Question re lighting system.

Coming back to SL after a few months' absence, I find that there have been some changes to the way lighting is implemented in the game.

At one time, it was possible to light up a room by creating a lamp or other object which contained a prim with the "Full Bright" box in the Texture tab checked and/or the "Light" box in the Features tab checked. Now, these features only cause the prim itself to be illuminated and shed no light on surrounding objects.
Likewise, I find that light scripts no longer cause light to issue from an object.

Is there any way to produce "radiating" light which illumines objects surrounding the source? Thank you in advance for any replies.

Full Bright and "glow" only affect the prim.

To actually shed light, you must check "light" in the Features tab.

To SEE the light, you must have "local lights" enabled in your Graphics preferences, AND the light must be one of the six local lights in closest proximity to your camera. Open GL can only handle six local light sources. If you are wearing one of those many-light face light attachments, it can mean that you and those around you see NO other lights.

This isn't a recent change, by the way. It's always been like that.

There was a change to the lighting in 1.23.4. Older graphics adapters can now only show two local light sources instead of six.

Another good reason not to upgrade viewers!!

Crapwads. If I could afford a better graphics card, I'd already HAVE one. No wonder I was seeing problems with local lights.

Geez, LL. Whatever happened to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"?

For your voting convenience:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-13110

They want to set things up so the people with the hot video cards see shadows. To hell with older video cards.

Kind of like when they brought in Windlight.

I miss the pre-Windlight water.

At LL, it's become "If it ain't broke, break it!".

Sadly, Linden Lab insists on meddling with things that most of us are perfectly happy with, breaking it for many of us in the name of improving it for the few who can afford cutting-edge gear, while ignoring issues that the majority of is say are much higher priorities to be "fixed".

I concur. I can not afford a new graphics card for any price so I'm stuck When mine can no longer run SL, it's over, and I suspect that may be coming sooner or later. A nice run but all things come to an end. I could see so many cool effects with my old card before Windlight. Now it's all gone.




I agree with you..good post.

People can still download the Cool Viewer version of 1.19.05, the last pre-Windlight viewer, which has all the necessary patches to work in SL nowadays (plus a lot of other good stuff, too) from http://sldev.free.fr/

I used it recently when my main PC was in for repairs and I had to use an old one as back-up. Worked like a dream.

It was apparently to fix another problem, underwater terrain going black. You can get the six local lights back. Go to the Second Life program folder and edit the featuretable file (make a backup first). Remove the line with the video card you're using and you should have your six local lights back. You may also get black underwater terrain back.