[sldev] Improving rendering sequence

[Argent Stonecutter]

On 2008-01-07, at 11:30, Dave Parks wrote:
> become. In SL, this usually means the performance becomes that of the
> lowest common denominator in terms of what is acceptable. That is, if
> you think performance is important and build a nice house with opaque
> window exteriors and few textures, you'll still have a bad  
> experience if
> your neighbor thinks a flexi-prim bamboo forest is the bees knees.

I've had to put invisiprims behind alpha textured backdrops on a few  
occasions. This works pretty well, because invisiprims invoke  
culling, but the alpha texture and the invisiprim both show the sky.

Question: how do sculpties interact with culling?

A few things that I would like to see in the texture handling, that  
would improve things immensely:

1a. Define some texture as "transparent - never rendered", and stick  
it in the library. If a face uses that texture, throw away its  
geometry completely unless you're in edit mode. Then we can texture  
completely hidden faces with that texture and eliminate their  
geometry. This would be particularly useful for "one sided" prims  
(like signs on walls). As a bonus, this texture would be transparent  
to touch. Or,
1b. Add a prim face parameter "don't render" that you can set from  
script or the editor.

2a. Increase the "hang time" for sculpt textures. Maybe increase  
their priority arbitrarily, or
2b. Implement llSetSculptTextureAnim() with similar parameters to  
llSetTextureAnim()

3. Put the invisiprim textures and a 100% transparent texture in the  
library.

4. If possible, tag textures (on upload, and with a background sweep  
through the db) that have 0 in the alpha channel for every pixel  
throughout so they're all handled by the client as a single 100%  
alpha texture (tel the client the UUID is the UUID of '100%  
transparent' from #3).

5. If possible, remove the alpha channel (on upload, and with a  
background sweep through the db) from textures that have 255 in the  
alpha channel for every pixel, so that textures that get uploaded as  
32 bit by accident quit being alpha hogs.

6a. Load attachments before unattached prims. Load my OWN attachments  
first. Or
6b. Render avatars with unloaded attachments with some kind of  
placeholder.