Windlight

I have been recently told that the client you will need to use soon to play SL is Windlight is this true.

I really need to know as i have a fairly old pc and it wont run Windlight along with a friend of mine who has a laptop which wont run it either.

Please let us know any information you have about this.

Thanx again

Serina

Serina, hopefully you shouldn't have to worry too much, I believe that when the Windlight viewer rolls out, that you will be able to disable those new preferences and that the viewer will run as the existing viewer we have now.

Dekka, have you seen any word from LL on this? From what I have heard, Windlight is coming and there won't be any way to disable it. Yes, you can crank all the sliders to the left and disable lots of stuff, which will make it look quite a bit like the old client, but it'll still be Windlight and if the graphics card won't work with it, we're not going to be able to use SL.

Would be very pleased to see something from LL about this...

I would also suggest that everyone get it and try it, even with all the options turned off, so that there's no nasty surprise when LL stops making the traditional style client available.

I get hooked up via 3 different computers.

All 3 can use WindLight to varying degrees.

The super new quad-core, when my RL is lucky enough to get on it, has superb graphics and frame rate - all the windlight features - clouds, water reflections etc.

On the older desktop, WindLight doesn't do the clouds or reflections but it still has the nice lighting effects.

On the even older laptop, WindLight is spoiled in that it disables 'shiny'. You can still have 'shiny' on the regular viewer.

I believe Kalderi is right, although I haven't seen any official word from the Lindens. I do not believe you can just disable the the high end portions of the new Windlight viewer.

hmmm ok I retract my statement on just being plain ignorant to how windlight will effect SL usage

Dekka. I really would be a smart option to have if Windlight proves to be an issue with people who have older computers and just can't upgrade!

Dekka actually has a point. The settings form windlight go down pretty low, So they must accommodate people with older systems to some extent.

My computer seems to run about the same with both Windlight and non windlight as far as "smoothness" I don't know what my frames per second are in Windlight though because I cant figure out how to see them - Its not cntrl-alt-1 like the old viewer.

My computer is almost 2 years old and was a low-end one even at that time.

Colette,

It is ctrl>shift>1

I have run the windlight viewer both on a 6 year old 128MB supported graphics card and a 3 to 5 year old unsupported 32MB graphics chip on my laptop with little trouble. My laptop does get shitty frame rates even set to absolute minimum 0.7 to 15 FPS but it runs. So is may not be the SL Viewers problem it's self, I can not say for certain. I should also point out that I have seen frame rate increases running the windlight viewer and it's only getting better closer to release.

In the spirit of experimentation, and boredom I installed the windlight Viewer. My Computer is a Dell Dimension 8400, P4 3.0 GHz, with 2.5 GB RAM, 80 GB HD, A Radeon X300 Video Card, a cheap 19" CRT monitor and Cable.

WL loads a bit slower, and initial rezzing is slower. Keeping my settings the same as the Non WL viwer, Draw distance is 128m, Bandwith and disk cache are Maxed. At the recommended setting, Mid, The WL water is better looking but the sky is not. I can actually see divisions in the sky panels and there are no clouds. At the low setting, the visuals are awful, I would have no use for them if that were the only workable setting. At the High setting, the visuals are very nice, but moving about and rezzing are a chore, very jerky, and at Max, it is very impressive, but only for static situations and after waiting a long time for objects to appear. I didn't play with any of the custom settings yet, I will try turning draw to 96, which is as low as I can stand.

All in all it does look pretty, it seems stable enough. I still don't like the new Comm window, the Release Keys button is in a ridiculous place as already mentioned, and I miss the bandwith and packet loss bars. Also it keeps telling me Quicktime is not intalled, but it is.

All in all if this became a mandatory install today, unless I could tune it further to my acceptable standards of gameplay, or turn it off totally, it wouldn't be of much use to me, without a hardware upgrade. I might consider getting a new card for it, it does look nice, but with a 350W power supply I don't know how that would limit my options. I will play with it a bit, and also see what Nicholaz has for it , but the regular viewer will be fine for the time being.

Torley Linden posted on the JIRA that there seems to be agreement to move the Release keys button off into a menu, and not clutter up our desktops with them.

It definitely doesn't rez things any faster

A Windlight enabled browser will eventually replace the current official viewer.

Have you tried the current Windlight First Look? Make sure to try it out. If you have trouble, set graphics to low. If this does not work -- then I highly recommend the JIRA and the Windlight team's office hours.

Mari

Definitely agree with Mari's advice, but with one caveat - find out what your graphics cards is, and whether LL supports it for use with SL - see http://secondlife.com/corporate/sysreqs.php - if, like mine, it's not supported, you're not going to get much direct help from LL with it. All you can hope is that the issue also appears on one of their supported cards.

right i'm just downloading the Windlight client now to try.Thnx for all your prompt answers and help.

My system is this:

CPU: AMD Athlon (Thunderbird core) (1410 MHz)
Memory: 512 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Build 2600)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce3/AGP/3DNOW!
OpenGL Version: 1.5.7
LLMozLib Version: 1.1.0 (Mozilla GRE:1.8.0.12_0000000000)
Packets Lost: 2/459 (0.4%)

Well just downloaded and installed Windlight and it's weird my pc seems to be working better with that than the origanal SL Client lol. Well thnx for all your help everyone.

That was my experience as well. Have fun!

Mari
(Geeze, I'm becomin' a little Windlight evangelist ain'tI?)

I also agree. This was my experience as well!

Mee Three. (^_^)y

I have to agree as well, that was my experiance, on my desktop I was lucky to get 15FPS on my 9800Pro 128MB card, shot up to 25ish with standard sky and light. After a much, desperatly needed fresh install of windows I can safely run my desktop on High setting at 25 FPS and push it to Ultra and get 15 FPS. My laptop with a 7000 Mobile 32MB went from 7 to 15 and remains set to low.