Shadow Viewer 1.23

Very nice!..

You can find a build over here at Boy Lane's site:

http://my.opera.com/boylane/blog/

It now supports ambient occlusion (dark corners).

It also has groovy projection shadows (see the texture box in a light's settings). This means that not only does the sun cast shadows, but you can now have a second light in your home casting shadows below your BDSM rack and sex balls. Hurray!

Nice stuff, LL!

LL didn't make it.

Wish I could run it, too. Perhaps someday!

EDIT: I was referring to the viewer itself, and was corrected elsewhere that the shadow code is indeed all LLs doing. Would be nice to see some others jump in for other OSes (Mac!) though.

Egg on face (and not just from breakfast), sorry for mis-communication!

Wha?.. They didn't?

Well it's amazing that somebody has added those features in their spare time. Does LL plan to include those features in the official client? or are they going to roll their own?

Spill the beans, Kid.

Nope they just took what they need

The code is from LL, Boy Lane compiled it and released the viewer. It'll probably show up in an official LL viewer sometime down the road.

I understand they have more important features to work on now.

I couldn't get this to work, sadly. Nor could I get the older Kirsten shadow-draft viewer to work (wrong graphics card)

Yes LL do plan to introduce dynamic shadows. This was confirmed by one of the senior Lindens in an answer on one of the LL threads. But it's unlikley that shadows will appear on the main viewer in 2009, according to the same source.

I always believed that shadows would appear in SL, it's the biggest single thing that's missing from the graphics.

It doesn't start for me, despite having the "right' hardware and clearing out my old SL settings entirely. I look forward to seeing this in the future.

See edit above.

Are you starting from the exceutable, or from the shortcut?

Try clearing the cache and starting from a different location.

Thanks!

I started with the shortcut. Though I had to repair it, oddly. It doesn't get to the point of opening a window or dialog. The executable just quietly terminates.

What you mean with you had to repair it? It's not supposed to repair anything.. also notice that there's a shirtcut into the game folder you *don't* need to use that one, but the one created on your desktop.
Post your second life log (just the last entries) to figure where it fails (assuming that it is starting at all...), the file is "ShadowViewer.log" located into your PC appdata folder/ShadowViewer/logs/ ...if you don't find the path, use the file search.

Yes, same here. It's well known that the shadow code from LL only supports the very newest video cards, or at least ones new enough to have certain versions of required features. Quite annoying when your older hardware can easily run SL, but you still end up getting excluded.

Ah, I had first replaced those non-distributable files, so I noticed and used the shortcut in the install directory and tried that. For the record, that shortcut's target which gets generated is:

"C:\Program Files\ShadowViewer\ShadowViewer.exe --set SystemLanguage en-us"

instead of:

"C:\Program Files\ShadowViewer\ShadowViewer.exe" --set SystemLanguage en-us

But that's all neither here nor there, as the desktop shortcut doesn't work for me either.




There is no log file with that name. I guess it doesn't get to that point.

I couldn't even get the 2nd .rar archive to open. I keep getting a Bad Block error message.

If you put both rar files in the same folder and open the first one with the rar program, it reads both files to unpack the installer. You don't need to explicitly run it against the second rar file.

I had no problem with the downlload and have it running now,I am playing with the settings but can,t see shadows.shame, probably my card is not up to it Nvidia 9600..pity. edit .Could someone post a pic with shadows? That would be nice.

There is another thread here in the Technical Talk board and that's where it actually belongs to . Also there is a lot more detail on my blog and help and tips in the comments.

Not all cards are supported, but you may be lucky with shadows if you have something newer than Nvidia 8xxx or ATi HD3xxx. To enable shadows you need to go to Edit / Preferences / Graphics / Hardware Options. There select "OpenGL Framebuffer Objects" and "Enable per-pixel lightning and shadows". Antialiasing does *NOT* work.

And check out the SLUniverse forum for a thread with pictures.

Good luck

Not here, since the settings are missing (apparently) from yours. Add to the command line:

--settings settings_1.23.xml

Thanks! The desktop shortcut was also missing that.

But alas, it still doesn't work. Perhaps it's my graphics drivers. They are a couple of months old. I also have two 8800gt cards with SLI. Perhaps that's the culprit.

@Love

When did you download it? 2 days ago? There was a bug in the first installer. [update] *Lol*...and still is....the start menu shortcut is broken. Just use the one on the desktop. Will be fixed in the next release.

There are some tips in the technical issues thread here, perhaps that helps.

This is cool. The shadow of an un-rendered avatar.

Edit: RenderTreeLODfactor appears to have virtually no effect. Linden trees are almost fully rendered at any distance.

I got it to work with surprisingly few problems.

I used 7Zip to unpack the two compressed files into their own folders. Then I ran the first one as an installer. Second one gave me errors too, but it didn't seem to matter.

I copied the requisite files out from the SL 1.22 directory, and everything ran just fine. I can see shadows cast by the sun.

I haven't had a chance to "push" it yet. But I will. Want to know the first thing I realized? We're all going to have to re-think the use of things like textures containing highlights, prims used for lighting, and screens.

I've been flying around estates looking at all the homes with the shadow viewer. I'm not normally a big fan of SL houses, but with shadows enabled they can look really nice, almost photo-realistic at times.

and just when I was ready for giving up on SL. grrr

I assume that is the Linux version. If so there is no installer as such, it just extracts all files into one directory. Exactly the same way as the official viewer.

Great it worked for you!