Windlight Questions

Some of us like to speak only when something really important comes along.

Windlight works great for me now that I've got the Graphics settings tweaked. Seems to be a little slow rezzing my skin on some sims but everything else comes up fast and beautiful. I love the way the water and sky look.

My MacBook Pro is less than 6 months old and Windlight runs GREAT. I was having a few issues with SL in general (some textures showing up as pink a while back), but since the recent Apple upgrade and the updates to SL I've had no problems at all. Even the crashing is gone.

I've been using Windlight for some months now. It works well on my PC (a Dell with the preferred specs). I crash less, lag la lot less ess, and have a better frame rate than I did before I switched to Windlight. I use the medium graphics option under Preferences.

Works good on my laptop,but I don't get all the pretty water.

Works pretty well for me. I get about 10-15 FPS when I turn atmos shaders on and 15-25 when I turn them off... but I always keep them on. The framerate also increased when I started using this as well.

FOr some people though the game didn't run AT ALL in the normal viewer. I think it's mainly with Inel cards though. It runs on my laptop too but every time I close the game, it crashes... I think it has something to do with OpenGL graphics because stuff that uses DirectX works fine.

The desktop is an ACER ASE380 with AMD 2 core Duo 2.5 GHz CUP and 4 gigs of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce 6500GT integrated card.

It can render the nice water and stuff... but it gets MADDENING SLOW... I only put it up there for taking pictures.
I'm planning on getting the GeForce 9600GT card for that and some other games to work. That should push the framerate WAY up.

And yeah, there are some graphic glitches which I think are just in the game viewer right now. They said they were working on them. That hole in the horizon is one of them. There are also some where the sun and it's reflection aren't lined up correctly. Oh, and lets not forget the freaky way things render when they go really slow... Before the trees are trees, they're actually these odd pink walls.

Man, I'm glad stuff in RL doesn't work that way. That'd just be freaky.

I'll say this: Windlight is a lot more stable for my system than the regular viewer. Both computer system and human system. Computer system: I crash a lot less often with it, TP's tend to work (which they do not tend to do in the regular viewer), and other things I can't remember (sorry). Human system: My eyes are quite bad (hehe). Using the regular viewer I often have to log off after a certain set number of hours, regardless of how I otherwise physically feel, something about the regular viewer makes my bad eyes even worse. The same can happen with Windlight but much less often (and using the computer in general can cause the problem, but also much less often).

Also, it is pretty. I lost Windlight for a while. I was very depressed.

Um. Right. I need to read the date of threads before I reply. Now I'll read whatever it was that brought a thread from November back from the dead.

Windlight actually runs better for me too Lexi,than the regular viewer.(minus the pretty water though,SIGH.) I usually get horrible lag at the place that must not be mentioned. Last night with Windlight I could actually turn around without ending up on the bar!

Has been working fine on my precision work stattion with nVidia quadro FX mobile, but the last update knocked out my ability to make water edits stick through the next login. Hmm...

XP pro, 2.4GHz C2D, 2G DDR2, nVidia 8600M. No noticeable change in frame rate with Windlight. Contrast is a little bright, means a milder face light and no light blond hair. Initial crashing has stopped. Teleports can still be a little iffy. Couldn't even say for sure it has to do with the client. Pictures, even portraits, are gorgeous. The sky, the water... I'm hooked.

I went back in and edited my post to note that I was going to go find out why this thread was revived, as I had suddenly noticed I was replying to an old thread that had popped up on the first page. I did not actually look until just now.

I am sad now. I saw the names of the people who had posted in this thread.

Happy 19th birthday to the one that has now deleted themselves out of SL (based on some other thread; and based on profile - March 6th). Okiphia.

1) It does at ultra settings and i get an average framerate of 25 fps at a resolution of 1600x1050 with antialiasing and anisotropic filtering set to 4x with an AMD 4000+ single core CPU and an Nvidia PCIe 7600gt graphicscard

2) Yes, that's true. the SL client 1.19.1 will be a windlight only version, with the usual options to make it look like the old client, by reducing the graphics settings

3) Noone will have to upgrade their PCs because of windlight, if they can live with the reduced graphics quality in comparison to what others will be able to see. Even so, the new 1.19.1 client will most likely run faster than the current main client still.
Here's the 1.19.1 releasenote which explains also why:

Release Notes for Second Life 1.19.1(0) March 5th, 2008
=====================================
New features and changes:

* WindLight - Physically accurate atmospheric rendering and lighting
** Animateable day cycles
** Vastly improved realistic water with reflections and glimmer
** "Glow" as new object attribute
** Avatar Impostoring, which can speed up crowded scenes tremendously
** A new cleaned-up, easy to use Graphics Preferences tab with simple and advanced options for performance/quality settings

