Culling volumes / "render as sky" textures (hidden skyboxes)
tracked
rhet0rica Resident
The mainland is cluttered with skyboxes, and private region owners may be miffed to discover that putting something at 1000 m is no guarantee that it won't be visible from the ground by someone with a very high draw distance. A possible solution: culling surfaces.
Whenever the viewer is asked to render a pixel with TEXTURE_SKY assigned to it, it should simply render the sky buffer instead of showing anything behind that surface. (This would also be handy for making magic portal effects.)
For bonus points, implement this as a prim flag (like reflection probes) that actually causes anything inside it to be forcibly culled from the outside, unless the camera is inside a linked culling prim. Implementing this detection test doesn't need to be very sophisticated; nearly all use cases are covered by scaling, translating, and rotating cubes.
A creator-centric solution to these two (very similar, possibly should be merged) requests for blocking the display of skyboxes:
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Issue tracked. We have no estimate when it may be implemented. Please see future updates here.
Vincent Nacon
Would like to have this. To set up a way to trick people into thinking they're moving around in a much larger sim or different places while still being in the same sim or parcel.
rhet0rica Resident
Vincent Nacon Cool, right? A full region with a culling surface at every hundred meters of altitude could present the appearance of 40 levels—for a total of an eye-watering 2.6 million m² of terrain. Mix in some megaprim sim surrounds and you'd be able to host two entire full-sized 18-hole golf courses... or just block out your neighbours. Whatever floats your boat.
Vincent Nacon
rhet0rica Resident Maybe also assign UUID of a Sky setting? Like, it doesn't have to be current parcel's setting. That way I can reposition the sun, tricking them into thinking at every turn they make, they're still going in the same general direction, but in reality, they're just going in a circle.
rhet0rica Resident
Vincent Nacon That is
neat
, but it is also cursed
, and definitely a lot more work than just hacking together something that copies in pixels from the already-extant view of the sky.Here's a trick you might want to try. The secret to a good feature request is to just focus on the bare-bones essentials of the idea; that way the request looks less intimidating to the implementers who have to review it. The perfect feature request is one that feels so obvious and necessary that the devs would look crazy for turning it down. Less ideal is looking crazy yourself for having too many off-the-wall ideas.
In my experience, most passionate developers will come up with neat twists and extensions on their own as they brainstorm how to make the request feel worth their time and useful to a wide range of users. For example, rendering an alternative sky is kind of a no-brainer extension, but it also requires a fair bit more comfort with graphics code than just punching a hole in the volume buffer, so you can think of it as the quiet part you don't say out loud—at least, not until after the original request is implemented without any gravy.