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1.8.0(3): "Fixed various ripple water issues" - understatement |
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Torley Linden
Enlightenment!
Join date: 15 Sep 2004
Posts: 16,530
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12-08-2005 01:56
I have this strange feeling that now the land terrain has to look more realistic to match.
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Melina Loonie
Cosy Island Manager
Join date: 13 Sep 2005
Posts: 419
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12-08-2005 01:59
I have this strange feeling that now the land terrain has to look more realistic to match. This is what I have thought since I saw the first pics of the ripples.  Mel |
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Hiro Pendragon
bye bye f0rums!
Join date: 22 Jan 2004
Posts: 5,905
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12-08-2005 02:07
I have this strange feeling that now the land terrain has to look more realistic to match. Good call, Torley and Melina! _____________________
Hiro Pendragon
------------------ http://www.involve3d.com - Involve - Metaverse / Emerging Media Studio Visit my SL blog: http://secondtense.blogspot.com |
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Ghoti Nyak
καλλιστι
Join date: 7 Aug 2004
Posts: 2,078
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12-08-2005 05:10
Wow, those are gorgeous.
-Ghoti _____________________
"Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon." ~ H.P. Lovecraft
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Jauani Wu
pancake rabbit
Join date: 7 Apr 2003
Posts: 3,835
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12-08-2005 05:22
Immersion
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http://wu-had.blogspot.com/
read my blog Mecha Jauani Wu hero of justice __________________________________________________ "Oh Jauani, you're terrible." - khamon fate |
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Cocoanut Koala
Coco's Cottages
Join date: 7 Feb 2005
Posts: 7,903
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12-08-2005 06:55
I have an NVidia card (I think) so I guess I won't be able to see it.
But I'm confused - I thought I'd always read here about how NVidia cards were supported more than Ati by SL or something? coco _____________________
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Hiro Pendragon
bye bye f0rums!
Join date: 22 Jan 2004
Posts: 5,905
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12-08-2005 07:07
OMG ... and no one thought to do sunrise / sunset shots.
Check these out! http://www.flickr.com/photos/hiropendragon/sets/1536986/     _____________________
Hiro Pendragon
------------------ http://www.involve3d.com - Involve - Metaverse / Emerging Media Studio Visit my SL blog: http://secondtense.blogspot.com |
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Piccadilly Metropolitan
Bendy bus
Join date: 2 Dec 2005
Posts: 100
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12-08-2005 07:17
Soon, people like me with no money to throw at computer equipment will be rendered obsolete by SL's march of technology - especially if they do a similar thing with the land!
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Hiro Pendragon
bye bye f0rums!
Join date: 22 Jan 2004
Posts: 5,905
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12-08-2005 07:18
Soon, people like me with no money to throw at computer equipment will be rendered obsolete by SL's march of technology - especially if they do a similar thing with the land! Perhaps we should all go back to a text interface to satisfy those who haven't upgraded? _____________________
Hiro Pendragon
------------------ http://www.involve3d.com - Involve - Metaverse / Emerging Media Studio Visit my SL blog: http://secondtense.blogspot.com |
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Cocoanut Koala
Coco's Cottages
Join date: 7 Feb 2005
Posts: 7,903
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12-08-2005 07:22
True, Piccadilly, but at least we can still see it the way we did see it, and that's not so bad.
What's worse is when the update makes things look worse for everyone - as 1.7 did (and apparently permanently so). What I need is for someone to tell me what is the absolute best-for-SL computer I could get if I got a new computer. I need guidance on that. coco _____________________
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Piccadilly Metropolitan
Bendy bus
Join date: 2 Dec 2005
Posts: 100
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12-08-2005 07:28
Perhaps we should all go back to a text interface to satisfy those who haven't upgraded? That's fine for people who've got the cash to splash on acres of virtual land and a new 3D card at every update the Lindens roll out, but you're in the minority. There are thousands of people running this with just the minimum requirements (my Mac actually lies below those requirements in RAM) and making SL slower and slower for them on each update will effectively price them out of the market. SL can't subsist on the tiny percentage of its membership with über-PCs. |
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Hiro Pendragon
bye bye f0rums!
