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Madelaine McMasters

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Everything posted by Madelaine McMasters

  1. Madelaine McMasters
    You struck gold, Silent. When I lived in Forgotten City, I had the first page of Hedy's 1942 patent for a frequency hopping radio system (the progenitor of WiFi) on the wall of my lighthouse... Here's the texture from the portrait of Pope Innocent X in my Warm Welcomes skybox... Here's the print in-world. The list of my sins emerges from the frame and drifts slightly in the wind. That's Void Singer in my soul cleansing fire...
  2. Madelaine McMasters
    ...peers over her glasses at you, shifts to a glare, then shoves a flaming tennis ball into the bell of your saxophone. Yes! Lotta, If you strive for the fun of a doppleganger to be experienced by others, and derive your enjoyment from theirs, it'll all be good. I love to laugh with people, not at them. Here I am with my conscience, Snugs. We're under the watchful eye of a gift (a portrait of Pope Innocent X) from a dear friend who imagined that's how my conscience should look...
  3. Madelaine McMasters
    Hmm. Dad ran a mechanical engineering consulting business out of our home/lab/shop/barn. Mom did the books, banking, taxes, budgets, and scheduling, and provided a set of capable hands when needed. She did the same for our neighbor who ran a machine shop while his wife taught kindergarten. On the domestic side, Dad usually cooked (spiders are rich in protein!), Mom usually cleaned. Sometimes they switched, producing a crappy meal on spotless dishes one night and great food on "safely clean" dishes the next. Mom made better looking welds, spilled less oil during changes, and could get her hands into smaller spaces to fix things. Dad had the muscles and woodworking skills for home remodeling. Mom was the better painter, and taught me how to "cut in" and to wrap a used (oil) paint brush in aluminum foil and put it in the freezer to avoid having to clean it every night during long projects. (There's a paint brush in my freezer, right now.) Dad taught me how to pony my hair. He had more experience, his hair was always longer than Mom's. Mom taught me how to plant things, from seeds to trees, using my hands or the tractor. I learned sewing from Mom and embroidery from Dad. I used both to make kites and fix tears in my jeans and sundresses. I learned welding and driving from Mom, woodworking, marionette making, and aeronautics from Dad. I learned to drive hand puppets, tractors and motorcycles from both, and we all learned how to build a telescope (including grinding the mirror) together. Oh, I forgot to mention. I was home-schooled. No weekends off. No three month summer vacation. A trip to the Grand Tetons or Manhattan was road school. It was glorious. As a result, I'm a divorced (he wanted kids, I still am one), retired electrical engineer with long lapsed pilot's and amateur radio licenses, a home that's in it's 86th year of remodeling, a strawberry field that's now a forest and a walk-in closet that looks my parents are still sharing it. As I look around my world today, this is what I see: Across the street, mom's a lawyer, dad's an accountant. Next door, mom's a retired CFO, dad's a retired physician. Behind me, mom's a music teacher, dad's a biology professor. Behind them, mom's a lawyer, dad's a mechanical engineer. (We gang up on her.) I understand you learned there is "men shirt" and "women shirt". I didn't.* We do agree on one thing. Marriage is a team effort. *There is one gender anomaly in my observations. I rarely see women riding lawnmowers in my neighborhood. They're usually digging around in the dirt, planting things. From this I could deduce that men don't like getting their hands dirty.
  4. Madelaine McMasters
    Looks like it's time for this again...
  5. Madelaine McMasters
    Still, you'd want that one shared texture to be as small as possible. The fact that aggregating textures into one file improves things is slightly counterintuitive. Imagine I have four place mats, each with different 128x256 textures. Does it really save time to splice those four textures into one, then offset/scale that one texture differently on each of the four different mats? This is as I'd imagined, and you've answered my "(maybe it goes all the way?)" question with a "no". That's good. Yep, I've noticed this. And thanks for the detail on worn, rigged mesh. I understand that rigged geometry must be recomputed every frame, but I wasn't aware that was so much worse than the static mesh. Still, I imagine that zillion triangle static meshes taking up half the screen take longer to draw than hundred triangle meshes of the same size, regardless of texture size.
  6. Madelaine McMasters
    No worries, Fluffy. I love to rant. And ramble. Eventually I'll just set you on fire. The following crude explanation is not directed at you so much as anyone who reads the thread. I'm making this all up from my general knowledge of computer graphics. All Y'all feel free to correct anything I got wrong. The viewer uses JPEG2000 for its progressive download ability, which we see on log-in or TP as textures "come into focus" while we wait. I imagine the viewer fetches only up to the resolution it needs (maybe it goes all the way?). If scene requirements change, the viewer could request a higher resolution layer. All the while it saves everything it can fit into cache to build a local mip-map. Once we have a texture at the proper scale for the triangle we wish to texture, it's the size of the triangle affects the texturing time, not the size of the texture. The texture mapping engine will only fetch those pixels from the texture that map to the triangle. This is why fps scales with viewer window size, not texture size. Rendering speed also depends on scene geometry, the complexity of which is only roughly analogous to texture resolution. Triangles must be set up for texturing, taking a fixed time per triangle. That time is proportional to scene complexity, not window size. The number of triangles in a cube is the same whether it fills the scene or occupies only one pixel. If more complex geometry (avatars!) enters the scene, fps will drop. There is no JPEG2000 equivalent for geometry compression, so we encourage designers to create objects at various levels of detail (LOD) so that we can substitute simple geometries for complex ones as we back the camera away. Just as the use of smaller textures saves memory space, the use of smaller geometries saves rendering time. So, approximately... Texture resolution has minimal impact on rendering speed, but does affect usage of precious memory. Geometry resolution has significant impact on rendering speed, adding lower LOD models probably has a small impact on memory. You want low resolution textures to save memory space, low resolution geometry to save time. And, of course, textures and geometry are just two factors in rendering time. There's also lighting, transparency, shadows, reflections, etc. The SL viewer currently describes all of these things in a way OpenGL understands. OpenGL is fading away, and that will require potentially significant rethinking of the render pipeline. The render pipeline is only a part of what the viewer does. That data management stuff Coffee mentioned can still kill things even if the graphics are whizzy. As I've seen from watching my system monitor tools, SL uses only one or two of my Mac's eight CPU cores.
