Texture Preloaders

[Grace Loudon]

Are texture preloaders at the landing of a sim or region beneficial or a waste of time?  Do they create more lag than they are worth?

[Rolig Loon]

If a texture hasn't already been downloaded to your own local cache, it takes a few moments for your graphics card to download and rez it.  A "few moments" can be anywhere from a second or less to several minutes, depending on how many textures your computer has to download, how big they are, and how large your cache is.  Your system can only download textures within your draw distance, so one way to speed up rezzing is to decrease your draw distance to make less work for the graphics card. Another is to use an algorithm like the Stepped Draw Distance method that it built into the Firestorm viewer.  That system downloads the nearest textures first and then progressively farther ones over a period of 20 - 30 seconds.

If you preload textures by deliberately placing them where people are likely to see them as they first enter the sim, you are circumventing some of those strategies.  You are forcing people to download the textures before they may need them, so that they will be able to rez them more quickly later.  There are good reasons for doing that, especially if you don't want people to see the sim rezzing like a patchwork quilt.  The downside is that all that preloading does create some lag.  That could be annoying to a casual visitor who was only intending to stay for a minute and would never need all those textures cached.  For anyone else, it might be a fair tradeoff -- getting the bulk of their texture lag over early.  I can see preloading on a RP sim or on a sim where people will be seeing a great sweep of landscapes and buildings.  I can't see any merit in doing it for a sim full of shops.

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