New Prim and Particle types: Tile, Sprite

I would like to suggest the following prim and particle types.

New prim type: Tile.
This multi-faced prims will be flat, nearly 2-dimensional. All of its faces will face the same direction.

Advantage: This sort of a prim would allow for better XyText style and icon display when making prim-based "screen" displays in SecondLife. Rather then messing with a block prim to achieve three sides on the same side, why not make ALL the sides of the prim show at the same direction, in a grid-cell like, predictable manner? Or, atleast, more then 3 of them.


New particle source pattern: Sprite
Particles are 2D sprites that look the same from everywhere we look. This is a major advantage for certain graphic uses. Unfortunatly, it is very hard to make a good use of particles for display, as particles have an expiration limit and constantly need to generate new ones. Setting any of these settings badly would cause either a flicker or a bad "ghosting" when the source is moved - or alternativly, it will max out your particle limit.

What I suggest is adding a boolean flag to the llParticleSystem source pattern variable: PSYS_SRC_SPRITE, TRUE

When activated, the particle system will sustain a single particle. This particle will not expire. New particles will not be generated.

Avantage: This sort of a system would be excellent for all sorts of applications requireing clear, visible icons and objects that need to look the same from every angle.

Possible Problems: This leads to a problem of how to remove this particle later since particles are generaly removed by deleting their setting string and then letting the particle fired to expire.


These two suggestions are something that have been requested for many times.

Please concider.

A tile or grid prim would rock. As I said back in March:
/13/34/40320/1.html

A sprite prim would be cool too. Especially if you could scale them larger than the max 4m you can get with a particle.

People already do that sprite thing with particle systems that drop one big, long-lived particle every 30 seconds or so. I've seen it used to make a nice big sign that can be seen from any angle to advertise their store. Usually it's placed on a 16m^2 plot at flying altitude. Anyway, I could see advertisers like that enjoying a feature like this and making good use of it -- take that how you will.

Cshard, what the heck, xytext? We're going to have HTML on a prim and you still want a better xytext?

I like this idea of a single persistent sprite particle that lasts as long as needed. However, I would prefer to have a prim-based sprite that can be scripted for various textures, positions and off/on.

I've just run into a problem with particles. They no longer work very well for me. I've upgraded my video card, therefore allowing me to set a much higher draw distance. But, the higher the draw distance, the more erratic particle generation becomes. At 96m, I can run 0.1 rate/0.1 lifetime single particles and see them flash very quickly. At 288m, I get maybe one particle every 10-15 seconds or nothing at all. That happens at both the max 8192 max particle, and at a lower 1024 setting.

So basically, I need a prim that can act as a sprite.

In the industry we call this type of particle renderer type a Singleton, it is one of the cheapest type of particle to be created, normally has only a rotational value and scaling values, no physics options or anything like that. Just texture, scale, rotation and life. I would like to see this as well. However a better solution in my opinion than a particle type like this would be a billboarding function added to sl for use on normal prims. With the ability to lock off certain rotational axis.