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Are lindens ever going to fix the transparency texture overlay issue?


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Peggy Paperdoll wrote:

Which really means that LL will never "fix" it.  LL chose OpenGL as a means of graphics rendering so that Mac and Linux users would be able to join SL as well as Windows users.  DirectX is propriatory to Microsoft and can only be used for Windows based computers.  OpenGL is open source which is why LL chose that rendering engine........I don't see them moving away from that ever as it would immediately lock out some 20% of the users (plus tick off a bunch of people).

It's more like 8%. Or 7.9%, to be exact. Apple's operating systems account for only 6.82% of the desktop and notebook market, and Linux has a meager 1.08%. The numbers are probably even lower when it comes to SL, since people usually don't buy a Mac or install Linux in order to play 3D games.

If you ask me, it's madness that LL have wasted money and resources on developing viewers for Mac OS and Linux for years. At the same time, their choice of OpenGL turned out to be a PitA for PC users with ATI Radeon cards, which have a market share of 41.2%. So they ended up ticking off (or worse, driving away) a lot more residents than if they had developed a proper PC client, and only a PC client.

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ATI's OpenGL drivers were an order of magnitude better back when sl was starting out. It's only in the last 4 years or so that ATI stopped caring about OpenGL, and it took a while for it to get really bad. By that point sl's Mac & Linux user base was well established.

Also keep in mind that ATI's DirectX drivers aren't much better. Just read up on any gamer forum about people that have to install driver A to play game A, then switch to driver B to play game B. You never hear about Nvidia users having to do that. ATI makes some really great hardware, but you couldn't pay me enough to uses their drivers.

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Ishtara Rothschild wrote:

It's more like 8%. Or 7.9%, to be exact. Apple's operating systems account for only 6.82% of the desktop and notebook market, and Linux has a meager 1.08%. The numbers are probably even lower when it comes to SL, since people usually don't buy a Mac or install Linux in order to play 3D games.

If you ask me, it's madness that LL have wasted money and resources on developing viewers for Mac OS and Linux for years. At the same time, their choice of OpenGL turned out to be a PitA for PC users with ATI Radeon cards, which have a market share of 41.2%. So they ended up ticking off (or worse, driving away) a lot more residents than if they had developed a proper PC client, and only a PC client.

 

but you forget, the online venues that DO support Mac and Linux  have significanly higher proportions of those user than the net average... because those users flock to those areas where they do have support.

as for the choice of openGL, it was really no choice at all... small unproven company with no real backing, needs payed users to get off the ground... DX licensing woul've been a huge burden. Meanwhile ATI has always had crap driver support... seriously, always, so that wasn't and still isn't an issue... being bought up by AMD actually pushed their openGL support down (something I always found ironic). and none of that mattered because the featureset they were using at the time WAS supported, and the main appeal of SL at the time was to a tiny core fraction of mostly opensource developers.... I wouldn't be suprised if only half the original beta userbase was PC's.

as for wasting resources developing Mac and Linux clients.... ahahahaha have you seen the state those clients are in? almost all the real work on those is patches by people in those communities. LL just does a quick lazy port, and the community picks up the slack.

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Way back when, the old forums had a thread, Transparency and Alpha Channels: The Definitive Guide pinned to the top of the forum as a sticky, so innumerable people -- including me -- who went there to ask about this issue found some enlightenment straight away.

I gather this lithium stuff doesn't allow for stickies -- heaven knows why --- but over in Scripting Tips we've got links to useful resources in the older incarnations of the forum (and elsewhere)  posted as a reply to a pinned post by Lexie.   I'm wondering if that might not be an idea here, too.

 

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Actually anyone can put in a request for content to be pinned (AKA stickified), although to be concise I think we should talk Chosen into making some Copypasta and then we can all RIC the post with a request to have it pinned >=)

(because that's WAY more fun then just asking Lexie... I mean really, how else would we have a good excuse to report Chosen lol)

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