat 
to my chagrin since there are some (albiet few) places where high-res 
textures are very appropriate.  I was amidst putting together a gallery 
of classic impressionist works when this change went down, and in such 
an environment it was 'ok' to wait for these textures to rez so the user 
could examine them in fine detail.  I personally harbor this little tiny 
hope that the 2048 texture will make a return, especially as the average 
amount of video memory increases.

Regardless of my personal feelings though, I think it would be a mistake 
to handcuff ourselves to *any* arbitrary upper limit on texture size, 
just merely in the way of future-proofing.  If the intent is to move to 
a flat file for each texture size, at least make the architecture 
*protocol-extensible* (i.e. detect a new texture size coming down the 
pipe, and if a file doesn't exist for that size, create it) to 
accommodate more flat files for larger image sizes as LL decides to 
loosen restrictions.  Also remember that someday the SL server will be 
'in the wild' and different sysadmins may have differing policies on 
what the largest texture they choose to support will be.

-M


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