Shadows - better on one comp than other.

I've got access to two computers that do full Windlight and are capable of showing shadows. I've tried the 1.23.2 RC viewer on both, and the experiences are different.

Laptop - less powerful: - Full shadow effects - stable - slow, steady frame rate.

Main PC - Alpha textures don't cast shadows and avatar shadow disappears after about 1 minute - reappears if I go into 'appearance' mode and out again or if I teleport to a new location - this comp gives a much higher frame rate.

All my other settings like draw distance are the same on both comps. Is there something I can do to get alpha shadows on the big comp and also to stop the av. shadow disappearing?

It largely depends on your graphics card/chipset and drivers you are using. You did not provide any details.

Seems weird given the previous poster, but you *could* try using Boy Lane's Shadow viewer. Somehow she's managed to get avatar shadows appearing where the RC viewer doesn't.

Hers is the only viewer that also enables shadows from sources other than the sun and moon .. and that provides a user friendly way of enabling shadows.

Perhaps LL could look through her code and find out how she did it ?

In fact, shadows from sources are in LL code - that's not something added by 3rd party developers as Boy Lane or Kirsten Lee, even if I feel this is what most people think.
Object casting shadows are actually projecting a texture. I made this video with projected texture in March, and I was using Linden Lab's "render-pipeline" viewer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5VCcO7NFpo

[crossposting]
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

Yup, thanks obscure .. I should have made that clear; as far as i can tell Boy's work is based on LL source, with some OpenGL tweaks. However, her viewer has managed to render avatars correctly whereas LL's 1.23 viewer (and Kirsten's) doesn't.



Yup .. noticed this .. again, Boy lane's viewer has this, Kirsten's doesn't and haven't tried 1.23.

I have noticed that the light from projected textures seem to have a nasty interference pattern; if there's a forum discussion or Jira on that please point me at it!

Thanks for replies. On one computer - actually the less powerful one, the laptop, shadows are rendered properly and are stable. It's the fact that they are messed up on the better comp that puzzles me.

I didn't provide much detail as I don't know what goes on under the bonnet I just drive the comp! Maybe I need to top up the 0110010010011's.