Shadows and lighting update

Did I miss an announcement?

(Internal experimental branch)

And if we thought WindLight was bad on older cards:
It goes on to call people who aren't keeping up with the latest in video card development "cheapskates"... I really hope he was just having a bad day or got annoyed with the emails he said he received and ended up phrasing things more harshly than intended.

(Start of the SLdev thread: https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/sldev/2008-May/009875.html)

I really wonder who they think they are catering to. Many people who are invested in SL are not necessarily gamers who keep up with bleeding edge developments.

Just for the hell of it I think I'll drop my old 6200LE in this machine.

/me shrugs. Just more of the same old Ivory Tower / elitist philosophy that seems to be LL's guiding principle.

Is anyone really surprised?

Why does SL have to be just for bored housewives and their laptops?. and I wish people would stop using the word 'invest' as a crowbar to get their way with Linden Lab.

I invested in Pacman when I was just a little boy and look where that got me. Screw you, Namco!

SL may attract more gamers if it kept up graphically with other 3D games.

I don't mind shadows being for the 8x series cards. We all plan to upgrade eventually, don't we?. We will all get the shadows sooner or later. Then we'll all be able to complain at how the new shadows make us look fugly despite the 1000 new point lights attached to our faces.

Yep. Shadows were left unimplemented for a long time because they were expensive to render, and now when they try switching them on they're still expensive to render. What's the surprise?

It's more than that. It's outward contempt for a probably decent size number of their customer base.

Ok, think of it this way.

The rapid development of more advanced / cheaper GPU's creates an interesting concept.

Think about it like this, Second Life client adds these shiny new features that 8% of users might be able to use. within several years that number grows. The same content will look better and better to more and more people as time progresses. Advanced lighting would come sooner or later! Adding it now opens the gate for a sliver of the population to see SL in a new more advanced light. "Pun intended"

Not to mention there is going to be a real surge in High End GPU's being used side by side with your CPU to do more then just rendering. This is the belief by the majority of the GPU industry.

The real benefit is knowing the content we make in SL now will stand up for years to come.

What makes everything so interesting is we have the OLD SL Without Windlight (It can be disabled) Having a SL with Windlight, then having SL with dynamic lighting! if people do not like it they can shut it off. No one, I repeat no one forced Windlight down anyones throat, nor voice, all of that is optional use!

In the end let's face it, Second Life is always pushing the technological limits.

Please Note to people that may whine about work being done on this instead of the grid!
I do not want a Graphics Guru operating on the Second Life Grid, if you do then you need your head checked. (I think this was the original problem?)

Peace,
~ Soma

This sorta had to be coming, though, right? The WindMark guys weren't gonna just magically get DB fu and start fixing the asset servers, so once WindLight was about as good as it was gonna get, the rest of rendering was fair game. And people have been crying for cast shadows since long before I joined.

And there's just no way my older graphics cards will ever do cast shadows of a complex scene in under 10 secs / frame, in SL or anything else. So, if I want to see pretty shadows, I buy a new graphics card. I imagine it will be a little like "shaders", "local lighting", and "shiny/bump"--for the better cards only, except now "better" is a couple years further along.

Let's be realistic here - this shadow code is a very early preview of an experimental feature (in an experimental branch of the code), which may not even make it into the release viewer (and even if it does make it into the release viewer it could be 2009 or 2010 before it does so) - so it is a bit harsh to start criticising it for its current hardware demands.

LL does have a problem, though, it that it is perceived to be putting more effort into new features for high end machines rather than improving stability and performance on mid-range machines (and e-mails such as the one Kitty quotes doesn't help that perception). This is fine if SL is targetted at high-end gamers, but not if SL is targetted at typical home users, businesses or education.

Matthew

I'll send you my old card, you can see how much of a fantasy that "it can be turned off" is in practice.

WindLight is slower (or plain unusuable) on some older puters with all the WindLight features turned *off*, even though they ran pre-WindLight just fine. There's nothing "optional" about it.

Whether or not a 7xxx is "old", it's still sold in all the stores. For that matter, when I was looking, they still sold my old 5200. I bought that one just over a year ago, and when I looked for a new one for my old puter, a 6200 was the best I could find that didn't cost 200€ so it's 2 months old as far as I'm concerned. Not 4 or 6 years or whatever Dave wants to argue.

If I have to be honest, I can't really tell the difference between using my old puter or my new one. For everything I use it for, it works exactly the same as my old one. The only difference is that SL is a lot faster, but I was quite happy with the 10-15fps I got pre-WindLight so really all in all it was quite a waste.

If Dave feels anyone who doesn't instantly rush out to buy a new 300€ video card before it even hits the shelves doesn't matter, that's an opinion he can have, but it shouldn't become policy just because one random employee happens to think that way. If there's noone to pull him back in line and make him target what actually people are using instead of what he thinks everyone should be using or what he thinks is coolest, then that's just another failure in LL's management style.

Agrees. The non WL runs great on my machine, looks fine. None of the WL viewers, even Nicholaz' work as well, even "turned down". I'm happy with what I have, I don't need shinier water of puffier clouds. As lomg as I can continue with this setup, until I decide to upgrade, which really isn't an option for at least another year, I'm fine. Add all the bells and whistles you want so the cutting edge folks can get their jollies. But when an employee of the developer sneering derides any part of the user base in public, it doesn't reflect well on the company. Maybe he thought he was being funny, but he failed.

Frankly, I think he is right there. If you are going to add high-end eyecandy, you have to aim at the latest cards. By the time this actually comes into the main viewer, that GeForce 8 card is old as well, and probably can be purchased for a fistfull of dollars.

