Shadows and lighting update

Not at all, if they make it an option to turn on or off to fit your system, that is fine. But they need to make sure that they don't degrade the visual experience for the older systems in the way they did with windlight.

I don't think anyone is complaining, I know I'm not anyway.

I just tested the old viewer against the WindLight again with WindLight set to the same settings as the non-WindLight one (ie no atmospheric shaders). It's consistently 15-40% slower on my 6200 depending on where I test.

That's quite a lot for something that looks the exactly the same visually and where LL insists that there's zero impact because you can turn it off. It's just not true and if they're claiming the same thing for the next update, that doesn't inspire much confidence.

Hmm, try a different store.
GeForce 7600 - 32€ - US$50
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500031

GeForce 7900 - 64€ - US$100
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133186

GeForce 8500 - 45€ - US$70 - lower end of the cards with per-pixel lighting. More features than the 7900 but slightly slower than the 7900
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814134027

GeForce 8800GTX - 192€ - US$300
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814134009

GeForce 9800 - 192€ - US$300
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125096

==========================

The 7900 was (and still is) a great card. But it is now two generations behind. What is in the early stages of development will not hit our machines for AT LEAST 2 more years. By that time you can pick up an 8800 for 50 quid or less. I promise. In 4 years you will be saying this looks like crap; why doesn't have dynamic mesh clipping like everything else (or what ever the latest tech is at that time.

I have been a game junkie for a long, long time. I have seen this same development cycle so many times it's not funny. Welcome to the rapidly ageing world of digital technology.

However, I do agree that the comments were a bit contemptious and were probably best left un-said. It shows poor taste, but it's not the end of the wold or anything.

Yeah, sneering may have been a bit much. But he made up for it with the cheapskate line.

Ok a hundred bucks I could maybe consider shelling out , but what kind of power supply do those cards require,? I have 350Watts. I don't want to have to upgrade that too.

"Newegg.com does not currently ship internationally; we only deliver to locations within the United States and to Puerto Rico."

(Can't compare prices when they don't include shipping and VAT)

Then they should decide that's what they want, and market SL as a place for gamers and serious computer types, and quit with the all inclusive Metaverse BS they've been spouting. Then everyone will know where they stand and can decide if they want to go along. Basic rule of any business is to identify your target audience and cater to them.

I was trying to get things into perspective.

The *feature* (as opposed to Dave's outburst) we are talking about is currently highly experimental. It isn't on the roadmap for going into a release viewer. It isn't even on the readmap to go into a "firstlook" viewer. It may *never* make it into any viewer. It is one programmer at LL, seeing if he can get dynamic shadows working at all with a reasonable framerate. That it might still need a supercooled quad-GPU machine at this stage in development isn't really a problem!

Dave's actual post - albeit perhaps under duress - is more worrying, since it reinforces the perception that LL puts more effort into developing new features for high end machines than improving performance and stability on lower end machines. Even then, this in itself is not an issue is LL is only interested in attracting serious gamers - but if it does want to attract the more typical home user, as well as typical business and educational users the software will have to run well on lower end machines.

Matthew

Ah okies . That's what I was really after, thankies .

I was wondering why it popped up on SLdev (unless I missed a previous email) and was wondering if I'd missed something.

Maybe...

BTW - That was me stuck at the back of the login queue ...again.

Stability and fuctionality should be a priority no matter what. It doesn't matter how pretty everything is, how cool it looks or whatever. If you can't stay inworld, function, conduct business, buy stuff,etc, it doesn't matter if you have a souped up custom made behemoth or my 4 year old Dell. We both ain't getting much done.

No - LL hasn't decided anything about shadows.

A programmer in LL has managed to get shadows working but only on the more up to date NVidia cards. Rather than keep it internal, he has released the source code for this in case anyone else wants to play with and comment on it - unfortunately, he had far too many comments of the form "this doesn't work on my ..." (which missed the point of the exercise), and lost his rag a bit on a public mailing list!

Matthew

Well to be honest I did not see that line before your posting made me look into that particulat thread. For others who did not see this:



However I agree on what he is trying to say, this is indeed not the way a Linden Lab employee should communicate with the outside world. And I did not pick my laptop out of the recycle bin either, my boss forces me to work on it And somehow I doubt I can get my next laptop with the latest GeForce, since my job is not exaclty requiring 3D graphics

Unless the cutting edge crowd of bright younger people decide to devote their time to living in a virtual world instead of the more satisfying real one most of the bigger and younger crowd lives in, I wouldn't personally think it too smart, but perhaps you have some brilliant insight I don't have.



Like Kitty said (option sure, not standard).

Dunno, do you think it would be clever and lucrative not to cater to the average base ? I guess that does not make sense to me.

Personally, my computer won't be the average base, but I sort of know better than to think people with average machines don't affect my in-world experiences.

Go check out how many of the young cutting edge crowd are logged into GTA IV, WoW and COD4. What real world?.

I can agree with it too, after all it's their game, they can develop it however they seem fit. But it is just another example of how clueless they are when it comes to communicating to their customers. They constantly condescend, doubletalk and back pedal on almost every thing they say.

Disabling the Wind Light features on my system does not degrade performance ... not by much anyway.

Then again I actually took the time to configure my system to run SL way back before wind light .... I have set up a 6GB Virtual Memory page file.

They're only human. Can you imagine me as a Linden?. You don't know the meaning of the word condescend!

The Lindens don't post on the forums because of the high expectations people have of them. So instead they go post in some obscure places that only a few dare to tread because of all the geeky crap that blocks the path. Occasionaly somebody manages to return with a story of humanity and the rest of us mere mortals are disgraced that a Linden god actually said "cheapskates". Oh the shame!

So.... where is this source code, or download link i would LOVE to test this,hehe

for SOME realtime raytracing, all you need is three PS3s on a hub.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLte5f34ya8
or a GPU of 16 GhZ or more.
http://www.openrt.de/
so i'd give it 2 only more years to make interactive games look like rendered animation movies.

I am not saying that it shouldn't move forward; what I'm saying is that backward compatibility should be a priority. There are many people well invested here who are casual computer users and essentially forcing a hardware upgrade is not fair to someone who has invested much into the game. It's bad enough that people have left already with the instability that came with 1.19 and the endless asset problems. I'm getting a cutting edge computer because I'm greedy, but I wouldn't force anyone to use a client beyond 1.18.5 when it does a good job and is stable.

http://svn.secondlife.com/svn/linden/branches/shadow-draft/

he he. I think you'd be a perfect Linden......

I just latched onto the word 'SHADOWS'.

Yes!!! That's what SL is crying out for, now we have WindLight, shadows would improve our visual experience almost to perfection!

They took it too damn far. Let's see now, if my old (now burnt) Geforce 5200FX could render shadows and reflections in The Sims 2 perfectly, and other (current) 6200 and 7100GS cards could render ALL options in Valve's VERY high-end graphics engine Source, why do Linden have to screw me over and demand I buy a 8 series card before I can even SEE what they're talking about, even if it'll be in 1FPS? I mean, like I said before, look at Source!

Almost EVERY card today works with that superb engine, including my old 5200FX which worked very nicely and could render everything but anti-aliasing (too complex) and Anisotropic filtering!

In my opinion, he should be at least growled at from M Linden. Hmm, even IF it was only Geforce 8-compatible, could you please talk to us instead of shouting "hidden insults" in our ears?

I bet with some graphical tweaking, I could make it work, even on a Geforce 5200FX. I managed to get WindLight on it with 20FPS and no over-clocking or hardware changes. >.>