Windlight Questions

1) Does it work on your computer?

2) I heard it will be mandatory during some future update. Is that true?

3) If it is mandatory, I see a ton of people being forced to either upgrade their computer or leave SL. Plus it will limit the number of new users to those who will have cards that can support it. Do you think it will have as huge an economic impact as I'm thinking it will have?

I get less than 1fps with it. SL is unusable. That's on the latest Macbook Pro too.

Seems to depend on the phase of the moon for me, but mostly yes


Yes, a viewer with windlight integrated will be mandatory, but the option to disable 'atmospheric shaders' in graphics will stay. I think it is the intention to have SL perform on the same level as the old client when 'atmospheric shaders' are off.

I see more of a risk in the huge discrepancies that will exist between the ways 'low end gfx' users will experience the world compared to 'high end gfx' users.

I know windlight will have an effect on how I will build in the future, simply because of the fact stuff looks completely different. As I'm not going to switch back to 'non windlight' all the time to see how things look there, this could mean that stuff will start to look weirder/uglier for non-windlight users.

Right, so obviously they won't make something mandatory that will force all mac users out of SL...or will they?

Works very well on my computer, which i bought after the first WindLight viewer dragged my old puter to a crawl.

I works great on my PC which only just meets the system requirements. It's a laptop with Intel integrated graphics. It doesn't actually look much different from the pre-windlight viewer. I don't get the fancy water effect. I have turned my graphics settings to "mid" on most options and get reasonable frame rates around 15 - 25.

On previous viewers I usually got a BSOD crash when I edited textures on prims. I have never had a BSOD crash using Windlight and I'm flat out doing texturing I could not do before. Probably had a few more crashes to desktop though.

I really thought Windlight would be the end of my SL because I bought my PC for my RL work and can not justify buying a new one for a few years.

So far I'm delighted. Maybe Havok 4 will kill it! I'll worry about that now.

I refuse to ask Santa for a PC. Maybe the Easter Bunny, but not Santa!

That doesn't seem to be the case at all though. WindLight changed a lot more than simply adding the shaders, it changed the rendering with shaders turned off as well (actually I can turn reflective water on/off, makes no difference in FPS) causing a small to big performance drop on low-end/older cards.

At the time of the Q&A I got the sense that they will not be addressing that, but simply want that section of people to learn to live with a degraded SL experience at lower/worse settings than they're used to.

That might be a known problem:

Barely. Mine only does the "fallback", so I don't get the water or clouds or atmospheric effects. Strangely, although I was able to adjust sun position and color in the old firstlook, I can't do it in the new one.

The fallback windlight is slower for me than the current client... I get 3-5 fps in the current (yeah, pity me, but I can live with it), but only 1-2 spf in windlight. Yes, SPF. Seconds per frame. The frame updates every 1-2 seconds. THAT is some mean-ass lag.

My other major problem is one that doesn't affect most people: underwater. The fallback version of underwater is beyond ridiculous, and cannot be adjusted. It is so dark that you can only see 1-2 meters at noon, and linden grasses do some weird nuclear glowing thing when seen from far away. As I live underwater, this is the dealbreaker for me.


I assume I'm the one you heard that from. Admittedly it is pure speculation, but after the voice client became the main, I think it was maybe 3-4 weeks before it became mandatory. I would be surprised if LL continued to support the non-windlight client for more than a couple months after windlight becomes the main.

As for how it will affect the population numbers? Who knows. I can already tell you that several of my RL friends excitedly registered for SL so they could come play with me, and only one of them was even able to get the client to run (and he quit because it crashed constantly). So SL already has a limited potential user base, and this just reduces that number even more. But who knows, if it actually brings in a higher percentage of the potential user base, then maybe actual numbers will go up.

It's far too much of a hassle and work for them to merge and test changes between different codebases. Once WindLight is "main viewer ready" I think that would be the end of the old rendering code right then.

(After the web exploit hit they said they would deliver a patched pre-voice client with the old UI, but that never happened either)

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is photographic proof that WindLight will destroy the world. There's already a big hole in the horizon .

