[sldev] What color should I paint the bike shed?

Lawson English lenglish5 at cox.net
Sun Sep 23 22:06:34 PDT 2007


Tateru Nino wrote:
> Jason Giglio wrote:
>   
>> http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2491
>>
>> VWR-2491 has been kinda bumping around a while, I'd really like to get
>> some consensus before writing the patch.
>>
>> My proposal is to simply get rid of BMP snapshots and make PNG the
>> default format for saving snapshots.
>>
>> So far I've gotten about 50/50 feedback saying "go for it" and "keep
>> BMP as an option".
>>
>> Due to SL's cross platform nature, keeping BMP will likely require new
>> UI on the snapshot floater.    That's not a huge deal, but I'm not
>> sure it's necessary since I still haven't heard any compelling
>> arguments for keeping BMP other than "it's already in there".
>>
>> Does anyone have any compelling reason to keep BMP as an option,
>> including new UI to select the format to save as?
>>     
> I've got very little in the way of qualms about giving BMP the boot -
> except one.
> Writing the snapshot involves (correct me if I'm wrong) two basic
> phases. Encoding the image, and writing it to disk.
> During the encoding stage, the viewer essentially becomes non-responsive
> to the network (okay, this can happen during the write-to-disk phase as
> well, and BMP's are pathetically overweight). All that time taken
> multiplies the odds that the circuit to the primary simulator will break.
>
> That said, if this reduces the overall time that the viewer spends in
> fairyland while packets pile up on the floor, then hooray!
>
>   

Why should this be the case? Asynchronous file i/o has been around a 
long time on home computers. I patched the MacOS's version in the 
mid-80's because SCSI-I wasn't properly defined back then and Apple's 
non-standard implementation depended on timing loops (which our Mac+ 
68020 accelerator card broke) to fake it, but that was 20+ years ago. 
Surely Second Life can save a file to disk without blocking? And why 
should encoding block either? That's just lame.


L.





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