Improvements to mapping and upgrade to SLurl.com

James! Is there any likelihood that we will be able to have markers that change size with zoom level? This feature seems to have been removed in the new version.

Also, if the the images are on the SL map does that mean they have UUIDs that we can also get access to?

@Elanthius - I don't know the Javascript well enough to fix that issue. If someone has a patch that fixes it I can incorporate the patch into the official slmapapi.js

For the time being, the viewer will continue to use UUID-based JPEG2000 textures for the world map. "The time being" means months. We can't stop doing that because all existing clients (and 1.22) use that system for image display.

We might change that in the future to only use JPG tiles. I would like to. We have never provided an official mechanism to access the UUIDs of these images. The fact that these images display on in-world objects is, in my opinion, a hack. It's a cool hack, and one I wish I thought of, but they're not images a user uploaded and I cannot promise they will always work. We went through this once before with residents who were hard-coding image UUIDs from the client-side UI texture cache -- we removed a bunch of images that were unused (notice the client download for 1.21 was 22 MB, versus 1.20 at 34 MB) and this broke some content.

The reason this it is not trivial to preserve the existing UUID image system is:
* Our entire JPEG2000 image pipeline assumes images, once given a UUID, never change. This allows us to do lots of caching. Changing it would be really hard.
* Detecting whether or not a region has changed "enough" to merit a new image is also hard. It's harder than just generating a new image. Likewise doing image download / decompress and compare before deciding a new one is worthwhile is also harder than it sounds.

Anyway, that's my take on things. Hope that's informative.

James

You are curious! so here is the answer : The document located at <http://www.anna-tools.com/AnnAF/pages/topo_session/topo_session.php> was successfully checked as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. This means that the resource in question identified itself as "XHTML 1.0 Transitional" and that we successfully performed a formal validation using an SGML, HTML5 and/or XML Parser(s) (depending on the markup language used).

To show your readers that you have taken the care to create an interoperable Web page, you may display this icon on any page that validates. Here is the HTML you could use to add this icon to your Web page: etc......

I don't know exactly how the validator is working and if it is validating ajax codes, but at least for the calling page , all is OK.

I suspected as much would be the case. Generally speaking if they're getting XHTML right, they're not going to cheap out on scripting. I'm inclined to believe that this page is doing the right thing, IE's just demonstrating flagrant standard noncompliance in this case.

Thanks for answering. I know it would be hard, but nothing worthwhile is ever easy. I hope at some point LL revisits this, having the ability to render maps in-world was a very useful feature. But given the choice I'd rather have HTML on a prim anyway, so feel free to work on that instead.

heehee. "wasn't an intended use" has been a constant gotcha since day one. Examples: sit target hack, wrapPos and now posJump. Then we progressed to making use of the new data available to project the profile pic of random people in range, which I don't think G-Team has completeyl forgiven us for You of all people should know just how creative we can be

I've been projecting sim maps as particles for a few months now and even have it up on one of my wiki pages:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sim_Map_Particle_Projector

In other words, if the data is available anywhere, we will find a use for it.

I've switched over to the new tile URL format for map tiles on Amazon S3. Briefly, it is:

http://map.secondlife.com/map-1-997-1002-objects.jpg

I updated the documentation:

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Map_API#Accessing_map_images_directly

Old tiles (at map.secondlife.com/Z/XXXXX/YYYYY/map-Z-X-Y-objects.jpg) will stay up for 4 more days, then be removed by the garbage collector.

James

Hi all. We now believe that we are within 2 days of fully accurate on sim images. Can folks on this thread let me know IF:

1. You see a sim on the SLurl.com map that is actually not online

2. You know of an online sim that is not appearing on SLurl.com

Thanks!

/me sneaks into the thread, shouts "vote for http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-11118" then runs like hell!

Meade, the link is not working for me.

Hmm, I don't like this new map tiles, they look like lower resolution (diagonal parts look very edgy), maybe only anti-aliasing is missing, but some details I saw before are gone.
If you change the way you make them, why not higher resolution? (you already saved size, so give quality instead)

Also a way to gather info which map should be remake, could be a switch in estate-tool, so estate manager can control if and when they want a new map.

(and HTML on a Prim, just do it make a proxy between client and external page to avoid ip-gathering)

Really bad idea. Think of it this way; have kids that use your computer and turnoff the antivirus and firewall and then tell them they can go anywhere they want.

