Shadows and lighting update

Ha. I bet I can install Windows XP on mine and put that 8-core 3.2Ghz graphics processor by Nvidia to good use.

And that is NOT a complement!

WoW, land of the young, cutting edge?

http://media.ebaumsworld.com/picture/skatesnow67/HilariousMotivators011.jpg

I was using a 6200 without any problems up until about 3 months ago, and I only upgraded then because another game I bought didn't work.

You can't really compare the SL graphic engine to source, try to see how source handle a map without any VIS precomputing and you will see what is "lag". All the game engine todays handle the "world" by having on one side the stuffs that they know will never change and on the other side, the stuffs that can change.
Then the mapper is going to compute a LOT of things into his map, static shadows, visibility trees, reflection maps, etc... on complex maps it can take several hours.

Well guess what, SL can't do this because due to it's nature, everything can potantially change. So there is really little that can be done in terms of precomputation.
Second, a player character in source weight about 5000 triangles. in SL it can skyrocket to much more because the primitive system we use is geared to reduce data transmission for being streamed across the internet, but it's drawback is that it is quite wastefull in term of drawn polygons.

Document before bringing proofs please?

I asked before, but is that anything that precludes mixing "static" with "dynamic" content?

If someone owns a full detached sim and sets it up, it's not going to change terribly much at all over time once it's open to the public. Treating the whole sim as something dynamic that can change radically every second doesn't seem terrible realistic when it might take 3 months before anything signifcant does change at all.

Here's the main problem I see in the ways that Linden Labs makes upgrades to Second Life.

If Second Life is to live up to it's billing of "Your World, Your Imagination," then it needs to be accessible to the users who are attracted to the idea of taking their amateur shots at creating content and collaborating in creating the world.

If Second Life caters to high-end/wealthier users, then it sacrifices the broad inclusiveness and accessibility that Linden Labs markets.

One critical difference between Second Life and the typical computer game is that the graphics for the computer game are produced exclusively by professional designers. Professional designers are better able to optimize content, and also better able to create content that will hold up well across different platforms and hardware configurations. Professional designers can better create the games that may look great on a high-end system, but still look pretty good on a low-end system.

Amateur content creators may be attracted to Second Life's promise of "Your World, Your Imagination." Then many, like myself, will become quickly frustrated as Second Life quickly overruns both the skill and hardware outlay that an amateur can bring to creating content.

The idea of upgrading features and making them optional does not work as well on Second Life as it might with other kinds of games. It's hard to create content, at least for an amateur, that can anticipate what different features any particular user might have enabled.

Look at how shadows will affect skins, for example. Currently, may people draw shaded shadows into skins to deal with the fact that Second Life doesn't have a great shadow-drawing capability. Now add shadows as an option. Skins aren't going to be able to hold up equally well between both a system using shadows and a system using none. A skin made to look good without system shadows will look horrible under system shadows, and vice versa.

If Linden Labs wants Second Life to be cutting-edge graphic technology, that's fine. But that's not the "Your World, Your Imagination" promise that attracted me to Second Life initially.

And I've given up the idea of creating content, and may be close to giving up playing, depending upon how much more technologically advance Second Life gets. I'm just not willing to put out the money to constantly upgrade my computer hardware, especially when Second Life is the only program I have that actually requires constantly new resources.

It's not the sim that's dynamic. It's the sun.

SL has a very dynamic sun and this is why SL's shadows are going to be incredibly demanding. Most games have a fixed sun and so their shadows can be baked into the ground textures.

cheers, but how does one compile this, there are only a few files and i am sure that the viewer has allot more than that.

also how do i incorperate it into the main viewer?

if someone has compiled it and made it work please send us a link

It should just be the same process as any other release (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Get_source_and_compile).

Although it really isn't much more complicated than following all the steps on the wiki, if you're not familiar with it at all it might be hard to work around any unlisted problems you could run into. It might be better to ask someone you know to do it for you in that case .

(And obviously someone you trust not to mess with it)

Jaysus, I bought my 7600 a year ago and now it's old??? Screw LL if they think I'm going to run out and spend upwards of $200 on a new video card when gas is over $4.00/gallon and I just spent $300 on my dog's vet bill. LL needs a reality check.

[Edit: My 7600 does just fine with WL, BTW. Just sayin...]

It seems they start counting from the first day any "generation" of cards hits the shelves, which probably makes sense if you're only interested in the "ooo new and shiny, must buy" crowd.

Starting to count from the time any card becomes mainstream would probably make more sense in SL's case. Although the viewer sends everything along so they really should have a very good idea of whether their residents keep up or are content to stick with what they have.

And the word used to refer to any 7xxx card wasn't "old", it was "beyond obsolete" (since it's 3 years old from their perspective).

(Edited to add that there was a follow-up from another Linden that nuanced all of it, but I can't seem to find it again right now )

Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.

Woah, I am the only one that dose that? I thought it was a wide spread thing!

Joking aside.


Windlight is not the problem with the performance issues! When linden lab brought on the Windmark? (Guys who created the original atmospheric rendering used in Windlight) They did not just add the pretty skies they worked on a lot of the rendering system. the SL-Dev discussion is going, they are really interested in people giving them the right info one who is effected.


