Linden Water vs. Scripted Water

There seems to be two types of water in SL:

• Linden Water - reflects scenery around it, looks more realistic

• Scripted Water - poor excuse for Linden Water

I'm building a skybox and want the best water in it. Right now it's a 32 x 64 x .5m megaprim.

What is the best way to cover this with water? Is Linden Water even an option?

nope, you can`t recreate linden water

so I'm stuck with this crappy scripted water?

DANG!

Who makes the best water?

I'll pay anything! ANYTHING!!!

So long as it doesn't cost any money.

ANYTHING!!!

There are water textures in your Library. If you use them well, they can look very effective. I.e. put the bottom of the water - sand, pebbles, whatever on the prim and then put a water highlight texture from the library on another prim above it, and make that one phantom so you walk in the water. Something like that. The highlight texture will need to be animated of course. I haven't played with the library textures much, so 2 phantom layers using different water testures may work much better.

Yeah. I've done that. And I can live with it. But the difference between that and Linden Water is vast. I think it's because Linden Water reflects the surrounding objects.

So I can play with that method some more... maybe check out some pre-scripted products.

But can anybody tell me why there are two waters? Why can't I buy Linden Water?

Linden water isn't a thing, it's a sim setting. The sim owner sets the height of linden water for the entire sim (usually 20m). Any place that you don't see water will be water if you dig down to the right level. It only exists in your viewer, and you can turn it off under the Advanced rendering settings.

that would be like buying the sky, or a piece of the ground, just can't be done

also note that on mainland, in some places you won't even reach linden water, because of the restrictions in place for editing mainland land

This is why parcels on the water (the real Linden water) sell for a multiple over landlocked parcels.

It IS seductive. The Linden water, in and of itself, is what led me to go Premium....I really wanted to be able to be around that every day, without feeling I was trespassing on someone else's property.



sidenote: when I started selling parcels I'd write "Real Linden Water" in the descriptions. Enough people told me they'd been confused by the phrase that I stopped writing it....but it DOES mean something...

Well it may be a sim setting. But it can be "made".

If it can be made and is a superior product, why can't it be sold and used?

What is the logic behind withholding this product from us?

It cannot be made. It's an illusion. It doesn't really exist.

Yep. If you can't right-click on it, it's not really there.

I thought this was what the materials project was about.. No?

So all water I see doesn't really exist? The fact that you can't right-click it is just a matter of code withholding permissions from the user.

If it shows up on the screen, it exists. It can be manipulated, controlled.

Nobody has yet explained why it isn't being made available to the general public.

Who is wise enough to know this answer?

Dork.

It doesn't exist in that there's no object behind it. It's a viewer thing, not a sim thing. The sim just says "water is at 20.0m" and that's it. Without some object on the sim, there's nothing to manipulate.

You can not like the answer all you want but it's true anyway.

Ok... so I'm a dork.

Are you trying to tell me that the great minds at LL can't come up with a way to package that product — even if they have to spend a little time to turn it into an object — and sell it to needy dorks like myself?

Is THAT what you're trying to tell me?

Cutie.

[totally off topic] I have seen flame wars break out on many a forum over less than "dork"... People can get upset so easily. Your good natured reply "cutie" made me smile.

I'm not even going to put a tippy toe into the subject of water here

Actually it is possible, with enough hackage but it wouldn't look as good. Have an outside app take continuous screenshots of linden water, covert it to a quick time movie and then stream it as video onto a prim.

Linden water is not a texture, so you can't put it on the side of a prim. Getting it so you could put it on the side of a prim would take development resources which are currently working on bugs or the next cool feature. I'd recommend asking CG Linden during his office hours. It might also already exist as a JIRA post and you'd be able to see if there was any response/discussion on it.

They probably never thought of it, and it'd probably be something that would kill a lot of mid and low end computers. That kind of dynamic interaction is hell on graphics cards.

Oh, and also - Second Life is a toy. Toy's have limitations. That is why they are called "Toys".

Have you looked into some of the sculpted prims made to look like water? Still not at all the same as linden water, but I've seen them used to create a nice effect for flowing streams.

