Anti - Anti Windlight Thread

I have a visible performance deterioration. At the minimum graphics setting, grass that used to have a grassy texture now looks like discolored pea soup. At certain camera distances, I occasionally actually see skirts grow cases of the jaggies - jaggies! As in the bad old days of 1990s bmp fonts and dial-up. If I put the settings higher I get so much lag I can barely move. My weary little 128 MB graphics card just wont cut it now that I've downloaded the new viewer; but yesterday it was fine.

I really don't appreciate Windlight,
have no probs running it, between the over kill of surroundings and still avie blight [oh! the vanities!] just haven't found a happy medium in settings.
I use 3 diff SL clients, Nickolaz, Dazzle and the current version and switch back and forth to do diff things.

I tested it. I gave my feedback on it.

coco

It might be hard to describe ..

Even before Windlight was ever heard of some people had complex sculpted looks which they obviously spent a lot of time and money on.

While many others don't.

For example I spent over 10,000 Lindens and dozens of hours putting Carli Together. Heck must have been 20 hours on my usual hairstyle alone.

People who don't concentrate as much on how lighting affects their appearance are often going to miss the differences.


Mainly for me, All the things I hated about the lighting in the old client got even more pronounced in Windlight.

Some examples -

too many face angle problems without light shining directly being a big one,

another is the shadow area between the breasts

You guys gotta come up with a new line. That Commodore 64 bit is becoming almost Godwin-like.

Okies... Commordore VIC-20. (^_^)

I'm anti-Windlight, but feel quite indifferent about Windlook .

And my reason against it is the simple fact that the money spent on acquiring the team and the 10 months of additional development time could have been put to better use in various ways instead of dedicating it to fluffy clouds.

I do enjoy watching a sunset/sunrise in SL, but other than that I just don't really notice the sky in any significant way so I don't particularly care whether it looks fluffy or ugly.

I also don't mind that LL caters to the panorama crowd, but there are other projects that would benefit everyone (a robust and stable grid) or would make more of a difference (not having to accept a significant loss in performance or having to buy a new card/puter just so others can have pretty skies would be one).

I hate Windlight so much.

I can smell my graphics chip melting it's being over worked so much.

Why? Whhhhhy?!!

There's a new virtual environment on the horizon -

http://youtube.com/watch?v=_ED1ouzeNMM

Should SL remain in the backwater, and wait for other competitors to roll it over? My prediction is starting to come true... next gen Unreal Engine 3 getting applied to user created worlds.

http://news.filefront.com/gdc-08-nurien-harnesses-the-power-of-the-unreal-3-enginefor-a-rhythm-dancing-game/

yeah, the gamers hate it, but its so going to appeal to the big demographic of SL who like nothing more than chilling dancing to tunes in a club wearing the latest bling.

Well, just to beat another saying to death, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I happen to like windlight much better than the older viewer. However, anyone that says the lighting is "realistic" really does need to get outside more.

But it is a simulated world and I never expected RL picture perfect graphics from a cartoon so I guess my expectations aren't as high as other's.

And, I am lucky enough to have a system capable of running at 20FPS on full ultra settings which, for me is much better than the old viewer.

However, I have a couple of friends with Macs for which the new viewer is simply unusable. So, no, I am not arrogant enough to tell them to buy new hardware. LL really needs to do what it takes to get things ironed out.

Oh, I have one machine with a 128MB card, too, and an ancient ATI chipset, on the PCI bus (not PCI-E, not even AGP), so it's dog slow, but then it was dog slow before Windlight, too. But about jagged skirts: That possibly could be the "Avatar Imposters" thing kicking in. If that particular thing is the problem, you can just turn it off altogether, or slide up the "Mesh Detail" for Avatars specifically. Avatar Imposters really doesn't help performance all that much *except* in places with lots of avatars around (crowded clubs, say, or big meetings).

I do agree with Kitty's point that Windlight wasn't the most important thing for LL to invest in, and I rather suspect they hoped to get something more or less "off the shelf" that wouldn't take long to roll-out and everybody would go "ooo" and "aaah"--a quick win. That isn't quite how it's worked out, but then that's all sunk cost... water under the bridge at this point. Now we all have to figure out how to make people's adoption of it as painless as possible.

Really they need to look at how they light avatars and avatar attachments again for starters

Its not like it worked "good" in the old client.

Plenty of threads here complaining about those issues.

After land Avatars are something people spend a lot of money on, they shouldn't feel so disappointed in the Avatar shadows and angles they think they need face lights.

