[sldev] WTF happened to my texture?

[SL - Farallon Greyskin]

Using texture offset you can get every character on every prim, you just 
need one prim per character being displayed.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Harold Brown
To: Alan Grimes
Cc: sldev at lists.secondlife.com
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 11:51 PM
Subject: Re: [sldev] WTF happened to my texture?


I guess I should warn you now...  doing text with a texture is NOT going to 
load up in "microseconds".  Nor is it going to be light on prims.  With the 
setup you have chosen the best you can possibly get is 5 characters per 
prim.


On 10/9/07, Alan Grimes <agrimes at speakeasy.net> wrote:
SL has a problem with text.

You can't work with it affordably in-world. You have to pay to upload
each one and then to read it, you have to sit and wait for 20 minutes
(okay 5..) for the damn thing to rez before you can read it.

The simpleton's solution to that is to upload a single texture, a
codepage, and then create letters by mapping different parts of that
codepage to prims. -- too obvious, huh?

Alright, I fired up my old DOS computer. (Yes, I have a DOS computer)
and snagged myself my favorite font library.

I then wrote a program to extract the code page I wanted. 437 FOREVER!!!

It produced a nice little bmp file, 4158 bytes to be exact...

SL didn't like that so I made a PNG of it so that it wouldn't get
corrupted, 3193 bytes. -- pretty nice, huh? =P  (see attached, have a
look at it and then tell me 437 isn't the best codepage ever!!!).

(image specs: 128 x 256 x 1 bit)

The whole point is to make an in-world font system that will be
__FAST__, I mean rez as much text as you like in microseconds!!!

I was thinking oh boy, this'll make me a fortune in lindens!!! --
ignoring the fact that the linden is devaluing right along with the
dollar. =(

Then I PAID LINDENS TO UPLOAD IT!!!! =|

You see, this scheme only works if the font can be uploaded and relayed
to the client in a lossless way. -- being only 3kb, this didn't seem
like an unreasonable demand...

But what I got back seemed to be 256x512, and then downsized to the
origional... It also seems to have been converted to 24 bit, -- an
unspeakable waste for this application, and finally, some kind of
smoothing operation was performed!!!! -- It may just be that the
GL_LINEAR texture filter was left on... =\

The final result is totally unusable as a font system. =(

When I cough up L$10 to upload a texture I damn well expect that what I
get back is what I uploaded!! =\

BTW, Ron Paul has an in-world pavilion.


--
Buy Ron Paul's Money! =)
http://www.libertydollar.org/ld/ronpauldollar
Soundest investment on the planet!


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