I thought toys were called "toys" because they were "fun".

Thanks for "the" info"."

I really want to thank you all for trying to help me deal with this, and it makes me feel better that I'm not alone in feeling like this. I think the advice of staying away from SL is good, but I really feel that I want to be there. I know that's not going to help me, but after spending so much time, it's incredibly hard to stop.

Some of you were kind enough to offer to chat with me in SL, and I'm going to do that. Part of the problem for me being able to talk about my upset, was that we both had the same, small social circle, so things that were said would go straight back to that person, so it was impossible to talk about it with anyone. I don't mean bitching about them, which I wouldn't do, but our friends made thier own judgements without really knowing what had happened. It got really difficult to talk to anyone, and I'm not good at putting on a brave face.

In the end, I made a big mistake, mostly of my own making. I've learned a lot about myself and about SL, but it still doesn't take the pain away.

Thank you all again,

x

I feel tempted to tell you that NONE of what you see on your screen actually really exists but that would be letting out the secret.

Actually, it might help your understanding if you think about Linden Water as one of those graphics card glitches - the weird triangles that showed up with the Windlight viewers in the beginning, the shoe bases that cover the whole lower body etc. They sure are there, but can they be really controlled and manipulated like other objects? Not really. You can only deal with them within their own narrow parameters.

Linden water is very pretty, but by itself, it's a bit lame, too. It doesn't make any sounds, for example, nor ripple around a partially submerged object or avatar (although it does a really nice job of refracting, now).

I remember when I was new I was intrigued by the (then much lamer) Linden water. It really bothered me that I needed to buy a scripted attachment to swim in it, and that even if I scripted one myself, my avatar didn't have built-in swim animations. (But I really was a dork, and liked just fine the built-in male animations for walking, standing, etc.) I ended up spending a long time scripting water so it would hand out my own swim-physics attachments and animate many swimmers from the water itself. I never got around to selling that stuff, and I suspect there are lots of products like that now.

I don't especially like sculpted water except for really turbulent flow... and then I want to be able to animate the sculptmap, too, and that's too laggy to even contemplate doing to my neighbors.

(Muffin, m'dear, you posted this in the wrong thread )

When LL introduced Windlight, with the reflective water, content designers howled over the drastic change, and the fact that it was now impossible to make prim water that resembled Linden water. This meant that every stream, river and pond now looked like a poor imitation of the Linden water it was flowing into. Prior to Windlight, it was at least marginally possible to match Linden Water's appearance with prim water. Most prim water today still is close to what the old Linden water looked like, before Windlight.

Along with many other content providers, I spoke with several Lindens on the Windlight team about that disparity. They said that it was on their roadmap to make a prim property that would allow a prim to look and act like Linden water. But it also wasn't a very high priority.

From a technical perspective, Linden water is a difficult thing to replicate in a prim. Actual Linden Water is a flat plane that extends from edge to edge in the sim. It has a defined effect below that plane that affects visibility and flight/swimming and other things, and has a defined surface effect for the reflections and ripples. Because there is only ONE water plane in the sim, and it's position is precisely known by the sim, it's not too difficult to calculate the reflections for that one surface, even with ripple distortions. But if you could set a prim property to act like Linden Water does now... Suddenly you have the potential for up to 15,000 separate prims, with every prim surface, at whatever angle it might be at, to be reflective. The possibilities for compound refections rapidly make the calculations for those reflections too much for the sim, or your client, to handle.

/me dons scuba gear, complete with mask, flipper and oxygen tank and dives into the thread

I'm still using a non-Windlight viewer so for me Linden water looks pretty much like scripted water...in fact I prefer scripted water because it can be made splashable, make pretty waterfalls, etc.

Since atm, Linden water is not an obtainable object, I would just offer that NCI teaches a class fairly regularly on the topic of water - ways to get various effects, etc. I highly recommend that class while you're building your skybox.

I wonder if it is possible to to use this Software here http://www.xiberpix.net/SqirlzReflect.html
And create an animated gif.
Then take the animated gif to this website to convert it
http://www.peregrinesalon.com/anim/

Might be something fun to try.