Anti - Anti Windlight Thread

It definitely was sensitive to time of day, but not as much as you might think. The old viewer lit avatars quite differently than it lit objects, almost as if avatars had self-illumination. In order to keep the avatar from looking flat and featureless it was absolutely necessary to create highlights and shadowing in the textures themselves.

The fugly at noon phenomenon wasn't always there. That came into existence the last time LL updated the rendering code of the viewer, when they added local lighting and changed the shadow code, which was generally terrible on avatars. That's when facelights became a fashion accessory.

In WindLight, avatar shading is much much better and smoother. For the first time avatars actually look 3 dimensional without complex shading in the skin. Unfortunately it conflicts with much of the artistry of skin making as we've come to know it, and no matter how much nicer the WindLight shading is, it doesn't compare to the look that could be achieved with a skillfully made skin. Good shading could make the avatar look like it had much more detailed anatomy than it actually has. Windlight shades very nicely, but it makes the avatar mesh look like the avatar mesh, revealing it in all its anatomically lacking glory.

So in essence Second Life should be the All Inclusive Virtual World that should only be accessable to the Technical Elite? Is that what the 3D Internet will be? I'll pass then.

Chip,

Are you saying that avatars can look better in Windlight with skin made specifically for the way Windlight renders the avatar?

We are Borg. Resistance is futile.

This I simply don't get. They don't want to fiddle with settings yet want to fiddle with facelights?

Facelights are a plague anyway. Half the "vanity girls" I see got like 6 or more floating around, when SL can only handle that many lights at once! The new graphics system will be more intensive when it comes to dynamic lights and that's what facelights are. Yes, your character doesn't look photo-shoot ready all the time without them but that's hardly realistic anyway! I spend hours setting up a room so it looks perfect at both day and night, and then people with facelights come in, only to see lights dissapear because SL can't handle them all due to the facelights.

Please people, in real life your face isn't having a spotlight shining on it either. I know the 3D models aren't all that, but I suspect we'll be seeing improved models in the future anyway which may help. In the mean time, if you turn off the facelights, you won't have such a performance hit, and everything won't be "too bright".

Come on, a 3 year old PC with a decent graphics card can run SL fine, stop moaning. It's a 3D world! Can't handle it? Try puzzle pirates or something else that doesn't rely on highly detailed environments.

If you call people who are smart enough not to buy a shit graphics card "technically elite" .... because that's what it boils down to. The way some of you were talking, you'd think you needed a $5000 PC when my $1000 laptop can run SL maxed out with all details including anti aliasing.

Trust me, instead of complaining, just get a second hand graphics card off ebay. You'll pay maybe $100 for one that can run SL more than well enough, and you'll be a great deal better off. Oh, and update your drivers like SL says because I bet a lot of the colour issues are due to people not doing this and then complaining when things don't look right.

This thread reminds me a lot of when my Text MUD decided to upgrade to True Type fonts......oww the uproar....

I have a "shit" graphics card, so I can't argue there. It came with the machine that I bought new 3 years ago, on Ebay actually, for $450. I put $135 into adding 2 Gigs of RAM just to play SL. Yes I can probably get a new card for $100, but now do I need to upgrade my 350W Power Supply? So how much does that add? And in 6 months something comes along that obsoletes the new card I just bought. And now it requires a better processor or motherboard. I'm not complaining actually. IF SL is going to remain on the cutting edge of technolgy, then LL should market it as such, focus on that group and not worry about getting the average user on board. If SL out Techs me, no biggie. I'll find something else to do with my playtime. But there are people who have good equipment whoare having issues. Why must there be this , "If it isn't happening to me,it must not be true mentaliy"?

I haven't spent enough time working on new skins under windlight to answer that, and I think ultimately it'll end up being a matter of opinion. Considering the aesthetics we've all come to appreciate with the old viewers I'd have to say no, but I may change that opinion later on. Avatars can still look spectacular in Windlight so it may just be a matter of getting used to WL's specific quirks.

People overestimate things. A 350W PSU should be good enough as long as it's not a cheap brand. But really, you get what you pay for. If you invest hundreds of dollars into SL, surely an upgrade that makes you appreciate the items you bought is not wasted money?

