Hi all,
Just a quick idea I had, while once against fighting some of the terrible texture distortions we get in SL on some prims (notably any of the prims based on a modified cube - triangle, pyramid etc). There are many threads on the forums about the problems these can cause, with people ending up either living with the distortion, having to change to a different (sometimes less appropriate) texture, or even trying to inversely distort the texture in their chosen image editor.
In any other modelling system, you can specify the UV texture co-ordinates for a vertex of a polygon, so if you are putting a texture onto a surface, you don't get distortions. Instead SL just tries to squash a square texture onto whatever shaped side you have, and not even overall, but on a per-triangle basis (hence the majority of problems).
Since SL already deals with individual textures per side of a prim, it already knows what a side is - surely it wouldn't be hard to extend that with a set of UV's if specified by the builder. As long as it is something reasonable like a 0.00 <-> 1.00 range (enough for reasonable definition), it shouldn't take up much room in the data stream.
I know we hear that, when such texture distortion bugs are discovered, Linden Labs are working to resolve it.... with this system, we wouldn't have these problems in the first place, for current prims or any new ones they decide to add.
it is after all already done for clothing the avatars, so the system is in place in part (though possibly hard-coded within the Avatar system at the moment). It could potentially help bandwidth as well, with less individual textures required for a object.
Anyway, just my two hap'orth,
Elkestra Twilight