sl-service-account
commented
9 years ago Alexa Linden commented at 2014-10-29T18:20:20Z
Thank you for your suggestion. We've reviewed your request and determined that it is not something we can tackle at this time.
Please be assured that we truly appreciate the time you invested in creating this feature request, and have given it thoughtful consideration among our review team. This wiki outlines some of the reasoning we use to determine which requests we can, or can't, take on: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Feature_Requests
Thanks again for your interest in improving Second Life.
How would you like the feature to work?
Static sprites - free-standing permanent textures - are and have always been supported by the SL software but only applied in some very limited ways. Perhaps it's time to see if it can be put to further use sicne it's already there?
Why is this feature important to you? How would it benefit the community?
One apparently forgotten feature of SL is the "Linden trees". They provided essential life to the landscapes right from the start and may even today be the most common type of vegatation here.
A Linden tree is made from a cluster of sprites emitted by a small invisible object. In essence they are simialr to particles but permanent, non-moving and aligned globally. Juding by the weight figures, such objects are much lighter on the computers than similar looking prims, sculpts or meshes would have been - which is why I post it as a "lag fight proposal". Qualitywise they can't match the highest quality (and highest LI) mesh and sculpt trees but they good ones are certainly far better than the majority of "angled sheets" plants in SL. Unfortunately there aren't many good ones. Only a few were created in the first place and many have become outdated as graphics quality has improved (some where outdated right from the start to be honest).
However, ignoring the quality of the textures used, the basic principle seems to be very sound and potentially very useful and well worth taking a fresh look at. Here are some possibilities:
1) Allow the existing trees to be colored. Would be a really valuable function for anybody trying to make a forest of trees that don't all look exactly the same. Not sure how hard it would be to incldue this feature in the software though, it may or may not be worth the effort.
2) Introduce a new range of trees and other plants. Unless the number of possible varieties is hard wired into the code (which I find hard to believe) this should be very easy to do. Just find some more (and higher quality textures) and add them.
3) Open up for content creators to make their own static sprite based objects. This would be the ideal solution of course. Static sprites can be used for much more than just plants and it would be really exciting to see what wonderful low lag, low LI visua effects creative builders could come up with if they were given access to the function. In these modern mesh/voxel days it's easy to forget about the old and much simpler 3D graphics options. I'm not sure if it would be a good idea to introduce static sprites as a new feature today but since the feature is already here, why don't we use it for all it's worth?
Original Jira Fields
| Field | Value | | ------------- | ------------- | | Issue | BUG-7565 | | Summary | Lag fight proposal 03: Return of the static sprites | | Type | New Feature Request | | Priority | Unset | | Status | Been Triaged | | Resolution | Triaged | | Reporter | ChinRey (chinrey) | | Created at | 2014-10-19T12:56:56Z | | Updated at | 2014-10-29T18:20:24Z | ``` { 'Business Unit': ['Platform'], 'Date of First Response': '2014-10-29T13:20:20.303-0500', 'How would you like the feature to work?': "Static sprites - free-standing permanent textures - are and have always been supported by the SL software but only applied in some very limited ways. Perhaps it's time to see if it can be put to further use sicne it's already there?", 'Severity': 'Unset', 'Target Viewer Version': 'viewer-development', 'Why is this feature important to you? How would it benefit the community?': 'One apparently forgotten feature of SL is the "Linden trees". They provided essential life to the landscapes right from the start and may even today be the most common type of vegatation here.\r\n\r\nA Linden tree is made from a cluster of sprites emitted by a small invisible object. In essence they are simialr to particles but permanent, non-moving and aligned globally. Juding by the weight figures, such objects are much lighter on the computers than similar looking prims, sculpts or meshes would have been - which is why I post it as a "lag fight proposal". Qualitywise they can\'t match the highest quality (and highest LI) mesh and sculpt trees but they good ones are certainly far better than the majority of "angled sheets" plants in SL. Unfortunately there aren\'t many good ones. Only a few were created in the first place and many have become outdated as graphics quality has improved (some where outdated right from the start to be honest).\r\n\r\nHowever, ignoring the quality of the textures used, the basic principle seems to be very sound and potentially very useful and well worth taking a fresh look at. Here are some possibilities:\r\n\r\n1) Allow the existing trees to be colored. Would be a really valuable function for anybody trying to make a forest of trees that don\'t all look exactly the same. Not sure how hard it would be to incldue this feature in the software though, it may or may not be worth the effort.\r\n\r\n2) Introduce a new range of trees and other plants. Unless the number of possible varieties is hard wired into the code (which I find hard to believe) this should be very easy to do. Just find some more (and higher quality textures) and add them.\r\n\r\n3) Open up for content creators to make their own static sprite based objects. This would be the ideal solution of course. Static sprites can be used for much more than just plants and it would be really exciting to see what wonderful low lag, low LI visua effects creative builders could come up with if they were given access to the function. In these modern mesh/voxel days it\'s easy to forget about the old and much simpler 3D graphics options. I\'m not sure if it would be a good idea to introduce static sprites as a new feature today but since the feature is already here, why don\'t we use it for all it\'s worth?', } ```