[sldev] visual muting

Eric M. Tulla tulla at lindenlab.com
Tue Feb 5 12:28:38 PST 2008


Dale Glass wrote:
> On Tuesday 05 February 2008 20:41:16 Eric M. Tulla wrote:
>   
>> Using impostors for visual muting allows you to display a muted avatar
>> using only 2 triangles (a billboard) with minimal pre-computation, while
>> still preserving form.  Using LOD would require greater overhead for the
>> actual muting and less of a performance gain, especially if you want to
>> preserve shape (even with a really low LOD you'll still be drawing many,
>> many more triangles per frame).
>>     
>
> The problem I see with that is that my reason for wanting to visually mute 
> somebody is that I don't want to see them, because they're say, wearing a 
> mature attachment in a PG area. 
>
> I've had plans for some time to do some related work and will get back to 
> it as soon as I finish some more urgent pending things.
>
> But my basic idea is to make the viewer fully mute avatars and all their 
> stuff that are banned on the parcel the user is standing on. The current 
> situation is that if you ban somebody they still can hang around the ban 
> border and play sounds, use particles, etc. 
>
> My plan is to mute banned people completely. Make them fully invisible, 
> including the avatar, attachments, sounds, any objects they own and 
> particle effects.
>   
Dave's solution handles this.  His description to this list of the 
implementation specifically mentions that visually muting an avatar 
renders them into an impostor without attachments or textures (just a 
grey shape).  So even though they wouldn't be fully invisible, you 
shouldn't be able to see anything offensive or performance intensive 
being rendered for visually muted avatars.  This is actually preferable, 
since the server will still be calculating physics collisions between 
you and all avatars (visually muted or not), so making them fully 
invisible would have potential consequences on the ease with which you 
can move around a scene.


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