Road Sign Kit

Revision as of 12:14, 5 March 2012 by imported>NelsonJenkins
Road Sign Kit

Road Sign Kit vendor image.
Creator Nelson Jenkins
Launch year 2009
Company Gentek Technologies
Availability Marketplace & In-World
User Manual

The Road Sign Kit is a set of 281 road signs based directly of the MUTCD 2003 specifications.


Original Design

The first Road Sign Kit included only a few basic signs and was aimed mostly at roleplay sim owners. As there were no other comprehensive kits on the market, sim owners would either have to buy individual signs (usually 2+ prims each) or create their own, usually failing to conform to MUTCD specifications. Because of this, the RSK attained massive commercial success, and has been adopted by many, if not most, roleplay regions since.

For versions 1 & 2, each sign was a simple prim with a single texture. On the back, the texture was simply flipped horizontally and colored black. While this was somewhat unrealistic, sim owners greatly enjoyed each sign being only a single prim, freeing up prims to be used elsewhere.


Mesh Update

Version 3 replaced all signs with single-prim mesh versions. Additionally, to make loading quicker, two optimizations were made:

  • Only 2 mesh objects are used for all signs. One object contains sign faces for rectangular signs, the other contains faces for all other shapes. Faces that aren't used are simply hidden.
  • All signs are mapped onto only 2 1024x1024 textures. The original textures had issues with unloading from cache once each specific sign was out of view, so now the textures are almost always loaded as long as at least one sign is within view.

The mesh update has not been very popular so far with users as widespread third party viewers struggle to support mesh efficiently, and many outdated viewers do not support it at all. However, the mesh signs have been created specifically to avoid LOD degradation, so visibility should not be impacted.


Stop bord

A copybotted Do Not Enter sign sparked the Stop bord meme.