OK. What did you guys do to LOD in 1.10.2?

Come 1.10.3 and it still de-rez's when I get an inch away. It's impossible to get a good screenshot anymore. Guess I'll start Paintshopping screenshots of my products. Heh

I still don't see any real spheres, they aren't smooth and round as they should be no matter what the distance. Same goes for ovals or anything with a round edge other than columns, which are ok. Is this me?

Yeah - it's still screwy, but it's nowhere near as bad as it was. I would say that the current speed of LOD switching is just 'a tad' too slow, but still surviveable.

It was HORRID before...now I'd give it an 8/10.

Still noticing some problems on cylinder cross-sections and torii. Seems the maximum tesselation for these prims is still capped versus pre 1.10.2/1.10.3 levels.

Answers posts relating to it here and here .

Try this:

Make two tori:

1. Size: <0.5,2.0,2.0>, Hole size: x: 1.0 y: 0.25
2. Size: <2.0,2.0,2.0>, Hole size: x: 0.25 y: 0.25

They should be entirely identical, and until recently they were. Now 1. renders with a 20-gon cross-section, and 2. with a 16-gon cross-section.

Michi and Seifert, can you please post some pictures of this? I replied in /139/00/119901/1.html#post1139508

And this is with Object Mesh Detail slider set all the way to the right?

When I have a moment later I'll make the shapes that Sei suggests.

Torley, even with framerate optimizations we should at least have the *option* to push this to full detail.

While I understand that improving framerates for mid-level machines is important, we at least should have the ability to push the tesselation as far as, at least, it used to go.

We designed many objects with the old (increased) tesselation. I really would like to, at least, have the slider top out at a true maximum.

Some parts of our avatars simply *never* line up anymore, and they did when we designed them.

Allowing for lowering of detail when needed is good, but the detail limit should not be capped.

We were very proud of the bigcat tails when they came out because they looked so good: with texture mapping and alignment, and pretty much perfect prim-to-prim alignment.

Objects that were seamless, are now not.

It gives folks the impression of shoddy workmanship when in fact, in previous versions, they were lined up perfectly, and now, they *cannot* be fixed.

I would like it, personally if I could turn off graphics of the UI, rather than having my experience inworld changed, I've seen additional UI items with every update, rollover button lighting, 1.11 preview has a fade in effect with the pie menu, all this stuff takes an abnormally long time to show up on my screen.
My general complaints about slow are these 'ui beutifucation' items, I have not had specific problem with torii in the past, however since the LOD breaking (1.10.2-1.10.23), my computer's framerate has been gradually getting slower, I atribute this to the UI, not the inworld graphics, though I might be unique in this.

LOD changes that originally prompted this thread, did not change my framerate, and I am running a computer that should be affected visually by framerate affecting items, a scene that hasn't changed since 1.9 that I expose myself to has gradually reduced in framerate despite changes directly related to level of detail being (as evidence by this thread) broken.

LOD isn't the way to gain an extra frame per second, other UI elements should be examined, I feel.

My computer: Ath 1GHz, 768 megs of RAM, NVidia FX5200

P.S. Michi is right, it would be nice if the sliders for detail where actually used, possibly by increasing the min/max range of LOD with it (it does a bit but is for the most part not respected properly), and a method to judge what they should be set to initially. A person with a top end system should not be having a reduced experience becaue of the PIII 450 I choose to run SL on.

I'm not at the right computer, otherwise I'd post (or would if attachments were turned on! I'll send a picture to snapzilla when I get a chance and link here). Yes, the object detail slider is at max.

Michi's image shows the same kind of problems I'm getting, and yes in some cases they are unfixable.

Here's another shot of it. This tail used to be easily viewed as one solid unit. Now it has three such ugly joints. Customers have complained, but there isn't anything we can do.

This is with the object mesh detail slider at maximum.

This is also the best we can do with all future constructions, as well.

The loss of detail is visible even from a moderate distance.

Similar issues with our fox tails. Anything with a torus, really.






Yes, these were all aligned before. We put in a lot of hours to make sure they are.

Spheres seem to be effected too, so sphere-intersections are a lot more ugly than they used to be as well.

Not entirely sure the reasoning for not having this ability on a slider. If I was someone who had choked up a lot of money for a high-end machine for SL, and have SL only look like crap, I'd be pretty upset. I understand the framerate problems that many people have, but just as many others are happy sacrificing a few FPS for a game that looks crisp, clean and polished.

Making sliders for LOD are the only way that people can have it both ways. If people have these problems, then convince them to set their slider down. But don't convince yourselves that everyone wants it this way. This problem goes beyond furry tails and hair; it effects every nice build that people have spent a lot of time perfecting.

Edit- When I mean sliders, I mean sliders that allow you to view things at maximum quality, like before.

I worked for hours and hours on both of those tails, making sure every seam was as perfect as humanly possible. Everyone who knows me, knows what a perfectionist I am.

