SL shadows - Lovely, Amazing !

Are shadows disabled on certain sims? I can see shadows on some ...Hearts and Trompe Loeil, but not on others, *The Lost Gardens of Apollo* . How is this done?

Are you referring to the small smudge-like "foot shadows"? Yeah, they appear some places but not others - not really sure how that works. But those aren't the same as the fully-rendered shadows the thread is discussing.

No - the shadow source code isn't included with the standard viewer I don't think. But when it is, I'm quite sure it's true that they will likely be disabled by default.

Some people have argued against including the shadows, even when defaulted to off. Apparently, the argument is that so many builders in SL have already included fake shadows, in some cases spending "lots of time" painting textures and such, in order to create the illusion of shadows in their builds. The new client-rendered shadows would "make these look bad". It's similar to the way a lot of people who use facelights complained about people advocating the use of a client function that doesn't render facelights on their own viewers, since they want their avatars to look a very specific way to everybody, no matter what those people want (apparently). But arguing against shadows because some builds won't look good with them is kind of like arguing against the invention of widespread electric lighting because all those gas lines have already been laid.


There is the additional side effect of making a lot of builds look better, whose builders did -not- spend the same amount of time on them. Nobody's said it in so many words, but I suspect a lot of people will think that unfair.

In fact, this is a pretty fundamental thing to differ between the "haves" and "have nots"--enough so that it's difficult to decide how to build now. Simple, trivial example: all those fake shadow prims under furniture and trees: they're gonna look pretty lame on a shadow-enabled viewer, especially when the viewer's "real" shadows are somewhere else and they're brightly illuminated by the sun. But for viewers without shadows turned on, removing those shadow prims would look flat and crappy.

The same is bound to happen with a lot of baked-lighting surface textures.

Making "relief" trim from extra prims instead of textures should look really good with viewer shadows, whereas without shadows it's both wasteful and looks kind of clunky. So, what's a conscientious builder to do while both viewer types are common?

Well, I'll probably not see shadows myself for quite a while, but I don't particularly object to their inclusion, provided that doing so does not have a negative effect on users who can't see shadows.

When Windlight became standard, they said we could "just turn off" the new features, or that they would gracefully deprecate on systems unable to cope with Windlight. And for most things, yeah, that is true. Yet before Windlight, it was possible to make prim water that looks exactly like Linden water. Now that is impossible, and rivers flowing into Linden water still do not look as good as they used to. And on systems that can't see Windlight-style Linden water, the "depricated" view looks worse than the old Linden water did before Windlight. There are other cases, too, but I won't bother detailing them here.

As a builder, the biggest thing I will worry about is that I won't be able to tell what my builds will look like with Shadows working. So I may well build things that look bad with shadows, and would never know, because I couldn't see the effect. It would look fine to me...

Shadows will drastically change how Builders must deal with lighting, and only those builders who can SEE the shadows will be able to make the necessary changes. For the rest of us? We would be working blind, having to rely on others to show us snapshots so we could have any clue as to where shadows were appearing.

There IS some sort of stub for shadows in the Mac LL client. When talk of the shadow patch first came out, I tried to investigate it on my Mac. I did locate some of the settings that one has to manually tweak. But it just did not work, and then I found out that the code that existed wasn't written for my OS or my video card. Oh well...

Yeah, I was referring to the to the fully-rendered shadows which we are now discussing.
I was just curious, nothing really important.
I see these great shadows on most sims but not on all. None on Lost Gardens, great
lattice work ones at the Ahern Welcome area

And I am using Kirstens Viewer SD2-R7.

From what I've heard at office hours, when first released shadows will only be enableable in debug settings. And then eventually it will be off by default, and only enabled manually from the graphics settings.

The answer to your question is to look at your target audience. If you sell products, look at your customer base; if they tend to be Joe SixPrim, you'll probably want prim shadows. If you offer premium content, you'll probably want no shadows. Of course a good in-between solution would be to offer the shadow as a separate prim.

As for builds themselves, you'd do the same thing. Look at your target audience, and design for that.

Ironically, low prim items that skip the shadow prim will suddenly become superior, for those whose computers can handle it. Of course, a crappy texture is still a crappy texture, and the same for crappy primwork but still... in theory, the one that skips the shadow prim to save will suddenly take on a new light. pun intended.

It's similar to something I saw when Windlight, then ARC, was introduced: some of the items at Livingtree (skins and no prim hair) begun to get more interest. The shadowing on the skins are mild, so they looked better with Windlight, and the hair was desired by those going to events where ARC was an issue.

So bully to people without shadow prims.

