How do I get Wind Light..?

I keep hearing about this Windlight and wondered what's it all about..?

Can I get it..how do I get it..I've seen pics but how about the real thing..?

Perre

They had a WindLight version of First Look available for a while, but it had a lot of problems. LL has taken it back in-house for a bit while they work on it some more, but I think they are planning to release another WL First Look viewer sometime soon (2-6 weeks?). Torley's posts on the blog about it will give you the authoritative info.

ETA: Aug 2, the blog post about the new voice viewer says a new WindLight First Look viewer is "coming soon!"

So you're saying Windlight is a browser..like Firefox or Netscape..only specifically for SL..?

Jeez how embarrassing..(..bangs head on keyboard..uy/ccv l?ik3yf)..I thought it was a really cool climate feature (sort of like the aurora borealis) involving setting sun, clouds and the wind..honest I did..(why am I typing this..)..

No, you're right about what it is.

The First Look viewer is a special version of the SL client that LL releases to allow people to test new features before they are put into the "real" SL client. They don't currently have a First Look viewer at the moment, though, but the WindLight one is "coming soon". Keep an eye on the blog, as Torley will surely post about it when it's available again.

Perre, its the UI with that added into it yes you can make the sky, and clouds do things like that look like aurora Borealis on your screen and future we are supposed to be able to set estates (sims) to always have that look or set a look and pass it to friends.

I had no issue with the wind light viewer, besides that I couldn't save my sky, sun, moon, star, and cloud settings it always reverted back at each log in.

I LOVE it and want it back I took some great photos setting nice cloud sun and sky colors that were very surreal

Phew..that's a relief..

I'd seen pics of it and began wondering if it was a wind-up..and I'd fallen for it big time.

Excellent..I can just see myself standing atop my highest mountain on Laurentia, wind blowing my hair (I'll have to rent a wig..or maybe put on my Jimi Hendrix gear), gazing westward as the sun sets on a spectacular windswept sky..thinking..it's good to be virtual!!

Here's a Windlight sunset. Click the URL itself for a larger, less jpegged version.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/189/524752364_787af1bf54.jpg

Last time windlight was out, i tried it and my sky was all messed up. Everything was black until i faced south then the sky started to flicker of what it should have looked like, and back to black. hopefully when they re release it, they will have that problem fixed.

Hopefully when they re-introduce windlight, they can somehow integrate low level clouds that we can fly through (like we currently have). With windlight as it was, there were no low level clouds... you couldn't fly through the clouds. It looked pretty if you were on the ground, but sucked when you were high up.

Windlight was play-tested, and had a LOT of issues. It has been removed from public access while they try to fix what didn't work.

It didn't work at all on lower-end video cards that were otherwise perfectly functional for SL. Those who had low end cards were treated to skies that always had no clouds at all, and sometimes to sunsets with a blue-green sun... It also was very uneven on how it illuminated prims versus terrain versus avatars - things that looked great in SL pre-windlight tended to have differeing levels of brightness for prims, clothes, skin, terrain... This ruined the look of most prim-based avatars and clothes, and of any building projects that attempted to blend prim work with terrain.

But to me the worst parts were that windlight removed the particle-effect clouds that you could fly through and fly above, and that windlight simply did NOT work right unless you were standing on the ground at sea level. You could never fly up to the clouds, through them, and look dow from above. The higher you went, the more distorted the sea and sky looked. In a high skybox, the sea looked like a warped bowl, and the sun looked like a distorted smear on a too-close roof. And if you flew above a certain altitude, you had no sky effects at all...

The next version supposedly will restore the option of particle clouds, so those of us who LIKE being able to fly through and above the clouds can continue to do so.

But in my opinion, I doubt the will ever get Windlight to operate successfully in Second Life. It's most basic design factor is that as a client-side effect it 'paints' those beautiful sky effects on the planes of the 'sky cube' for the sim you are in. (Or of the next sim over, if yourdraw distance is long enough to see into the next sim?) Which means the perspective HAS to be locked at a particular altitude, or else has to constantly recalculate the whole display based on the altitude of your eyes or camera. And if you get too close to one of those "walls", the distortion is always going to be obvious. Windlight is great for a still photographer, rendering public relations pictures from the perspective of someone on the ground. But their first release was terrible for anyone who flies or who lives at even moderately high altitudes.

Hip hip!

It looks great when it works. You can check out a nice animated video of Windlight on Youtube.

This could still be doable. Since the clouds are only visible above your position, they shouldn't get in the way too much. if not, they can always put up a thin cube map layer that spreads across that same distance from the ground.

It is sad that i just bought my geforce 7600 GS 256MB card this year and it was acting exactly like you just mentioned. :/ Why can't i ever have a decent video card? oh yea. I don't have a ton of money.

And yea it is odd how once we play SL for a long time we start to understand what it's limitations are and how it's built. We don't even have to look at the source code to find out what SL can and can't do. XD It's become our world.