Anyone a map maker?

I was just looking at my fps and when i look in at a current house i get alot of extra polys drawn, is there any texture that works the same way as caulk in a map making program?

If your not familar with caulk, it is used in a map making program so that any hidding sides of box's are not draw, because if you can't see it why should your computer draw it. If this dose not already exist I think we should start brainstorming right here on some aspects of how this should work in sl.

Some of my idea, Normal screen, all caulked sides are not rendered just like they should not be, but while in the build menu, they are redrawn so they can be edited, maybe it should be a check box so that if there is alot, it can be unchecked so small changes that do not need them will be easyer.

If your lost, then just think this, large high prim places, (clubs, malls) will run faster on your computer.

I'm not totally sure, but I think using a transparent default white texture should do the trick. I've been thinking about this as well. It would be cool if we just had a no-draw texture like in the hammer editor.

Unfortunately, the SL rendering engine doesn't work this way. Prims are drawn entirely. I'm pretty sure even transparent faces are still drawn even though they're transparent. The object itself appears as a whole before the textures that are on each face are loaded.

Yea...limitation of the engine unfortunately.

One way to help things to load faster in SL is to try to use textures that are no larger than 256 x 256 and saved in efficient file formats.

With you all the way up to "efficient file formats." Everything in SL is saved internally as Jpeg2000, regardless of the source file format before upload. For speed purposes, the source file format is completely irrelevant. For quality purposes though, always use TGA, always. Between the other options, BMP and jpeg don't support transparency, and jpeg invariably looks terrible. There's never ever any point in using those formats. TGA all the way, every day, ooh baby love TGA!

Making hidden faces transparent or putting a 100% alpha texture on them will probably even decrease performance, since alpha-textured surfaces require an additional pass through the renderer.

Just to make my post make a bit more sense. I didn't mean upload a large transparent TGA file and use that, that's the worst thing you could do.

What I meant was that *if* the default white texture you get when you're building was installed on the client's machine when SL is installed, it would cut download time while an object using it rezzes. If that is the case, using the default texture would be more efficient than using another uploaded one. But I'm not sure if the white default texture is installed client-side. In any case it's nowhere near as efficient as telling the SL rendering engine to just not draw the face, like the 'no-draw' function in Valve's Hammer Editor.

I'm not too sure about all textures being converted to JPG though, they'd lose their alpha channels surely. Unless you mean the alpha channel is saved as a seperate jpeg but that doesn't make much sense to me. If you want to make a transparent texture it'll be a TGA, and they can get pretty big seeing as they're not compressed anywhere near as much as JPEGs... and they have a whole other colour channel.

I can't remember the last time I saw a TGA below 1Mb. :/

^^^^ ********************** I take that back! I've just found one on my hard drive that's 9k

They're not converted to jpeg in SL; they're converted to jpeg2000. Huge difference. Jpeg is a low quality, lossy format that does not support transparency. Its only practical use is for web pages where speed is much more important than image quaility. Jpeg2000 on the other hand, what SL uses, is a completely different animal. It offers better compression than jpeg (smaller file size) by using a completely different type of mathmatics, much higher quality (optionally lossless), and it supports transparency, among other things. With the advent of formats like jpeg2000, jpeg is pretty much obsolete. There's even talk that jpeg2000 may end up replacing TIFF as the format of choice for digital image archiving. That says a lot.

good news and bad news, Ruok.
Bad news: As far as I know there is no magic "don't draw me at all" texture.
Good news: SL does indeed do back-face culling. Any sides that are hidden because they are on the opposite side of a prim are not drawn at all. Take box, for example, and texture the top face with a transparent texture. Notice that the 2 back faces and the bottom face are not drawn as you view through the top.

Ah I see!

I didn't know that man, thanks for the info. Wow Jpegs with transparency sounds pretty damn cool to me

Backface culling, yes. Occlusion culling, no, and that's the problem. In other words, interior faces of polygons are not drawn ever, and that's good. However, all exterior faces of polygons are always drawn, even when they face away from the camera, and even when they're blocked by other objects, and that's bad.

It is: http://secondlife.com/badgeo/wakka.php?wakka=ClientAssetKeys

Wow, thanks Ushuaia

Well there we go, theoretically you can save download time on your prims by setting your unseen faces to pretty much any of those texture files.

Looks like theres a few others I'm gonna have to play around with (lightning?)