animats Resident
Per Geenz Linden's request at the last Creator User Group meeting, here are two minor features which would help make the "infinite draw distance" code much easier. The goal is to have SL look like Google Earth in the distance - you can see distant terrain, at low resolution. This makes the big world real to users.
For an overview of what that's about, see this video: https://www.animats.com/sharpview/technotes/impostor.html
Technical discussion: https://www.animats.com/sharpview/technotes/impostor.html
Github repository: https://github.com/John-Nagle/maptools License LGPL.
So, the feature requests:
  1. Access to the height map.
Currently, to get the height map, someone has to create a "bot" account which logs in, visits thousands of regions, records land elevation data, and uploads it to a server. Many users have done something like this, to create terrain models. Flying over the whole grid regularlyis a headache, and bothers some users.
Some way to get this terrain info via an HTTP request would simplify things.
Along with this, it would be very useful to be able to get the present map tiles without the "FOR RENT" and "FOR SALE" overlays.
A set of map tiles taken at 64m or 128m above ground level would do this.
  1. Asset upload and wrangling tools.
With the new pricing for Premium Plus, uploading a full set of map tiles is affordable. Mapping mainland requires about 30,000 image assets, which are currently 256x256. This is about 6GB of asset content. (It is not necessary to make impostors for isolated single-region estates - you can never see them from the outside. This cuts down the load.)
The mechanics of uploading are somewhat painful. Bulk upload is supported, but everything ends up in the root inventory folder.
It would be helpful if uploading a folder with subfolders resulted in corresponding inventory folders.
That's useful for other purposes.
We need to get the UUIDs of the textures and meshes uploaded.
This is currently done by putting all the tiles into a prim, and running a script in the prim to scan the prim's inventory. A better approach would be nice. We'd also like to be able to get mesh UUIDs for meshes we have uploaded. Mesh UUIDs are not usually exposed in SL, so that's worth thinking about. If that UUID info were only available to the uploader, it would not be a security issue. The uploader already has their glTF file.
Note that this requires the asset UUID, not the object UUID, because the map is made of assets that are not associated with the currently visible regions.
That's enough to get to the point where what you see in the video can be deployed grid-wide.
If LL wants to take over this entire effort in future, that's fine with me.