I'm trying hard not to get angry here, but it's hard to find a reason to bother doing good, solid work, when these 'make everything ugly to squeeze out an extra fps for the midrange users' sweeps keep going by. Anyone on a lower end computer already had the option to move that slider down and reduce detail for fps; now that is the only choice any of us have.

The detail we're currently being provided isn't even enough to build with; You can't even see when seams 'theoretically' line up or not because of the mis-keyed hex edges of two unevenly degraded circular cross sections.

It's just very disheartening, I guess.

The tesselation system used to go out to what looked like 32 sections when it was maximally zoomed in, and they lined up well with concurrent objects, aka the seams from one cylander would pretty much always match a second, joined cylander that had the same number of segments and opposing rotation.

Now it looks like segments are always capped to something around 16-20 and it doesn't look like a 2^n number, so mebbe more likely 20, so that opposing rotational torii will no longer line up seamlessly.

At maximum detail, 32 segments, or even if you REALLY wanted to go nuts, 64, for things they zoom REALLY CLOSE into, would be more builder friendly.

And other detail levels should be probably left at 2^n points so rotational alignment would be less of an issue. 22 segments, for instance may look really good stacked end on end, but would look really bad if one of them is turned 90 degrees compared to the other, for instance.

Hmm, I thought it was 20, or 24. Not sure now. It's never a huge problem unless two prims that are supposed to line up have different numbers of sections, but when they do it's a showstopper.

This is exactly what I was thinking. Otherwise, those who want to save on FPS could slide "Object Mesh Detail" to the middle, or even lower.

Thanx a LOT for the pictures. I'm going to include all this right now on an internal file.

Looking at the info--we'll continue to watch this thread.

I have a simple reproduction that I'm willing to toss to anyone who wants it, just IM me inworld and ask for 'Torus LOD sample' or simular and I'll drop it on you.

I guess this is a little late to the party, but I seem to remember a number of Lindens responding to the Answers forums about recommended hardware an listing some pretty high-end setups. I would think they personally would see this change with little benefit to their frame-rate. Oh yeah, this is it:

/139/52/112406/1.html

With another generation of hardware on the horizon following the Xbox 360 and upcoming PS3 launches, and new features sure to be innneed of upgrades for Windows Vista, I would assume allowing even more detail at the hight end would be the goal. with perhaps a more conserative "Detecting Hardware Settings..." outcome.

As a quick test I went to Luskwood and bought a copy of the basic Big Cat, forced sun to Noon, edited appearance and snapped these three picks. Cick to get the full-size 1400x994. These guys are real artists, I would never have though to look that closely. For me I'd just love to get the more round spheres and cylinders back!

Some links to what things look like now on some of my builds:

http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/pic.aspx?id=85438

http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/pic.aspx?id=85439

Object mesh detail at full, and of course things used to line up perfectly.

Thanks a lot, Clubside... We spend a lot of time making sure that textures and seams match up so that our avatars are more of a "whole" than just the sum of their parts...

It's frustrating seeing changes in the graphics architecture create the appearance of a sloppy job, especially when we have no way to rectify it, even through further adjustment.

I agree -- if folks want to "opt out" of the high detail, by all means, they should be able to.

But we also should be able to opt in -- at least while designing. Eventually, hardware capabilities will increase. Today's hardware framerates will become less important in the coming years -- and we'd like to be able to design objects to be ready for that.

The ultimate goal would be, as hardware and capabilities increase, the detail and precision of the avs we make would reveal themselves along with it.

But since 1.10.2/1.10.3, we haven't even been able to design for the highest level of detail, since the new system keeps us from seeing it..


Thanks for looking into this.

Wow, Seifert. I can see that clear as day -- that's a real showstopper, and I can see how good your build would look -without- those LOD induced seams...

Putting it in an image tag as a 'bump' so everyone can see -- but this is clear as day...

This should NOT be what "maximum detail" looks like.

Also updating this with some comments on the issue from Eltee -- she can't get on to post right now but:

eltee Statosky: the biggest problem we're seein is two fold, one is that it is not hittin the same high tesselation levels - the other is that its using non 2^n faces, which means rotations don't line up; in many cases, can't line up.

I can vouch for Seifert's build: every vertex lined up perfectly, and it was all perfectly smooth at the joins.



Actually, I'm pretty sure the cross-sectional face of a torus used to be a max of 20 vertices, not a nice power of two.

I'm still here and have this thread aggregated--looking very closely at each and every picture. Our graphics devs are aware too. Thanx a lot for the ongoing feedback.

I thought it was that, but then I remember being annoyed that the number of sides wasn't 20 (20 is all over the build tools - the amount that a cut or twist, or rotation changes when you click the arrows to change them is 1/20, and SL seems to like those angles and cuts).

Yeah, just checked - the LOD on a cylinder hasn't changed, and they have 24 sides, and used to match up with tori.