Posted by Joshua Gargus-2 on Feb 02, 2007; 7:10pm
URL: https://forum.world.st/Re-Croquet-vs-Secondlife-regarding-future-development-some-thoughts-to-share-tp125565p125580.html


On Feb 2, 2007, at 10:49 AM, deadgenome -.,.-*`*-.,.-*`*- wrote:

> I know, and to solve this nicely requires really intelligent
> distance/priority lodding done before download, so that the client
> only requests stuff to the detail level that it wants to display it. I
> have been looking at a couple of mechanisms for achieving this based
> on analysing meshes as though they are waveforms and then using
> amplitude and frequency to give mesh data a priority level. I don't
> know if there are any engines that do this already but it seems to me
> a better way of doing it than tile based systems.

The sort of LOD that you describe seems orthogonal to whether a tile-
based system is used; the tiling is a strategy for deciding which sim  
is responsible for which land area, but says nothing about how any  
given sim and client negotiate what needs to be downloaded.   I  
believe (without having studied the code) that SL already does  
something like what you describe;  it might not be smart enough to  
stream a particular LOD down, but it gives a higher priority to  
nearer objects.  There is no reason that this couldn't be extended to  
be LOD-aware.

The particular approach to analyzing the mesh is a separate matter.  
The infrastructure that I mention above will work whether you use a  
fancy algorithm like you suggest, or if you set an intern to the task  
of manually annotating the meshes with metadata about what LOD to use  
at what distance.

Josh