Grey Skies in WindLight

The Windlight skies may be great for those with the best graphic cards, but for me, they suck. I wouldn't mind if I just couldn't use the new features -- I don't expect to get all the fancy pretties with my low-end machine -- but the sky handling is actively worse for me in Windlight than in the old viewers, which I'm pretty sure I remember the Lindens saying would not be the case. In the old viewers, we had green grass and blue skies, nothing fancy but nothing wrong with them either. Now, we have green grass, blue skies, and in between them a huge ugly swath of grey horizon that I can't make go away no matter how I fuss with the settings.

Someone asked about this back when Windlight was still in RC and was told to change the fog distance ratio, but that doesn't make any difference for me. Turning fog distance all the way up to 10 just splits the grey horizon into grey and solid blue layers; if I turn my draw distance all the way up too (which I don't really want to do), the rezzed objects will hide most of the blue, but the grey is still blatantly there. And of course, turning it all the way down just makes the fog come closer, which makes it look like the grey is taking over. But even if you turn Fog off entirely in the Advanced Menu/Features, the horizon will still be grey. I'm really not convinced that the grey horizon has anything to do with fog; it looks to me like it's some different effect that just happens to be the same shade of grey as the fog.

Does anyone have any tricks or tips for getting rid of this ugly horizon? Maybe something in the five million debug settings or elsewhere in the Advanced menu? I've tried RenderFarClip, RenderFogRatio, RenderUseFarClip (no idea what frustum culling is, but I tried it anyway), ShowNearClip (couldn't figure out the effect of that), and WLSkyDetail (no apparent effect either). No luck with any of them. I don't mind if it's something that will kill my performance otherwise; I've resigned myself to living with the grey skies normally. But I'd really like to be able to take a few still photos without that horrible grey.

Rihanna,

You might to tell us what system you're running on and which graphics card.....all your specs. This might help folks to better pinpoint what's going on and how to solve it. I have been running windlight since inception and I've never seen anyone post about what you describe.....a black band in the horizon yes, but not the gray you're seeing. Can you post a screen shot for us???

I'm using a G4 Mac Mini with a Dell 2005FPW monitor and a ATI Radeon 9200. It's an older system, but still works great for everything except SL, and even there the skies looked just fine before Windlight. We were specifically told that we'd still be able to use SL without losing anything in Windlight; using a lower-end computer just meant we wouldn't gain as much as folks with newer systems.

I can also see the corners of the sky in Windlight if I look for them, but at least that's not a regular running problem -- I have to actually cam around and look for them.

I'd love to post screenshots, but since the forum won't let me use attachments, I've no idea how the rest of you manage it. I'll have to try and see if I can throw some up on my blog and post a link.

Here you go: http://bedawyn.livejournal.com/190214.html

This thread here mentions the problem being related to altitude. I haven't seen it as such -- it's more visible higher up, but only because the horizon in general is more visible from higher altitudes, while it (and it's accompanying grey) is more likely to be obscured at ground level.

/333/2d/187282/1.html

Sweet Primrose mentions the same problems here with a different system. I don't use VBO at all, though, because of my system.

/333/b4/188119/1.html

I couldn't actually find the old thread that specifically mentioned fog distance -- I know it's in here somewhere...

Hmm.....I don't run on a Mac so I'm not entirely sure where the glitch is. I'll do some more research when I get on my home puter and see if I can find a mentor in-world that runs Mac that can help with this~!!

They lied. The grey band btw is the ocean not the sky. The "fixes" you mention are pretty much what you suspect, ways of fudging it so it isn't as noticable. You can also try playing with terain detail, but there's no "ocean detail". The only way to get rid of it is to enable basic shaders + atmospheric shaders. Older hardware can't do that. But the post-WL low-end renderer is NOT the same as that pre-WL.

Geez! Now you got me thinking of a song!!

"Gray skies are gonna clear up,
Put on a happy face;
Brush off the clouds and cheer up,
Put on a happy face."

Well, I wouldn't be surprised about that. I'm awfully far in-land for it to be ocean, though; the ocean was never visible in the distance before Windlight. It's a good four or five sims away, at least, north and south, and dozens of sims away east and west.

Is there any way to turn the shaders on, just temporarily? I don't have the option in preferences (greyed out), but something I could tweak in the Advanced menu or maybe even in Unix? Like I said, I don't mind if it kills my performance otherwise, as long as I can take a few pictures before crashing.

the shaders need to be support by the graphics hardware, I don't think there's any way around that.

the "ocean" is actually just a continuous plane which exists everywhere. The land texture covers it if it's above it. If part of the ground mesh is pulled "below sea level" it becomes a lake. But it's all the same water plane. Increasing draw distance will increase how much of the ground is drawn. (of course it also controls how much of everything else is drawn). If you are on mainland and do not care how long it takes to render you could max out draw distance, altho on mainland that could take days before all the info is drawn