Tree questions

Okay, this is driving me bonkers. Did they make some changes to the Linden trees while I was gone last year? Because the park that was lovely from the day I planted it until this time last year now looks like crap. The Linden pines that I use to love now look more like badly used bottle brushes than they do trees. It's almost impossible to click on the things unless you're standing right next to the trunk -- something I never had a problem with before. And half the time the trunks render as only paper-thin even with the tree rendering at Mid, which is something I only once in a while had happen before, even running with trees at low. It's bad enough that my skies don't render anymore thanks to Windlight, I really don't want to replace all my Linden trees with primmy and expensive ones.

In fact, even my prim trees look worse these days. I've been seeing all sorts of prim plants lately, mine and other people's, that are supposed to be completely transparent on the edges but instead stay permanently gray so that the prim borders are plainly visible. It doesn't seem to be a rezzing lag issue, because everything else rezzes fine around them, it's just the alpha texture isn't rezzing. *is clueless* Help?

And while I'm on the subject of trees ... any great new botanists come on the scene last year? I know the old ones, Botanical, Lilith Heart, Fate Gardens, Creative Fantasy, but anyone new I should look at? I'm particularly looking for temperate woodland trees and understory plants, affordable and not too primmy of course, especially trees with sculpted trunks. I'm going for a realistic look with maybe just a touch of magic, so I'm not interested in cutesy or gothic styles (i.e., tiny lizards are good, giant ladybugs and butterfly poofers are ... not).

They turned down the level of detail on the Linden trees to help with lag issues for many residents. You can adjust it higher by going into your debug settings (under the advanced menu) and selecting RenderTreeLODFactor. Try it at about 2.0 and see if that helps. This can affect your fps on a slower computer.



if they're remaining gray, then I would assume it's a lag issue, or something else that's keeping it from fully resolving.



Try the New Trails sim. Also look for Keith Extraordinaire's trees.

Everything in SL is looking a bit more ragged to me all the time. And laggier too. I always assume it's because my computer is getting older while new graphics features like reflections and shadows are being added. I take photos fairly often and I'm always changing all my settings depending on what I'm shooting.

Elgyfu Wishbringer (Tin Teddy) does some wonderful copy/mod trees that come in both the traditional three-prim version and a one-prim sculpty version. You get both types when you buy the pack.

Then there's Tistrah Oh (GuTi Extravagant), and I second Marianne's recommendation of Vitrail Illios (New Trails).

I like New Trails also.

Some other tree landmarks in my inventory are:

Botanical at Straylight
Garden World
Bridgets
Happy Mood
Flower Feast
Organica

Marcel Flatley has some nice 1 prim trees.

So what's your tird question?

They screwed up Linden Trees four times in the past couple of years.

1. Windlight. The new tree standups are, for no reason I can comprehend, completely different from the 3d versions.

2. They changed the number of versions and added one that uses triangles instead of triangular prisms for the limbs. There is no good reason for this.

3. They changed the level of detail, as Marianne noted.

4. They turned off swaying by default in 1.23.

I do not comprehend what they're thinking of.

BWAHAHA!

You could always try the lovely trees in Zindra.

So what are the other two questions?

Pep (Still laughs at the thought of Phil Lynott in the US)

Argh. Well, at least now I know I'm not going crazy imagining things with the Linden trees. So nice of them to completely screw up my landscaping -- which since it's a woodland, is the most important part of the parcel -- for no good reason. Yes, they were laggy, but if I thought the trees were worth it with my older video card and sucky net connection, they were NOT causing enough lag to be worth changing for everybody. It's not like anyone troubled by the lag couldn't just turn trees off temporarily.

Thanks for the store recommendations, folks! Most of those I hadn't heard of yet.

What I have figured from what I've heard over time, they're considered laggy. Perhaps there's some issue with them that causes some trouble, I don't know. I suspect, though, that they can't get rid of them without breaking content in every single region.

Unfortunately, rather than try to fix what's there, the answer seems to be nerfing them. Which is unfortunate.

Me, I *still* want SpeedTree.

Uni Ninetails in Winterfell. Must. See.

It's worse than that. They've made changes that have nothing to do with performance. When they went to Windlight, they changed the geometry of the trees. This made some of them (for example, pine trees) taller. It would not have hurt the performance to increase the height of the standups to match. It would not have hurt the performance to reduce the length of the limbs so the trees matched the standups. But no, they didn't bother doing either, so now when you fly over a forest of pine trees they *pop* up when you get close enough.

I don't care about Speedtree (which would probably not be allowed in the open source clients anyway), but they could certainly implement https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-303

One thing I did notice is that when 1.23 is set up to render shadows, the trees look great. I think they also don't suddenly snap to a simpler version as you move away like they used to. I don't use shadows most of the time because the frame rate is much slower, but in the future..............