Shadows now in an official build!

Lol. My desire for upgrades to my computer just keeps getting stronger.

For yuks, I did try enabling it on my mac. Client seems to run with it enabled, but no shadows are rendered. I did not hang around long enough to fully test.

But yes, the ugly eyelashes are ugly -- and did anyone else see issues with camming around avatars and prims?

I also thought I'd never say it, but I miss the swaying Linden trees.

Wow! I did get shadows! Amazing! At last I've seen my shadow in SL!

OK, being the first test release, it's far from perfect. Avatar shadows - very realistic but unstable - dissolved into blobs. Building shadows - very good - even patches lit up where sunlight streams through my windows. Finally sunlight doesn't come through walls any more either. Buggy though - some prims not rezzing, shiny and bumpmapping not working even though they were enabled, couldn't turn off the old fashioned classic clouds.

There are even shadows on me, like made by my arms, which move when I walk. I think light and shade modelling on my skin might be a bit better too, difficult to tell.

Frame rate slow, though - not too bad on my sky platform but much slower down on the ground in my home.

For me this is one of my most memorable experiences in SL. Thank you Linden Lab, really! It's just a start - keep up the great work.

I gotta say it - Linden trees look rather nice with the shadow viewer.

Aw, you say it like that's a bad thing. Shouldn't we Mac users have access to the same crashtasms as everyone else?

Sigh, but should I get more memory for my old Pentium D, and a new video card, and the requisite power supply, or buy a new rig, but .... Vista. Windows 7. And what of the other machine, should I spend any money on my surfing machine with it's AGP bus and only 512 megs of ram and a single core processor? Would I want Windows 7 version 0 or would I want to wait for SP1? I'm ready to switch from CRT, but they still look better than LCDs.... and I want a portrait monitor, and not a widescreen....

Apparently, so long as my computers function, I will think stuff like this until I die.

I need to say it , the Boy Lane compilation runs much more smooth than this RC.

That's because Boy's cuter than they are.

Lol, me too, Suezanne.

*tries it*

*sees his shadow*

*goes back to his old viewer for six weeks*





.

I was using the 1.23 shadow viewer again this morning.

One or two more things I noticed. I couldn't take a snapshot of a scene with shadows - the little picture in the snapshot window shows a midnight view with black sky whatever lighting you actually have.

I played around with times of day and got some good shadow effects. I rezzed a plywood cube and when I stretched it, the shadow stretched with it - cool.

I mentioned I have shadows cast on my body by my arms, but I noticed there's even a shadow on my neck, cast by my chin, in addition to the normal light and shade effect in the main viewer.

One strange anomaly is that in 1.23, I logged in to find I had black lipstick over a much wider area than my mouth. Normally, my no-mod skin layer is slightly translucent in the lip area, so that the system lipstick sliders only vary the colour very slightly. Does this mean that there is that make-up is on an extra layer in 1.23, so that it works on top of no-mod skins?

I took a snap in world to show a friend how my legs disappeared in the latest RC (alpha issue I believe). After I sent him the snap I noticed my shadow was gone and that the coloring of my surroundings darker then what I actually saw in world.



I then took a snap "save to disk". In that one I am still missing my legs, but saw my shadow, and colors matched things as I saw in world.




Aside from this, in the new RC my frame rate was about a quarter of what it usually is, my av had ugly eyelashes that gave appearance of thick eyeliner but my skin looked much better.

This is only to be expected in the early development stages - I remember when they put WindLight on First Look for the first time. I got some quite nice ambient lighting but it was full of glitches like black sky flickering, crashes and funny shapes instead of avatar imposters.

But now look at WindLight - it works perfectly, it's one thing in SL that is faultless - except for losing custom presets with some viewer updates, that is.

So hopefully the same will be true with shadows.

One does not put early development stages into a Release Candidate. That is screwing up thousands of installations of users and simply irresponsible.

A RC is used to fine tune and fix a fixed clearly defined feature set. Features that are already stable enough to be given to a wider userbase to help testing but not by screwing around with the ones who are willing to do that testing.

Why you call it faultless then when it clearly isn't?

Check out your eyelashes.

They moved the layer or something, so it breaks every no-mod skin in SL. They're supposed to be working on a fix. How this made it into a release candidate is beyond my.

Except for feeding dirty words into the search, the 1.23RC viewer is useless.

Can anyone point me to where I can download and reinstall the previous RC version?
I upgraded to check out the shadows but hate everything in this new RC.

Thanks,
Handy

It loses the day cycle preset with ALL viewer updates. It still has worse and lower resolution Linden Trees. It doesn't have a replacement for the nighttime alpha setting. You can't set your camera at the water surface any more. The alpha blending problem is still far worse than the original rendering engine. Runitai's depth-sensitive waves are still gone. Parcel border lines are still invisible under water. Parcel border lines still show through Alpha objects. Lighting is still massively over-exaggerated even after spending significant tuning of custom settings. And that's just the problems with Windlight that I can recall off the top of my head.

That seems to not be a Windlight specific issue, but more a change that came in with Windlight, with a nod to cutting viewer lag. The 1.23 viewer's removal of tree "sway" is f'r the same reason.

If you want better looking Linden Trees, go to Advanced > Debug Settings > RenderTreeLODFactor and set it in the 2-5 range. There's also a Render setting for turing th' sway on too. Here's a couple shots taken with a higher tree LOD.





...now if only I could take those shots with shadows!

They have completely different trees in Windlight... they even changed the *shape* of the trees. They used to have the same shape for the billboard and "3d" versions: Windlight's trees are differently shaped (eg, the pine trees are shorter and fatter) but they didn't change the billboard to match. Increasing the LoD won't stop the trees snapping to a new shape as they enter and leave LoD.

Presumably the shadow function is a low-key inclusion, even on the RC - when LL want to encourage lots of people to try shadows they'll probably put an 'enable shadows' button on the graphics menu in preferences rather than leaving people to fiddle about with the debug settings.

By the way, Linden trees and other trees look really good with the shadow viewer, when they eventually rez. As well as shadows under the trees there are dappled shadows on the trunks and somehow the foliage looks more convincing.

I've not found that except with 'glow' in daylight, especially from a distance. I will say that on our older computer, which can't do full WindLight effects, the lighting is poorer than it was with the older non-WindLight viewer, but on the comp that does full WindLight effects, it's great.

I can't imagine it will be all that long before you'll be able to.

Maybe Hyang Zhao can compile a shadow viewer for the Mac?

Well on a 1Gb 9800 shadows look great, the FPS is a bit slower and I did crash once in a crowded area after 4 hours, I have seen alpha textures missing as well, but this is RC 1.23.0 afterall NOT RC 1.23.99, so I expect that mans they will be refining the stuff they've addded over later RC's.
Cool stuff LL. I'll keep using it

Please - someone - anyone

tell me where to go to download the last RC! I dl the new one and hate it so bad I could cry!

Why oh why did they mess with the pie menus!
Why are my photos screwed up!

I hate it!

LOL sorry for the drama

I want to go back to the previous 1.22? RC
Anyone know where I can find it?

Handy

It's on the downloads page.

http://secondlife.com/support/downloads.php

1.23RC0 was so bad, they put 1.22.11RC back.

Oh thank god.

Thanks for letting me know. lol
Handy