Function Idea, or new paramater for Object Cameras.

[God Emerald]

Arlight, so I've been brainstorming ideas for creating an object camera, or monitor. Basically the object would appear as a texture to display a fixed location, and update every second or so. Most of this could all be handled by the client viewer, but objects would still need parameters for Camera Location and Camera Rot.

This would allowed people to create monitors to monitor different areas of a sim, or even a mirror. I personally would like to have like a little hud monitor that shows everything behind me, and as I suggested most of this could all be done by the client viewer.

Anyone else have any thoughts on this idea?

 

[Rolig Loon]

You mean something like this >>> http://community.secondlife.com/t5/LSL-Scripting/Need-help-with-a-camera-tracking-an-object/m-p/1450567/highlight/true#M9683  , only simpler, since you don't need to have your remote camera be mobile?

[God Emerald]

No, I mean object's having cameras and displaying what they see sort of as a texture. For instance if an object were a mirror, it would show you exactly what you looked like, and some of the areas behind you just by looking at it. Kind of like how water reflection works in SL.

Basically, I want to be able to see multiple areas of a sim just by looking at 2 or 3 objects without having to move my camera.

[Rolig Loon]

Ah.  Sorry.  Can't be done.

[God Emerald]

Yeah, but it'd be a nice idea to have implimented.

[Tigger Genira]

Well, you could achieve this, but it would take more than just LSL, you would essentially need a customised version of the viewer and some bot accounts. The bots would be your cameras, either streaming or generating snapshot type images.

Make sure the output is accessible via the web and use media on a prim to display it back in world.

Lots of work and lots of your own bandwidth would be needed.

I get what you are saying about a 'nice to have' feature, I've thought the same thing myself about having true reflective surfaces, but features like these have the potential to utterly destroy performance, particularly if overused or deliberately misused. Reflections are bad enough and they would only need to be rendered on the client side.

But a camera/screen setup, even if rendered by the client, would place a lot of extra load on the servers. The server would have to send extra data, for areas you normally could not see. Even if its restricted to only working in one sim you would either effectively have to ignore view distance and send all data for everything in sim, or determine which screens were in view, which cameras they were related to and what was in view of those camera(s) and send that in addition to the usual set of data. Remember that although a sim is only 256m per side, it is thousands of meters high.

Multiply that extra data by the number of sims, number of cameras and number of avatars present and consider the impact of lots of cameras/screens on bandwidth used by the server.