Fly up and look how distorted the water looks.

Fly up and look how distorted the water looks.

The water appears to be a texture applied to the interior of a bowl.

I hope lots of folks other than the usual beta testing crowd try the Windlight viewer and fly up over 700 meters and look around at the water and note the absence of 3D clouds and how the skydome stops in a totally unnatural and defective looking manner.

I hope LL is not planning on giving Windlight to us looking like it does now minus bugs plus tweaking but instead has plans on major changes to how the sky geometry works.

Suezzane, I always enjoy your posts and I've been meaning to ask you..what was SL like before the big migration. I came in the fall of 06 so I don't know how SL used to be.

Is it true that there used to be only 7000 online at one time? You must have been on right at the beginning.

If you feel like telling, it would be great to hear how it was..especially from someone who is good at noticing things.

I noticed this too. Seems to improve if you set "View Distance" higher, but that also bogs down the client as it tries to draw everything in sight.

Guess we should set the View Distance to 200000m and hope for the best!!

We had a couple of not-very-successful pile-ons where EVERYBODY was encouraged to stay online - we didn't make the 4000-online goal. When was that... maybe the winter of 05.

I remember that ,, it was a horrible time for us in europe tho, way late ~.~

WindLight does appear to be horribly flawed in many ways - not least at the management level.

I see it as yet another nail in the coffin of SL graphics. Combine watermelon graphics with poor controls and the relentless drop in LOD - especially where landscape is concerned and SL is going to become a Day-Glo cartoon world.

The second worst issue to my mind is that, with WindLight, I can be looking at the world and seeing one thing - and everyone else can be seeing something else. How schizophrenic is THAT?

And your carefully crafted and textured skin/build/eyes/landscape...
It's almost certain NO ONE ELSE will see it as you intended.

What chance selling your products when a tiny movement of a couple of sliders can make your work look like rubbish to a potential buyer?

So, bye-bye commerce.

Realistic skies and lighting my ass! What's being served up already is Day-Glo chaos.

Indigo,

Torley has indicated on the JIRA that server-side skies are being worked on so that you may set the weather to reflect a certain look and feel (on private regions at least). This would of course, open up some really interesting design options. These options may require you to enhance textures in such a way that they will be optimized for the particular lighting configuration that you have chosen. Of course the user may still override these settings if they wish.

It may be a rather nice thing for texture artists in other ways as these textures (if lifted) may be somewhat useless unless displayed under the same lighting conditions.

Web designers have been faced with such issues pretty much since the onset of HTML. Text did not autowrap, running off the edge of your display, fonts were not (and still aren't) displayed unless the end user has the font installed on their system.

WindLight is just in a test phase right now. Certainly the bowl effect of the water and the disappearing sky at very high altitudes are not all that pleasant and need to be worked on. The best we can do is report these idiosyncracies as unpleasant so a solution can be found.

As far as design is concerned, I do believe the best solution is to design at default settings unless you intend your creation to be used in a specific lighting environment once sky settings are available server side. Lighting is already something that more designers should pay attention to. How many times have I seen a nicely done photograph of a red outfit in SL taken under whatever lighting conditions the designer chose only to find that wonderful red outfit is actually kind of a rusty brown? Lighting can already be used to make a lackluster design look better than it really is in the first place. Some people seem to enjoy that sort of distortion. Many wear lights that impart a glow to their skin. To me that lighting makes the features of most skins rather gaunt looking but they like it so what can you do?

Dnali,

You are right. Suzanne always makes great posts. She is everywhere, testing everything. We are lucky to have her around.

Best,

Dirk