Peace,
~Soma

What's part of the problem here is we're doing per pixel lighting, soft shadows, all this shit when really what's nessicary is simple stencil shadows for /static/ objects. Notice how there's an option in the WL viewer for limiting reflections to objects that don't move? That was a genius idea.

Self-shadowing is nice and all, yet avatars are so render costly without having to do bloody soft-shadows with per pixel lighting on all the attachments on them.

If we're talking this super high quallity shadowing, then yes, dave is right. What SL needs is something that's slightly more primitive than Doom 3's lighting.

Right now in SL, if you're in a house with the blinds drawn over the windows, you've still got the sun shining on your avatar, that's the issue.

Yes, he's right, but we've seen the trend - they make this mandatory instead of optional. 1.18.5 still works if you have a viewer on a different channel, but the official viewer is Windlight enabled, and turning that down all the way still saps performance out of many low end computers. There needs to be an approved official branch of viewer development that accommodates older video cards, for people who don't find all the whizbang necessary, in the vein of 1.18.5.

Ehh. Sorry, but no.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mapping

(the process generally involves drawing the 'sketch' of scene from the light source PoV, then applying that information in the actual drawing of the scene. It's not "incredibly demanding" given it could be done even circa year 2000, on the hardware of that era. Real time and per each frame, meaning you could have the light source hop around like mad and it's still well covered)

And for that matter, i believe the realextend viewer (the open source modification of SL viewer using Ogre renderer amongst other things) already handles real-time shadows in SL, and it does so on quite old hardware. Because the concept itself is also quite old...

Nicholaz has a nice little missive on this topic in his latest blog, in case you didn't see the link I posted in another thread:
http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/

To be fair to the Lindens, BigPapi did indicate that he's willing to spend time looking over a patch that would bring back the old "ripple water" as a separate setting from "Basic Shaders", which should make WL comparable again (ie low settings but pretty water with pre-WL FPS).

The only catch was that someone else had to make the effort to integrate it back in.

(https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/sldev/2008-May/010034.html)

SL itself once supported real time shadows. But we all know what that meant - bloody blob shadows.

There are many types of shadowing techniques and just because a 3D engine claims to support shadows doesn't necessarily mean they're particulary nice or even usable in a real world situation. (okay, "real world situation" doesn't quite sound right here.). I believe realextend is using Ogre's stencil shadows which is a totally different and inferior shadowing technique to the one you linked to.

The shadowing technique you linked to is notoriously demanding and very few games use it in outdoor scenes. Crysis is one. So that should give you a clue as to what kind of performance to expect from shadow mapping, keeping in mind that the Crytek engine is pretty state of the art.

..unlike SL's Duct Tape engine.

Surely if WindLight can create real-time reflections, which are dependent on the positions of the viewer AND the light source, shadows, which only depend on the position of the light source, should be less demanding.

You're probably thinking of ray tracing. Reflections are often generated differently in real time 3D games.

But to help demonstrate the difference in complexity:

If I asked you to make the floor in a club appear shiny with reflections then you'd simply set the floor to 40% transparency and drag a copy of all the items down below the floor and turn them upside down. You could probably perform the task in under 30 minutes.

Now if I asked you make the room of another club have shadows (and I mean proper shadows, not bloody blobs!) then you'd have to take all the textures from the floor and walls into photoshop and manually paint all the shadows into those textures. You'll be lucky to get the job done in a day or two.



and anybody that says "Well I would just bake the shadows in Maya" is just asking for it!

...

http://home.comcast.net/~tom_forsyth/startopia/startopia_pictures.html

if you scroll all way down, you'll see this notoriously demanding shadowing technique run in years-old game on _geForce 1_ gfx card. And yes, the blocky texels look the part but try to get stencil shadows working with that sort of hardware..?

There isn't really anything notoriously demanding in shadow maps (relatively to other techniques) -- for that matter if you check the matching article on stencil shadows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_volume) it points out the shadow maps are actually the less demanding/less precise approach out of the two...

Yeah, looks nice ..from a distance. Which looks to be how the game is intended to be played. and it's not exactly a 3D virtual world like SL. But it would be interesting to see how the method performed when applied to a world like Second Life with newer hardware. Maybe like Crysis?

I got tired of waiting for someone to post screenshots so I just compiled it and took a peek... I didn't like WindLight and I still think it's just fluff, but I do really like this .

Being able to see every last light source adds a whole lot as well (except for when you have 50 lights stacked together into a small space; the hangout nearly blinded me ).

And maybe it should have been obvious from the start, but shadows mean that walls finally block sunlight!

I was wandering around something I built and the interior wall should have looked like this:

But instead I saw (the odd bump is my head , I'm standing outside the window in the opposite wall):


Bay City - Cafe Deco, with and without shadows:
WL:
Shadows:

I wanted to see how bad a group loaded with facelights would look when you could see every last facelight, but instead I got distracted by a wall at Bad Girls:
WL:
Shadows:

I took 3 comparison piccies at the Straylight sims as well (http://www.flickr.com/photos/kittybarnett/sets/72157605382907054/)