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

SL - Farallon Greyskin sl at phoca.com
Sun Sep 23 22:14:45 PDT 2007


There are a couple of places that SL is strangely non-async :( Uploading 
files also halts the viewer and causes some funny artifacts when is starts 
up again. WHY? Start a new thread for the file dialog...

One of those things that /should/ be fixed but is unromantic and not really 
"problematic" and so will stay that way forever I would guess ;)

Farallon

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lawson English" <lenglish5 at cox.net>
Cc: <sldev at lists.secondlife.com>
Sent: Sunday, September 23, 2007 10:06 PM
Subject: Re: [sldev] What color should I paint the bike shed?


> 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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