This blows my mind - Why not Rez nearest things 1st?

Perhaps I'm missing the point here but..............

It seems crazy that I TP home and over the next 5 ot 10 seconds I see my whole house being built up before my eyes (furniture in mid air for while) but whilst this is happening I can't open the door of the room (my home location) as the door (2 metres in front of me) has not rezzed yes, and often seems to be one of the last things to actually rez.

Would it not seem logical to rez the items closest 1st (given priority) rather than things further away 1st and making you bump into things in front of your nose as they are still invisible.

Or an I crazy in thinking this would make sense?

Nope, not crazy. I've been experiencing, and thinking, the same things you are.

You are absolutely right!

I noticed that rezzing priority seems to be linked to the camera position. If you zoom in to something, it seems to be loaded sooner. Another tweak to induce texture loading is editing something and immediately closing the edit window.

With the current sluggishness of texture loading you get a lot of practice for playing around with texture loading priorities.

From a user perspective, it makes a lot of sense. But from a 3D rendering perspective, it's much harder to do things in that order.

Think about it this way. If you do the distant object first and then the near object, you can just overwrite the pixels of the distant object with the pixels of the near object. That's easy.

But if you draw the near object first, and then the distant object, you need to figure out which pixels of the distant object you should not be drawing, because there's something in the way. That's a much harder problem.

Except that the client "draws" it even if you can't SEE it!

Stand on one edge of a sim, facing out into a void sim (no actual sim there), and with your back to a high terrain cliff. Look at your frame rate and bandwidth usage.

Turn around and face the cliff. Watch your frame rate plumet and your bandwidth skyrocket as everything in the potential cone of vision on the far side of the cliff gets considered for rendering by the client, even though the only thing it NEEDS to show you is the cliff face.

I know what you are saying for a 2d representation of a 3D view as you are then covering things up that are further away.

However

Would it not actually be faster the other way around?

I mean, if I'm in an enclosed area and it's the 1st thing to rez, then, at that moment in time as far as I'm concered everything is rezzed as it should be. The further away items that are not in my line of sight anyway will rez a little later and by the time I have left my current area and moved towards them, they will be there.

Perhaps

I raised a JIRA on this - suggesting that things which aren't actually in view shouldn't be rezzed or loaded, and that there should be a "first pass" where just object bounding boxes are loaded so that the client can work out what you can and can't see.

I think the people there seemed to think I was mad.

The real mind-blower for me lately is how I've been able to speed textures along simply by hovering my mouse cursor over the face... Even to the point of being able to "write" my initials in the vendor boxes... (O.o)

Big pic warning >> http://jira.secondlife.com/secure/attachment/22334/Demonstration%2Bof%2Bmouse%2Bover%2Bcontrol.jpg << (^_^)y

Well yeah, but the SL viewer carries around a whole bunch of occlusion code to handle just that problem (and try to benefit from it by skipping unseen textures and so on), but it goes partly wasted because things aren't drawn in a smarter order.

I raised a JIRA on this - suggesting that things which aren't actually in view shouldn't be rezzed or loaded, and that there should be a "first pass" where just object bounding boxes are loaded so that the client can work out what you can and can't see.

I think the people there seemed to think I was mad.

Rezzing priority is linked with camera position as well as the object you have your cursor on. You can speed the rezzing of a particular object if you hold the cursor over it and right click, and just leave it highlighted like that. It's just some weird thing they implemented I guess, but it won't help if the object is entirely invisible. Yes I agree the object nearest to the avatar should rez first, as well as the entire floor and walls. Just another thing that they can improve in the next ten years or so.

That's rezzing priority for _textures_ on objects that have already been downloaded, and it's implemented in the client.

The order in which objects are downloaded is defined in the sim using a structure called the interest list, and the interest list is (so far as I can tell) initialized by just loading the objects in the sim in the order of the sim's internal ID for that object. This ID is an integer and it's allocated in the order that objects were initially rezzed in the sim. As far as the user is concerned it might as well be random.

The JIRA proposal I referenced a few messages back is to have this interest list initialized with the objects in the sim in order of distance from the avatar.

Voted.

Simply reduce your draw radius? Not only are those things you can't see not rendered, but they aren't even sent to you!

I used to regularly go to an event that was always very crowded in a laggy sim, we'd try to get there early to be able to have dance balls rez to use, the simplest solution was for one person to go where they were, TP in another with their draw radius set to about 5, voilà, instant rez in a full sim!

