There does seem to be a collective feel that the terrain needs to upgraded somehow. Even a Linden suggested maybe a way to override it if the builder choses, like with sim sized mega prims.
My first concern is LOD. The constant changes of LOD on the terrain make the appearance the terrain unnatural and unstable. There are times where we spend lots of time to get the terrain to look just perfectly aligned with other objects nearby. When one decides to walk away 20m, 40m, 60m, however, the perfect alignment becomes a prefect fashion statement for a drunk bulldozer. The hard work undertaken to detail the alignment of the terrain seems like a complete loss. As I've used other renders, lets pick on Call of Duty, the terrain is pretty stable even at a distance. It has to be. The mere jump of LOD in the terrain could mean a way to cheat in Deathmatch sniper rounds. You know how snipers love to crawl around the terrain. That kind of stableness doesn't happen when the drunk bulldozer decides to rearrangement the landscape every frame you move. Call of Duty uses the Source Engine, yet this isn't a 'lets all switch over to the Source Engine' rant. It is a use-case that shows that even on old steampunk video cards there still have the coal to burn up the pixels and display a stable landscape. The use-case means, bottomline, it is possible. Maybe a baby-step solution is just to have an option to turn-off the LOD for the current sim, and maybe nearby sims. The problem here, maybe, is that the changes to add vertex limits would be affected by this. It might not be all that simple like it was in the past without the vertex limits. Therefore, there would need to be separate vertex limits: one for the terrain and the rest for objects. Here is another use-case with a collada file: Lets say I have a collada file that contains a very detailed structure of a volcano (terrain only). The volcano is 1km wide. That crosses several 256m sims. There are lava tunnels that lead inside. The suggested solution was to use a sim sized mega-prim. To do that with scuplties would be hard for more than just looks. Sculpties need to calculate all the phsyics, yet the collada file could have that already detailed and compiled with the file. How do we do this with the stock viewer even if we used sculpties? The stock viewer doesn't include a "sit on this object here like one sits on land now anywhere" option. If we used a mega-prim, it would disabled the ability to sit anywhere on the terrain. The other idea is to import a terrain, which is an available feature. That doesn't allow us to have multiple height maps, like lava tubes. If a lava tube crossed a sim to another, there would be a hole in the terrain in one sim. There current terrain engine doesn't allow holes. Multiple height maps would allow us to have holes in the terrain. The physics detail of a scupltie bent to make that hole doesn't preform (and I don't mean just frame optimization.. I mean like how a skirt clearly either looks good or not when you sit down kind of 'preform'.) So, maybe the solution include that baby step.. to allow multiple height map layers. A Lava tube could be done with three layers. One for the bottom of the tunnel. One for the top. And one for the side of the volcano above the tunnel. There would be needed an extra feature with the height map to allow empty spaces, to allow where the tunnel opens into the side of the volcano. So, before we even digress into the advantages of collada refineries, it seems the first two baby steps would be to fix LOD and allow an arbitrary number of terrain layers. I would like to see what others think about this. _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/OpenSource-Dev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
