[sldev] Concept of "loaded avatar" was changed?

[Melinda Green]

Kelly wrote:
>
>> Kelly,
>>
>> Thank you for the additional background and technical details. It 
>> does sound as if a URL-based system should work well for many 
>> temporary textures. It may also be a good short-term solution for 
>> handling baked textures but I suspect it's not the best long-term 
>> solution. That's because I'm beginning to realize that baked textures 
>> are conceptually very different from other temporary textures. Even 
>> though they change often, they're also far more precious. My baked 
>> textures are almost as important to my presentation as my displayed 
>> name which is why I'm starting to think of them as part of my agent 
>> data. I would like to have more direct control of the baked textures 
>> that I use to present myself to the world, even possibly to the point 
>> of being able to edit them in Photoshop and uploading to SL. I'm not 
>> saying that I want to do that today but I'm saying that I think it 
>> will be important to stop thinking of these as ordinary temporary 
>> textures.
>>
>> -Melinda
> I do not think there are any other baked textures in our system, 
> although it is possible someone has piggy backed onto this feature for 
> something else the entire setup is specific to avatar baked textures.  
> In other words there is no such thing as an "ordinary temporary 
> texture".  

Avatar impostors are certainly another case of temporary texture, and 
emailed snapshots might be another.

> While they are important, what makes them "temporary" is their unique 
> property that they can be regenerated.  If the baked texture is gone, 
> which is expected to happen since cleanup of the texture files 
> happens, hosts go down etc, we can ask the client to regenerate the 
> textures.  

I don't buy the idea that they're temporary because they can be 
regenerated. That may *allow* them to be temporary, but doesn't imply to 
hat they need to be.

> This changes if you can make your own custom baked textures, at which 
> point they just aren't temporary any more - but they also aren't auto 
> generated.   Before 1.23 this was actually a semi reasonable behavior 
> (assuming everything worked right) since you could still see avatars 
> correctly if their baked textures weren't there - you would just 
> composite on the fly for a couple of avatars.

I don't see what auto-generation has to do with this. The contract is 
that it's the viewer's responsibility to serve up baked textures in 
order to express how the user wants others to see them. I like the fact 
that the standard viewer can produce those textures but it could 
certainly serve them up from disk or URL just as easily, with no one 
else the wiser.

Imagine the case where I might use very different clients at different 
times. I might use the standard viewer to produce baked textures, but 
later use the SLIM client to keep in touch with friends while I'm on the 
road. I'd certainly want my friends to see me with the textures that I'd 
previously produced, even though my simple IM client doesn't deal with 
textures at all and certainly wouldn't serve up baked textures. That 
suggests that for this all to work, the baked textures need to be able 
to be accessible wherever the rest of my agent data is found.
>
> The problem is as you state though - these textures are very important 
> and any hiccups in this system become very apparent and a huge 
> concern.  And we have never managed to get the system exactly perfect.

I agree, and I suspect that the reason we never got it right is because 
we never realized just how important baked textures are. The fact that 
they are composited from other textures suggested that this was just 
some sort of caching problem. When all the layer data for one avatar was 
available to all viewers, that was partly true but now we're beginning 
to realize that they are more than that and that this is not about 
caching. I think the right way to think about this problem is the same 
as we do with our profile photos. If a person's profile image is not 
available, then the viewer shows the stand-in question mark image which 
is the 2D equivalent of Ruth. I think it's great that the standard 
viewer is capable of automatically producing my baked textures but that 
doesn't change the fact that they are as much a part of my identity as 
my profile photo. More so probably.

-Melinda