Windlight HERE?

Would Windlight Highlight Bradley's Ass?

It's hard to imagine improving upon the shining glory that it already is.

Sorry, I should have been more specific.

In theory, WindLight was supposed to "degrade gracefully". In other words, lower-end graphics cards that could not run the more advanced features of WindLight, like the clouds, would simply not render them.

The problem is that this also includes the "atmospheric effects" -- the haze that gives the environment a sense of a third dimension (toward you / away from you), and hides things beyond your draw distance. This function is currently served by "fog", but the fog will no longer be available. So, no fog, and no haze to replace it... the effect is similar to what it looks like now if you turn off fog, but a bit harsher. People with the lower-end graphics cards usually keep their draw distance low to speed up performance, but with no fog/haze, you can now see right out to the horizon. The end of your draw distance is seen in all its nasty half-rezzed glory.

So between the lack of environmental dimensionality and the constant view of partially rezzed land and structures, all sense of reality is gone. For this reason, I do not find that WindLight degrades gracefully as promised. The degraded version should look as good as current SL does, but in fact it looks much worse.

On the bright side, their practice now of not always forcing us to update the client might mean that people like me can keep running the non-WindLight client, which would be perfectly acceptable. (Of course, they did end up forcing us all to the Voice client... )

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Another problem that I experienced, which I believe was common regardless of graphics card used, was the cube-ish sky. It really did look gorgeous from ground level, but at altitude I often saw the edges and vertices, along with some skewing like viewing a TV from the side.

The cube sky also renders face-by-face. Now when I switch from night to noon, the whole sky switches at once, but in WindLight it would do one face of the cube, then another, and so on. This was probably more obvious to me because my system rendered it so slowly, but unless it happens completely simultaneously, it really destroys the illusion of reality.

Hopefully these could be fixed by making the sky a hollow sphere instead of a hollow cube, but I have a feeling it's just not that simple.

Well, it crashed my laptop. So I hope this low-end work allows me to simply disable whatever graphics wonderment does that.

Ava, I'm still using the Pre Voice 18.0.6 Client with Nicholaz' 18n Old School Viewer

no, You missed the LL Sucks where is my inventory zomgwtfhmp with the connections wth are they doin! stuff...



YAAAAAY WindLight!!!!

oh and any references to Brendas panties, Raymonds Crabs or Anns pies is always good to throw in as well. and dont forget teh hippos!

I saw there is finally a mac version of the Nic client, so I might give it a try. Does it have visual muting yet?

the thing i dont like about wl is the lack of 'real' clouds. i depend on those clouds for foggy graveyard immersion and photos and such.

not the version brenda refers to (i use the same one).
dunno about the voice enabled version.

According to Torley, the old style clouds have been added back in as an option, at least until some future time when they implement the newer 3D clouds. Some very influential old residents are aviators, and felt that being able to "punch through the clouds" was important. I'm glad they pushed on this one... pictures of clouds on the wall of a cube just isn't the same.

You can read the discussion about this, along with Torley's comments, on JIRA:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-960

Among my concerns about Windlight after testing it out months ago is that there wasn't a Reset to Default button and all of my particle scripts were completely washed out at the
defaults, especially smoke effects.

Other things I remember were loss of performance and a horrible banded horizon if one's AV was above the ground level.

That said...Windlight does present some beautiful skies.

- Infrared

This is still an issue in the current internal Windlight?

(How did you get your hands on it?)

Mari

Nick's version doesn't do that, that was Able's version, there's a link on Nick's page-tho I don't know which platforms it's for.

Personally, I think Windlight is primarily useful for the PR folks to use for ground-level still photography. If you spend ages tweaking the way-too-many parameters, you can set up some cool PR photos that make SL look far better than it really will look if you are actually in-world.

If you were not chained to the ground, it distorted the hell out of the horizon, the seas, and the sun. It's a system designed by someone who never, ever dreamed of leaving sea level. From 700 M up the sun and sea and horizon were so distorted as to be obscene. And go above 768 and you had no sky at all - no sun, nothing...

The clouds were only rendered on the sky dome, and not in 3D. Fine for still photos, lousy for flyers. They relented and added the old-style particle clouds back as an option.

Hopefully with Havok 4 in the wings, they will at least push the 'sky dome' for Windlight up to 1024, since we will be able to build that high with Havok 4.

The lighting model was very uneven on terrain, prims and avatar skin. This screwed up the appearance of every creation in SL, unless you spent lots of time fiddling with the settings, and locked the sun at a specific place in the sky. Again, great for a still PR photo, lousy for real use. Builders as well as avatar makers hated what it did to their work.

And when they finally release it in the client, the old skies will NOT be an option (other then the old 3D clouds). If it doesn't look good on your computer any more after that, "too bad, so sad, go get a new video card or a new computer". You're out of luck, and they couldn't care less.

No, I was referring to the last FirstLight version. I'd have to recheck JIRA, but I think Torley said something like "it SHOULD look as good as the old version". But then, they said that about the first WindLight, so I'll believe it when I see it.

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Ceera's take on this was very similar to mine, especially regarding the sky distortion seen at altitude. The view from skyboxes was not particularly attractive.

They DID "fix" the "no sky above 768" problem, though. It was weird... like they just added more of the sky cubes on top of the main one. I could easily tell where I went through the ceiling of one, entering the bottom of the next one up. I hope they fix that, because it made flying really weird.

oh you're a MAC person. Hmmmm I'm not sure if there is a mac version for Nick's.

Ava, look in this thread in the Mac Discussions forum for the Mac version of Nick's client.

/164/61/213201/1.html

I am running version "Q" of Nick's Mac client. I'll look tonight and see if it has any 'visual muting' option. So far about the only thing I saw that is different is the Chatterbox is gone, and the old Chat and IM and Friends UI's are pretty much restored to the pre-Voice client forms. On my Mac, I haven't gotten better performance with it.

Here's the updates page on the Windlight project, with a lot of more recent details:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Torley_Linden/Project_updates

I also asked Torley, at today's office hours, to put more pictures on her stream of the "fallback mode," for comparison.

Mari

It's good to see that they have been working on it a lot. Some of Torley's screen shots still scare me as I see some the whole image tinting and a LOT of highlight blow-outs still She talks about crummy textures being exposed but frankly I never saw a single texture that wasn't ruined to some degree by Windlight.

I am looking forward to the next first look because I REALLY want to see that that has been fixed.

Additionally, one thing that was really missing from the UI and still appears to be, is the ability to assign any variability to the weather. And there wasn't any LSL access either, nor any talked about that I saw.

It's nice that you can make it foggy in the early morning then clear by noon but... where in the world is it foggy EVERY DAY? I really want to be able to vary the clouds and the fog and everything else so that there is some day to day interest in what the weather is going to be like. (Yes like other games!!)

It seems a little silly to put in an infiantely variable weather system but then have to fix it based on time of day.

I think a lot of that may be Torley's personal preference for hyper-saturated colors and blown-out whites. Unfortunately, most of the WL lighting presets that I tried were similarly garish. I remember I was able to tone it down to a more natural looking light, but I think it took a bit of time. Hopefully they will include more natural presets in the future release.

Thanks Marianne. You're a good kid. *grins*

I sent Torley an e-mail, noting that the one major bug completely absent in Torley's updates was the glaring problens with the sea, horizon and sun getting distorted if you were not at 20M altitude. I asked if there was any progress on this, If Torley replies, I'll let folks know.

Dat's my suspicion. She likes to push the envelope as far as she can. I jes wanna see a pretty day.

Mari