Scriping a comic-book in SL

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

By "scripting" I mean the LSL needed to show the pictures, not the writing of the story.

What I see in SL is rather monotonous: a constant beat forced by texture loading. So, are there ways of pre-loading textures? Could multiple images on one texture be used to give a couple of fast changes? How may images be pushed into the cache? I think it is possible to zoom in on an image, but that works better with a rostrum camera than with a digital image.

A two layer display might help. Think of cel animation.

Linden plans can change everything, but we could get a better sense of motion, in time and in space.

[Ciaran Laval]

Take a look at Rolig Loon's post in lsl library about pre-loading:

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/LSL-Library/Preloading-Slide-Viewer/td-p/1723417

Basically you load the textures on other faces, but colour those faces black, so in theory the texture should have loaded for avatars before they view it, which should help with the speed of textures appearing when they change page.

[NOiSOk Mayo]

Could multiple images on one texture be used to give a couple of fast changes? you can and it's a excellent idea (and if you can more frames better). You can make this  changing the option offset of a face or llTextureAnim.

[Rolig Loon]

Remember, however, that the maximum texture size you can upload to SL is 1024 x 1024 pixels.  You can fit four 512 x 512 images onto a texture that size and still get good resolution.  If your cartoon cels have much detail at all, though, don't plan on trying to squeeze more than four images on that texture.  Remember, also, that you'll still need to use some sort of preloading method because it takes most viewers a long time to rez a 1024 x 1024 image.

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

Thanks, it seems I'm on the right track.

What I was thinking was something like this...

Frame One: Villain makes verbal declaration of intent finishing with something like, "See how you like this!"

Frame Two: Close-up of "this".

Frame Three: Close-Up reaction shot, startled eyes, perhaps.

Frame Four: Medium shot, hero's response.

Frames two and three could be shown for a relatively short time.

It's not going to entirely get around the problem of slow downloads. It would also need specific scripting rather than running a general-purpose image display script. Unless there is a method of signalling to a script when a texture is fully loaded, there could still be problems.

I suppose I am trying to break away from a rather simplistic framing style, you can still see it in the newspapers, to the more dynamic use of images that people such as Kirby and Lee introduced in comic-books.

 

[Rolig Loon]

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WolfBaginski Bearsfoot wrote:

[....]

It's not going to entirely get around the problem of slow downloads.

[....]

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Oh, but thats exactly what pre-loading does.  Done right, you shouldn't have any loading lag at all. 

[Ela Talaj]

I have a book with preloading pages textures.

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

So there is a way in LSL of knowing when a texture has finished loading? 

[Qie Niangao]

There's not, but when you think about it, there sort of can't be. Multiple viewers, watching simultaneously, could load at very different rates, so it would be really messy to even know whose texture download should be finished.

[Rolig Loon]

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Qie Niangao wrote:

There's not, but when you think about it, there sort of can't be. Multiple viewers, watching simultaneously, could load at very different rates, so it would be really messy to even know

whose

texture download should be finished.

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Besides which, you don't need to know.  Unless you plan on flipping pages super fast, you can preload enough pages to be well ahead of most people's reading speed.