So, I’m sitting here banging my head this morning over two issues. One, why the heck is terrain never deviating from zero height, and secondly why things werent looking quite right – as you could see in the previous posts it was clearly rendering prims but things were ‘missing’ or not quite right. Turns out the answer was both.

First, Terrain.

Yesterday I got the heightfield behaving properly, but couldnt understand why it was never being set when placed onto the live feed coming from the network stack. Answer turned out I was doing something stupid and had typo’d on a variable name for my indexer. Once that was fixed, we were rendering scenes like the one below.

It’s beggining to look a lot prettier, but as you may have noticed, the prims dont appear to line up in any recognisable pattern. While there is definetely a pattern there – something is very off.

Second, Objects – Part A.

Showing this one to Easy [Babcock] in the office, we quickly worked out that infact objects were never being rotated – every object had exactly the same identical zero rotation. After a few minutes debugging, this turns out to be related to the conversion from a Quaternion to a Euler rotation for WPF. Switching from Vector3 to Media.Quaternion internally solved the problem nicely.

Here’s a view of Abbotts aerodrome with the fix inplace.

Much better, although there’s still some clumps missing.

Second, Objects – Part B.

So, it’s looking like we’ve almost got this rendering correctly. At least object shape and rotation is being displayed correctly, although there’s still something lacking. It turns out that most of the bits missing corresponded nicely with camera view – so I’ve fixed this by telling libsl to ‘rove’ the camera position around the sim to download the entire thing. The above screenshot had this fix inplace.

This solved at least terrain loading completely and most objects.

Loading it up on OSGrid in Wright Plaza – everything seems to actually render properly now, at least so far as primitives go – we’re missing sculpties right now which form a large component of Wright Plaza’s design.

Second, Objects – Part C!? Huh?

Panning our Camera around a little, we notice something a little bit … odd. Namely that around 0,0,0 there’s a large congregation of primitives. I’ve been noticing this already and had discarded it as possibly being neighbouring sims in which case, I’ll just knock them out later.

But it turns out, there’s valuable prims being thrown there – it looks to me like maybe the child primitives in link sets having their “Position” being relative to the parent primitive rather than the sim (in OpenSim we have both .Position and .AbsolutePosition to seperate these).

So, I’m going to be working on that for the rest of this afternoon – after which I’m going to play with either texture rendering, or getting Meshmeriser to work so we can discard the dependency on the black-box GPL’d rendering library.