why do flags wave like crazy when you near them?

Just a general question, and perhaps only applicable to some.

But why do (some) flags wave about like crazy when you are close to them, but as you move away they slow down and hardly move?

Just wondering

Avatar movements participate in the wind fluctuation in SL

Or at some point it was true...


Also flexible prims have level of details and the closer you gets the more complex they are.

Thanks.

This is only relative to my camera postion and not my Avatar by the way.

I kinda guessed it was something along the lines of "you see more things the closer you get) it just that flags seem to chow this the most.

From a diatance they hardly move and when you just move your camera in they flap around like crazy.

That's a design to try to minimize client-side lag when there's a lot of moving objects about. Things move less (and less smoothly) the farther away it is. Same with avatars. If you ever notice a club full of avatars dancing, you'll notice that past a certain distance, the avatar imposter kicks in. They're rendered 2-D, and their movements are not updated anywhere near as often on screen.

Most graphics in SL, including avatars as well, have about 3 levels of 'clarity' built into them. Whenever you upload an image, for whatever reason, it makes 3 copies, I think it's 3 anyway. One hi rez, one medium and one 'thumbnail' or filler image. This is used as people said to counter lag and give the client a bit of a break.

So I would assume that SL renders all the far away graphics with the lowest versions it can find. I guess that would include physics and inworld wind.

That's called mi mapping, it's usually to lighten the load of the textures on the graphic card memory when they are seen from afar.

As for the prims yeah they have several 'lods' and i believe the flexible prims have a variable number of "bones" used for animating them, when seen from afar they prolly behave very stiffly because only a single "bone" is used (opposed to 3 if i remember on full lod)

Thanks for the replies.

Very interesting

So that means ladies can't see my willy from too far away... LOL

It's the small blessings that make SL worth while...

I rather like the way flexible items move as your camera passes them (hair, trees, skirts etc), for whatever reason. It adds a touch of realism, or at least an SL sort of realism.

/me is used to people waving flags as he passes by . . .

Pie (*waves back in royal acknowledgement*)

I think something else is going on here besides the LoD factor, at least when one first cams in on a flexi. It seems as if the viewer suddenly recalculates how the thing should flex and gives it an abrupt shake before settling down to normal.

At Qarl's office hour yesterday, I learned that flexies have just 8 "flex" vertices to keep the computation tractable; this limit will also apply to the flexi-sculpties that he's just finished up. (There was an earlier third-party viewer attempt at this, with some math flaws he fixed.) This won't be in viewer 1.23 (not even in RC yet), and may or may not make it into 1.24.

They are politic about it, but it's clear that developers are getting frustrated by the QA bottleneck.

Flexi sculpties?! It's the end of Second Life!

I have noticed that about flexies too. It's like they're almost stiff until you cam on them. Then they abruptly unfurl. This is more noticable with those more influenced by wind. I always thought it could be a cool intentional effect but never could figure out how to exploit it.

That's correct; only the men can.

Is there something to be done about the QA bottleneck, such as, for an obvious but not necessarily very good example, hiring more QA staff, or is it just part of the process that no one likes but can't be eliminated?

Sigh, it would be a lot more impressive to have flexy sculpties if they weren't going to be gray deformed flexy sculpties that sometimes vanish from your inventory and which when used in vehicles can't be counted on to survive sim crossings.

Having the collision boundary match the visible appearance would increase the cool factor by several thousand times.

Better wavy tendrils aren't nearly as good as seamless sim borders and objects that are there when you look at them, with their textures in place, like was promised on the secondlife.com website 5 years ago.

Probably "QA bottleneck" is too narrow a characterization. I think the frustration is about the overall delay between Development completing a feature or bug fix and its released availability. Some of that is QA, some is release management--and all of it is the culture shock of increased discipline on what must have been a pretty open-loop process before.

And then there's frustration with doing exactly what we've been demanding: fixing what's wrong with higher priority than introducing new functionality. It's reportedly difficult to get work approved on anything but modest new features, no matter what cool shiny new thing a developer might want to make. And I think that's lead to some dissatisfaction (or attrition?) among old-timers accustomed to a more free-wheeling environment.

That's not to say the bugs should go unfixed, nor that the priorities should be less focused. But as with all things, it comes with a price.

Tha's a blessing.