Join date: 22 Jan 2004
Posts: 5,905
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12-08-2005 07:30
That's fine for people who've got the cash to splash on acres of virtual land and a new 3D card at every update the Lindens roll out, but you're in the minority. There are thousands of people running this with just the minimum requirements (my Mac actually lies below those requirements in RAM) and making SL slower and slower for them on each update will effectively price them out of the market. SL can't subsist on the tiny percentage of its membership with über-PCs. Then I can reassure you - this is a client-side upgrade. That means if you want to turn it on, you turn it on. If you don't, you keep "ripple" disabled. It has no impact on sim performance. _____________________
Hiro Pendragon
------------------ http://www.involve3d.com - Involve - Metaverse / Emerging Media Studio Visit my SL blog: http://secondtense.blogspot.com |
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Surina Skallagrimson
Queen of Amazon Nations
Join date: 19 Jun 2003
Posts: 941
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12-08-2005 07:44
What I need is for someone to tell me what is the absolute best-for-SL computer I could get if I got a new computer. I need guidance on that. coco If you've money to spare you won't go far wrong with an HP Workstation. Mine includes... 3.6GHz Xeon processor (could have two), 1G (or more) of ram, SATA hard disks (running at 15,000 rpm), nVidia 7800 GTX graphics with 256Mb on a x16 PCI Express bus. Does anyone remember the wave effect we used to have back in 1.1 or 1.2? Something I'd like to see is for avatars to respect the water surface so that they float. This has been possible in Active Worlds for years along with water depth dependant wave height that actually makes your av bob around... _____________________
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Surina Skallagrimson Queen of Amazon Nation Rizal Sports Mentor -------------------------------------------------------- Philip Linden: "we are not in the game business." Adam Savage: "I reject your reality and substitue my own." |
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Bond Harrington
Kills Threads At 500yds
Join date: 15 May 2005
Posts: 198
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12-08-2005 07:53
Those sunsets look gorgeous. Especially the one where the sun hasn't risen over the horizon, but the sky has the reddish-yellow glow.
At least you can turn this off without restarting your system, unlike Shiny and Local Lighting. Heh, that's something someone should try: Local Lighting with Ripples and see if you can get an reflection off of the water from a prim light source. |
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Runitai Linden
Linden Lab Employee
Join date: 29 Aug 2005
Posts: 52
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12-08-2005 10:14
UPDATE: I am quite wrong about Radeon 9000 supporting this effect. I don't know what the exact issue is yet, but I suspect Radeon 9000 and 9200 don't support dependent texture lookups. I can vouch that I have tested it on a 9600 and 9800, both of which work just fine. Sorry for the confusion.
w00! Ok, let me put all those "does my card support the new water" concerns to rest. The short answer: If you have a NVIDIA GeForce FX series or later card, you can see the ripple water. GeForce 4 and earlier cannot. If you have an ATI Radeon 9000 series or later, you can see the ripple water. Radeon 8000 and earlier cannot. ATI Rage, Rage Mobility, etc. are right out. Intel chips won't work either. I can't speak for any of the other brands/chips. Oh, NVIDIA Quadro FX or later will work, too, but I don't know why you'd have one of those for Second Life. CPU speed doesn't matter AT ALL. The water is done entirely on the graphics card. The long answer: The water is mostly procedural with a noise texture for detail. The pixel shader does 7 texture reads total, but 2 are 1-dimensional on low-res textures to keep from calling sin/cos in the pixel shader. The vertex and pixel shaders are written in Cg and use the Cg profile ARBVP1 and ARBFP1. Under the nvshaderperf profiler, the pixel shader reports 43.9MP/s on a GeForceFX 5900 Ultra. That basically means that if the graphics card wasn't doing anything else, it could render the water at 1024x1024 (roughly fullscreen) at 40 fps. Since the water is single pass (and GeForceFX is 2 generations behind current day), I think this is acceptable. To do the distortion effect, the water needs to copy the screen onto a texture, which eats about 3-8MB of video memory depending on your display settings. All these texture reads mean that if your card has lots of texture bandwidth, you'll be just fine. That basically means GeForce FX 5200's and Radeon 9600's will be seeing a slideshow with ripple water on, as will most mobile cards. An FX 5900 or a Radeon 9800 will see about a 10% drop in performance, and a GeForce 6 or Radeon X series or later shouldn't see any change in framerate at all. For reference: I have a GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 128MB at home and work on a Quadro FX 5200, Radeon x600, or a Radeon 9600 at work. Also, the shaders themselves are in your app_settings folder (waterF.cg and waterV.cg). I'll admit the code is a bit ugly as its been optimized (half the math is in the vertex shader), but if you're feeling adventurous, feel free to fiddle. I AM IN NO WAY IMPLYING THAT WE WILL SUPPORT YOUR CRAZY HACKED SHADERS. DO NOT CONTACT TECH SUPPORT ABOUT HACKED SHADERS. I'm just saying, if I were you, I'd want to fiddle. |
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Eggy Lippmann
Wiktator
Join date: 1 May 2003
Posts: 7,939
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12-08-2005 10:22
w00! (...) Also, the shaders themselves are in your app_settings folder (waterF.cg and waterV.cg). I'll admit the code is a bit ugly as its been optimized (half the math is in the vertex shader), but if you're feeling adventurous, feel free to fiddle. I AM IN NO WAY IMPLYING THAT WE WILL SUPPORT YOUR CRAZY HACKED SHADERS. DO NOT CONTACT TECH SUPPORT ABOUT HACKED SHADERS. I'm just saying, if I were you, I'd want to fiddle. I think you're my new favorite linden _____________________
