Shadows?

AGREED! And these clowns always seem have disposable income to toss at the lastest super-expensive video card the moment that it is released. That's nice that they can...someone has to pay for nVidia's CEO's ferrari. BUT I could do without the snarling arrogance they display to the rest of us that can't. I'd venture to say there are more users running an 8800's or less, than techheads with the latest n' greatest.

Of course, that calculation NEVER enters into the minds of the lab ... Lablogic - 'what do you mean, not everyone has a ultrahighend card and top of the line processor? All our workstations do!'


Shadows are pretty. But I have never been one for adding eye candy when there are still systems that do not work on a regular basis. Once I can use group chat reliably, can rezz in an empty sim in under 5 mins during peak hours, and there message box about not rezzing things inworld is a rare, rare occurance, then I will be impresed by shadows.

Maybe if you had a better graphics card...

No, actually most of us "clowns" have barely enough disposable income to scrounge for months to buy last years tech to make a mid spec 3D machine to run a 3D application rather than complaining how our dinosaur wordprocessor performs on a 21st century 3D application. An 8800 is a graphics card as old as SL, so it's not the latest tech, it's an average spec gaming machine, if you can't see shadows because you have a lesser card, well sorry, you just can't, LL can't do anything about it.
LL can't stop adding new features just because there are still people trying to run SL on a Win98 586 with onboard graphics. If it were up to some people SL wouldn't even have colour or it'd be in ASCII.....................

SL is bottlenecked mostly by the CPU.

I had an Athlon X2 6000+ (3Ghz) with 3 different GFX cards (ATI X1800, NV 8800GT, ATI 4870X2) The frame rate was pretty much the same with all 3. I averaged around 15fps, depending on scene density (High settings, no AF, no AA).

I recently upgraded my CPU to a Phenom X4 955 (3.2Ghz). My average frame rate more than doubled at the same settings.

Shadows are still pretty crippling though .

It appears that in 1.23.1 you actually CAN enable anti-aliasing and shadows at the same time. The catch: if you thought the frame rate penalty of shadows was bad, just wait until you see what the combination does! On my system (Core 2 Duo E7200, NVidia 8800GT) I got the following frame rate results in one location:

Shadows off, no AA: 24fps
Shadows off, 4x AA: 24fps
Shadows off, 16x AA: 8fps
Shadows on, no AA: 16fps
Shadows on, 4x AA: 3fps

These numbers suggest that in the non-shadow case the GPU is NOT my system bottleneck at 4x AA; the added rendering burden causes no drop in frame rate. (That second line is how I normally run the viewer.) Going up to 16x AA makes the GPU the limiting factor. (Also to my eyes 16x AA makes SL look TOO soft, as if I were viewing the entire world through a Vaseline-coated filter.) Turning on shadow rendering also makes the GPU the bottleneck, and shadows + AA makes it much worse. (No, I didn't try shadows + 16x AA!) The viewer DID seem stable with shadows and AA (well, as stable as shadow rendering is currently), just very slow.

Maybe GTX 295 owners will be able to use shadows and AA at the same time. The rest of us will just have to pass for now.

Rendering with shadows enabled also has some other problems. Alpha textures sometimes randomly appear and disappear with small camera movements. Avatar shadows sometimes look VERY strange if the avatar is wearing partial-alpha prims.

You sound like an addict.

Well some of us have other interests besides computer gaming to support otherwise I would be running the latest wizzbang stuff.
If I wanted to spend nothing on my hoby I wouldn't keep upgrading PC's every 3 years. And would probably think Active Worlds was great because it would be the only VW that machine would still run.

Do you have any evidence for this? There are surely lots of people who are, and lots of people who aren't, but I don't think you can say with any authority that "the vast majority" are not interested in the visual improvements being made.


.

The problems mentioned had absolutely nothing to do with graphics cards, unfortunately

There are nearly daily issues on the server side, and even those of us with top of the line machines can do absolutely nothing about it. Second Life leaves much to be desired when it comes to stability, but as was mentioned before, the graphics devs don't work on non-graphics issues, so they do concurrent development within their areas of expertise.


.

hmmm is it mine or not ,why I see some weird
alpha textures popup everywhere with my G8800GT???
is there a fix of this or is it SL it self needs a fix?

And now tell me, why you want to forbid LL to add features useful for about any GPU above 100€ (if not lower)? I know a lot people, who don't use SL because of it's extremly lowend graphics (missing shadows are only one part of that...).

Because there are MUCH more important issues here than adding fuzzy shadows, some virtual light kitsch which does not really work and all this nonsense. Look at the pJIRA. 3500 unresolved issues.

And i know several million people paying Blizzard for graphics which are of the same quality as they were six years ago. So, who is wrong? Blizzard ( xxx Millions of paying customers) or LL (Less than 200,000)?

I've enabled shadows, they don't look quite as good as Kirstens SD5 (the last one I tried), maybe thats just my imagination though.

