Shifting Land?

I am SOOO frustrated about this quirk. I believe its been around for awhile, but I havn't been in a situation where it bothered me this much. Im trying to build an underground lab, but land around the walls shifts as much as 4 meters. Its unpredictable too, certain parts stick out, when others dont.

I am extremely tired of coping with it.. I want it fixed SOO badly.

It occurs when the camera is a certain distance from land extremitys (steep slopes, jagged edges, etc).

Ive attached two pictures of the worst examples that occur on my land. (They will be attached to the next two replys.)

Here's the first picture, where my camera is close up to the land. As you can see, its almost completely vertical.

Ditto.

When flying near my mountain in Lusk, the top of the mountain - which is fairly narrow / thin (along the north-south axis) by land standards - pops in and out of visual existence as you move.

Not an aesthetically pleasing sight. I mean, either it's visible from a certain distance or it's not, but can we make up our minds here?

/end whine

=SV

Gah! The forum silently fails on attachments that are too large.

And here's the second picture, Im about 30 meters away from where I shot the first one, and the mouselook dot is pointing at the problem area.

The reason this happens is because of the resolution of the low level-of-detail JPEG heightmaps SL uses. Because it's a bitmap rather than a vector image, as the level of detail goes down, the resolution decreases. In most cases, this is fine, but it can make for weird quirks, as in the examples you cited.

If the Lindens do fix this --and I agree that they should-- it would likely require a different compression scheme, or possibly eliminating the bitmap-based heightmap altogether -- no small task.

One possible solution could be to use high-resolution heightmaps, and just lower the actual detail on them, along with changing the way the client interprets the heightmap values per pixel. Again, it's not a small change, and would require some clever work to figure out how to keep the polycount low, but it's a lot less work.

That seems like a design overlook... wouldnt having a mipmap-based ground that changes resolution like textures do at a distance, be like... NOT a good idea?

Isnt the ground supposed to be a static entity?

Why must the ground be based upon a texture anyway? And if it must be, why not have the client keep the highest resolution image it loads.

Is there a reason other then network loading times to have a low resolution image at a distance?

==Chris

It's not a bandwidth concern, it's a rendering one. Less detail means fewer triangles. It uses a bitmap to achieve this because it's the easiest way.

A better system could take the magnitude of points into account, so that things like cliffs would be preserved relatively closely, while flat areas or slopes could be drawn with fewer polygons.