Windlight Weirdness today?

Is anyone else noticing this, or is it just me? In the Windlight viewer, every shiny object now seems to have a random degree of brightness. Most look almost like they have Glow turned on. Some appear half way normal, but with ridiculously washed out specular highlights. Others appear blackened, with extremely high contrast in the shine. No shiny object looks right.

Adjacent objects with the same degree of shine can appear radically different from each other. Here are some screenshots:



My USS Defiant. As you can see, the whole thing appears to glow, with the exception of a few prims, which have the "half normal" effect I described above. In actuality, all the prims of the hull are set to medium shine, no glow. The base texture is just a simple brushed metal. The ship should appear gray and shiny, not white and glowing.




My sculpted Cylon. This actually has the same texture on it as most of the Defiant's hull, just a simple brushed metal that I often use as a placeholder while I'm working on the finalized textures for a given model, and it's also got the same medium shine on it. From a distance, the Cylon glows white, just like the Defiant. But when I zoom in closer, the brightness of the glow dims almost to a blackish tone. The overly high contrast makes the Cylon appear way too shiny. The only difference is the Cylon has a medium gray "color" on it (via the Color field in the editor), and the Defiant has the default white color.



My front walkway. This just has a very simple wood plank texure on it, with a low shine. Notice that each panel has a different amount of overblown washout than the next, even though they all have the same texture and the same amount of shine.



Again, is anyone else seeing this sort of thing, or is it just me? It seemed to start around 4 p.m. SL time yesterday, as best I can tell. At least that was the first time I logged in and saw it. I had been on earlier in the day yesterday, and everything was fine then.

I know there are server updates going on that are sparking all kinds of strange behavior across the grid, but I doubt that's the problem since I can't see how a change to the server software could affect client-side graphics like this. I also can't imagine that it's a driver issue, since nothing on my system has changed recently. The Windlight client was working just fine with my current drivers until yesterday afternoon. Anyone have any ideas?




Here are my system specs, in case anyone's wondering:

2.66 GHz Core2 Extreme (QX6700)
(2) GeForce 8800GTX
EVGA 680i SLI motherboard
2.5 GB DDR2 RAM
(5) WD Raptor 150GB hard drives
(1) WD Caviar 750GB hard drive
Tagan 1100W power supply
Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Exteme Audio

Chosen, now that you mention it, I did see something like this yesterday afternoon, and evening as well. At the time, I didn't pay much attention except to sort of say to myself, hmm, that seems awfully bright.

Windlight has also gone back to crashing on me with the "out of memory" or "memory could not be read" or "stack heap collision" errors. I don't think that's related, though.

I'll bet it's some sort of interaction between WindLight and the new 1.19 server-side software upgrades, because I don't see it everywhere.

Lindal, I get those out of memory errors with Windlight, too. I always have. There's definitely a giant, gaping memory leak somewhere in it. I really wish they'd find it and plug it.

I'm not sure if it's just coincidence or not, but it seems every time it happens, I'm working in another application at the time, and SL is just sitting there. If I'm actively using SL, any number of other apps can be sitting by on the sidelines, and the error never seems to pop up. But step out of SL to use any of them, and within a few minutes, it's "out of memory". I have to force shut down SL from the task manager at those times. It seems Windlight just can't handle being pushed to the background.



Anyway, how's it looking now to you? Did things return to normal, or is stuff still too bright?

Anyone else?

I can't say i noticed anything similar when I was on last night and I have the same graphics card... will keep an eye open for it when I get home later today.

It may be a good idea for you to bring this up on the First Look group though - there is a fair Linden presence in the group during the day and you may get lucky in tacking down the source of the problem.

Thanks, Aki. I should have thought of that. I'll post there now.

I've been getting those "Out of memory" errors alot in the last few days. Mainly at SkinFair. I figured it was due to the crazy amount of textures there, but it doesn't happen anywhere else.

I also notice that at SkinFair, my normal WL preset, which is a pleasantly low contrast nice ambient light based off the Wintry Day preset, becomes blindingly bright to the point where every pale surface glares white. I'm guessing its because of so many local lights in the area, but I'm not sure. I'd love it if someone else with WL could go take a look and tell me if they get the same effect

Maybe you're seeing the Chosen Effect. There are plenty of light surfaces in that build, to be sure. I didn't see anything bad on Saturday using WL default settings.

Local lights shouldn't have an effect...your viewer will only render the nearest six.

I figured it out. Somehow RenderDymanicReflections got switched on. I turned it off, and everything's normal now. Whew.

Chosen, never mind that, but WHOAH! A cylon, cool! And the Defiant! (<--loves DS9) Even cooler! *wears a sci fi geek hat*

In case that's the same thing that's plaguing me, where do you find that settng?

You can find it in 'Client' (Ctrl-shift-D), --> 'Debug Settings'.

Does anyone else get their mouse sticking..pausing..freezing..randomly selecting objects half way across a sim in windlight? It only happens to me in windlight..to the point i can't build with it anymore..I can barely navigate thru windlight anymore because of this glitch.

~Lana