They're already inside SL. How much worse can it get?

Philip & James, I've sent you both copies of my "Map Table" inworld.. so you can see at least ONE of the myriad applications that "inworld accessable region textures" can have. Hardly a "hackish" application.

I really think that this highlights, again, the fundamental issue that comes up because there's no way to access textures OUTSIDE of SL's walled garden.

Sculpts are very, very, very badly broken on the new map tiles (they "rendered" fine on the old map tiles), making 1/4 of my sim appear as a "grey blob" now.

2 thumbs down for breaking something that used to work just fine.

..and that is strange, how, exactly? Isn't that what SL is all about? Finding unique ways to use the service to realize the "your world - your imagination" slogan?



Isn't scalable how? Cost? What cost? What is it costing you to do it with the new map API? Are you paying L$10 to yourself per region per update?

That "cost" isn't going to go away, no matter how you implement it, because it is part of the base operational cost of providing that service.

Now, if you are going to say "we can't afford to keep ADDING 30,000 images to our asset system every couple of days", you can do one of the following things:

1) reuse the UUID and update the image data.
2) DELETE old map data after a couple of cycles. IE, at most, have the current image, and one older image, per region.

Personally, I prefer #1.



There's more than one way to skin a cat, Phillip. All it takes is a little "out of the box" thinking, you know, of the kind that got SL started in the first place?

Hello Phillip.

Explain to me why Mark Kingdon is hiring more and more "executives" who will do nothing but sit on their butt all day and push pens? Explain to me why he is hiring these executives who obviously are getting payed a lot of cash simply cause they are executives?

Now explain to me why you cant "afford" to keep a system in place which downloads a 60kb jpeg file for transporters, map tables, gate dialling devices and such like?

You can't "afford" it?

So, youve made your own CEO out as a liar cause Mark Kingdon (yeah the same dude whos wasting all Linden Labs cash by hiring more and more executives) said that Linden Labs is not, and has never had ANY cash problems AT ALL...

The great Phillip Linden...turning his back on the innovative community he SEEMINGLY supported.

Aww, I like the way my giant bunny renders in Noonkkot.

Kitty: Which sim is the one where your sculpties are rendering wrong?

Since it's my home I'm not that comfy posting it here on the forums, but since the same problem occurs on the sims where I got the content from:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Heart%202 (and Heart 4 and Heart 6) - those gray blobs are sculpted mountain (on the old map the shape used to match how they actually looked, while they now appear as an - oversized - blob that covers up other things)

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sculptomancy - the diameter of Animon's trees never used to be that big and that gray "blob" around X:149/Y:99 is a dock although the problem there isn't as easy to see with the way he has it set up vs how it looks on my sim.

Since all those sculpts cover far more area than they visually do in-world, if I had to guess, it seems they're rendering using the "prim size" vs the actual "visual size". I.e. 1 part of the Sculptomancy's dock is visually 10m long by 4m wide, but it's applied to a 32x32 megaprim and on the map it looks like it's covering a 32x32 area instead of the 10x4 it should. It also seems to get the textures wrong, or not get them at all (all grey vs the colour they should have).

(And if the old images for those sims still exist, comparing those with the new ones should make a lot more sense than my attempt at explaining how it looks different ).

How were sculpts rendered before? As boxes or spheres the size of the collision envelope? I don't recall.

They rendered as they looked (as far as the map was concerned).

So if you had a L-shape sculpty applied to a 50x50 prim and say you'd see a 25m long thin stripe and a 25m wide thin stripe on the map to make an L.

Right now it seems like you'll see a "squarish blob" covering a 2500m² area, cocealing other things that used to be visible.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/black%20swan also looks a little funky...

edit: er.. more funky than it's supposed to look, anyway.

edit edit: Philip/James, if it's not too far outside what you're working on, if slurl is going to report that it can't find the region name and that name ends with a '?' character, any chance you could have strip the '?' off and try again? That's the only way to get URLs into the forums now - enclose it in img tags and put a ? at the end of the URL.

In other words, it'd be great if http://slurl.com/secondlife/black%20swan worked for the Black Swan region.

TY!

That's impressive, given that in general prims weren't rendered on the map as they looked (spheres turned into hexagons, just about everything else turned into blocks).

Sounds like the Uberclient (or whatever they call it... the one that makes the map tiles) has some LoD issues.