I don't have any complaints with the "Old" graphics, but when I tried the Windlight viewer, it did look nicer. And if all i wanted to do is sit still and gaze at the sun and clouds while the water ripples at my feet, I'd probably use it too. I can always use the 20 minutes it took to rez to throw a load of laundry into the washer. But, in order to actually do anything, I have to turn the settings all the way down, which resulted in picture worse than the Nicholaz Viewer I normally use. My video card is the culprit , no doubt, but it is what it is, I'm not going to change it.So as long as Nick's viwer works, I'm good.

I thought that was the voice project.... heh...

Also Windlight works fine here on a Radeon X1950Pro 256meg, 2gigs Ram and an aging AMD A64 3000+ single core at 2000mhz. Defaults to High setting. Not bad for 2+ year old computer parts....

Make sure your vid card drivers are current.

I'd say some here need a timeout *points to the chair in the corner*

A big majority of the "anti" crowd have hardware problems with WL rendering... Dummed down, that means it doesn't run right. Crowing "get over it" because you're not affected by it is pretty lame, don't you think? Might as well yell that to cancer patients too, cuz it's about the same level of "cool".

Even for those who just don't like it... that's THEIR choice. Many have invested tons of time and money to achieve a certain look, and to have that nullified by a mandatory update that is NOT necessary at this point is pretty annoying. Pointing fingers because that's not a priority of YOUR SL is just selfishly stupid.. I'd like to think the supposed "adults" here would have a little more class than that.

Maybe it is just now more apparent to them that all that time and money was spent making them selfs look good to "them selfs" as you really have no clue how other people see you. You may look like ass on your computer now but to someone else you might look better than ever... Nothing has really changed, just more obvious now I guess..

Considering how many updates there have been and will still be....we are beta testers who pay to take the tests.


Windlight accentuates the imperfections of textures and shapes, but the light is adjustable and fiddling with the controls, all that porous skin and stark look, can be made to look better then before. Grain in lower rez, textures is going to show, but those lights need, easy controls on the interface bar. I hate digging into the menus all the time.

Making Windlight friendly content will be a whole new market.

Well, as someone who's invested hundreds of hours into designing skins for the old viewer that now look quite a bit different in Windlight, and perhaps even not as good as they did before, I still think if everything else looks ten times better then it's a fair trade off, and even a net gain. I bet most people who've invested tons of money and time refining their look did so mostly because they had a lot of fun doing it. So now they might need to tweak some things and it may take a while for skin designers to figure out how to best design for WL, but shouldn't that still be fun? Isn't customizing your avatar one of SL's major pasttimes? Under certain lighting conditions in WindLight I look at my skins on avatars and think "ugh" but under others I look and think "holy crap that looks good!" That's not exactly a new phenomenon. That's why every designer using the old viewer always forced sunrise before taking pics for their boxes. It's just change, and aside from people who have genuine performance issues I bet a year from now seeing snapshots from the old viewer even the anti-windlight crowd will think they look flat and antiquated.

the avatars have been bad all the time, but now we see the problems better.

i am tired of having a broken nose, box feet and a dent in my chest. (and bad poly bending at the hip+ bad uv mapping with way too many visible seams, only morphs for face and hands instead of bones animations)

/me votes for new avatar meshes (knowing that even more people would whine than now about wl)

my guess is, we will get them around the end of 2010 (if that ever happens) right after the database fix

what about adding a mesh and letting people decide if they want to keep their old mesh or use the new one? wouldnt be too hard to do.

btw. i like wl and havok 4.

Well that could be it too .. dont change the lighting but fix the AVATAR - because thats the real problem.

If avatars didn't have these glitches they wouldn't show up easier with Windlight.

OMG Colette, you are right.

Still, the face looks better than all my other skin lines. Love to show my belly though.

BTW, I have a commadore 64 in mint condition, and it still works just fine. My uncle bought it for my big brother when I was just a little girl.

The lighting still sucks. New avi mesh or no.

Fix the friggin' lighting AND the avi mesh gets my vote.

lol id be willing to buy a new skin, and new clothes , etc if it meant all the glitches were gone.

For both accounts. I don't wear that much when using Carli anyhow .

As the newb boys say, "You are so hawt Colette!"

Send me a pic.

Love,
Jannae

Well said.



The thing is many people don't have the computers to run this new contraption. And don't counter with let them buy a new computer either. And from the looks of it judging from the many daily complaints in these forums, even the ones who have the computers to run it still have problems.

This makes the anti, anti, anti-windlight better suited.