05.12.08
/bling off, for crying out loud
I’ve noticed a pattern in my work on the viewer, and that is most of the features I work on are so that I can control the ways in which people inworld can annoy me. My primary motivation for working on visibility muting was simply that 16 sqm ad farms are, well, damned annoying.
Sometimes I feel like this makes me sound as if I am a virtual old codger yelling at the damn kids to keep off his lawn. But really what it boils down to is my belief that if you are able to annoy me, I should be able to ignore you. So it is with yet another way to ignore something that motivated one of my recent viewer contributions.
Introducing JIRA issue VWR-6540: “Add options to selectively render attached lights and attached particle sources”. (An alternate title might be “Let people turn off bling attachments and facelamps”.)
This patch adds Advanced menu options to disable particle sources and light sources that emanate from attachments.
Attached particle sources can not only be annoying, but they also contribute a lot to the Avatar Rendering Cost (ARC), so if bling annoys you or you’re in a busy area, turning it off can help reduce visual lag.
Attached lamps (usually facelamps) can also be annoying, in that they can interfere with ambient or environmental lights that happen to be part of neaby builds. Mostly this is due to the fact that most people aren’t aware that there is a 6-light limit. I see a lot of people with 2 or 3 attached lights (although I’ve seen some people with 6 lights, and one time as many as 30! attached lights), and as they move around a sim, local stationary lights can flicker on and off depending on your location.
The patch is pretty simple; particles aren’t drawn if their source object is an attachment, and light sources whose source is an attachment are simply omitted from distance sorting when the viewer selects which ones to render.