  7. Madelaine McMasters
    It's a piece of reactive artwork I made back in 2008...
  8. Madelaine McMasters
    Stop making me work, Fluffy!!! Here are two screenshots at medium window size. Speed scales with window size from about 60fps full screen to 130fps when the window goes so small the fps text gets trampled by other stuff in the menu bar. Hi Rez, 98.6fps. Lo Rez, 100.0fps I watched the fps meter for a few seconds for each of those scenes and they were actually closer together than the snapshots indicate. I call it "no difference".
  9. Madelaine McMasters
    ...sets you on fire. (All your house are belong to meeeeeee!) (I'm also vibrating in anticipation of being chastised for going off-topic with a mole. ;-). "LL, Quartz made me do it!!!!!!"
  10. Madelaine McMasters
    Yep, that's full screen. If I squish it down, it rises to over 130. ETA:
  11. Madelaine McMasters
    ...sneaks into your fridge while you are distracted and fills it with the remains of the Easter treats that made her sick two days ago.
  12. Madelaine McMasters
    Texture size is absolutely a red herring. Firestorm has two graphics settings that impact texture loading. Preferences -> Graphics -> Rendering Restrict maximum texture resolution to 512px (64bit only; requires Restart) Max Texture quality level: Normal, Mid, Lo, and No Here's my skybox at full, normal resolution and 59.9fps... A moment later, at 512px and lowest texture quality and 59.5fps... Reducing texture size to awfulness does approximately nothing to frame rate, as I'd expect. The size of a texture in the cache does not affect the speed with which a surface can be textured. I believe textures are downloaded progressively, using JPEG2000. The various progressions then populate mip-maps. The texture mapping engine then selects the best fit map and strides it as needed to fill the surface. Because SL content is user created, there's no high level coordination to promote reuse of textures across assets. When I joined SL, my only other 3D game experience was some XBox game my emergency backup kid showed me. I noticed that the tread pattern on the car he was driving was the same as the brick homes, but black. There were only a few leaf shapes for all the foliage in view, resulting in dandelion trees and sunflowers with aspen petals. There's no way to shove SL's bazillion texture worms back in the box, but there are bigger fish to fry, like single-threadedness, OpenGL, and all the data management issues you described.
  13. Madelaine McMasters
    I've not owned that generation of Miata, but I still get the pleasure of seeing them wink at me.
  14. Madelaine McMasters
    Ah, the double edge swords of misogyny (and misandry). Though it's fairer, I hope misanthropy isn't the answer. If you really want to upset me, accuse me of not being nefarious.
  15. Madelaine McMasters
    In a daring act of defiance, I've started wearing summer dresses in-world. Take THAT, filthy weather gods! Pikers, the lot of ya! I've been driving my Miata, top down, all winter.
  16. Madelaine McMasters
    While I'm thinking of it, these signs are mean...
  17. Madelaine McMasters
    I always thought those were depictions of some famous Asian man who really gets around. I'm still on the lookout for Falling Rock, a Native American who's apparently been missing since before I was born.
  18. Madelaine McMasters
    I like to lay down in it and look up at the clouds, which results in a sky high contact high.
  19. Madelaine McMasters
    Why do you people keep setting out these challenges for me?
  20. Madelaine McMasters
    It can take time to develop a voice. I sometimes jump in to diffuse heat that arises when a newbie encounters the buzz saw we can be.
  21. Madelaine McMasters
    As a member of this form for over a dozen years, I grow fond of many of you. Blocking the offensive doesn't prevent me from seeing their effect on the rest, which in turn affects me. This isn't called a "community" for nuthin'.
  22. Madelaine McMasters
    It's difficult to take you seriously when you project your attitude on others, then chastise them for it. Your first post in these forums was as a "victim".
  23. Madelaine McMasters
    ...beams!!!
  24. Madelaine McMasters
    It's finally warm enough to bike, so I'm back out in the wild, viewing wildlife... and dodging roadkill. Yesterday I watched this... It doesn't look like the roadkill I usually see. It might have been drinking a beer (the can's lid is on the left) when it got hit by someone (probably another bicyclist) wearing a pants strap (on the right). I should have been a detective.
  25. Madelaine McMasters
    ...isn't sure whether to beam, glare, or feign indifference.
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