I'm puzzled by this.

[Phil Deakins]

A friend rezzed a prim, on which appeared the map of the sim, taken from the world map, and a small prim for each avatar in the sim, placed and moving in its correct position. I liked it, and it's not difficult to create, so I started to make one, just for something to do. Rotations always manage to flummox me, and they would again if the prim isn't rotated properly, but I got stuck in anyway.

Out of interest, I had a look at what's actually available, and I found 1, maybe 2, that could overlay the parcels in the sim, with different colours for different parcel owners. Nice. But how the heck do you do that? That's my question.

It would be easy to rez a prim for each 4x4 area, coloured according to the owners. It would get the parcel shapes correct, but it would need 4096 prims to do it, so that's not the method. It could be brought down to 820 prims by using prims with 5 usable faces, but that's still way too high. I'm at a loss as to how it can be done. Any ideas?

I'm thinking that the way must be to create a 64x64 texture outside SL, and auto-upload it onto the overlay face. Or can the pixels on a face be coloured in a similar way that touching the face can return the exact spot that was touched?

Edited August 8, 2022 by Phil Deakins

[Jenna Huntsman]

57 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

touching the face can return the exact spot that was touched?

Not 100% sure what you're trying to do, but for the above question, look at llDetectedTouchST

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlDetectedTouchST

[Phil Deakins]

@Jenna Huntsman

Thanks, Jenna, but I only used 'touch' as an example of doing something in LSL that's specific to a pixel, comparing it to what could answer my question if it could be done; i.e. change the color of a pixel on the face of a prim.

Edited August 8, 2022 by Phil Deakins

[Frionil Fang]

Using a mesh with 8 square faces like a strip of pixels, you need ( 64 / 8 ) x 64 = 512 of them. Their geometry is so minimal that they have 256 LI when linked together, which is a bit rough still.

If you didn't need color, you could have a texture that represents several "pixel configurations" in the same face, chosen via texture offsets, getting you down by a factor of 4 for instance if you had each being a 2x2 pixel cluster.

Edited August 8, 2022 by Frionil Fang
my math was off, as usual

[Phil Deakins]

@Frionil Fang

AHA! Thank you, Frionil. That sounds like the solution. My experience with mesh is so tiny that using mesh objects would never have occurred to me.

The sums don't look right to me, but I may be misunderstand it. 1 pixel = a 4x4 area of the sim. There are 4096 of those in a sim. It would need 512 strips of 8 pixels to cover the sim, not 128. But I do have a question. I thought that mesh has only one face. I'm not really understanding what you mean, am I ?

 

[Frionil Fang]

1 minute ago, Phil Deakins said:

The sums don't look right to me, but I may be misunderstand it. 1 pixel = a 4x4 area of the sim. There are 4096 of those in a sim. It would need 512 strips of 8 pixels to cover the sim, not 128. But I do have a question. I thought that mesh has only one face. I'm not really understanding what you mean, am I ?

 

Shh that version of the post with my "a region is 128 x 128" just-woken-up math never existed, see the edited version. 

But meshes can have up to 8 faces in the same object, which makes them a very convenient construction block for something like this. 8 individual squares for 0.5 LI (when linked).

[Phil Deakins]

4 minutes ago, Frionil Fang said:

But meshes can have up to 8 faces in the same object

Ooo. And can each of their colors be changed with LSL? I.e. do they behave as the faces of a normal prim?

Even so, 512 meshes to cover the sim is still an awful lot. But maybe they do do it that way.

Edited August 8, 2022 by Phil Deakins

[Quistess Alpha]

Sounds like a problem for media on a prim. Make an image with CSS/HTML and display it on the prim.

[Phil Deakins]

1 minute ago, Quistess Alpha said:

Sounds like a problem for media on a prim. Make an image with CSS/HTML and display it on the prim.

Do you know, that's something that never occurred to me. I'd thought about making a graphic file (texture) and somehow auto-uploading it, but the much simpler idea of an html file on a prim didn't get anywhere near my brain this morning. That, I think, is the actual solution, at least for me. I'll do it that way.

Thank you Quistess - and thank you Frionil too.
 

[Frionil Fang]

18 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

Ooo. And can each of their colors be changed with LSL? I.e. do they behave as the faces of a normal prim?

Even if you're going for a MOAP solution, yes, they behave like basic prim faces.

[Phil Deakins]

4 minutes ago, Frionil Fang said:

Even if you're going for a MOAP solution, yes, they behave like basic prim faces.

Thank you, Frionil. I'm going to do it with MOAP because, for me, that's so simple compared to me creating meshes lol. And, of course, it only needs 1 prim. The idea of mesh having faces like that could be useful for me in the future, of course, so it's good to know.

[Quistess Alpha]

1 minute ago, Phil Deakins said:

that's so simple compared to me creating meshes lol.

FWIW, I often mis-use the meshes that come with furware text. the UV mapping is a little off from ideal, but it's close enough, and having 8 faces in a row is useful for a lot of things.

[KT Kingsley]

It's free, so I hope this is allowed under the forum guidelines, but I've put this up on marketplace: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Eight-face-display-panels/11026621.

[Phil Deakins]

7 hours ago, KT Kingsley said:

It's free, so I hope this is allowed under the forum guidelines, but I've put this up on marketplace: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Eight-face-display-panels/11026621.

Thank you, KT. That's brilliant!