However, recently I've moved my tower and am running afoul of some clouds as the sim I am in is a mountain range so the ground is much higher.
Now, I'd rather avoid having to move the top parts of my tower into a sky-box or some such, firstly for the extra prims required, and secondly that part of what I enjoy of my tower is running up the spiral ramp
So, in light of occlussion culling which is now making it's preview appearance, I'm wondering if an extension to it might be a good idea?
Basically (for those who don't know) occlussion culling breaks the sim down into chunks, and only renders those chunks that you can see, this greatly speeds up indoor areas and helps in many outdoor areas too.
What I'm thinking, is that leveraging this fact it ought to be possible to somehow use this to keep clouds from intersecting close areas. Even if a room is made of transparent prims (and thus would not normally block things from rendering) it would still be possible to mark that block as 'obscured'. Using this information you can detect areas that are closed off. Now, this would only hold relevance to the area the avatar is in, thus if it is closed off, clouds could be removed?
That may be complicated but it's a thought.
The other alternative, which is quick, simple and probably my preferred method is to add a checkbox to the land tool 'disable clouds'. This is quite simple, by selecting this, clouds are no longer created/rendered directly over your parcel of land. If you want clouds in some areas but not others, then you can break up the land to do this with some disabled as required.