[sldev] Rendering Limits

[Melinda Green]

That's an interesting suggestion, Nexii. I'm not sure how the LL 
designers feel about all those Windlight preferences but I wouldn't be 
surprised if they'd mostly prefer to hide or eliminate most of them. 
There's always a tension between number of controls and the 
all-important SL learning curve.

One way to break this logjam is to start using the new XUI features to 
allow external designers to create custom UI without the need for 
developers to hook them in and compile entire custom viewer binaries and 
then update them with each viewer version. Skinning is the first step on 
that road but there is a lot of other useful stuff under the hood that 
can also be used today. My favorite is the "control_name" XUI tag which 
lets you associate check box and slider values with particular saved 
settings. When you load a floater or other XUI element containing a 
check box or slider with that tag, then it takes it's initial value from 
the named saved setting and automatically saves back out modified values 
as the user interacts with those controls.

This is extremely powerful and should let you create your custom panel 
to control any of the boolean or real valued settings that you see in 
the debug settings floater. The only thing really missing here (other 
than support for more control types) is the ability to launch a custom 
floater. Ideally that would come with the badly needed keyboard 
remapping functionality to allow you to specify a hot key to load a 
named floater. (Hint: Great Snowglobe feature here!) Since we don't have 
that yet, you'd probably have to append your controls to some existing 
floater if you want to add controls without programming, but that 
shouldn't be too awful.

-Melinda

Nexii Malthus wrote:
> I think by spatial groups you could consider how dense an area is.
>
> We really should open many more options on the preferences menu. 
> Perhaps it should branch off into a seperate menu due to the relevant 
> complexity, imagine how complex the windlight sliders are, but they 
> are also nicely dispersed into their relevant categories and sections. 
> We should aim to achieve the same, not to mention the explanations 
> that were provided in the WindLight menu were pretty cool and awesome 
> to understand what the settings do.
>
> WindLight is a mere single subsystem of the entire graphics system, 
> why can't we have the same attention put into other areas in terms of 
> control via the UI?
>
> There are many hidden settings, some that are not even affected by the 
> more generalised "Low, Medium, High, Ultra" that have an impact on FPS 
> and the experience.
>
> L$0.02.
>
> - Nexii Malthus
>
> On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 7:50 PM, Harleen Gretzky 
> <gretzky.harleen at gmail.com <mailto:gretzky.harleen at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     It appears to be more than just jewelry that is effected.
>     VWR-14049 and VWR-14146 are builds that are effected also. When
>     posing this question I was really trying to understand how the
>     rendering limits work. For instance, does the renderMaxNodeSize
>     limit apply to the entire scene, or only to portions of the scene?
>     Does it apply to avatars as well as objects? It seems to have
>     something to do with 'spatial groups' but what are 'spatial
>     groups'? Is renderMaxNodeSize the only rendering limit?
>
>     If renderMaxNodeSize is the only setting that, I would think the
>     best solution as has been suggested on the JIRAs and here is to
>     move the setting onto the Graphics preference tab. Since it seems
>     to be a little low for those running graphics at High and Ultra it
>     should probably be increased for those users. So maybe something like:
>
>     Low - 2048
>     Mid - 4096
>     High - 8192
>     Ultra - 8192
>
>     Then if a user chooses Custom there should be a slider control to
>     allow it to be set to the value of their choice. Just my two cents.
>
>     -Harleen
>
>
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