Are We Ever Going to Get Reliable Texture Tools?

I am one of those people that's forever not in the "in" crowd, or in the loop as to what is really happening in SL. If someone who is "friendly" with the Lindens and has the ear of the development team could answer this post with the "inside scoop" I would appreciate it.

I would ask the Lindens to answer themselves, but you know what that's like.

Okay, so ever since 1.10, the build tools are totally screwed for me and for most of the people I talk to. Things like prims disappearing and reappearing, wild rotations of prims that you did not apply, prims changing shape and size without being touched and all kinds of texture mayhem. It seems with the last patch that the disappearing prims and the "you cant rotate anything without it acquiring three different rotations" problem have disappeared, but the texture nightmare continues.

Specifically, you can't reliably enter a texture offset or size with three digits of precision. A great deal of the time (and the occurrences are random just to play with your mind), you enter something like 1.335 and it is magically changed to 1.30. sometimes this happens while you are looking at it, sometimes it happens at some later point and you only find out when you look again. We had this problem occasionally before 1.10 but since 1.10 it happens almost all the time and shows no signs of going away at all.

How the heck are we supposed to build anything if the only texture numbers we can put in have only one or two decimal places of reliable accuracy? And it's worse that you can never even tell when it's going to decide to change. If the system can only handle the two decimal places, why not just stick with that? At least we wouldn't be in the situation of selling something that looks great in the store, but like crap after the customer buys it.

To make it worse, several times since the last patch, (once this morning), the box refused to even take the second decimal place! I made several objects and entered offsets of 1.25 (a pretty standard number), and it kept changing it to 1.2 or sometimes 1.3 seemingly at random. OMG! how can you build anything under such crap conditions?

All the releases up to 1.7 (remember that disaster?), the texturing was fine, but ever since then we have had this random rounding problem that comes and goes. with 1.10 however it seems to have been hard coded into the release. Perhaps LL thinks that random texture changes are fun?

Seriously, does anyone know if LL even realizes this is a problem yet? Is it on their big "to-do board?" Or is a problem in the "avatar is invisible until you change groups" category and we will just have to live with it forever? I know these problems are not very sexy for the developers to tackle but I would like to know if there really is any hope of it being fixed or if certain building projects I am doing should just be put on indefinite hold.

Dianne,

Send a letter directly to [email]philip@lindenlab.com[/email] outlining all of that. CC it to [email]robin@lindenlab.com[/email], and see what they have to say. I am curious what the response would be.

No.

This is why we need a builders' group that acts as a union, to make a whole lot of noise about a building bug. Then another building bug, etc., until they get fixed.

coco

Hi Dianne

SL is a compromise of fast loading against accuracy. The bottle neck must be the asset server since everyone accesses it for details on every little thing in sl.

My bet is that SL developers looked at this before 1.7 and decided to share variables together. Floats in sl are normally 32 bit and carry an accuracy of about 6 to 7 decimal places. So where you only need .1% (1 pixel in 1024 a side texture) accuracy, it would be tempting to combine that with something else to make for a smaller asste profile on the asset server.

The other explanation might be that textures have integer (whole) sizes, and that the software rationalizes the float offset you entered to a integer and then converts that back to a float somehow. Whatever, the errors are not reliably repeatable for this to be the case.

We have to keep on pressing these poiints so SL developers take notice and fix it!

Ed

Oh noes! Whenever someone raises the specter of the U word to organize, people cry GOVERNMENT and freak out. It's a good idea though.

That's a good idea, but then they would actually have to consult the builders group. Since they currently don't ask anyone anything when they change stuff I doubt whether this is going to happen.

I am beginning to think that this issue is really the same one as "prim drift," i.e. a rounding error problem, and the system just can't handle the math, period, full stop. They can't do anything about it and they probably don't want to talk about it because if true, it means that nothing you make can ever be around for very long as it will eventually screw itself up over the rounding errors.

They don't want potential users of the system to realise that this place is really a tool for doing rough mock-ups, prototyping and testing of 3-D creations, not a place that you can actually make 3-D creations.

* shoots Dianne with a lemming gun for using that phrase *

cool, thanks

I love to get actual information.

The idea that texture numbers could even carry 4 decimal places would be a godsend let alone 6 or 7. I vaguely remember it accepting four decimal places once. Clearly they have changed something since it hasn't reliably accepted three for a long time.

I should have realised something like this was happening since whether it takes the number or not seems to depend on the lag or at least the general "goodness" of your connection at any one time.

On a related note, and to any Lindens that might be reading, has anyone noticed that the actual edit palette itself can't display more than the two digits of precision in the right hand boxes when using the object palette? For the last two or three updates, the entire right side of the palette from "Building Block Type" down to "Top Shear" is pushed to the right so you can't see more than two digits on the screen at once.

How absolutely glaring errors like that get by the UI team (and over multiple updates!), is a mystery to me. It's reminiscent of the recent Inventory tab bug that was obvious to all users after about ten seconds of testing yet blew right by the UI team even though the major purpose of that update was the "new inventory."

I would laugh if it wasn't so painful.

*falls over in a faint*
(while wondering what a lemming gun is)

My suspicion on this and similar problems (occasionally with profile cuts I get the same kind of issue) is that the client thinks it can get greater precision than the data that is actually transferred to the server and to anyone else's client. Whenever I have something like this come up, I fly to the next sim and back. That means it will have reloaded from the server, and IIRC every time I've had this issue, the fly and back procedure makes it snap to the lower precision parameters.

At this point I decide that it's not worth doing that way, and find a way to do whatever I want to do with the numbers I am allowed to work with (or give up - there are some things I would like to do that are simply impossible without getting a 0.125 on a tube profile cut).

What I'm not sure is that this is a new thing, or rather that the true, server side precision has changed in the year that I've been here. I've never had something that I was able to do previously become impossible. Perhaps the client thinking that it can do things that the server cannot is new.

Best. Weapon. Ever.

I am certain that I have had long periods of use (before 1.7 and the age of optimisations), where I was able to enter three digits of precision.

I would argue that three decimal places of precision is kind of a "gold standard," as four is hardly ever necessary, but there are some fairly basic everyday things that fail without three.

for instance this morning I am using a 768x256 texture across three prims. I have to use 0.333 as the repeats and 0.666 as one of the offsets because it's thirds. It keeps defaulting back to 0.330 and 0.660, which leaves a clearly noticeable line in the texture. It's a common thing to have to do an the system should be capable of doing it, but it's not.

I was always just under the impression that you couldn't go beyond a certain level of precision... I know it "seems" to accept it, but if you watch it always seem to snap back to a less precise value.

I agree with what another poster said... I suspect they are trying to save space, or something. Like their innane "nobody would ever need more than half a degree of precision of rotation" fix a few versions ago (1.5?)

That DOES NOT, however, explain why Cut is so totaly broken as to be completely unusable for precise building.