You Don't Know How Good You Have It

Bah! Have the Lindens STILL not fixed that bug?

I'm opening the floor for all the old timers to think back as far as you can, and tell us how something (prim building, changing appearance, using inventory etc) worked way back when...

It'll be fun to see if we can remember just how far we've come in all that time

Spit bucket and chewed tobacco is optional

there were no rings or cylinders and sometimes an object would ghost.

fortunately MJW interceded on behalf of the community throughout the past two years, on behalf of frustrated builders, stakeholders and tourists alike, and pushed LL to improve SL for everyone!

I have a slot machine I built way way back in October '03. With a minor change to the llListen() it STILL WORKS.

Things I wanted at the time...
The number of flashing lights on it was limited due to the "light tax" - now fixed.
Griefers could "sniff" private chat between scripts - Now we have link messages.

ummm... that's about it I think.

Anyway...

Proper alpha rendering order has been reported and discussed consistently since at least December of 2003. On the surface, it seems that the ability to correctly render layered alpha textures is critical to a project that focuses on users being able to upload and apply their own textures to prim structures that they've created.

Noone can argue that LL have come a long way or that many of our gripes and suggestions are difficult to itemize and implement in any sort of sensible order. Several are even based more on philosophical differences of gaming, socialization, and software development than they are quantifiable improvments to the code. But alpha layering in Second Life is an obviously necessary, high priority feature that has never worked any better than it does today.

Havok2 was coming in 1.1....

There is no Havok2

There is only Zuul.

In other news..! We have.. PRIMS! ~gasp~!

Remember when we couldnt llEmail or send chat to private channels directly?

Oh, and two words: Altitude Tax.

Seconded. I've reported this at least once myself, and never seen any motion on it. I'm thinking of bring it up at Lordfly's RAC group. I know it's possible for the rendering engine to properly render overlapping, intersecting alpha textures: trees prove this. Create a tree, one of the tall ones, then lock your camera on it and pull back. At some point the detail reduction will change the tree to just two intersecting flat textures, and those textures overlap properly.

Beyond Lordfly's group, I've thought of starting a group specifically to get this bug addressed. ISTR some mention that the vote system would be overhauled in the near future. If this is true, when that's done I'll create a new suggestion to fix this bug, apply all my votes to it, and encourage others to do the same. I don't know whether this problem will be simple or difficult to fix, but it's possible that with higher profile bugs this one gets lost in the crowd, especially as it's not a showstopper.

It's nice that they adapted the tree engine to feed correctly formatted data to our cards but it is a special case beyond the normal rendering engine output. The tree engine uses quadrants of a texture to calculate the proper rendering order. When you're camera is close to a tree, the trunk is rendered using bark prints on the left side of the texture and the branches are crossed prims bearing the image in the top right corner. When you pan far enough away from the tree, the very multiprim version is replaced by simple crossed images embedded in the lower right quad of the texture.

I figured all this out over the weekend replacing the texture keys in trees.xml with varying test textures of my own design. I've gotten some pretty good looking results. But the point is that when it's LL's alphas that need to be properly rendered, the engines are adapted to see that they are. When it's ours, well, we are just tourists after all.


Can we call it Society for Proper Rendering of Inworld Graphics?

Remember when there was no streaming music, and Outkast's 'Hey Ya' was like the only song ever played, ever?

Okay, I'm not really an oldby.

On proper alpha rendering - this is the single most irritating bug I've found, as the builder of low-prim housing. It makes it almost impossible to do windows with textures, especially in curved walls. Once this is fixed, my creativity with medieval turrets will know no bounds!

I saw someone mention ghosting as one of those things we used to have. Has it really gone away? When?

I haven't seen a ghost, other than flying avs, in a couple of releases. Taking that back, occassionally I'll rez/delete/rez/delete/rez/delete/rez/deleterez/delete/rez/delete and generate one. But that's my own damn fault.

SLive was streaming music.

Rez cost.

No twisty hoochie hair madness.

The hot air balloon at the welcome area.

Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."

But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.

I believe you Siggy and I am unanimous in that.

I remember when TPs used to eat my ass alive. @_@

You should get some of the soft, two-layer kind. The stuff with the little blue pictures of butterflies and things.

MJW did not exist until a couple of weeks ago.

Thats what they would like you to believe...

*cue Twilight Zone tune*

Okay well that crazy Fractal created the Society for Proper Rendering of Inworld Graphics group specifically to address the problem of out-of-order alpha rendering. We'll spend a few days recruiting those who need to see this bug addressed, compile a list of questions and examples for the rendering team, and find out how open to discussion said team is.

Rather than mob LL with numbers of members and reams of input, we'd like to compile a reasonable set of reproducable effects and queries from those of us who are having to consistently work around the bug as I do with plants and Fractal does with semitransparent cylinders. IM Fractal Mandela or myself for an invitation.