For users without high-end cards, Second Life does run with less eye-candy, but nevertheless does run. Myself, I run SL on a laptop with built in Intel 945, and it runs pretty well considering the card. Of course it doesn't look half as good, as it does on a machine with a good card, but thats my choice. The Windlight features are just not available, thats all. Neither will, in the future, these new features be available to me. But I can run SL, that is what matters.

So no, SL is not just aiming at the high end market here, they even included some intel cards like mine a while ago on their certified list. What they do, is making features available for high end cards, that cannot be used by low-end cards. Where real games cater to the hardcore game machines, SL caters a whole spectrum of cards, who all can see the portion of eyecandy their machine can handle. Quite a nice way of dealing with your customer base I guess.

Agreed that he tried to be funny with the preschool / talk sentences / obsolete sentence, but where do you find him sneering? He just said that he thinks they are kind of generous to include the 8 card in the development of future high-end features, in my opinion.

These are supposed to be old cards:
GeForce 7900 GS 512 MB - 153€ / $239
GeForce 7600 GT 256 MB - 104€ / $162
GeForce 6200 256 MB - 53€ / $83

Maybe your idea of a "fistful of dollars" differs from mine, but if I didn't know any better I'd go with the 6200 since 50€ would be about as much as I'd want to spend on a video card considering I'm not interested in video games.

For a good video card I might consider the 7600, much more I would not pay either. But that is not the most important part of what I tried to say. Taking your 3 examples, all three cards are served (if I remember correctly). The more you pay, the better your experience will get.

Second Life is state of the art technology, and requires more of your computer then Office 2007 does. So if you buy a "cheap" card, Office will run well, and SL will still run with all eyecandy switched off. Still not bad in my opinion.

Developers gone wild. Cannot imagine what his manager would make of that, unless they are that oblivious about a target demographic. Don't you always want to design with average user in mind ?

By the same token the cutting edge dev teams are usually meant to be insulated from average user concerns.

I am remembering a large computer center going into crisis mode at the loss of a mainframe as a dev sat there upset because he could not see the new colors he had implemented into his application screens. He had no perspective, but he wasn't meant to.

After watching the Gartner/Infoweek interview with the CFO response, I think I am accepting that this is about as good as SL gets until someone else picks up the standard to run with it.

(increasingly apathetic 7600 user)

I havn't read all of the threads, but it is 6 of one and half a dozen of the other.

Some people really do need to upgrade there machines, but LL need to make some features backward compatible.

Now my opinion is that LL SHOULD include features that are only available on the latest and greatest hardware, this way it won't force people to upgrade, but will push people in the right direction

Stencil shadows do eat juice, but will not change performence regardless of how many or how few there are

Per Pixel lighting is a damn good idea (and really the only way forward in terms of lighting) but allot of people will miss out and have to stick to the old lighting
Any GeForce 8 series card will handle it

Most GeForce cards above 4MX's will handle stencil shadows

I think it is a good idea that they are finally going to include the "latest and greatest" features for "the latest and greatest" hardware.

It will be just like any other 3D app or game then

ps. i havn't read the link yet so i don't know how it was worded

Those are all old cards. The latest games like Bioshock, Crysis and Call of Duty 4 wont run well on those cards at all. Especially if you enabled shadows. And those games are made by games designers and are nowhere near as dynamic as SL.

You need an 8x series card for dynamic shadows and a decent frame rate. But if you don't care about shadows then a 7800 GTX will work just fine.

Most of your posting I do agree with, but not this part. Because most of the newer 3d games just do not run on a low end card, because they do not allow you to turn of too many features. SL even runs on that poor 945 chipset of mine So I am getting SL for low end peeps, you are getting SL for peeps with a hardcore machine.

Let me see if I have this right...

Facts :

- Rendering shadows is computationally expensive on a GPU.

- Not everyone has a top-of-the-line graphics card, and not everyone wants to upgrade.

- LL has decided that it will implement shadows, but only on graphics cards that are capable of handling the load.

- LL described GeForce 7 series cards as obsolete, and incapable of handling shadow rendering.

So, what are people complaining about?

Are people complaining that their older graphics cards won't be able to handle shadows?

Are people complaining about the words chosen to describe these older cards?

There's nothing we can do about the fact that older cards can't handle it. Its just a limit on the technology.

If people are upset in the words chosen to describe 3 year old graphics technology, then I would suggest that they are a tad too sensitive. Get upset over something that really means something.

- Ace

I think the idea is that average users are wondering if they are keeping average systems in mind or even recognize that it prolly is the majority of their consumer base...though I would not call some of the posters average for their level of knowledge.

I mean let's face it, if you reasonably expect to be successful you have to define the general parameters of your target audience and support them. If you are in it to make money, you want to reach as many average people as you can. The money that you make from the average base is what writes the paychecks of your cutting edge dev teams to appease the much smaller number of cutting edge users with hardcore machines.

and sometimes you can change your audience to a bigger and younger crowd by changing the lighting on the stage. The older folks don't like too many bright lights.

Maybe LL wants a different audience from this one?:

The problem though is that many older computers will run SL just fine using the 1.19.0.5 viewer (pre-windlight) but many of those same computers can not run 1.19.1.4 at all even with the eye candy turned off.

And, for those that can run the windlight viewer, with the eye candy turned off, the visual experience is far worse than it is with the non-windlight viewer.

And, with the current economic conditions within the U.S., a lot of folks are going to be hanging on to their current systems for as long as they possibly can.

If LL really wants SL to be the "next world wide web" they had better take a really hard look at all those non-gamers out there who are not going to be buying new hardware every six months just to see the latest flashy gimmick.

So... you are suggesting that LL *not* implement shadows, even for those who have a graphics card capable of rendering them, simply because a large number of people have older technology that can't handle it?

That doesn't seem to make much sense to me.

- Ace