Patch Improves OpenSim Rezzing By 200% -- When Can SL Get This Too?

One of my biggest technical peeves of Second Life by far are textures that are slow to load. For new SL users, it's probably one of the chief contributors to quitting early on. Already accustomed to online games that come with a pre-loaded graphics library, it must seem like the weirdest thing for Second Life noobs to log in for the first time and get greeted with undifferentiated globs of gray for several seconds or even minutes. That's why I was so excited to read this post from Dusan Writer, whose metaverse company is developing OpenSimulator for various projects. One of his coders added a patch that greatly improved texture loading in OpenSim (and significantly, it was approved by the original texture coder in under four hours.) As the video above suggests, the improvement is substantial. Question is, could a programmer reverse engineer this patch and implement into a Second Life viewer? And if they did, how long would it take to get accepted in an official build?

Comments

[Nebulosus Severine]

Wow, that is really impressive! I hope that someone will be able to integrate it into a working SL viewer soon.

[Maggie Darwin]

Well, as I read the blog post, this speed-up is the result of a rewrite of a module in the OpenSim server. So it has nothing to do with a viewer patch.

And since OpenSim is (as I understand it) a reverse-engineered cleanroom implementation of SecondLife server, it's not based on the Linden server code and thus patches to OpenSim are unlikely to relate to the LL server.

Of course, if Tom Grimshaw has a radical new algo here, it might be of interest to the LL server devs. They might want to look at his patch to see if it has any relevance. And since OpenSim is open source, that should be possible for them to do.

[Metacam Oh]

It also loads textures closes to you first, as opposed to the Linden viewer which loads ass backwards.

[Hamlet Au]

Yeah Maggie, that's what I was thinking, Grimshaw's method might give the Lindens or SL open source devs a workaround idea with their own code base.

[radar]

they really need it. i don't know what it is, but lately texture loading and actually even object rezzing is taking forever when i first log in. maybe it's just me, but i doubt it. nothing's changed on my network or computers. the past week has been really slow initially after log in.

[Echelon]

@Two Worlds: What a wonderfully inane, useless comment. Back under the bridge troll.

In response to the article:
I've always had a hunch that the current asset loading system was a bit archaic. While comparing SL to OpenSim is akin to comparing a orange to a drawing based off a description of a orange, I wouldn't be surprised if this is indeed a much more efficient algorithm.