Texture Optional Second Life

How about the ability to turn off texture loading and have a wireframe view that looks like the wireframe view that we have now but which doesn't load any textures for prims, avatars, etc.?

My understanding is that while the current wireframe view doesn't display textures it still downloads them.

For more variety, have separate checkboxes for "Load Prim Textures" and "Load Avatar Textures" so you could have a view that showed normal looking avatars but wireframe objects and vice versa.

The goal of the options is to offer a choice of ways for SL to look and to allow for a lower bandwidth mode of SL for folks with slow connections or in times of network trouble.

------ oops, this should have been in feature suggestions - could someone click the bad post button and ask a moderator to move it? thanks -----

Use the First Look viewer and tell it to use HTTP to fetch textures.

I'm doing that now, iusing First Look with request http textures on, in fact, and it still loads textures. It doesn't seem to make any noticeable difference at all with the latest First Look version.

Another option to add along these lines would be to not load textures but instead of displaying a wireframe, do the fill with solid colors of a certain transparency, or use algorithm generated textures. The color to display instead of a texture could be a value calculated when textures are applied that would be something like the average color of the pixels in the texture that are above a certain transparency value, with the transparency value being the average of the transparency values for each pixel in the texture. Something like that. Or the builder could have fields to assign "Colors and Alpha for no-texture-loading mode".

This is a seriously cool suggestion, I hope that it is implemented.

Ah, it must be the proxy issue that I mentioned some weeks back: if you need an HTTP proxy to fetch through port 80 or 443, then things like SL's help pages, the ToS agreement, and it seems HTTP textures don't come up because SL doesn't know how to use a proxy. I'll bug-report it. No, I'll grep the source... hmmm, they're using curl, so env http_proxy=http://10.0.0.1:8008/ /path/to/second/life/app should do it for Linux or Mac. I'm sure there's some equivalent for Windows.

Anyway, for your experiments, I'm sure there's some way of getting Windows Firewall to block the client from these ports. Or just set http_proxy to include a non-existent address.

Let me just add that the resulting view is not one that anyone would want to see, at least with the default loading texture.

please god no, not the default loading texture!

I quite had my fill of grayworld back when it had a white outline on each surface.

An averaged colour would be interesting, because then you can just dial network speed down, which impacts textures the most as avatar movement etc takes precedence I think.