Windlight Questions

Really? I'm using WindLight on that chip right now. Had to upgrade the drivers to get the shaders to work right, and it's unbearably slow for anything more than snapshots when Atmospheric Shaders are turned on, but otherwise... mostly works for me. The texture-loading takes some getting used to, though; it's like most everything is blank for a long time and then stuff fills in rapidly. Well, relatively rapidly.

I even have it running--without Atmospheric--on an antique Radeon 9200. Neither of these chips were speedy before, so I don't really notice that much difference. (Now, if only I could get my Linux box to work with its shiny new HD2600XT. Too bad I can't blame WindLight for that mess.)

My PC actually runs SL better with Windlight. I'm getting about 25-35fps, less lag, less crashy. Got some annoying glitches, like stuff going invis (like Avatars, floors, etc). But that can get fixed. Guess my machine just didn't like running old outdated graphics and wanted something shiny to play with.

Right, feeling particularly brave today (or bored, whichever way you look at it) and decided to give it a try.

Initial impressions: permanent need for sunglasses ... colours are painfully bright, sun at sunset and sunrise is blinding, sun at sunset discolours everything orange, can't find the moon at midnight, looking down from the roof of our castle in the sky there seems to be water below, local lights don't give off any light, can't stand to look at myself because my skin looks horrible and my freckles have gone .

The clouds are pretty though and the clothes I've made seem to have survived any major damage.

Overall so far: bleh, no thanks. ETA: Oh plus that communicate thing is in there and voice won't switch off on our land.

/me runs back to her Nicholaz viewer

I'm on a fairly high-end Dell at home (but at work, so I can't get the specs). Windlight is extremely slow, things take forever to rez, and honestly, I haven't even seen where the water is all that pretty, although I notice that the trees aren't as pretty as they used to be. My beach is completely bleached out, although my skin seems normal.

All in all, I'm not overly impressed.

I've noticed this exact same bug in real life too!.



God can't program!

I should have said: everything, including my face, bright blinding ugly crazy orange

Also just noticed a drop in overall performance, though not as dramatic as I was expecting.

As I said in another thread:
While the world may look a prettier place, no-one is going to be able to tell what anything else looks like to anybody else. How daft is that?
Plus .... if it's going to fry the systems of the average resident, it's not going to help teh monkeys in the long run.
I for one wholeheartedly support the notion that this world of ours should be accessible to a wide range of people, not just those who can afford watermelon-enabled systems.


Just my 2c, IMHO, YMMV, etc.......

I've been using Windlight for a couple of days now, on a three year old machine (with a recent update to the graphics card, NVIDIA 8800 GT/312).

I'm on the "Ultra" settings, with everything enabled and only minior tweaks to the environment (lowered the water fog).

SL seems to run about the same as with the current viewer or the Nicholaz viewer. I crash a little more frequently, though. I suspect a memory leak, and WL is making it leak a little faster.

My biggest complaints are:

-The appearance of avatars, especially in full sun
-The fact that facelights don't seem to work anymore. At least, they don't improve your appearance.
-The Invisible Skirt issue. This happens even on non prim, non alpha textured skirts. Why the skirt mesh should be affected, and not the other parts of the avatar, I've no idea. It's a good thing I like pants.

I expect WL will be standard fare by sometime in January...and that many of the bugs and issues will still be with us when it's crammed down our throats. So I'm learning to like it as fast as I can.

The overly-contrasted sky is falling?

Runs perfectly fine, stable and actually faster than the current mainline client on my system. Windlight rockzz0rz my b0x0rz. ;3 There are still minor glitches here and there that I am certain they are working on. Remember the first shot at windlight and the way it made the Earth look like a bowl when up at altitude? *giggle* I am sure before it goes mainstream they will get some more work done on it and massage more of the bugs out. But to be fair, they are going to also have to state in their FAQ what the new current system requirements would be. Windlight is not for the faint of heart or hardware. It's flawless on my cutting edge bleeding box. It gets strange and lowers frame rates on hardware as recent as an unlocked ATI-X850 Platinum (Full 16 pipes enabled and OC'd like a squirrel on crack) that previously used to eat heavy FPSs like candy. This is even with the latest Catalyst Drivers.

Conversely, on a pair of 8800 GTX-OCs from BFGTechnologies - I need to bolt my monitors to the desk, the rendering is quite sublime and speedy with everything yanked up to Ultra. All shaders enabled, all sliders to the right, all options enabled. I started taking photos in world to give my friends that didn't believe me.

Sorry, pre-built off the shelf systems unless you specified a hard working graphical system and at least a gig and a half of RAM even under XP are going to have stability and performance issues with Windlight for certain. I cannot wait to see what it will look like when I swap my AMD X2's for Phenom cores! *hand rubs evilly in anticipation*

Fase, please read my reply to your post in the "Windlight and Macs?" thread and let us know if anything helps:
/333/c8/223453/1.html

I'm running Windlight happily on my Mac at 2.5 - 3 times the frame-rates I got before.