In reply to Raymond,

1. Yes, had the prefs running at "ULTRA", loading textures, huds and attachments takes for ever, and for some reason my grass textures looked drought ridden, but it worked on my 3 month old iMac 2.4GHz core 2 duo with 2GB of ram.

2. Pass

3. dunno

one of my friends uses a mac notebook and says windlight works awesome for him. i have heard some people say they have gotten fps increases and some say it makes sl unusable. it works great on my amd x2 gforce desktop.

Works on mine, but I am not happy with the shading effects. Shading happens on any surface, whether it be prims of a tree or inside wall of a house. That is never going to look correct. They only thing to do is make them full bright, and then you lose the 'darkness' aspect at night. It also plays havok with wall panels used to create a scene in the same manner.

As many problems as I see people complaining about with this new windlight I won't ever add it on.

Then again, I'm smart enough not to add on any new content that's optional. Been here long enough to know better as far as downloading these updates as I've seen plenty times over the problems they bring. It's bad enough now without adding problems to the mix.

Just think of Windlight as Vista for your Second Life.

Stupid question... How do I activate wind light? I have the latest client =/

Apart from one rendering bug which affects the sky, it works great for me. The issues of contrast being too high will be addressed. And the rendering team are looking at improvements to other types of object in sl - e.g, avs, terrain, trees and regular prims.

It's the new First Look client.

http://secondlife.com/community/firstlook.php


Really? People were telling LL about it the first time they released windlight, and in the months since then nothing was done about it.

Really.

Turning off the old particle clouds can help things dramatically. If you're in a sky box that hovers near the cloud layer then you're really gonna suffer.

My frame rate can drop as much as 40 fps if I go near the evil clouds.

My comment was actually more about how what LL says is not necessarily what LL does.

But to be honest, I don't see an actual commitment to fix the brightness issue in the quote you posted, but rather a vague "we're working on it"... which they said before. If they do it, great, I will certainly welcome it. I hate to say anything critical of Torley, but his penchant for supersaturated colors and blown out whites seems to have had a significant effect on SL windlight development.

The two computers that I have which are at least marginally capable of running SL at all are both at the bottom of the curve for video hardware.

One is a Mac Mini, with 512 MB RAM, only 32 MB VRAM on a non-upgradable integrated ATI video card. It only gets 3-5 FPS in most SL environments with the non-Windlight client.

The other is a Windows XP system, with 512 MB RAM and a 64 MB VRAM Intel Integrated graphics card. At least that one is somewhat upgradable, though a limited power supply and an AGP video slot limit my headroom.

In general, yeah, I can run the Windlight First Look client. But it chops my frame rate in half, and I can't ever see any of the water or sky effects. So what does it give me? Ummmm... Brighter, somewhat overblown colors. More dynamic shading from sunlight and moonlight, and the ability to readily set the sun at any time of day. That is about it. I have already uninstalled it as not worth the bothering with on my current hardware.

I'm buying a new Mac computer at the end of the month, thank the Gods... Top of the line Mac Pro Tower with a 512 MB VRAM ATI card and 2 GB of RAM, which should get frame rates in the high 30's to 40's. That will be my main SL system. The Wintel system I may eventually get more RAM and a better card for, but it is my Work computer, so if all I can do there is check messages and sort inventory, that is marginally OK.

NO! NO! /me - hides under desk shaking and whimpering.

I'm not even "oozing edge" so I won't try anything here until I have to. They sky and water as they appear to me are fine, so I'm in no rush to Windlight. So when this becomes Mandatory, I will wait to see if Nicholaz comes up with something for it, thanks to him, I can use a pre voice client with the Old Style Comm Window. If not, I'll try the official viewer, and see what it does with my hardware, but I'm dubious since my video card is not even on the list anymore (Radeon X300). If an upgrade is needed, I will worry about that cross when they nail me to it. Upgrading hardware is a possibility for me, to a point. In anycase we have to epect SL to change, and we have to change to stay with it, but you sometimes wonder if all changes are really necessary for true growth, or are they just bells and whistles to bring in new users, to replace those who won't keep up.

Just crept out from under the desk to find this:

http://www.vnu.co.uk/vnunet/news/2203809/internet-face-meltdown-2010

So, what use for any number of pretty bells and whistles if you can't get internet access?