flexible attachments and hardware lighting in 1.9.1?

Just how ARE lights calculated in linked sets (objects) anyway? If an object has 6 prims, does each prim emit a light or, I would think, just 1 light for the entire object? What about if only 2 prims are lights in the object? What about if the 2 prims aren't touching?

Yay for swishy tails, wobbly ears and cans on ropes dragged after the car on marriage! ^.^

But.. about the lighting.. 6 lights are not that many, but should be okay. the big question on my mind is: Are walls that are not set to "glass" as material (or something) finally stopping the light?

Next to my house there's a pink skin shop, and it's shedding it's pink glow all over the area.. and even though I got a solid wall in between, my entire house (and the next house, so on, the entire area) is tinted pink.

So, I don't use light currently not cause they slow me down, but because they're not stopped by solid objects (helloooooo, shadow!) and they are pretty random when it comes to which prims are lit and which are not (make a 20x20 cube field, put a light above it, and you get some lit cubes, others are not, heh).

But! I hope that's all peachy now with HW lights, as that can as well make use of the gfx card's lighting ability and not shine through solid stuff.

*meow*
Sheila!

Hold on, I'm pretty sure I have seen shadows with lighting off in the current code. Or was I imagining them?

Could have been pre baked or drawn in, it's the current "in" thing with the cool kids I think. Never noticed any shadowing with lighting turned off otherwise though.

They won't, they'll flop independently from their own anchor points. Unless you butt them together anchor to anchor it won't look good.

Yeah, as long as those tails & ears use only 1 prim. Otherwise, I wouldn't get too excited at this point in time. And I'm afraid the cans on ropes wouldn't work, either (though ropes by themselves might).

Here's hoping for the future, though!

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Hmm.

Okay, I personally don't have a problem with that. However, I suspect others might... especially those who may have purchased light-based items from a creator who is no longer active on SL. This does kinda fall into the "breaking existing content" category, if I'm reading this right.

EDIT: On second thought, you may be doing the right thing. Most users don't seem to turn on local lighting in the first place, and the sheer number of light objects that currently exist in a lot of areas inworld could potentially eat up the 6-light HW limit pretty fast. Perhaps it is better to start fresh, then.

Oh, I'm sure we'll see some creative solutions from residents! I know there's plenty of ingenuity out there. Still, that doesn't affect my view that linkset flexibility would provide a far greater range of possibilities than what's currently being implemented. I had hoped this was the functionality being provided when I first found out about flexi-prims, and I know I wasn't alone. This is most definitely something a ton of folks would appreciate.

Someday? Pretty please?

Kelly, couple of questions:

1. With the lights, can we set these new properties by script, meaning we can change the settings for the light automatically? Or are these just interface settings? For instance, could I change the color of a light via. script.

2. With the floppy prims, can you actually set a prim to stick to a certain 'floppyness' and stay that way, or does it have to be a moving kind of a thing? I'm thinking that if you could set it to a certain, fixed static floppy state, it would actually prove a useful tool for creating different shapes in all types of building.

Oooh, that sounds interesting... particularly if a floppy prim bent according to its local gravity... apply llSetForce(llGetMass() * (<0,0,9.8> + new_gravity_axis), FALSE); to a flat cube to make a *slightly* curved wall in a larger-than-10-meter circle...

Kelly, thanks for the reply. It's a shame about number 2 - it would be like giving us several different new prims all at once, judging from the video that Torley made. Even if the implentation is client side, you could still get the client to keep a certain shape in the overall floppyness spectrum I'd presume. Maybe it's something to think about. I can just imagine what organic shapes it would allow us to make. Hey, we could even put flat invisible prims in front of the floppy ones to stop people going through builds, so it wouldn't matter that they're phantom either.

I hope number one does get finalised before 1.9.1 because we could do some really neat things if we could control it by scripting.

BTW on breaking existing lights, this change breaks a lot of my content from the first 6 months or so I was here. But, to be honest, this sounds like it was required and I'm all for that if we get less laggy and more control and realism in lighting. Just wanted to say that, as in the past I've often grumbled about anything and everything here

For the first two days, there will be massive login issues. After that.. lag.. lag.. lag..lag.. Computers will squeal in pain and fry.

But I must have the glow!!!! I have to have the power of the glow!!!!

Should an "ATI RADEON X800 GTO x86/SSE2" support the hardware lighting option?

Where should the option appear?

Yup. Pretty much all 3D accelerators should support it AFAIK.

I'm guessing they'll put the option in the graphics settings, since that's where the lighting setting is at the moment. I'm really not bothered where they put it though.

Thaank you for working on hardware light, sorly needed as it does make SL look alooot better

Theres sooo many light objects all over SL especially older sims thats been untouched for awhile uses light aalll over the place, rendering impossible to use LL in current state, well ok so its broken everywhere now but still on lone sims you can run with LL on barly

Will the "set light" be a option in build or could we do it in script instead, right now its easy to set anything "light" and forget you ment "full bright" , but then again if hardware light works alot better it'll be permanent on and youd notice if you accidentally set something "light" when you ment full bright.

SL without "ooh shiny!" is just another text-based MUSH.

