Full bright with shadows?

Just a thought, but I'm using full-bright to create a lit room, so it always stays at the same comfortable lighting level throughout the day. However, cylinders look a little odd like this as they have no shading as a result, while cubes can be manually shaded (making two sides darker than the others).

Another option that would be nice would be "Shading", this toggles the shading of the object on/off. While full-bright toggles on/off whether or not the object changes brightness throughout the day.

This would be theoretically nice and simple, and quite welcome for some graphical projects =)

I'd like them to fix local lighting and eliminate the problem.

It's incomprehensible that local lighting on a prim halfway to the edge of my draw distance, that isn't throwing enough light to illuminate anything near me, should be included in my rendering at all... let alone escaping culling because it's made of light.

SL should just turn "light" prims more than 20 meters from the AV into "full bright", maybe with a "halo" particle attached, so that local lighting could actually be used by people with less-than-fire-breathing systems.

heh, the problem isn't rendering the light prims themselves, it's rending the light they cast on everything else.

I was with Chage McCoy, Adam Zaius, Ice Brodie not more than a day ago. Chage had remarked about some odd lag I might be able to relate to, and I came--and we pinpointed that enabling Local Lighting made things very bad indeed.

I mention this here because Adam suggested that perhaps the simplest solution to a problem like this would be to limit the Local Lighting effect to the first X number of prims in view. So what Argent's saying is shared by that. I think I'd like it too. And it's not unlike particles in that regard--too many particles? Just won't show 'em.

Haravikk, in your instance, is using something like a simple texture with a bit of grain an option to add shading? I find Full Bright, or even too many Shiny objects without their own textures to look spookily flat after awhile.

Sneaky tips for full-bright: Reduce the LUM-inosity in the color picker. You still preserve the textures colors from being affected by sunset/sunrise redness but it no longer looks like it was lit from behind with a halogen lamp.

Full-bright on very darkly colored textures seems to successfully resist being bleached out by nearby light sources if I remember correctly...

(hoping hoping hoping Local Lighting performance will improve again some day it dogs even my new nvidia 7800 gtx!)

I'm on a 7800 GT and I'm hoping hoping hoping too that more eyecandy like this can make use of supah GPU powah!

limiting it to a few objects actually being light sources would help. but it needs to be not just the closest but a calculation of power/distance.

What could this be called? LIGHT CULLING?

If the prim is so far away that they have to make a special case for light prims to get it to render at all, there is no way it should make a difference in the rendering of anything else in range.

That would be a better solution, but for most situations just the closest N lights would probably be good enough, and just pulling the render distance for light prims in and subjecting them the same rules as other prims (which is what I want) would work even better because... power is proportional to swept area, and culling should already be using something proportional to area as well.

Me too, I have the 6800 Ultra, but it should still be more than enough for simple lighting, I can run Unreal Tournament 2k4 with massively complex lighting effects yet SL just rolls over and dies with local lighting switched on, even if I'm in an empty sim =S
I'm also running on a Dual 2.5ghz 64-bit machine, so it shouldn't be the processors, though I dunno if SL has support for multi-thread or 64-bit.

Anyway, erm yeah, I'm going to make custom textures, but it would be nice to not have to, as it'll have to download like 5 different versions of the same texture as a result, plus they can't be tiled so I have to make them quite large to get the same quality.

As an alternative to light culling (not that I'm opposed to it, sounds like a great idea!) perhaps some adjustments to the radius of effect of local lighting in relation to prim size could be considered. I've noticed from experimenting with local lighting that while using a few small prims can yield quite a pleasing and subtle effect the use of larger prims tends to result in a very 'washed out' effect.

I think that 'light culling' could be very useful if handled in the same way as attachment culling (i.e. give the user a choice as to how much culling occurs rather than impose a global limit on everyone) but perhaps even higher frame rates could be achieved by reducing the maximum radius of effect by a % of prim size, thereby reducing the number of prims that are lit by huge signs that may be using local lighting purely to be seen (Im a big fan of fullbright but i've noticed that theres still a lot of residents using light objects to illuminate their 10x10 signs and billboards, but I don't know wether thats out of personal preference or because they're unaware that fullbright can serve very much the same purpose in that respect).

For reference (and I hesitate to mention it because I know how unpopular the "everythings fine for me" statements can be when a lot of people are having issues with something but maybe the information will prove useful to someone) I'm running a 128mb Geforce 6600 GTOC with a dual monitor set up and an athlon 3000xp processor with 1024mb of ram (so definitely not a case of having faster equipment than those suffering issues) and I haven't really suffered any serious problems with local lighting adversely affecting framerates under most reasonable conditions.

