Shadow Draft 2

Hey everyone. I was looking around on Youtube and saw that there is a patch for dynamic Shadows in SL.... well it's a patch because it's below beta stage... but I still wanted to try it out.

Well it says you have to have a GeForce 8800 to run it... I have that. So I DL'ed and patched it and now when I try and run it the game crashes.

I also tried running it on the new 260 card... same deal.

I don't get why either. It appears to work for everyone else with those cards.

I'd really like shadows as the sun shining through everything is a bit odd at some points.
It's not so much that I want LL to hurry up and finish them, it's just the fact that I have the requirements for the patch and it still doesn't work....

Did anyone else tinker around with this and get it to work?
If so, what are you PC specs?

Also... I know this is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY up in the future, but you know how shiny surfaces only reflect the horizon, well when do you think they'll be able to reflect other objects as well?

That's about it.

They already do. Check your graphics options. You can set it to "static objects" and "everything" as wll as just terrain/sky

*edit* I guess that's just water. I'm pre-coffee still

It's just water, Annabelle. *hands a cup of coffee* Although there was once a thing under the debug settings that you could set things to reflect (had reflex, I need coffee too!). It was a couple of (I was still living in Disl) years ago.

Edit: Found what it used to be. It was RenderDynamicReflection which is no longer there. I have a nude snapshot of Raudf standing in front of the prim... Kinda neat!

For one it was not made by the Lindens, its open source based. And second it only really works with one specific client version, unfortunately from about 4 months ago now. You may be able to find it archived somewhere.

The patch is compiled by a resident, the code is created by Linden Lab.

I made such a video much time ago, SL has changed oh so much, probably why the patch dose not work anymore. Hmm, need to take it down (Shadow Days)

It's okay, Somatika. LL tends to change things so drastically. Such as the example of reflective surfaces. They did have a debug setting for it, but it vanished a few iterations ago.

It wasn't the greatest thing when it came to reflecting.. it mostly only reflected the avatar and the color of the background.. and not much else.

You saw a random video on YouTube that linked to a random SL binary that claimed to have something you wanted to see and you just went ahead and blindly installed it (running it through a virus scanner does you absolutely no good)?

It's a wonder more people don't have their account "hacked".

You made that claim before (/333/b7/271058/1.html) and it was debunked then already.

Any shadow-draft binary you might find will have been compiled by a resident rather LL, but the code comes from LL. Whether it's a direct compile or whether anyone added some malicous code before releasing it is anyone's guess and why you should never just blindly grab a viewer from anywhere unless you implicitly trust the source (that actually goes for any executable in general).

"Shadow draft 2" is the current, separate, branch btw, it's not the same as the orginal branch, and it's the supporting files which matter (mismatches between the DLLs and the app_settings, etc is what'll cause the crashes) and you can just download those from SVN as long as you know what branch and revision it's compiled from.

Actually, the "RenderDynamicReflections" did render the prims in the room as well as the avatar... But the angle of incidence and angle of reflection was so far off it was hard to see the effect at all, and the "mirror" wouldn't work at all if you were closer than about a meter and a half from the surface. You had to stand back about 2 Meters, have nothing closer than 2 meters from the surface if you wanted it to show, and then you had to camoff to one side, to a wierd angle, to "see yourself." Like looking from about 8 feet to the left, instead of from your actual position!

Not surprised they dropped it, because it never did work right. I'm amazed the water reflections work as well as they do, but that must have come with the Windlight code that they bought from external programmers. LL's own crew couldn't figure it out.

I have friend who uses it, its great for shadow effects in photos but I don't use it, she recommend I not use it because its not FD friendly.
I doesn't do anything special except shadows.
For it be not FD friendly rating it has to be for specific graphic card users that are more advanced then what I have or has advance technical issues this unrezzed mind can't fathom.

Yes, I do remember that.. issue and the fact that my not-g-rated snapshot shows that I had to take it from an angle.

As for Windlight? They bought the external programmers as well as the code

Indeed. Here's a couple of old screenshots :



In the second one, the palm trees you can see reflected are actually about 500 meters below the skybox.

(Darn this forum, I can't get hot-linking to work. Here are the links to the full size images)
http://img398.imageshack.us/img398/4975/fl11at6.jpg
http://img398.imageshack.us/img398/7323/fl12bo2.jpg