User:Huns Valen/Much Longer Land Draw Distance

• The idea is to have a separate slider for land draw distance. It must be greater than or equal to the "master" draw distance. As drawing land is much less resource-intensive than drawing objects and avatars, it should be possible to have a land draw distance measured in kilometers, not meters.
• Could possibly use colored map textures (from the world map, not from the viewer-generated local map) as terrain patch, rather than the supplied patch, although this might not look great for closer-in terrain.
  • Perhaps all terrain within 512 meters could be drawn using the sim-supplied textures, and anything further could be drawn using the world map textures.

Barriers to Implementation

• Would require child connections to more simulators to render "sorta near" terrain (that is, beyond the draw distance for objects and avatars, but within the usual "far clip.") The simulators would have to JUST send land, not objects/avs/etc. as that would defeat the purpose of having a lower draw distance. (Terrain beyond the usual far clip would all be done as world map textures.)
• Colored map textures may not be available in suitable resolution for it to look really good. However, it should be acceptable to many residents in lieu of the "version 2" graphics engine we were shown previews of in 2005 (and which subsequently was cancelled.)
• If this works well as a proof of concept, LL might be persuaded to make higher-resolution world map textures available, and work on some server-side optimizations.

Please file this in Jira, and/or flesh it out more and move it out of your user namespace, into its own article, and back into the feature request category, thanks. Gigs Taggart 12:45, 24 February 2007 (PST)