Hey could you verify something for me?

I did some testing on a new sim I'm working on. It seems to me that when I put prims about 100 meters away that cubes which are 1.7x1.7x1.7 show up while cubes that are 1.65x1.65x1.65 or smaller tend not to load until I get considerably closer.

That seems to be a significant threshold for whether a prim will show up or be culled from your view. Can anyone else verify this? To do it, rez some cubes whose sides are 1.5, 1.6, 1.65, 1.7, 1.75 & 2.0, respectively. Then fly about 120 meters away and turn your camera back to the cubes and see which ones are still visible. Then, fly or walk towards them until they all appear. In my tests, cubes which were 1.7 meters were visible far further away then 1.65 cubes.

Thank you for the help. I'm trying to see if this is universal or if this has to do with my system and settings.

You definiteley have a bit too much time on your hands

I've noticed something similar, Keiki. For instance - the packaged goods at my store are in boxes, maybe 1 meter wide. These boxes do not appear until I get close to them - maybe about 15 or 20 meters away. The shelves that they are on will render from far away, but not the boxes. I assume this is some sort of Level Of Detail decision to help improve performance. Doesn't seem to happen with every object, though.

I think that you might be able to avoid this by linking the smaller bozes to something larger, but I have not tested it.

I'm working on designing a mall and want to come up with a recommended vendor size of 1.6 by 1.6 or smaller. That way when you are on one side of the mall, all the vendors (and textures) on the other side of the mall aren't visible. I'm hoping this will have a beneficial effect on lag.

And yes, I probably have too much time on my hands.

Yeah. I've seen the same thing with some of my vendors. The thing is, I want to exploit this to help with lag, not avoid it.

I've not gone in-depth with the sizes, but I did notice a rather abrupt threshold for distance culling. In particular, I noticed with some freebie animals I was placing on my land (I have no idea why this was most noticeable with animals, but that's where I noticed it) that if I left them at the size I got them, they disappear relatively quickly when I flew away. I scaled them up just a touch, and then they were still visible even when viewing the scene as a distant panorama.

Sometimes when I'm in a store this culling doesn't work. When I walk up to a display the boxes still don't rez. Yes, it's the prims I'm talking about and not the textures. The latter you can blame on 256M video ram not being enough (pfft!) but prims not rezzing when you are standing 1m from them is a problem.