Kirsten 17 ShadowViewer

I have a feeling that Kirsten wasn't intending this for wide release. Where is the announcement from her? Certainly if she wants to make her own viewer for her own pleasure, she's entitled to, without grief from the community. The problem is that people know where her host is and they have access to the directory. If I was her, I'd close off that access.

OK, I really miss anti-aliasing. Has anyone been able to run the Kirsten 17 with it on? and if so, which card are you using? tyty clever folks!

It certainly was: http://kirstenleecinquetti.blogspot.com/2009/04/s17-viewer.html

sigh. ok, whatever.

A few pics taken around Half Hitch. Oddly, photos taken with the client snapshot don't show shadows (for me). These used the good old-fashion print -screen key.

View of the NE corner of the sim:




Shadow of my attachments showing, but not my mesh. Or not much of it; you can see my head and little highlights here & there:




Aha, there it is! I found if I changed skins, my shadow would appear, briefly, before the skin had fully rezzed. I also noticed that skin make-up (the LL stuff found in the Appearance menu) appears on top of the tattoo layer rather than under. I had to set all the make-up to zero, which wouldn't be possible with a no-mod skin. I hope some of my other skins have these set to zero by the maker, otherwise they'll look silly in this viewer.

KirstenLee deleted my last comment on his blog. But that doesn't mean it disappears nor does his GPL violation:

"Sweetheart, do you still miss the point? You distribute a binary that is GPLed. Without sources. As you did in the past, as you did with Openlifegrid, and as you do it now.

I don't really care about KDU or Vivox as these are licensed to LL and they will go after you if they deem necessary. Not my problem.

My problem is your continued violation of GPL slapping every code contributor directly in the face."

@agree with BoyLane. We do have to respect content creators as a best practice. I do appreciate being able to play with KirstenLee's viewer but it will become increasingly important to give credit where credit is due as time goes by.

That being said, am I right in understanding that the next RC (1.23) will have shadows thru the debug menu?

And that my 8800 is obsolete? I thought the new graphic cards where considered lightweight and the 8800 was still more robust. (I have the 8800 Ultra 768mg).

This build runs on my SLI dual 8800GT's very very well. No noticeable slowdown (though the performance meter crashes the viewer, so I can't do a direct comparison of frame rates).

So unless SLI suddenly started making a difference with SL, you should be fine.

@Dnali

No, there will be no shadows in 1.23. If you look into SVN it's right now completely confusing as the render-pipeline branch (shadow branch) is internally named 1.23 whereas the http-texture one that 2 or 3 days ago became 1.23 is internally 1.24 .

To sum it up, 1.23 will be using http textures but not shadows. Shadows may make it into a 1.24 far away on the horizon but I'm not sure about that either given all the adult changes coming that likely will have higher priority.

I expect shadows to hit a viewer either in 1.24 but more likely in 1.25. But these are just guesses.

Not obsolete, just replaced by the 9800 and GTS250, which use the same GPU as the 8800 did.

A 8800GT is in fact a 9800GT which was planned to be a GTS240 before Nvidia backed out. So this is a pretty recent and good card that should work well for at least a year to come.

The shadow branch has problems with cards that have an S in the end, I mentioned that a number of times and so far nobody could confirm to get a shadow viewer running on one of them. If you could, please let me know .

This is a huge leap for the look of SL. Windlight brought SL up a couple dozen notches, and this will shoot it up even more. Here's my curiosity...has anyone seen how this reacts to:

a) Fully enclosed rooms?

b) Prims with alpha textures?

c) Local lighting through prims?

Fully enclosed rooms seem to be fully shadowed within, masking all other shadows. Light levels vary with the sun position.

Alpha prims cast shadows as if they were real objects. So an alpha grating casts the shadow of a grate, not solid black or no shadow. A solid textured prim with transparency set casts a shadow if transparency is less than about 40%, no shadow if it's higher. The shadow doesn't fade, just blinks out as it passes that threshold. I'm guessing partly alpha prims (like grates) are judged on a threshold too.

Local lighting brightens areas of shadow, but doesn't cast shadows of its own.

Sculpties cast the correct shaped shadow, once they've fully rezzed.


One issue I've noticed is that partly alpha textures vanish from certain distances and angles. This is *very* beta, after all.

An example:



White prim rezzed to make the shadow stand out. Note that the lower part of the ramp should be the same grid texture as the upper part, but from this angle the viewer loses it. It still shows the shadow.

@Eric

Grab a shadow viewer and play around with it, people discover all kind of fantastic things you can do with it. Don't take anything for granted. Don't use it for serious work.

Have fun

I think I will wait for a non beta to try on my gtx275

See you sometime in 2011

Clothing or a tattoo layer with a Luminance (brightness value) of 50 or less cases that area of the mesh to not cast a shadow. It's extremely localised: wearing a black & white striped outfit will make your shadow visible & invisible in stripes.

Maybe its a way of making sure vampires won't cast shadows.

My unscientific comparison is here:
atomic-raygun.com

Here is a pic that shows an alpha seagull overhead which throws a great shadow. I also had to use screen capture / Print sceen .

Have you tried the Shadow Viewer? Snapshots and shadows work.

Anyone else duplicated my findings with dark clothing or tattoos? Some screenshots to show what I'm seeing:



Top, stripy clothes, bottom, stripy skin.

My unscientific comparison is here:
atomic-raygun.com

Nope.




My unscientific comparison is here:
atomic-raygun.com

Depends on the clothes. I found one pair of jeans in my inventory that doesn't cast a shadow.

The non-functional snapshots is a showstopper for me. Back to SD2-R7.

As we just had a long discussion in SLU and assumptions were confirmed: KirstenLee's viewer calls home to pull the startup picture from one of his servers. By doing so it counts user statistics and it collects your IP address. If and what the connection may be used else for we don't know as KLee doesn't provide sources in violation of GPL.