(You can set your draw radius under 64 in debug settings, RenderFarClip was it?, I used to keep mine around 50 which seemed very nice and fit in most stores and indoor places, if you want to see farther, just bump it up although you'll have to wait for the further things to rez of course then.)

And also voted!

what i used to do when i entered a store or anyplace that was taking forever to rezz is.. right click the farthest prim then click something to close the pie and things rezz connected to the prim..clicking off to the ground was always best then hitting another prim..if someone was gray and had a prim on them i would click like their hair or belt and they would rez faster..

i still use this on gray images and they seem to rez faster also..it helps speed up the shopping hehehe..
this was back when things used to really rez bad on the older 4 servers..especially when i went to work and had those 15 minute change time delays..that was terrible times then lol
sometimes even 30 minutes just to change a shirt..

That's another reason why some buttons (floating HUD perhaps, or somehting built in the client on screen) that allowed you to click on some pre-defined "DrawDistances" would be great.

Go shopping (inside one store) click on the 50m distance.
Back home ot your island, click on the 200m distance to you can see your neighbours.

That kinda thing.

Just (as I say) seems crazy that I'm standing in my stating location (my home position) and I can't move out of the room as the door that's in front of my nose has not rezzed and I can't even walk as I can't open a door that not rezzed yet.
And yet, I can see things that are 3 rooms away coming into view, before the door in front of me.

I'm certain we have alll had this is shops all the time.

You TP somewhere and see something you like Rex, so you think, "Hey, I'll just start walking towards it, whilst everything is rezzing" you end up bumping into things that have not rezzed yet, and you just don't seem to be able to reach it.

Finally a wall appears in front of you and you realise you have been walking in the wrong direction all along and have to turn around, fint the buildings entrane, go out and then round the back of it, as that's where this thing was all along !!

I keep my draw distance down to 64m even when I am at home, which means that in theory I shouldn't see objects on the far side of my parcel. Nevertheless I can see my neighbour's home and several other objects that should be invisible to me. This doesn't bother me especially but the minimal draw distance does not improve rendering of objects within my home and I have exactly the problem the OP has described even though rendering does not take long enough to be a severe issue.

However, I would be inclined to get out and about more if sims rendered in a logical and orderly fashion around my camera position. There is no enjoyment to be had waiting ad nauseam for distant objects to download willy-nilly over an extended period and I can only busy myself so many times with a cup of tea and a ham sandwich or whatever to avoid the extreme ennui.



I think you may be a little HUD-happy, Piggie. No offense. It isn't exactly rocket science to do Ctrl+P and set an appropriate draw distance in the Graphics tab.

Lately, I've been noticing that scripted objects, like the OP's door, are the ones that are generally slower to rez.

ETA:
It could actually be objects with contents though. I haven't studied it, but I do notice that certain objects in my store consistently rez after those that contain nothing. I'd thought it was scripted ones, but it could be those with any kind of contents. I'll have to take more notice.

Could be. I see a lot of issues with scripting and Mono on the JIRA. It's hard to tell which scripts may be causing problems unless you can see them of course. Still, I get the strong impression Mono isn't all it was cracked up to be.

I can't put what I'm seeing down to Mono - not directly, anyway. Almost all of the scripted objects in my store haven't been recompiled in Mono, but their rezzing is still delayed compared to objects without scripts or contents. It could be a side-effect though - the system needing to do some extra work because there are two different script systems.

I've always found the fact that distance objects seems to want to rez quicker than either you or your immediate surroundingsa mite strange and quite frustrating, sometimes. Personally I think rezzing should be prioritized radiating from your avatar outwards.

I don't really want a HUD as such, but like the have the MiniMap and Camera controls it might be nice to just have a tiny addition to one of these (or another small one) which had say 3 user defined buttons, like 64, 96, 128, 256 or something like that.

As rezzing is one of THE very biggest issues of the SL experience, I just think it would be quite handy

I don't suppose its technically possible to change SL slient settings from a HUD using scripting is it?

I wouldn't know but then again I've never seen the point of looking into it: I put a lot of time and effort into combining/reducing the HUDs and scripted items I wear.

You might try asking the Scripting Tips forum. Lotta brains there just love questions like this.

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: Impossible.