Box for fighting - invisible on the outside, visible on the inside?

Hi. I've been involved in a few fighting games inside of SL, and lag, especially with an attending audience, is a constant nuisance. I thought maybe if the fighters were inside a box with a visible interior (to reduce their systems' need to draw their surroundings) but an invisible exterior (so the audience can still see the action) might be a workable solution.

Is there any way to construct such a thing so that the audience can't see the facing interior walls? Or would that have to be so heavily scripted as to make any gain against lag marginal? Any input would be appreciated.

You can set the inside of the prims to be invisable, but the interior furnishings would be visable, just the walls would be invis. There are scripts to phantom and set to invis, but it's mostly just using the alpha channel in the prims. You are better off just placing it somewhere high that can't be accessed easily if you want to hide something.

That was actually the first thing I tried. But the interior walls were still visible to people outside of the box. What I'm trying to find out is if it's feasible to create a box that only the people inside of it can see, and anyone outside of the box sees only the people and items inside, but not the box itself.

You will get the best result by actually being as far as posible from other prims. So put your fighting space up high in a skybox.

Placing the combat area within a box that is transparent from the outside and opaque from the inside won't gain your fighters much, if anything. While common sense says that occlusion culling should make it more efficent if there is an opaque wall blocking the combattant's view of the spectators, the truth is that SL will still be affected by the scripts and textures and prims of the audiance.

If you make a prim box, and texture only the inside surface with an opaque texture, while texturing all the other surfaces as 100% alpha, then the audience will see through the walls closest to them, but will see the walls on the far side of the combat area. There is no way you can prevent that.

For the maximum benefit in lag reduction, put your area in the sky, and put the spectators in one sim and the combatants in the next sim, with the sim border between them. That will eliminate most of the negative impact of the audiance on the combatants.

Using this technique will also allow you to put an audience clear/combatant opaque wall between them, but not surrounding the combatants. That'll allow your audience to have a fully unobstructed view. Again, it won't help appreciably, but it'll do what you're aiming for.

A

All right, thanks for the info. I'll just file it under "well it SOUNDED like a good idea..."