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Nathan Stewart
Registered User
Join date: 2 Feb 2005
Posts: 1,039
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12-08-2005 10:26
w00! Ok, let me put all those "does my card support the new water" concerns to rest. The short answer: If you have a NVIDIA GeForce FX series or later card, you can see the ripple water. GeForce 4 and earlier cannot. If you have an ATI Radeon 9000 series or later, you can see the ripple water. Radeon 8000 and earlier cannot. ATI Rage, Rage Mobility, etc. are right out. Intel chips won't work either. I can't speak for any of the other brands/chips. Oh, NVIDIA Quadro FX or later will work, too, but I don't know why you'd have one of those for Second Life. CPU speed doesn't matter AT ALL. The water is done entirely on the graphics card. The long answer: The water is mostly procedural with a noise texture for detail. The pixel shader does 7 texture reads total, but 2 are 1-dimensional on low-res textures to keep from calling sin/cos in the pixel shader. The vertex and pixel shaders are written in Cg and use the Cg profile ARBVP1 and ARBFP1. Under the nvshaderperf profiler, the pixel shader reports 43.9MP/s on a GeForceFX 5900 Ultra. That basically means that if the graphics card wasn't doing anything else, it could render the water at 1024x1024 (roughly fullscreen) at 40 fps. Since the water is single pass (and GeForceFX is 2 generations behind current day), I think this is acceptable. To do the distortion effect, the water needs to copy the screen onto a texture, which eats about 3-8MB of video memory depending on your display settings. All these texture reads mean that if your card has lots of texture bandwidth, you'll be just fine. That basically means GeForce FX 5200's and Radeon 9600's will be seeing a slideshow with ripple water on, as will most mobile cards. An FX 5900 or a Radeon 9800 will see about a 10% drop in performance, and a GeForce 6 or Radeon X series or later shouldn't see any change in framerate at all. For reference: I have a GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 128MB at home and work on a Quadro FX 5200, Radeon x600, or a Radeon 9600 at work. Also, the shaders themselves are in your app_settings folder (waterF.cg and waterV.cg). I'll admit the code is a bit ugly as its been optimized (half the math is in the vertex shader), but if you're feeling adventurous, feel free to fiddle. I AM IN NO WAY IMPLYING THAT WE WILL SUPPORT YOUR CRAZY HACKED SHADERS. DO NOT CONTACT TECH SUPPORT ABOUT HACKED SHADERS. I'm just saying, if I were you, I'd want to fiddle. Im sure he might like to see pics of any fancy ones we design though, not that i've been looking into this since i saw it coming back lol, looks innocent, coughs out http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cg_toolkit.html _____________________
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Hiro Pendragon
bye bye f0rums!
Join date: 22 Jan 2004
Posts: 5,905
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12-08-2005 10:28
I think you're my new favorite linden Whoa, agreed. What a way to meet you, Runitai! Welcome to the party! _____________________
Hiro Pendragon
------------------ http://www.involve3d.com - Involve - Metaverse / Emerging Media Studio Visit my SL blog: http://secondtense.blogspot.com |
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Hiro Pendragon
bye bye f0rums!
Join date: 22 Jan 2004
Posts: 5,905
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12-08-2005 10:30
Im sure he might like to see pics of any fancy ones we design though, not that i've been looking into this since i saw it coming back lol, looks innocent, coughs out http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cg_toolkit.html Whoa, check her out:  With the fairy wings, does that scream SL or what? _____________________
Hiro Pendragon
------------------ http://www.involve3d.com - Involve - Metaverse / Emerging Media Studio Visit my SL blog: http://secondtense.blogspot.com |
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Eata Kitty
Registered User
Join date: 21 Jan 2005
Posts: 387
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12-08-2005 10:45
Considering how easy shaders and stuff are and the fact SL doesn't really use our expensive graphics cards I would have thought this would get done sooner but at least it's getting done and fairly comprehensively too.
Next they should improve the sky. |
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Aimee Weber
The one on the right
Join date: 30 Jan 2004
Posts: 4,286
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12-08-2005 10:50
Whoa, check her out: With the fairy wings, does that scream SL or what?  *feels threatened*  _____________________
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AJ DaSilva
woz ere
Join date: 15 Jun 2005
Posts: 1,993
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12-08-2005 10:51
Oh, that's just great. Now I have to add "play with the water shaders" to my list of things to do.
 ... Seriously though, thanks so much Runitai! So much cool info!  _____________________
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AJ DaSilva
woz ere
Join date: 15 Jun 2005
Posts: 1,993
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12-08-2005 10:55
Next they should improve the sky. _____________________
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Torley Linden
Enlightenment!
Join date: 15 Sep 2004
Posts: 16,530
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12-11-2005 12:37
Ok, let me put all those "does my card support the new water" concerns to rest. Wow... that was massive. Thanxies for the info! Sadly, I'm not on the supported list. ~cries~ O well, a better graphics card for me can't be too far off in the future. I might enjoy saying, "I got this so I could see ripplewater in Second Life!" LOLEX. I've been hoping to see more pixelshaders in SL for awhile now, and this is the tip of the melting iceberg... literally. _____________________
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Kazuo Murakami
Sofa King
Join date: 31 Aug 2005
Posts: 359
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12-11-2005 13:31
 Incidentally, LL says "thats how its supposed to look." |