* Additional rendering optimizations:
** Faster, more reliable occlusion culling - occluded regions are discovered instantaneously, eliminating random bad frames due to the camera moving too quickly
** No geometry transform overhead on region crossing - results in region crossings being slightly smoother
** Faster frustum culling - less time is spent determining what's visible, thus giving better overall framerates
** No copy-to-texture for ripple water - objects under water are rendered to texture at half resolution, resulting in better overall framerates
** Faster sky updates - the non-WindLight (aka no-shader) skies update quicker - even faster than the pre-WindLight skies!
** Single pass shiny when using shaders - making an object shiny will no longer require it to be rendered twice, which results in virtually free shiny functionality from a performance standpoint
** Single pass terrain when using shaders - the terrain is no longer drawn in two passes, which, from a performance standpoint, results in virtually free high detail terrain for shader friendly cards (See the System Recommendations at http://secondlife.com/corporate/sysreqs.php)
** Improved object update code (less work for the CPU) - attachments are no longer added to the active list, which improves performance in crowded areas
** Better scheduling of Avatar LOD (Level of Detail) updates - Avatar LOD is now calculated every 16 frames as opposed to every single frame, which removes redundant work
** Better Avatar culling through more accurate bounding boxes - Avatar bounding boxes now match their current animation, resulting in more optimized culling of avatars that are not visible in the frame
** Better tree rendering (70% fewer matrix operations, no reliance on GL matrix stack) - results in improved performance for tree rendering
** Trimmed unused state in LLDrawable, LLSpatialGroup, LLOctree, and LLFace - results in memory savings
** 16-bit index buffers are now used instead of 32-bit buffers - improves memory bandwidth for rendering geometry
** For more information, see: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/WindLight
** Known Issue:
*** DEV-2876 VWR-1749: Second Life viewer client freezes on MacBook Pro

* Parcel Media - adds the ability to display Web based media on a parcel
** New API for Media Rendering
** Enables Web content inworld
** Added two new click actions, one for playing movies, and one for opening media
** Fully featured Web Browser
** Added support for Media resizing

* Estate-Level Abuse Reporting
** Estate owners and managers now have the ability (under World > Region/Estate) to enter an email address where abuse reports will be sent.
** If this address is empty, abuse reports will go to Linden Lab as usual. If the address is present, the abuse reports will be sent there instead. In both cases, all abuse reports are logged by Linden Lab.

* Voice changes
** Changed the default voice volume to be a bit higher, to better match the volume of in-world sounds
** Changed the voice volume slider to default to the middle of its range, so voice volume can be boosted above the default

* Improved Linux Voice support
** Better support for USB headsets and other devices
** Better voice audio quality

Fixes:
* VWR-434: HUD textures are attaching but not being seen
* bumpmapping flips on active objects
* Fixed various Teleport and Show on Map bugs
* VWR-2030: Avatar only turns half-way in Appearance Mode
* VWR-2920: Sculptie LOD causes object to be deformed into a flattened sphere close while correct far
* VWR-2164: Particle Alpha transition is done incorrectly
* VWR-1609: disabling "Show Selection Beam" makes beam render incorrectly for others
* VWR-2834: Builds fail on 1.18.4.0 with no mozlib
* More Help Buttons in Graphics Preferences
* VWR-983: Particles -> Offscreen/hidden particles get extended life -> as of 1.16.x at least.
* (Linux) Working device enumeration A.K.A. USB headset support
* Linux Voice quality issues in 1.19.0
* VWR-4921: not recognising in Linux that client is already running
* Change the way local output volume is handled
* Checkboxes in About Land untick when selected
* Add missing header file to export list for public SVN repository
* Copy To Inventory fail to execute without any output feedback when Notecard has changes but not saved
* Resolve instant message crash report
* Textures/Snapshots in a notecard are opened again when you click copy to inventory.
* VWR-882: Group name showing as (???) in About Land, IM tabs, and object edit window
* Packet-loss while viewing inventory currently results in perceived inventory loss
* stop and pause Media and music buttons do not work
* Displayed page in the client browser disappears when crossing property boundaries.
* replace misspellings in alerts.xml parameters (<message name="messsage") (3 S's)
* fix a misspelling of 'participants' in floater_chat_history.xml tool tip
* clean up some viewer text strings related to Windlight features
* Media browser history dropdown does not save items across sessions
* XML CLEANUP: duplicate sibling names in en-us xml
* Crash in LLTabContainer::draw() if selected tab is invalid
* sculpties on the top10 crash list
* The Search floater does not enable the "Search" button until the user has typed 3 characters to reduce db load

Source changes:
* VWR-3290: Linux scons build script doesn't work with distcc

-Asriazh