Terrible default texture on particles

Oh, man. What have you guys done to the default texture on particles? My waves look FUGLY till the texture rezzes! This is no good! Can you PLEASE change it baaack?

Seen the sky with hightlight transparent on?, fly up to cloudline, turn it on, huuuuuge red blocks,

That actually looks pretty cool to me. And I think the original texture was hideous.

I like the new default textures too. Hehe..

I like them too, helps you too see where you're going when things aren't fully rezzed. It helps me not get trapped inside of walls, lol.

I don't see any advantage to the new default textures.

I've never got trapped in a box because I couldn't see the default texture. The old one is plenty visible, and in any case once a prim has rezzed in enough to show a texture it's rezzed in enough that you'll bounce off it. Now... I've been trapped in a box because the prims hadn't rezzed at all, but changing the texture they show once they DO start to rez isn't going to change that.

The new one is decidedly ugly. Try rezzing in with prim hair and random patches of grey and white all over your head for a minute and a half.

Summary: worse texture, solves nothing, improves nothing, revert it.

What's worse is trying to walk through a heavily wooded parcel before the tree textures rez. Grey squares all over the place don't exactly help you see where you're going.

I think I understand the problem, but I could be wrong. The way I understand it is that geometry downloads are MUCH faster than texture downloads. Geometry is sent as a few bytes of "primiitive" that the client already kinows how to draw.

Textures can be HUGE and there is no way for the client to know what the entire texture will look like until the texture is all downloaded.

So, geometry appears almost instantly, and waits for its texture. And waits. And waits.

You can't see the geometry. It has no texture yet. So you run into it. That's why geometry has a "default" texture of smoke or blank holodeck gray in the current client.

I understand Linden Lab's position on the situation. They want geometry to be visible before its texture has finished downloading. So, they apply a default texture and then they use "progesssive" texture detailing, where the texture starts out blurry and gradually increases detail.

This progressive texture loading is a feature of the JPEG 2000 format that SL uses to store textures.

But, I think JPEG 2000 has some other features that are not being used.

The JPEG 2000 SDK says that:

"JPEG 2000 files are scalable image files -- no decompression needed for reformatting. With JPEG 2000, the image that best matches the target device can be extracted from a single compressed file on a server. Options include:

1. Image sizes from thumbnail to full size
2. Grayscale to full 3 channel color
3. Low quality image to lossless (identical to original image)
"

So, it appears that, instead of a blank grey or cloudy image, we could be seing:

a reduced quality "thumbnail" image, until the progressive detailing can start
a greyscale image, until progressive detailing with color can start
a reduced quality version of the full image, until progressive detailing can start

My point being that it doesn't seem like we should *ever* have to look at cloudy or blank grey default textures before the full texture can start appearing.

Am I way off base?

In any case, can we PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEESE stop showing an ugly blank grey SQUARE for particles whose texture hasnt fully rezzed? The effect is just plain WRONG ang UGLY for particles! Users don't collide with particles! Make it stop!

The new default textures don't suit me, especially since you can get to see them over and over just by turning around in a circle. It is taking so long to render things, and the cache doesn't seem to be working right, The welcome area keeps appearing with default textures all over the floor and the trees appear with the default texture.

Sigh. this is the worst SL has worked for a good while now for me, so far as being able to enjoy the view.

OH well, if they get P2P teloport we can just go from one interior space to another, use the dafault texture on everything, that might work ok. Just change the name of the program to GrayWorld.

I actualy like the new texture. When i have time i'll release a tool for changing it back to the pre 1.7.4 texture. But thats unlikely to happen till december.

I think I could get used to the new default texture for prims - but I suspect particles would look a hell of a lot better rezzing in if their default texture was just a 100% transparent nothingness.

Considering I fly a lot in SL, this is a great boon for me. No longer running into prims that have the default untextured smoky screen that I can barely see. However, I agree with the original poster that I dont like the particle default texture. I liked the old default particle texture, but I like the new prim default texture, so...I dunno.

The old texture wasnt that great, the new one isnt much better but its an attemp and is indeed a bit more functional. I dont care for it much on the particles. Perhaps a default 16x16 cloud map would work ok?

I don't suppose there is any way to use the old texture on intangible stuff, like particle effects and collision sprites, while using the new one on tangible objects, like walls?

As far as i can see it, the only useful thing about the new texture is for noting stuff that you can actually bump into. If you can't touch it, who cares about its edges?