Cross posted from the Hotline to the lindens for comment and a poll
I have a suggestion reguarding textures used in SL. This may be a little difficult to implement in the inital stages and admittedly will not work in all cases but i think it will provide for a much better experience in reguards to how items rez (especially buildings)
When a new texture is uploaded it is analyzed as to the primary color content of the texture and is assigned a numeric value for that color.
the viewer then contains a base set of plain color textures (preloaded) I would recomend at least 256 that can be pulled from. These are then matched to the texture based on a clossest match possible.
Then the veiwer is set so that when you enter an area and the texture for whatever is in the veiwer has not loaded, instead of a Grey wall/pannel ETC in front of you, a wall/panel of SIMILAR color to the final product will apear until the "true" texture is downloaded and appears and all the fine details appear.
also distant objects/buildings can use this base set of textures instead of the "true" to draw at distances of 150-200 meters or so and would be set as low priority for drawing.
as an added feature the person uploading a texture can set the texture to use a SPECIFIC base texture in the properties of the texure if they want to adjust the automatic selection that is made on upload.
I think this would provide for a more colorfull environment and more pleasing experience while the textures are loading as the buildings and envrionement wont look all grey and will actually show up as something similar but MUCH less detailed than the final product.