"Preloading" a Particle Texture

I've made an avatar with a touch-triggered particle effect. To avoid floating gray squares I'd like the particle to load for others before the effect is triggered so I've included it on a face of a prim in one of the attachments. It's on a face of the prim that is hidden by another prim. Will it load for them even though it's not in their field of view but the rest of the prim is?

I don't know, but I've always assumed not, because of occlusion. I have successfully used this trick: if the object has any black places on it, put the texture in full view there, colored the same black. The texture will preload, even tho you don't really "see" it since it just looks black.

Thanks, Nika! Ah, yes, occlusion. I remember that word from somewhere. No black places but maybe I can incorporate one. Alternatively I might be able to find a spot to make it tiny and unobtrusive.

EDIT: Total brainstorm! I'll post it here in case anyone else needs this trick: the edges/corners of the texture are transparent so I'll set it to a decimal number for horizontal and vertical repeats on one face and then just offset it .5 each way and....voila! It's hidden in plain sight.

A nice & simple solution to s/thg I happened to have been mulling over for the last week or so. Thanks

I'd be interested to hear if this works. I have tried to do this exact thing with particles to no avail. Makes no difference where or how I preload the texture, I always get the gray squares.

Doug

That will work for something that happens to have transparent edges. For one that doesn't, just apply the texture to a prim, and then set the prim's transparency to 100% via script. See http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlSetAlpha for more info.


I'm not sure I've ever tried it with particles. I don't use particles very often. In theory, as long as you're using the same exact texture (same UUID) in both instances, that should do the trick. It may be though the particles aren't actually pulling the texture from your local texture cache the same way polygonal surfaces do. Perhaps it's actually calling a whole new instance of the texture from the server, no matter what. That would explain what you're seeing, Doug. It doesn't seem very sensible, of course, but it's certainly possible.

Anyone know for sure?