Saturday, September 22, 2007

Why Does This Happen?

Written 21 September, 2007

Why Does This Happen?

Back in the spring, when I was first learning to zoom my camera far away, I noticed that sometimes objects just weren't there on far view.
I freaked the first time it happened and went racing from the House of 1000 Pleasures down to Pele, and yeah, my little train was still there. No one had stolen or deleted it.

I've noticed that keeping my draw distance up makes for better long distance viewing. I can zoom the camera further, and less stuff is missing-- but certain objects seem, reliably, to not be there.

These objects are scipted but some scripted objects are visible, and others aren't. I've not yet learned what, if anything, the difference is.

But anyway, here's the teleport board from 350 meters away.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

What you can see is dependable on your drawing distance, no matter if you altcam or not. And smaller objects disappear with distance, cause client thinks that you cannot see them anyway.

Peter Stindberg said...

Exactly. The viewer keeps a list of objects you can "see" from your current position. Wenn you use the camera to zoom around, only this list gets used since - as far as the viewer is concerned - you do not change your actual position and therefore there is no need to update the list.

I have the impression though, that objects in that list have a certain latency. They do not get deleted immediately even if you move out of range.

So if you are on the temple at Pele and hav draw distance at 256, you will only see frcations of the vampire castle. Now move close to the vampires. In theory, you ought to only see part of the temple at Pele since you moved out of range for small objects. However if you use the alt-cam to zoom close to the temple, you still see all the objects.
It would be interesting to experiment if that list is flushed after a certain time, or a certain distance. Also if it gets flushed after a TP.

btw: here is a very good article on tweaking viewer performance, and I highly recommend to switch away from the official viewer anyways: http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/2007/06/tweaking-performance.html

Anonymous said...

Peter, objects have "latency" because they stay in the cashe. Client just won't download things that are our of view range of the current position. But if they are already in cashe, it will draw them.

Cheyenne Palisades said...

I don't think that's quite it, folks. I'm aable to zoom to sims where I've never been and see objects that are quite small. And some objects disappear when they're quite close, maybe 30 or 40 meters away. And certain scripted objects reliably disappear.

/me shrugs

Anonymous said...

I found this page searching for "scripted objects dissapear" and I understand. I can max my settings, and see things in the next sim, but this 1 scripted object I have disspears when I move just so many meters away. It's quite annoying knowing There are things that I'm probably not seeing that my environment as far as I can see suggests that I should be seeing.