TEXTures

Here's an idea... so many people have textures out there that merely feature -text-, and nothing else, that it'd probably be a good idea to have a system in game for creating basic 'textures' that are merely text/font data with a colored background. It'd be faster loading, and put less strain on the system.

Indeed. I've been waiting for something of this nature... a way to apply text to a texture dynamically. Would make for much more resource friendly signs and such, even if it would limit to the fonts that the Lindens allow.

Yup Yup! One of my long term wants, even more needed in the prime-poor post-1.2 days.

Yes, I want this too.

When I first came here I was kind of surprised it wasn't already an option to do. Coming from ActiveWorlds where you can do this sorta thing. Setting text color and background color would really be the only needed options, if possible add in some kind of font option too where we can chose the basic fonts, Arial and the like. The text above objects isn't always disireable.

The only reason I could think why this isn't already implemented could be because the engine isn't capable of it. I could be totaly wrong on that though.

Untill then, why doesn't someone list the UUID's of some font letters they've uploaded so people can save some money and use those, kinda like a public texture text list.

Well, the way it could work is your client would just generate the texture according to a few settings in the script. It sounds like a good idea to me. It really kept things nice and fast in Alphaworld.

This one's a good idea, but it's not at the top of my list.

An option is we pool in together, and make a big big set of font textures & some Alphanumeric LCD's (I got one designed at the moment already), then split the cost of uploading them equally, of course it's not as good as engine support, but that may take some effort to program, and I wouldnt expect to see it soon.

-Adam

That would be very convienient

this would be delightful

It just occurs to me that the proposed I/O system as discussed here (The addition of better I/O functionality (I say "better" because currently we have output, just no input.) would allow LSL scripts inside SL to communicate with programs and databases and scripts running on computer outside SL. This is my most-wanted feature, for those of you keeping track.)

Now, where were we? Ah, yes. If the I/O system were able to tranfer images to SL, (Currently being discussed is an XML-RPC implementation-- is that able to do this? I assume not?) it would be ridiculously easy to write or modify an existing script or program to generate textures for use as signs in SL, just by handing a scripted object in SL a notecard containing some XML. If it was able to give you the image back after rendering it, that'd be pretty cool.

It wouldn't be client-side, though, so you'd still have to actually download the image from the SL servers. If there was client-side texture generation based on XML data, that would be VERY cool, but this is good too.

You could still use it for events -- maybe auto-generate the name on a giant cardboard cheque after a race win-- or for classes: use sensors to get a list of all the students who attended, then whip them up a "diploma", and just upload it to SL manually.

On a side note, there are two or three insanely cool features being talked about in the Feature Suggestions forums and I'm getting really excited at the prospect of not only using them, but hooking them up together. Could you tell?

Eh, the idea of downloading uniform graphics is an organized one, but doesn't help the textures load any faster. I'm thinking more of a system that uses pre-existing fonts on your machine (most usually fonts that everyone has, much like in HTML) and the client merely uses those to create the signs. Makes the signs appear -much- faster. As it is right now, to read a sign I have to wait about 10-15 seconds for my client to load it (as long as I don't get hit with the texture bug).

I don't think the cost of the textures is too prohibitive.. You can easily fit the whole font on one texture, via tiling.

The main issue is even with the textures, it still requires primes to display the text, and that adds up quickly. (Even at 6 letters/prime, which is the best I got working so far.)

This would be GREAT! I've wanted this for soooo long =) Not only would it help download times and make it easier, LL wouldn't have to use nearly as much space on thier drives for all of those TEXTures.