But, I'm unable to take snapshots, the sky is black and the shadows don't appear.

I have a decent system (i7 920, 6MB, GTX280, Vista64), but had the same issue with the Kirsten viewer and snapshots.


Otherwise, 15-min and no crash, lol

New Games like SL are starting to pop up and older ones are improving there Graphics engine. Mind Ark Is releasing there upgrade to there world soon running on the CrysisEngiene2 platform. Blue Mars "a true Second Life competitor" is also using the same platform to move things along. They know as well as every other company, the only way to attract new people and new found revenue is to have a product that is presentable.

I know SL is meant to be allot of things to many people. If it dose not at lease stay competitive with its competitors then SL will begin to die a slow and painful death. I for one would enjoy a scalable graphics engine like HL2. As you should know by now HL2 min requirements are lower then SL min requirements, this should tell you something there. I think it comes down to bad Viewer Programing. To me its getting to the point where they should just port every thing they have on SL to a new engine. Every time they merge the old code with new features it seems like the SL get slower and bogged down. I recommend they Rebuild SL using OGRE or some other open source engine.

Well all I'm trying to say is, They need a complete client rebuild. I am sure that LL has the Man power to do this and the money since most of you guys are paying them. All and all Im looking forwarded to any advancements that come are way. Also for the people that say SL is only a social experience hers a link for you.

https://secure.katharineberry.co.uk/ajaxlife-s/login.kat

A complete client rebuild wouldn't help if they're going to continue to render user-created content built by amateurs.

And if amateurs can't build, then it wouldn't be Second Life any more.

Problem:

Yeah, you can bypass that, but it's just AJAXlife, not sure what the point was.

Well it a browser SL client that allows you to chat a do a few there things mainly only social. Well If I knew how to program I would Work on SL source code my self. If any one would point me in the Right Direction Maybe or maybe if a group of us gets together we should be able to port SL to a other engine. How hard can that be? We have SL Source Code. WE should have the tools available and we will would learn some thing in the process.

If any one has Knowledge about this kind of stuff please point out the problems. It is possible I know that much.

I did not think Macs could see shadows yet but they can (kind of)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/patricec/sets/72157619061427959

The shadows show but the sky is black.. 2nd picture shows RenderDeferred FALSE

RC 1.23.2

Macbook Pro OS 10.5.7
Radeon x1600

Oh crap! I have shadows on my iMac, 10.5.7, Radeon X1600.

I couldn't get the deferred rendering to work unless I set RenderUseFBO to true, then restarted the viewer, and set Renderdeferred to True.

It runs at a little over 1fps, and my avatar doesn't render properly but I see shadows.

Now to try it on something faster...

Further finds -

Hardware skinning is a requirement for deferred rendering. I can't get shadows on my Radeon HD2600 equipped iMac.

I did get them to work on a Macbook Air with an Nvidia 9400M. It's fast enough to actually render my avatar and the shadows at the same time. Barely. 5-6fps in the same scene as above. SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Nantli%20Xolal/238/165/22

I hear Active Worlds does well because they haven't had an upgrade since they introduced colour in 1999, the sheer stability of it just nets thousands of paying customers per month

If Activeworlds allowed the same kind of building, scripting, and avatar customization that SL does I suspect SL would never have gotten off the ground.

Who cares? LL won't be forbidden to do that, and in fact they'll do that.
And I'm glad they'll do it.


You don't need an expensive computer to enable shadows on Second Life: you just need the correct hardware. Some tips:

Laptops are the wrong choice if you need both a a cheap and graphic-powerful computer.

Avoid quad-core CPUs as they are more expensive than dual-core ones and SL won't leverage on their power anyway.

Blu-ray drives? you obviously don't need them for SL.

In many cases, Nvidia cards will make your second life easier than ATI ones.

Do you really need to buy the software you use? I pay 0 for my software as I use Linux, so I could save hundreds of US dollars that I can buy better hardware with.
I'm a tekkiwikkigeek? maybe, still I'm using a default installation of the Ubuntu operating system, and you will find idiot-proof, simple guides to install and use it.
Second Life performs well here.

Remember that you only have shadows casted from objects if you use a viewer that supports "projected textures", that is a client built from Linden Lab's "render-pipeline" source branch.
That viewer has an expanded Feature tab in the Edit window, and there you can set the texture you want to project. You have to set a projecting texture for every object you want shadows casted from.
You can even project the Parcel Media Texture so that you will really project a webpage, or even a movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHF6y_iqTi8

The official wiki has instructions about how to compile and build your own viewer.
Here are the sources for this viewer:
http://svn.secondlife.com/trac/linden/browser/branches/render-pipeline/doc/asset_urls.txt

I think Kirsten's viewer don't support projected textures.
Release Candidate viewer for sure don't support it.

I made some video demos. You can find them here
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=OpensourceObscure&view=videos