Having said that we have a mall in the sim next door still using local lighting in almost every one of the vendors and stalls, I can't go there without dropping to around 1 fps but then theres probably around 100 local light objects in a 96m radius and some of them are quite large casting light up to 40m or more so its hardly surprising, but when hanging around our own land I usually get around 20 fps with everything turned on (except shadows cos of the crashing) and a draw distance of 96m (I also turned my fog distance ratio down to 1.8 cos it looked a bit nicer )

Another thing I've noticed with local lighting is the way it tends to exclude prims at random, and when using a lot of light prims of the same dimension they dont always appear to have the same radius of effect (which leads me to wonder if there isnt already some culling occuring anyway).

One final thought is that perhaps the reason that some of the newer graphics cards are exhibiting problems with local lighting and rendering rates while slightly older cards are unaffected (or at least not affected to the same degree) is that the newer cards may be attempting to render some effect that the older cards aren't (possibly because whatever it is isnt a supported feature on the older model of geforce cards). I have no clue when it comes to the technical side of how graphics cards work so can't provide any technical basis for the explanation, but from a logical point of view it seems like a possibility.

But yeah you can sign me up for the 'fix local lighting petition' for sure!

There are several existing graphical effects in SL that are prolly due for a GOOD overhaul. Ripple Water's (WHAT A RUSH!) already come to pass, and effectively solved the "ugly sun reflection" problem (if you have it off, you'll see what I mean).

1. Continuing from here, as has been well-detailed in this thread, would be Local Lighting. I don't know of all the technicalities, I am an experiential empiricist (who wakes up confused at night because I forget how to use the SL UI), but definitely have it make more use of your graphics card instead of crushing your CPU.
   

1. Same goes for Shadows! I think Shadows are treated in a similar way, from what I understand, and they too, could not only be more efficiently accomodated on the GPU, but they used to have a nasty problem crashing the client. Sometimes, still, I get a weird prob when I TP to a new area with Shadows on, and my av starts flickering between light/dark like mad, and I have to fly around some to solve it.
   

1. Bumpiness... "custom bump mapping" is another thing that's been asked for since my first days in the SL sandboxes. Would literally add more "depth". Also, for bumpiness to gradually fade out past a distance, instead of being on/off as it is today within certain # of m (the default is 10).
   

I've sent bug reports and/or observations on all of the above.

Great observations, SunenRec... I hear ya! Local Lighting currently works very inconsistently. If I have several Light objects interacting with their glows, and I relog and reposition the camera, each time, they will be different. :\ Don't know what happened, but Local Lighting was more useable for me in 1.6--and this was on an old graphics card. My hopes are up for a bright future! =)

Add to this the number of troubleshooting cases where someone's framerate inexplicably dropped to the low single digits, and it turned out to be they were playing with Local Lighting and didn't know it would crush and crumble things this badly.

Inshort, I love the way Local Lighting looks, but can't recommend it to be turned on in good conscience, even on top-of-the-line computers.

Hmm, forgive but how do you actually enable local lighting on a prim? Is this what I'm doing when I enable full-bright? Because really all I want is to stop them from being effected by the time of day, is my room going to kill people using local lighting? I haven't had local lighting turned on since v1.7 which gave me 2fps with it switched on, and that's when I started building my home, shop and extending a friend's house, all of which are using full-bright to simulate a lit room. However, I don't require local lighting for these, maybe for the ceilings to illuminate avatars as well, but not on all of them.

You can enable local lighting on a prim by going to the Object tab of the Build menu opening the pulldown Material menu (bottom left) and selecting Light instead of the default Wood setting.

Fullbright and local lighting aren't the same (altho they have the same effect on the appearance of the prim). From what I understand once the face of a prim has been set to fullbright the renderer no longer applies any lighting to that face (either local lighting or the default daytime/nighttime lighting of SL) so what you see is the exact representation of the texture displayed (unless of course you add color to the prim as well) without the default 'shading' usually applied to prims in SL.

If that is the case and prims using fullbright are being excluded from the 'lighting/shading' part of the rendering process then it may possibly be that using fullbright prims will result in slightly higher frame rates than using normal 'shaded' ones as they take a little less time to render (thats purely supposition though, I'm afraid I don't know nearly enough about the renderer and the technical side of graphics hardware to be able to say wether thats actually the case or not).

Anyway, hope that helps

Sun.

to the shading round objects thing you could use a bilenar gradient (a texture that gets darker on 2 edges and light in the middle) should give you what your looking for till a fix is resolved