LL could do far worse than they do now - today's update is a very minor one and already people are moaning. It shows that most of you never played any games because things are a LOT worse there. Look at the game Counter Strike which got a forced upgrade making it unplayable on lower end machines and Counter Strike is a game where fast reflexes are important. Second Life is not. If you lose a few frames per second, it's not the end of the world, so I think most of you are enormously overreacting.

Basically: wake up folks. Linden Labs needs to keep up or we'll lose even more folks. In a year, everyone will say it was a good thing anyway - they always do. It's only that a lot of people hate changes. Instead, you should look at the good work they did with Windlight - I would post screenshots but SL is down but it looks terrific now as long as you don't wear a gazillion facelights to ruin it all.

I've never used a facelight, so I'm not sure, but isn't it just a matter of attaching it to the avatar's body? If it is, then there's nothing to fiddle with...

Majority of computer users aren't tech-savvy, they can do basic stuff like surf, email and so on but they don't know anything about graphics cards or how to adjust the SL viewer's graphic settings to get the best results for their particular system. Many of them won't even try, for fear they'll break something in the attempt. I have known users so timid that even when I give them step-by-step instructions on how to enable the "Client" menu and turn off the typing animation, they tell me it sounds too complicated and that it's too much for them. A lot of times they live with the default settings because the default is good enough for them.

That's what the default is supposed to be -- it's supposed to be good enough for everybody, sort of like the most basic stuff, and then if you wanted the bells and whistles you could tweak the settings to your hearts' content and customize it the way you wanted. But if you have a default setting that doesn't work for a lot of people, then that becomes a problem.

People aren't moaning about this for the sake of it, if the estimate Pastrami gave is close then we're looking at 20%, that's a high figure. In terms of a business move that's a massive own goal.

Do you really think Windlight will attract 20% more people?

God no - for me facelights are a lot harder to do than just changing settings. Getting the right strength of the lights, the right angle, setting them up so you look good in every environment ... it's a lot of tweaking to get it right. You can buy preset facelights of course, but depending on your shape and stuff, you still need to tweak them.

(mini rant coming)

And the reality is that a lot of people are just lazy. I'm tired of seeing the excuse "they're not tech savvy". The truth is that you don't have to be tech savvy. You just need to have some common sense and not be lazy.

Do you think "tech savvy" people are clairvoyant? They don't know most things any more than you do, but they make the effort to try and search it instead of going "oh dear, it looks complicated, let's ask someone else".

I mean, look at the settings - what's so hard about them to understand? Amount of particles = amount of particles shown. Now that requires an IQ of 200 *sarcasm*!

Let's be honest here, people don't like to fiddle because they are too lazy to find out what everything means. Despite there being a nice wiki which neatly explains it all, despite there being countless tutorials. But oh no, it's too much work. If something doesn't work right away, off they go to the forum to complain.

No, if people would invest as much time into helping themselves as they did in complaining, there wouldn't be anywhere near as many problems. People need to start depending on themselves more and not automatically assume something is too hard for them to do. Most things are designed so that even a zombie could use it - you just need to practice, fiddle with things, and you'll be fine.

*rant over*

My only regret about having to use Windlight is that in the old viewer the sunrise light in my studio was perfect for fashion shoots. Now I have to fiddle with a lot of lights to get rid of unsightly shadows.

Exactly. Not everyone who comes to SL IS a Gamer. I'm not. Never played one before SL. So does LL want to cater to the Gamers and Tech Types to the exclusion of the average computer owner who buys a decent machine and doesn't have the time or interest to learn how it works. ? They can't have it both ways.

Windlight alone won't, but SL WILL lose people to competitors if it doesn't improve in every area, and graphics is STILL the primary area people look at before deciding to try out Second Life.

Besides, just like new games, as time goes on, people get better hardware and SL will run better and better. Some people just have the bad luck of being at the change-over now. Besides, it's a good sign you're running on outdated hardware. Wait till SL introduce new high-poly-count models. People are complaining that they need facelights to hide the imperfections in current models, but wait till we'll finally get those improved models. There will be a lot more moaning about poor performance because polygons make a bigger impact on performance than what Windlight does.

