Not as simple as it looks...

A little bad news

In my last post on "bug hunting", I talked about the LOD decay issue and a potential fix. I said in the blog that "subject to QA" it would be coming to you soon and sure enough QA found an issue. It turns out, rather a large issue given that as a result of my fix a lot of mesh textures get utterly corrupted. Needless to say, that patch was backed out. Thanks to Ansariel Hillier and Whirly Fizzle from the Firestorm development team for spotting and doing some initial troubleshooting of it for me while I was overseas.

It is not all bad news

The good news is that I have submitted a new patch that uses a completely different method. It is a method that I shied away from first time as I felt it was too close to the critical path, i.e. a part of the code that has significant impact on the overall performance, and chose to make changes far earlier. I am happier with the new solution, it is simpler, more elegant in some ways, and overall improves the performance ever so slightly by avoiding some convoluted checks when calculating the LOD for Mesh.

This patch has also highlighted the rather bizarre dependency that a mesh has on the legacy prim definitions and adds weight to my request for documentation on why this is done. Once I have cleared a few other loose ends up I may well circle round and have a look at this again.

On a related note. Complexity and confusion

With the recent introduction of complexity limits to the viewer has confused some people and highlighted certain bad practices in Mesh creation. However, due to a range of different "features" it is still not really as reliable as anyone would hope. Part of this is down to the fact the rigged mesh does not have its LOD calculated in the same way. 

In fact, for worn, rigged mesh the LOD is not based upon the radius of the object but is instead tied to the bounding box of the avatar that wears it. This is a quite deliberate choice, explicitly mentioned in the viewer code,  and means that if you wear a Mesh body and Mesh head and Mesh hands, that they ultimately LOD swap at the same time, rather than the hands decaying first (being the smallest) then the head and later the body but it also means that the complexity calculations need to consider this (which they do not at present). This means that those super high poly onion skin mesh head that melt down your graphics card in a busy sim, are only getting a complexity score based on the apparent scale and yet they are visible based on a much larger scale. Once you realise this...you can then read my Jira here because it is actually worse than that, rigged meshes are being given a far far easier ride that they deserve.

All this being said, it is what it is and changing this stuff is hard because it breaks things. So the Lab are looking at pulling together all the oddities in the LOD and complexity calculations and reviewing them to see what if anything can be done to make the complexity numbers more meaningful and usable. There is no timescale for this, just an intention to review things at the moment. I for one will be keeping a keen eye on progress.

Love 

Beq

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