[sldev] Lighter weight client?

Dale Mahalko dmahalko at gmail.com
Thu Feb 14 09:28:48 PST 2008


It's probably workable on a system with no dedicated 3D, if you split
the user interface and chat away from the render window. Then you can
have the 2D UI  elements (object editor, texture picker, script
editor) large and full-screen, while the actual 3D world view shrinks
to say 320x240 to reduce the rendering load.

I've often wondered if the render distance could be hacked to go lower
than 64 meters. If you have a very small screen and a smaller FOV than
normal, you aren't going to be able to see the distant vistas all that
well anyway, so just pull it back further to say 32 meters. That's
still a reasonably large viewspace, and it cuts the object and texture
load by a quarter, vs 64 meters.

It would probably end up looking like DOOM, except with a chat window. :-)


An even more interesting question is the age issue, since LL is so far
choosing to make K-12 educational use of Second Life almost
impossible. How can I set up an elementary-level educational island in
the teen grid, where adult staff members, mentors, and other
professional educators can freely come and go? Apparantly all adults
of any kind whatsoever are not allowed on the teen grid, so there goes
that plan.

These access policies may be even more of a technical challenge than
the problem of trying to do 3D on a processor that doesn't need a
cooling fan. OLPC Second Life may have to wait until the release of
privately operated gridservers, so that we can overcome LL and their
overly protective child/adult grid access rules.

- Scalar Tardis / Dale Mahalko


On 2/14/08, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> The XO has a 433 MHz AMD Geode LX processor, and no 3D acceleration
> hardware. Memory is 256 MB, and there is 1 GB of NAND flash.


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