It runs okay on my 2-year-old machine. I can hear the fans speed up in my PC after ~10 minutes so it's definitely pushing something harder than normal, probably my vid card. Guess it's time to chase all the dust bunnies out of the case..

I'm really glad to hear that they are (at least thinking about) working on the contrast issues. Making light textures a bit less bright would go a long way to making me happier with it.

Biggest gripe is how it deals with shiny. Either LL needs to add another few levels of shiny or really tone down how WL deals with low/medium settings. My favorite all-prim avatar looks like a big blue mirror with legs.

I always knew you were a shady character.

(Quoted you, but more in general )

You can download and install WindLight into a separate folder and it would just co-exist with whatever viewer you're using now.

If it works fine for you, you'll know you're not one of the people impacted; if it doesn't work fine for you and you need/want/can upgrade at least you'll know in advance and can plan/budget for it in advance if need be .

At least on XP, the WindLight install doesn't overwrite the standard or RC viewer installs.. No need to pick a different folder - it'll co-exist by default.

Yeah, seriously. The fan on my old graphics card gave up on me recently (but pre-WindLight), and now I have a very high-powered doorstop till I can get the Linux drivers working for the replacement card. So, when the fans are more audible than normal, it's time to give them some TLC.

Great advice, I will remember that when it becomes mandatory. Thanks.

I'm running Windlight with everything maxed on a NVidea 6800 and get about 15 fps. With the regular viewer I get about 22.

1. Yup. six-year-old PowerBook G4, and it runs it okay. I usually keep it at low, which provides me a bit of a performance boost over standard SL, an turn it up to ultra for piccies. I lag purty hard then, though.

2. I imagine, at some point, there will be an SL upgrade dat'll be mandatory, with some security fix in it or something. That may well be a client with Windlight in it as well. Tink about how we all got voice -- it wasn't to get voice, but to close an exploit.

3. I think it will have as much economic impact, in the long run, as voice does today. There will be some adjustments are designers begin to adapt to the lighting (an begin to use features like glow), but in the end it'll all even out.

Mari

1. My machine is fairly high end and less than a year old but due to a known issue with some Nvidia GPUs, I can only get water OR sky, not both. I hope they can figure it out and fix it before this becomes mandatory.

2. Yes, it will become mandatory at some point in the future. Likely, a ways off yet as there are significant bugs with occlusion culling, alpha, shiny, among others.

3. No, I think that when it does become mandatory they will hopefully provide a preset that renders the world as close to the old SL as possible for those on older hardware. At least, this would be the smart thing to do.

Same here Meade...

Pretty sky, but beautiful Deunan now looks pretty ropey and due to my shiny hair ribbons, you can now see straight through my transparent head !!

(No smart jokes people please)

Windlight runs okay for me on my high-end 1.5 year old machine for a few minutes, but then all the prims start to drop out, until finally I'm standing on 90% empty land. The Linden oceans start to drop out also.

As it is now, it would probably be the end of SL for me if I had to use Windlight.

Some type of upgrade to the computer is an option for me, especially since the upgrade would (I hope) be less than what I've spent on land and tier. But I don't know what would happen to the rental market if a good percentage of the potential tenants out there were suddenly forced to either upgrade their computers, or bail out of SL.

Personally, I'm not in SL to look at the scenery. Windlight makes AVs, particularly light-skinned human ones, look like sh*t.

I doubt LL will change this, because they have already stated it is an inevitable consequence of "more realistic" dynamic range in lighting.

Excuse me? Is someone in SL to get a "realistic" experience?

A big reason why a lot of people are in this game is because it is an immersive experience of being a gorgeous human being. Thus the obsession with "barbie doll" like collections of shoes, clothing, etc.. Make AVs look like shit and you lose that.

I've tried Windlight in a few sims and times of day on my Intel-based computers, and on one gaming computer of a friend's as well, so it is not only my machine. I've looked at some of the threads talking about all the tweaking you can do, but frankly, I think enabling a lot of client-side tweaking is a BIG mistake. If two avatars are looking at the same thing but see it vastly differently, that is a PROBLEM, not a feature.

They spent a bundle buying windlight, and it is inevitable that it become mandatory. But, truly, Malachi is right: it is Vista for SL.

I'm not sure I can buy this comparison. I don't know anyone whose high-end computer won't run SL because of voice.

I am running my 3 Year old Compaq Evo N1000c laptop right now at work. Specs as follows.

P4m - 1.8GHz (Single Core)
1.5GB DDR400 ram
60GB Hard Drive
32MB Fixed, Dedicated Radeon 7500 Mobile Video chip.

On the currents full release with all graphics set to minimum and all options off, Cache and Network set to Max I get between 2 to 4.5 frames per second.

On the Windlight First Look I am getting between 8 and 10.5 frames per second at the same settings.

If anything the Windlight Client is FAR more efficient than the current full release. I will post my FPS on my home system when I get home. But with these numbers I can easily see myself using the Windlight client till it's final release.

Perhaps LL has decided what path SL will take, not the Virtul World Fantasy land but the 3D Internet/Real Life Extension/EHarmony platform.