Do you ever have local lighting on?

I used to use it a long time ago, but I stopped - once you get a bunch of people around, it just turns SL into a slideshow even on high end machines. I used to love it, but the performance hit is not worth it at all, especially now that we have full bright textures. I have a Geforce 7800 card on a dual core Pentium D, and local lighting still kills my frame rate. Hopefully the new rendering system will have much better lighting options.

I turn it on when I'm above 300m from the ground. At that point anything with LIGHT as a material won't lag me. Below that ceiling though, I'm lucky if SL is responsive enough to register Ctrl+Q. >.>;

Maybe the Linux client would fair better, I'll have to try that later. It could just as easily be a windows VM issue.

I tried turning it on once. It cut my frame rate by an order of a magnitude (from ~15fps to ~1.5fps). It's one of those features that I'd love to leave turned on, but that's just too much.

I never turn it off.

Looks like "not anymore" or "not since 1.7" would have been a useful option for this poll.

wow.. this is incredible O.O;

but I used to use it a lot.. now my system chokes without it so I never bother to try it anymore/log in

Khamon wants to bake light textures and rule the world.

Are there tools he can use to learn and practice? Anybody teach a class? Need your hair brushed?

Oh..yes.. the hair brushing thing. I'll take some of that!

/me brushes Aimee's hair, shines her wings, and paints her big toenails superbright royal purple.

Now, where's my learnin?

No, never, because it just encourages bling.

NICE POLL!

I use Local Lighting occasionally--and I agree with some of the assertations that its performance has been especially problematic before since 1.7. On my old computer, I got tolerable performance outta it in packed clubs (I remember the Bedazzle Gravity Space Station signs). But on this current Opteron 170, I am debilitated by it in certain situations without an obvious number of light sources in view. Very easy to repro!

I have noticed a similar bug with Shadows on in certain areas, and filed a report on this as well.

Baked textures have added a lot to build quality inworld, especially in controlled environments. There's a "dark side of the moon" missing tho, *wink wink nudge nudge*.

I will turn on Local Lighting on occasion to add glow and presence to a photo. However, the fact that requires a relog and can't be clicked and applied is also a deterrent.

I used to have it turned on ; but not anymore. Recently I was wondering why I got 1-2FPS at some times on SL (after upgrading hardware too). Someone advised turning off local lighting, which I did, and now SL is *fast* I could set draw distance to 256m and get the same FPS as 64m + Local Lighting.

It's pretty, but since SL 1.7-1.8 it's really too slow...

Yeh, I discovered that the first time I booted into Windows to run SL on my P4 instead of my Mac mini. I turned on local lighting and FPS went below 0.1! I found a build halfway across the sim that had hundreds of objects made of "light".

It's usually not *that* bad, but most places it's about a factor of 5 or more, and when I create lights myself they are very unreliable and when they're on it's sometimes hard to see if they're illuminating anything... probably because there's so much local light from "accidentals" that they're swamped out.

LL really needs to have a couple more options:

[x] Only use the closest [5 ] lights for local lighting.
[x] Reduce the number of lights if FPS < [3 ] FPS.

OMG, that's the most gorgeous build!

Now I want to go crazy in photoshop, and that means turning on Classic again (Photoshop under Classic is actually faster on my Mac Mini than the Carbon version).

WOW that looks like the real thing! Great job! Where is it located in world?

Since 1.7, local lighting has remained off for me.

While there are places where it works fine, there are many, many places were it doesn't. And there's no way to know when it's going to go bad. When it does go bad, it brings my client to a crawl. From something like 15-20fps to 1-2 fps. And it requires a relog to bring back normalcy.

Local Lighting is probably the only feature that I wish wasn't sticky. So, LL, if you want to make local lighting a transient toggle like property lines in order to increase FPS. Be my guest.

But I have to say that the performance problem is not the only reason for my disillusionment.

Improper use of light is still rampant, even though we've had full bright for a while now. It's just plain painful for me to look at snow with red, green, pink, and purple lights on it. There have been proposals for restricting light on your land in the same way as sound. That's looking better and better to me as time goes on. But it won't solve the problem with bad light, only mitigate it somewhat.

Light is also unreliable. Light sources often shut off unexpectedly when I use them, forcing me to relog to make them come back on. They sometimes only cast light on the root prim. Relogging will fix this as well.

Light is difficult to control. There's no way to focus light in a specific direction. Prims will look lit on the side that faces a light source and will look dark on the other side, but they don't stop the light. So, for example, if you put a box around a light, it won't stop it from shining on things outside of the box.

For me, Shadows works much more reliably and gives me a much bigger bang for the buck.

Anger, denial, resgination, apathy, acceptance and death? I forget the series, but I feel like I went through it all with local lighting.

At first I was flummoxed... on my new system with new vid card I was getting 1fps in some areas... even with fast timers the reason why wasn't always obvious. At first I thought it was the bazillion cut and twisted torus hairdo's...

Rather than shut off LL... I just stopped going to places that slaughtered my system. I struggled along with this for a while. My own use of Light prims was moderate and deliberate enough that the effect caused me no performance problems (even on my older hardware), and the ambiance was one I did not want to give up. (I love to build for the night.. and wish night were longer).

Then I went through the annoyance of restarting SL to flip LL on and off as needed. Back when I was on my ATI card.. this was no particular issue considering how often SL was crashing on me anyway.

Now... it just stays off. I miss it terribly... but won't be turning it back on until it's repaired.

Personally, considering how fubared it is... I think LL should just sweep the database and set the Material: Light back to wood everywhere it appears. On every last prim. Set them FullBright, turn on client's 'lights glow' by default. Leave the Light material option there... but as a building option available *ONLY* to players that have local lighting turned on, so that the few that do can use and enjoy the effect. (oh.. and shouldn't light sources be something we should be able to track with object beacons too?)

And while I'm ranting... there really aught to be a law in first life forbidding people with no sense of smell from applying perfume to themselves. (*ACHOO!*)

--
All hyped up on too much bad coffee and still holding a torch... for local lighting.

Totally impossible to use since 1,7 I cannot even move with local lighting on and cant move that well at all when Sl first rezzes for like 5 mins now after 1.7.. something changed that completely made local lighting impossible to use

Light Glow does something?

I've never managed to get Light Glow to have an observable effect.

Why would I want to cripple my fps?

I USED to use it, before LL broke it terminally with 1.7

In fact pre-1.7 I used it all the time. Now, despite a powerful PC and a top end video card it's unuseable.
Like I had 'ripply water' on permanantly - until LL turned it into 'heaving toxic jelly', now it stays off.

What a strange poll...

In case anyone missed this posting by Steve Linden re Local Lighting: /invalid_link.html

It looks like LL has something up their sleeve.

I'll be sure to show this thread to Steve.

It really matters.