And they don't, and they never finished the job. I want them to put Runitai's water back and let us specify prim and avatar "materials" to turn off the obnoxious windlight glare before messing with shadows.

my computer will not run it at all, crashes on load. so I am waiting for build of better pc

Honestly, I think we can expect to wait at least 18 months before seeing it come into production. By that time most frequent SL users will have replaced their computers with better computers and the nvidia 8800 will be old hat. I can run the shadow draft on mine, and it's about 6 months old with an 8800GT. In another 18 months, I will have had my speed craving and will have bought a newer computer. People with machines much older than mine will most likely have upgraded or have received a new one as a gift by then.

At the very minimum, a year... but I think 18 months to 2years is more likely before we see it in production.

Ah...the problem there is likely that all the plants and things in Apollo have full-bright textures; shadows don't render across full-bright textures, even though the objects around them technically do "cast" shadows.

Although the 8800 series has been around for at least 3 years, I think it will still be a valid benchmark for software even in 3 years time it's a pretty common and powerful card for gamers, though gamers will be all into something else by then. the 5000, 6000, and 7000 series will probably be buried though,

Classic!

Yes this is exactly what would happen, unless you purchase and use the the XS 47 conversion tool.

The solution to that one isn't to make the new Windlight water look worse; it's to give us the ability to make water prims that render just like the Linden water.

As for the shadows, they're pretty but they have some weird problems in Kirsten's current viewer. First, the edges are blurry and unstable; they look fine at a distance but somewhat odd when you zoom in. The shadow-enabled viewer also has some problems with objects with alpha textures disappearing with small camera movements. And you can expect a serious frame rate hit with shadows enabled unless you've got REALLY serious graphics hardware; think SLI 8800s or 9800s, GTX 200 series, or HD 4870x2 if you really want it to sing.

But despite the issues, I'd love to see LL release it, and add some UI to make it easy to turn on and off. In the Kirsten viewer you have to go into the debug settings and change a couple of things; it should be a check box in the graphics settings.

No, it's to make it look better. Runitai's water looked *better* than Windlight water, except for reflections, and Runitai had reflections working off his water back in FL 57575. In fact he had reflections working off any surface in FL 57575.

I asked for the ability to have normal prims look like the new Windlight water at a Linden technical meeting, and it's "on the roadmap" but not easy. The problem is that while it is easy to do the reflections and all that other pretty stuff for a single plane in the sim, in only a horizontal orientation, the calculations become far more intensive when technically any prim, at any orientation, and as many as you want, might require that calculation. I sure would love to see it, biut don't hold your breath.

As for "turning it off", I didn't mean anything about making Windlight water look worse for those who can see the Windlight water effects now. What I meant was that if you CAN NOT see the Windlight water, it should look no worse than Runtai's original Linden water used to look. And what we have now looks flat and dead.

As long as having it there on a system that can't see the shadows, like my Win XP system with a mid-range ATI card, doesb't slow me to a crawl, I don't care. And I certainly agree that there should be an easy way to turn it on and off, so Builders who CAN see the shadows can readily check to see what customers who can NOT see the shadows will see.

What I hope does not happen is what happened with Windlight. Where if your system isn't capable of deailing with Windlight, by the time you turn off shaders, dimb down draw distance, and reduce other factors enough to get back the same frame rate that you had pre-Windlight, you have a worse SL experience than before the change. Worse water, and shorter draw distances to get the same frame rate; or worse water and slower frame rate to get the same draw distance as before.

He did it well enough for almost-optically-correct results even from curved surfaces, without a huge frame rate hitch on my Macbook Pro:
Notice the second and third order reflections. This was done by taking a single lower resolution cube map from the camera position each frame, and letting that propagate from frame to frame. You sometimes got weird results when the camera moved quickly, but no worse than you get in television...

Actually, the combination of shadow-draft and "pre-baked shadows" really isn't bad. Here's an example from the very first s-d builds from last july - mouse over the flickr picture to get a highlight over the prebaked shadows, then view "full size" to see the effects in combination. It could work fairly decently in a non-noon setting, especially if the furniture-shadows are reacting to "local lighting" and the sunlight casts a separate set of shadows.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/23766626@N07/2631598118/

i started a little travel page with shadow enabled screenies a few days ago.

http://kdc.ethernia.net/?page_id=436

So far as I can tell the Shadowdraft viewer with shadows off is no slower than the RC builds, which are essentially the same code base without the shadow code. There doesn't seem to be any penalty for having the capability unless you turn it on except for a larger viewer download (and probably a small increase in memory footprint).