How many lights?

Spoken like a true borg

Great post, and filled in a few knowledge gaps f'r me, too.

Mari

First of all, I pointed out I wasn't around and that someone would correct it if I got it wrong, which you did .

The quote above (dashes and numbers are mine to make the formatting a bit clearer) is from the release notes of 1.9.1, the 1.10 release notes only mention "Nearby Lights".

1) is what we have now and 2) clearly makes a distinction between prims that are lit by *all* lights and avies that are lit by the 6 nearest ones (both in addition to the two default lights).

Not tryin to jump on ya, Kitty



As I recall at the time, it was initially a bump from 1.9.0, but the addition of light and flexi caused them to make it 1.10 instead. 1.9.1 was identical to 1.10 as far as lighting goes (as I recall), so what you noted may have just been a language clean up, rather than a change in features.

Mari

Pity that it doesn't actually hold up in practical testing... if you want, I can demonstrate what 6 black lights will do to an area lit by artificial lights. By your argument they shouldn't do anything... sadly, 6 black-light prims is all it takes to shut off ALL the local lights.

I know . I'd rather figure it out than argue over semantics .

I'll just take one more stab at it before I sulk and give in

1.9.1 -> 1.10 announcement thread (/290/b5/106869/1.html#post1039958) is the closest thing I can currently find that indicates they throttled back what they had planned:

Ooh, good catch. Now that you've quoted that, I do remember those three separate options used to exist. I stand corrected, at least in part. Sorry for the temporary memory lapse from earlier.

Here's my best recollection of what was going on then. It was a combination of hardware and software based lighting. When "all lights" was enabled, textures on static items (non-moving objects and terrain) would be baked to show the passive results from any light-emitting objects that were close enough affect them. This theoretically could create the illusion of more lights being present in the scene than OpenGL hardware rendering could support. The eight-light rule could be worked around in this way because no actual light other than from the first eight was really present. The textures were just being altered. In actuality, there would still have been just eight real lights in the scene, but the baked texturing could make it appear like there were more.

Good texture artists do this by hand as a matter of course. This was just an option to allow the system to try to do it automatically where applicable.

For moving objects (avatars, attachments, trees, grasses), that kind of baking wouldn't be possible, since you'd have to redo it literally every frame. So those items would only be lit by the eight real lights in the scene.

What's important to keep in mind is that the eight-light rule was still absolutely in effect, and that the basic system was the same one we're still using now (not counting Windlight). The extra baking was simply an add-on, a software-based illusion. It was not a separate system.

I don't recall how well the illusion worked, or how convincing it was. All I know is that when the option disappeared, I didn't really notice. My guess is that it probably never worked well enough to justify the significant extra processing power it had to have required.

Thankies for clearing it all up .

& sowwies for making you strain your memory trying to recall what options were there two years ago .

NP. Thanks for being patient with my faulty memory.