I Can Turn Off Your Stupid Facelight!

Artists particularly have been providing this kind of input to visitors to their installations for some time now and prior to Windlight becoming a part of the standard viewer. Builders will need to do this too. Art museums in the real world do this all the time by regulating the lighting around a piece of art. As an egregious example, San Francisco's art museums have been so controlling of the effects of light on their displayed works that often people have to carry flashlights to read the printed cards supplied by the curators.

Moreover, we all have different computer screen characteristics already, and short of an instrumented calibration, we all consequently see things differently: my screen--even at its lowest contrast setting--is still so contrasty I've had to lower brightness (to avoid headaches) which makes me lose a lot of the dark color shades on black design work that seems suddenly au courant in SL.

We could start here...

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Let us be clear about this - the option would not have been put in had the issue of Obnoxious Facelights not been so pressing. I do not get out an awful lot myself and even I have had trouble with confusion and the effect of carefully-lit builds being ruined by Facelight Vandals.

(To be fair it is also I think due to it being a relatively easy change to the viewer.)

Fixed.

Agreed...

LL needs to remember the LCD; I'd prefer it if we DIDN'T have the ability to customize Windlight. When I buy those hi-falutin video games for my PC, I'm not allowed to customize the view; it's designed a particular way and it's going to stay that way. It allows for greater detail work by the designers who know exactly how something is going to look, which ultimately allows for greater creativity. Windlight "dumbs down" the system, in that creators here are forced to think about all settings, not just one standard setting, which makes their creations a bit more vanilla in the end. I do like Windlight, I just think we should do away with the customized settings.

I agree with this as well. My viewer is on the default windlight settings and I have no intention of changing them except on the very rare occasion that I may visit a build intended for a particular setting.

Perhaps people could avoid the "dumb down" effect if they just built to the default setting and went creative from there. Then if someone changes their settings and everything looked crappy they only have themselves to blame.

Yup.

Plus, have you ever talked a newbie through the Graphics Customize window? That window alone is super scary for newbies, and then they see the Windlight customization and just run screaming for the hills.

Good Lord, it's just a few sliders.

For us, Cristalle, sure. But for a newbie, it's really scary.

It won't break the computer. Really!

Peeps...

There are no "individual rights" in SL. There are Terms of Service.

Pep (And a reminder: there is not just one constitution and some civilised places don't even need one)

I'd say "often" rather than "usually"; it's completely hardware-dependent. If you have a decent GPU (as two of the three computers that I use for SL do - NVidia 8800GT and 7600GS), the defaults set local lighting on. If you don't have a good GPU (like my laptop with ATI integrated graphics), local lighting is off by default. Sadly, that does mean that all those systems with Intel integrated graphics, like 90% of the laptops on the market, have lighting turned off by default.

Windlight is actually quite realistic -- from a CAMERA'S point of view. The human brain automatically adjusts colors to a large extent to compensate for changes in lighting color and extremes of contrast, so lighting effects never look as extreme in person as they do in photographs.

To see what I mean, get your hands on an old-fashioned 35mm film camera, load it with slide film (not print film -- the printing machine also does color correction, and some newer ones can do contrast correction as well), and take pictures in a variety of situations. A high-end digital camera might also do if you have the option of turning off all the corrections that the camera's software normally makes, or you could try a camcorder that lets you set manual exposure and white balance.

Cool feature, but hard to implement. OpenGL hardware lighting doesn't do that; it would all have to be calculated by the viewer or by custom shaders in the GPU. The performance hit would be horrendous except on VERY high-end hardware.

A feature that COULD be implemented (it's in OpenGL) is directional lighting; lights that have a defined beam width and direction rather than being omnidirectional sources. Those would make flashlights, spotlights, and track lighting much more realistic, and would make it possible to build more friendly personal lighting systems. They wouldn't fix the problem of light shining through walls though.

excellent. now people have no reason to cry about noselamps.

Rendering it pointless to anyone but you...

But I will say, Nina, that since you want the blue effect, that yours is a different case than most.