Better lighting models? more shaders?

Just wondering if theres any work being done on the state of the art? Ive always wanted something like a directional light, real spotlights, projected textures, displacement maps, bump maps etc.

I second this, Cods, very strongly.

The SL viewer appears to make almost no use of the programmable hardware vertex nor pixel shaders available on modern nVidia or ATI graphics cards. If you're running nVidia, check out how few .cg files there are in the installation subdirectories, namely just 8, and they're being used entirely for water effects, nothing else. (An ATI installation should have something equivalent, but maybe using HLSL or ATI-proprietary shader language files instead.)

This is extremely bad, to put it mildly. Being so graphically intense, SL cannot afford to not use the most powerful features of our modern graphics cards. If they did use the programmable GPU shaders more, the state of the art graphics effects you mention could be handled without slowing down our client FPS by another order of magnitude. And the current effects could be handled with less CPU loading too.

Here's a great list of public vertex and pixel shaders available at the ShaderTech GPU Programming archives site, which highlights very well the immense range of possibilities that can become viable if you use what's now available in the hardware. When done in software, it's all so sloooooow that many effects are simply not viable, or everyone switches them off to raise FPS.

Guys, they're already working on the next version of the graphical engine. Chill.

A reference to that, please.

I was looking out for any mention of greater use of hardware shaders in Philip's talks of the 27th and 28th, but other than saying twice that they had a good graphics team to rival the best, there was nothing.

Has any Linden mentioned specifics?

Oh ye of little faith.

Link.

Aye, engineers don't use faith. That's a good thing too, or bridges would be falling down a lot more often.

There's nothing in Cory's weblog to suggest that they're focussing on GPU shaders. All we are told about progress on rendering is: "we have to increase the content team's ability to deploy land and we need to draw the world better and faster. We are moving forward on both those fronts". So, no technical details at all there.