User:Pyrii Akula/Wishlist

This page is to detail and show my wishes for the Imprudence and SL client in general, I'll only showcase client-side features here. The reason that this is here on a separate page instead of in the main wishlist page (Wishlist Page) is because I want to go into detail and develop these ideas on this page.

Toggle hiding small objects
(high-priority) As a builder, this one annoys me immensely. I will start with a story of something I realised today when working on a sim-wide 13000 prim project, only to find I had missed prims because they were hidden from my avatar being too far away. This left me needing to recheck all my work and spend more time fixing mistakes.

About a year ago, Linden Labs became very aggressive in improving framerates, view distance culling was already there and user-adjustable, hidden-object culling was also brought in (Known as object-object occlusion) but they went too far and introduced the forced hiding of small objects (less than 0.5m big) at a close distance, this ignores the user's set view distance and is based on the distance of the small object to the user's avatar instead of the camera view. This causes people to lose track of small objects on large parcels or sims, so increases the workload for sim caretakers, and causes builders to sometimes lose objects or difficulties in building at distances.

I want to see a toggle option in the preferences for this item. The ability to turn it off for builders or caretakers is essential. This should have been optional in the first place!

Detachable Windows
(I've just noticed that this already is expressed here: Tear-Off_Pallets ) One of my complaints as a builder is that the screen can become cluttered making work hard and work flow sometimes slow when dealing with scripts, object placement AND of course chatting with a client at the same time. Many people now have a dual-screen set-up and I use it for video-editing and 3D, even Photoshop these days allows you to move toolboxes for a bigger work-area. The above link is better than I can do to show, but I've heard from various people that have to deal with clutter because they need windows to do what they need to and lose screen estate in the process.

Image sequence export
This involves the ability to export footage from Second Life/Imprudence into image sequences. This is a popular format for video editing and 3D as it's lossless and usable in most video-editing software (Premiere/3DSMax/After Effects/Combustion/Maya/VirtualDub/AviSynth). Video would be exported into name-type-frame.ext format (scene22-diffuse-0187.png) into the location of the user's choice. It is clear that diffuse, z-depth and object matte information is available in the client, being able to export all of this information for each frame will be a improvement to post-processing and the type of videos that can be made from SL footage.

Z-depth is a per-pixel based mask of the distance of a particular pixel from the camera. White being closest and back being farthest away. In the client, this should be based on draw-distance.

Object matte is the colouring mask of objects separately so that they can be singled out for hiding or other effects in post-processing. Objects should keep their colours even when off-camera. But there is 16-million possibilities (24-bit images (8-bit per channel): (2^8=256)^3)

In the latest clients, the ability to export video has been removed, but this feature might not need to rely on those functions, but more on image export functions which hold z-depth/object matte features. Different framerates (23.95/25/30/50/60) and resolutions should be supported.

(mock-up image in the works)

Pen/Touchscreen compatility
Subtitle: Changing the way the Imprudence client handles mouse/cursor input.

Instead of repeating myself, here's links to my work on the matter: Pen Mode article on SL wiki VWR-5860: Pen Mode (Graphics Tablet/Tablet PC support)

What has changed since making those articles is the increased support for touch-screens and tablets in Vista/Windows7 and Apple is has filed patents for multi-touch. So this feature is slowly becoming a requirement.