Invisibility Prim Refresh - Obsolete?

heyas;

okay, so most all of yas know about the invsiiblity prim (invisi-prim) script and deal. its sets a special 'magic' texture and settings on a prim that make it not render anything behind it that has alpha mapping on it. i also remember reading something about the script making it switch between the two 'magic' textures, all at the same time. for... some obscure reason.

well, i was looking at an avatar i just got, and it had invisi-prims on, but to my surprise when i looked in the prim, there was no script.

so.... i threw the invisibility refresh script into a prim, waited til it turned invisible, then stopped the script. and... it seems to be fine?

so i dunno, is this texture switching routine no longer needed by the new viewers? do we really need to keep going around with all these scripted prims hiding stuff? if just loading the texture settings will do?

what's up with that?

Yes, from my understanding the need to change between textures hasn't been required in a very long time. Once LL understood the benefits of the technique, they made viewer changes to better support the texture. I removed the timer and a lot of the rest years ago, and have never had issues. I do recommend you leave in the part about setting the offsets etc, as there is a less than transparent section on the texture.

Also, once the texture is set, you can remove the script. I do this to all of the items I buy if I find the script is still present.

there were two popular textures, and the reasoning for switching between them was conflicts between the the two... I haven't tested whether they still conflict or not.

Oh, heh: this wasn't the question I expected it to be.

The thing is, not only is the texture-swapping trick obsolete, but the whole invisiprim mechanism is soon to be obsolete. If that's old news (well, it *is* old news), sorry about that, but anybody with bold plans for using invisiprims should.... umm, make them short-term plans, I guess.

As "soon" as it was going to be obsolete three years ago, or is this NEW old news? Heh.

Of course, I guess there's less need for them now that we have sculpties, so it wouldn't be quite the panic-causing nightmare it would have been....

Since when? I've not seen or heard any "phasing out" of the invisprim effect, and would be a little upset if they removed it, since my avatar has an "ethereal" mode that uses it along with shiny for a neat effect.

Well I think he means there will be the alpha layers added to the skin, which will allow one to hide body parts selectively. In many cases it will be superior to Invisiprims.

However, It's my understanding that invisiprims will *not* be eliminated, as they are still necessary to both support legacy content, and because the alpha skin won't allow you to do things like have one leg or one arm hidden, these body parts are mirrored from one texture. You either hide both, or none.

Technically, the avatar skin always HAD an alpha layer, it just never used it, or provided a way to set it. That's why invisiprims worked in the first place to hide all/part of the avatar. They only would normally hide textures with an alpha channel. Prims with non-alpha textures would not be affected by them.

Removing the invisiprim effect would mean that the dam in Zindra would have to be changed. The portals that fall into the water level yet still stay indoors use invisiprims to hide the water's surface while inside the build. To date, there's no other way to accomplish this. (^_^)y

I suppose they may have reversed themselves since I heard about it a couple months ago at some of Nyx's office hours; at the time the avatar makers were all up-in-arms about it. The story was that there is some extreme kludginess in the rendering code that makes the invisiprim effect work at all, and that they didn't want to keep making the kludginess work anymore once the alpha-masked avatar was working. (I can imagine that they might have plans for the rendering pipeline that would make invisiprims especially difficult, but I don't know that.)

I, too, have used it for building tricks having nothing to do with avatars, but my results have always been "fragile": wrong cam angle on an avatar standing in the wrong place and the view is downright disturbing. Others may get better results.

That was a matter of the invisible avatar megaprim. The one that bumps your ARC to the point where the client refuses to render the avatar it's attached to. (^_^)y

In those office hours I think there was a lot of confusion between the megaprim invisibility hack and the invisiprim thing. The mixed-up terms seemed to be coming from both ends of the conversations. The megaprim thing did go away, of course.

Even if kept around, invisiprims don't play very well with shadows, they are even glitchier than usual. Just because of that, I expect that eventually people will start avoiding them when they can.

there was talk of ditching the old style invisiprims, but I think they came to their senses.... as for alpha on skin, IIRC it's to be 1 bit alpha (no gradient) last I heard.

Correct, it will be a 1-bit overlay. It's just about the only method of avoiding alpha transparency shuffling in the rendering engine we use today. The skin already has this channel somewhat implemented to facilitate eyelashes. (^_^)y

hehehheh...

when was anybody gonna tell all the 'invisibility prim refresh' users??? :X

i cant wait til avatar alpha whatevers can hide the bloody avatar. but what i was thinking of was alllllllllll those items allllllll those shoes allllllllll those digigrade legs allllllllllllllll those tiny/micro/lolo avatars ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL running this useless script all the bloody time.

imagine how much less laggy the grid will be when we turn all those off!


uhm... okay, we can pretend.


thanks guys

Those are slowly being replaced by sculpties, and I imagine the alpha skins will do the rest.

That's the megaprim attachment hack.

actually several of the big makers of digitgrade avs already tossed the refresh script.

I'm pretty sure hardly anyone uses the refresh script any more. I haven't seen it in quite a while.

I expect you're right, and that I probably misremembered which thing was going to be / is now unsupported.

(Or something. I tried to block out time this week confirm I was wrong, at Nyx's office hour, or BigPapi's, or Q's, or somebody's, but it's just been a gawdawful week and I couldn't get to any of them.)