I just told you, SL is not a game. There's no fast reflexes needed, so it's nowhere near as big a deal so you can't use that argument because it's plain void. SL can be played whether you run it at 5fps or 500fps. It's a 3D chat room. Unless you do roleplaying with combat, performance will not be a huge issue. I've run Second Life on my 6 year old laptop with the crappiest of graphics and while it's more fun for it to be super smooth, it was good enough for me.

Like I said, it's not the end of the world. And you're hugely exaggerating if you compare the $2000 rigs you need for modern games with a $100 upgrade to run the new viewer. Perspective, please.

The WL client is NOT optimised for most older graphics chips yet, genius... That means it doesn't run "fine" on their cards like it does on others, even though many of them have more powerful cards. The chipsets with the higher, newer version numbers get support for their chips coded in first. A GeForce 6800GTX is tons more powerful and "SL capable" than a GeForce 7200IGP.. Same with the Radeon 9800XT and the Radeon X1300... Take a wild guess which ones get supported in the viewer code first?

EDIT: It's not a choice between supporting older video cards/older graphics and newer cards/graphics, like so many uninformed believe. It's a matter of LL taking the time to ADD the code that lets the older stuff work right TO the new shiny cutting edge stuff... All the arguments about "zomg graphicz will lookz liek teh old stuffz" completely shows how little people understand about programming for hardware support.

[mode=naive user]
Uh, what's a particle?
[/mode]

Seriously, put yourself in the place of a naive, brand new user. How would such a user discover that reducing particle count is a good way to speed things up? How would such a user learn what the impact of this change is?

And remember, you can't say "read the forums" because they're not accessible to people with no payment info, and a new user may not want to provide payment info until they're sure it's something they're going to use.

Wow, I never had any idea. Phew - makes me thankful I never bothered with them then!

Yeah some people are lazy. But some are also scared of technology. I mean, I had to teach my mom how to email. She'd type real gingerly with two fingers as if the keyboard would bite her, and she'd hold the mouse as if it is a living mouse and might escape from her at any moment. And she'd ask me twice before clicking on anything, she was so scared she'd click the wrong button and bork everything.

But I gotta give her kudos for trying Now she sends me email and then calls me to tell me she's sent me email! (I still haven't dared to try explaining SL to her lol)

[ I would post screenshots but SL is down but it looks terrific now as long as you don't wear a gazillion facelights to ruin it all.[/QUOTE]

And the true problem is that SL is down, or when not down it is borked. Who cares what it looks like when it does not work worth a damn for anybody, regardless of what hardware you use.

This simple fact will be the thing that drives customers away, or keeps new ones from coming in.

Well then it will be optimized more in the future. It means performance will improve, so what are you complaining about? The new viewer isn't even mandatory yet so by the time it will be, you'll probably have an optimized version.

Oh, and the 9800 series is badly outdated anyway - you're talking about a 4-5 year old card here. It doesn't even support pixel shading 2.0!

Just stick with the old viewer and wait for optimised code. But don't expect your ancient Geforce4 Ti4200 to run Windlight. A 6XXX card or higher will be needed at least. I'd say, get a 8600 or so, or an X1900XT. Pretty cheap and great performance.

They may very well be tech savvy, but not care enough about this buggy platform to waste their time trying to make a silk purse out of a sows ear. Not everyone who might have some interest in SL is as fanatical (or addicted) as those of us who generally frequent these forums.

Yeah it's sad to see how people who are perfectly capable of figuring things out rely on others to help them out. Second Life is a pretty complex program by itself, so changing a few settings can't be that hard, just because it's a bit more technical?

I can't count the amount of times I have to help someone out with something that can easily do themselves if they would even read the manual or just read what's on the screen. One colleague came running to me a few weeks ago saying Photoshop wouldn't start and it gave an error. I went to the computer, and just read the error and it said that a plugin would not load and said to click okay to continue. She had clicked cancel o_O. I asked her, why didn't you click okay like it told you to? And she was like "well I didn't read it, it looked too technical". *bangs head on desk*