[sldev] WTF happened to my texture?

[SL - Farallon Greyskin]

Ah, yes of course, I was thinking more along the lines of a 20 character display or something where it is possible to be very very fast and not overly script burdensome, but an 80x25 display is completely different :D

Basic drawing/font rendering on a prim is definitely a utility of great signifigence, however it's done. Hopefully we can see that done sooner rather than later and I too like the idea of a drawing api rather than html at this time. In fact if it were done completely as an add on for the Open Source viewers, and assuming it was done in a reasonable way. Maybe it would be more likely that it would get migrated to the main client sooner rather than later? :)

Farallon
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Harold Brown 
  To: SL - Farallon Greyskin 
  Cc: sldev at lists.secondlife.com 
  Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2007 11:36 AM
  Subject: Re: [sldev] WTF happened to my texture?


  You misunderstood what I was saying.

  Using 1 prim per character any decent display will exceed the link limits by a large margin.

  An 80x25 display (DOS screen anyone) is 2000 characters that's 2000 prims or roughly 8 individual linksets.
  Using a 5-face prim will reduce that down to 400 prims, still 2 individual linksets.
  Using the 5-face prim with the 2-char XyText font will bring that down to 200 prims.  A much more manageable size.

  And then how are you going to control the texture offset in each prim?  A script in each prim?  Master / Slave scripts in the root prim?  It's still not going to change and display text in microseconds... you're talking something that will take 1-3 seconds to change and fully render. 

  On 10/10/07, SL - Farallon Greyskin <sl at phoca.com> wrote: 
    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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