Local lights, rezzing objects

Silly issues but they irritate me

I've a radio in my house..works fine but sometimes it won't rez until I walk up to it. Annoying when you have to walk across the parcel just to change the station.

I've also been setting up local lights outside and fiddling around with the intensity etc. so as not burn your skin off. A bit like the radio though, the local lighting effect seems to be dependent on AV proximity...kinda spoils the effect when looking across the parcel. Is not the light radius..just switches off altogether when you're too far away.

Are these connected? Is there setting I'm unaware of when rezzing these or setting up lights? Or is there a client setting?

Thanks

Not sure why small objects don't appear until you're up close to them. Could be that the sim just isn't telling you about them because it thinks you can't see them or it could be the viewer thinks something's blocking your view..

For the lights, SL can only show the 6 closest lights at once. There's a debug setting (from memory.. might not be quite right) Advanced menu -> Info Displays -> Render Options -> Lights which will draw boxes around everything that's putting out light. Try moving to the point where your lights seem to switch off and turning on that option to see if you've moved into range of other lights.

Thanks, Sindy.

I had a feeling it was just one of those things, but didn't know the '6 local lights' limit or the 'box' - I'll keep fiddling

Sounds like you need to increase your draw distance. Go to Edit | Preferences | Graphics (Click th Custom check mark) | increase draw distance with the slider

Tried DD, but it hasn't any effect on this. The objects that are not rezzing (the radio in this case) are well within the DD and objects way beyond the errant object are rezzed quite happily.

This seems to affect quite small objects only.

Small objects dissappearing at a distance is called "LOD Culling", and is something the client does to improve performance. You can't control that effect. So for example, I have a large building with a couple of gaslight lamps by the front door. If the lamps are seperate small items, they vanish when you get far enough from the building. If they are linked to the building, and thus part of a larger total object, you can see them from farther away.

Local lights are limited to only the 6 closest to the avatar as being active, though if you select a more distant one, the selected light takes priority over one that is actually closer. This is a limit of Open GL as a rendering engine, and can't be improved on.

What some designers do is to add some phantom fullpright prims to simulate the glow of the more distant lights. Otherwise, if you're in a large area with a row of streetlights, only the six closest to you will see to be lit.

Thanks (again) Ceera !

I've a couple of gaslamps that do exactly that, so linking will solve that. Not sure what linking the radio will do to the scripts in it, though.

"phantom fullpright prims to simulate the glow" for distant lights sounds worth experimenting with.

TY all for responses

You probably DON'T want to link the radio to the wall.

Linking lamps to the wall should still work, however. Depends on how the script is set up.

For example, I use windows with touch-activated scripts in them to open and close the window, by changing that prim's textures. Those work fine when linked to a wall.

But I have a fire in a fireplace that uses link messages, so that when you touch the fire or give the right chat comands, three different fire prims receive messages to becoem visible and glow, or to cease glowing and become invisible. If I linked two such fires to the same wall linkset in a house, touching one would cause both to light or extinguish.

You may run into a similar problem with your lamps, in which case you would need to script an individual on/off switch prim for each lamp, and use a different command or a different chat channel for the commands to each lamp, and to the associated parts in each lamp.

/me grins and scratches her head ...

OK...think I follow you ...more thought needed

That's server side as far as I know actally.

Each sim maintains a separate 'interest list' per (child) avie which is a list of objects (I'd assume avies too really) that the client will know about. It's - in part - based on your avie's position (client side culling on the other hand is mostly camera-based), your draw distance and the size of a linkset.

As you move around the sim will be sending out object updates for everything on your interest list and send out subscription notices for new objects that come into range and deletion notices for objects that go out of range.

I'd guess the reason to cull small objects sim side already was primarily for the sim's benefit rather than the client's in terms of performance (the sim has to be able to reasonably manage an interest list for more than 100 avies).

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For lights it is the adjusted distance that they sort by and which determines which one will actually light and which one won't, but the adjusted distance is based on radius, the distance and the intensity of the light.

/8/03/259102/1.html#post1991477 has a better explanation but the basic formula is:
(Selected lights do get a priority boost and if you're in flycam then lights are camera based rather than avie position based)

And you can turn off dynamic lights in the new RC which makes a big difference already when others are around.

And if anyone cares: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-7587