Why don't thing you look at rez first?

Probably a daft question (and I guess down to the manner in which the SL world is displayed)

But just for curiosty I'll ask the question.

Why is it that something that you are directly looking at (possibly even so it fills your screen) get rezzed before things you are not looking at?

Many a time I've found (and I'm sure you all have too) that I go into a building and see something I might want to buy and I'm trying to read the writing in on the sign.

I move in close, but no, it's all fuzzy and has not rezzed yet, meanwhile the whole rest of the area is rezzing in, loads of things I don't want to look at and yet the sign I'm trying to read is still fuzzy.

It's not until virtually everything else has finished rezzing does my sign eventually and finally become clear enough to read.

Anyone explain this?

I'm just curious

When you look at something, a *request* to download it is sent. But if it is a large texture, it might take a long time to download. Meanwhile, other, smaller textures download and get displayed.

Another possibility is that you are experiencing packet loss, and by bad luck, the requests are the packets being lost.

You can hover your mouse over things you want to rez first. You don't have to touch or right-click on them - just hovering the mouse over them will bump up thier download priority.

Like Lee says though, that doesn't mean that they'll be quick.

Oh, I never knew that

It's just that "sod's law" it always seems to be the 1 thing that "I" want to read is one of the last things to rez!

I'll try that tip next time and see if it works.

hah I get that all the time, panel of oh 20 things for sale,
the one! thing on the wall I do want to see to Buy, is always the last to rezz.

I'd hit edit, alt zoom, use to work, looking away then back always works lol

alt-leftclick scroll-zoom 30 sec later, loaded.

In general, the server doesn't know where you're looking. It just sends you all the objects in the circle surrounding your avatar whose radius is your draw distance (set in preferences).

It would be nifty if it would send you the stuff in the middle of that area first, but I suspect that would be asking it to do a lot more work, slowing things down for everyone.

Of course, as mentioned above, there are ways to give the server clues to help it prioritize what it sends. I believe that trick applies only to textures, on objects that have already been rendered but not yet textured. Since it's textures that take up the bulk of the data, that's probably OK.

If anything, you're probably waiting for a vendor box to rez and the builder/seller used a 1024x1024 texture while the rest of the build was done with 512x512 prefab textures. It's all loading at the same time, but the part that's ACTUALLY worth seeing is taking nearly twice as long to arrive. (^_^)y