Shiny, pretty stuff *is* serious.

This doesn't seem like very good design. See below.

Perhaps an overall object size threshold should be in place. So, if an object is, say, less than 4m3, any multiple prims set as lights are set to full-bright and only 1 central (or close to it) prim is chosen as the light source. And, especially, if light range is not governed by prim size, this just makes even more sense. Otherwise, hardware lights will QUICKLY be sucked up by inept modellers and SL will once again be back to grinding like a halt due to the abundant software lights it currently has--or are they getting optimized somehow too? Obviously, the 20m max light radius will help but surely there's a better way to design linked set lit objects.

Another option is to add a separate light source object that doesn't count against prim counts and can't be seen (except in edit mode, of course).

I don't particularly like this. Now I will have to change my MANY CORRECTLY-SET lit objects to be light again. This is not cool. Perhaps some exceptions could be made for some users?

Will the new lighting allow overbright textures? With our current lighting system, textures are never lit to a value greater than their RGB values, while blank colored prims can show overbright, "bloomed" coloration.

Not much point to that; SL vehicles don't handle too well and fly apart at sim borders and such.

I'd just like to know what cards can and can't handle it. I'm using a GeForceFX 5500 256MB AGP. While I can run ripple water it runs slow as hell so I wondering what the minium card spec would be to not take a performance hit that would drop me to 5 or less fps.

I'd love to join, but you're several thousand kilometers away and in another country, and your employment page states "Authorized to work in the US" as a job requirement. >/
Couldn't I telecommute? I'm only 3 hours ahead and I sleep like I'm 6 hours behind. >D



I don't think this is a particularily good idea picking an arbitrary testing number. You're assuming that we residents are reasonable human beings and won't go overboard on light sources for things we create. What about all the low rider cars that MUST have running board lights? That's at least six lights there (two headlights, two tail lights, and two to x(?) under carrage lights). I believe the amount of lights that are hardware rendered should be a user definable choice in preferences. So if we only want to have hardware render three lights, we can, and if we want to see what our bleeding edge cards can do we can set it to fifty.



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Sadly that rules out large area lights, like miniature suns or large glowing space ships that would require a larger than 20m distance. But I can understand that choice. Perhaps you can let users choose a distance up to 127m away and then give a choice in the client preferences to limit how far a light source can project light locally? That way you can allow people to make their mini suns or spotlights and no one who wants to see a light go farther than 20m, 30m, or even 60m is happy.

Also to really rule out the pink wall turning your plot pink issue you'd have to support raytracing. I, personally, would love it if my apartment would not light up on the back end of the room when there's a prim wall in the way blocking sunlight. It helps prevent the pain of digital hangovers. >3


On the topic of flexible prims, I eagerly await the chance to make a flexible tail. I'm hoping I can affect it with scripts so I can at least try to simulate realistic animal behaviour. I'd also love it if two flexible prims could be attached end to end to do subtile movements (the tip of a tail twitching, as is all too common amongst cats). Also, would flexible prims be a suitable replacement for joints, at least client side, so that a new set of wind chimes could be made that appear to dangle and dance about?

*faints with joy* Thanks! You make the kitty happy! *purrs*

It'd also help if lights would just stop on parcel borders, so the neighborhood club won't "pollute" my house with it's lights ^.^

But yes, in the end we really need the ability to have objects block lights, cause shadows, have directional spotlights instead of just omni lights and the like. Graphics-wise SL is a good step behind the current possibilities of modern gfx cards, but I know it's hard to also keep the players that don't own high-end cards and that due to the world's dynamic nature you can't do tricks like other games do.. namely, shadow maps and such.

Still, to give us a really good visual experience we'd need:

- Hardware Lighting with at least 20 light sources, omni and spot-lights, configurable with color, fall-off and an option to (sometime in the future when gfx cards are so fast) make it volumetric. The light needs to cast shadows and must be stopped at at walls. Walls should have a property that determines how good or bad light would shine through them.
- Ability to cut out intersecting prims to create new forms (intersect a sphere with a cube to get a sphere with a cube-shaped hole in it, the like).
- procedural blobs (procedural only to limit data traffic and server storage)
- while at it, procedural textures.
- and while we're there.. layered textures on AV's and prims, with photoshop-esque options on how the layers are combined (multiply, color tone, negatively multiply, the like) with each layer beeing configurable regarding texture repeats/position/transparency/color, etc.
- Better trees. Really. Go license the SpeedTree engine.
- Better physics. Havoc2?
- Custom bump-mapping textures.
- Shiny object surfaces should not just be shiny.. they should reflect the surroundings. Mirrors, anyone? ^.^
- Some basic way to make use of some pixel- and vertex shader effects.
- Rigging for Linksets so one can create animations for them (as in creating a bone structure, the floppy prims are a nice start, but not anywhere near real rigging, tho I am thankful for the floppyness, heh).

And, first of all: Better ground textures. I look at the water, then look at the grass next to it, and I shiver. The ground textures SL uses are from the stone ages ^.^ (WoW has nice textures plus a highlight layer that is combined with the normal ground texture using some kind of vertex or pixel shader).

*meow*
Sheila!