1.8.0(3): "Fixed various ripple water issues" - understatement

Wow, that looks cool! Damn shame it doesn't work on my video card. Looks like it's time to upgrade.

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i got damn ATI 9000 and i still cant see it

Is the box greyed out or doesnt it work when its available, personally i though it was for ati's 9500 and above.

Well . . . so I guess my 3-year-old NVidea GEForce 3 isn't gonna do this, huh.

coco

No - the Geforce 3, which was not even current when you bought it, is not capable of displaying the rippled water effects, which use a video card techique called pixel shaders that is only offered in more recent video cards.

That's cool. Now my next question is...

How about adding this as an attribute of a texture or an attribute that can be added to a prim surface like shiny, so we can make our prim water look as good as this?

Yes, I noticed that too. Still, you can't have everything.

I thought it was current when I bought it, it was on a brand-new dell I ordered for my mother with the best graphics, etc., I could get so she could see things easily. I ended up with it.

coco

Sorry, I don't see the problem. Unless it's the fact there's way too many waves for a puddle.

The Geforce 4 line was the main Geforce line in 2002, just FYI. If you were buying a consumer level Dell at that time, unless it was one of the gaming machines, it would probably have had a Geforce 3 or an ATI 7500 or 8500 in it. They were the consumer oriented cards - the Geforce 4 would have been high end at the time. Video card technology is still one of those areas where a lot of innovation and progress happens with each generation of cards, and they come out very quickly. The downside is that the new cards come out often and are very expensive (my Geforce 7800 GT was $500) - but it makes the previous generation of cards more affordable.

Unfortunately, with an application that uses the video card as extensively as SL does, to get improved performance and visual quality, they are going to have to start taking advantage of features of newer cards. The ripple water effect is gorgeous - and I wish it were backward compatible, but the technology just does not exist on those cards and cannot be simulated in any decent way.

I was lucky to have my home reproduced on the Preview Grid. This is what I get to see at sunrise. Ripple water could lead to more waterways in SL.

I have to admit, I felt ridiculous standing there in the preview actually looking at the water and just watching it move, especially since my condo overlooks the Atlantic ocean in RL - but the effect is mesmerizing. Watching the water ripple has the same sort of calming effect sitting and watching it in real life does on me. I know people bitch about eye candy features as being pointless, but I have to admit, I really like the effect a lot.

Do you live in a universe where the edges of people are just always wavy?

Oh yeah, didn't notice that. That's definately not supposed to happen, whoever said it is probably misunderstood what was being reported. I'll see if I can reproduce it and figure out what's going on once I've finished my work.

And speaking of things that aren't supposed to happen: has anyone else noticed the water in the sims doesn't match the water of the sea properly?

Underwater looking up looks pretty good considering. I like

I've been sat here for the last few hours playing with the ripple water code, not sure exactly how to fix it yet as this is my only first day with cg, but seems to be due to the underwater ripples you see on objects and not the ripples you see on the surface on the waves itself, it seems to be transfered onto anything that is black that is over the water rendering surface be it av's or objects.

So what its rendering really is your reflection but rippled, i figured this out by making it double the size and painting myself on the sea.

So all i've got to figure out now is why its choosing black and/or how to stop it adding the effect above the waters z height level

It's not just black things - it's everything (I guess black's just more noticable).

I've got a feeling that this is something that can't be fixed without altering the whole graphics engine.

Argh. That looks awful. Your av I think is the absolute WORSTE case with that problem. Fortunately, my av is the second worste case, so I've checked in some tweaks that should minimize the visibility of that problem, but it will probably always be there.

It's a problem inherent with framebuffer distortion. The shader has no depth information when it's doing the distortion, so it can't tell the difference between a pixel that's in front or behind. Adding depth information to the shader is a significant performance hit and knocks a couple chips off the compatibility list, and I feel that this particular artifact just isn't worth it.

Runitai, any luck with getting it to match with the sea at the edge of sims?

Its nice that LL finally decided to admit that it looks awful, but this begs the question of why you implemented it anyway when you knew this was an inherent problem.

Having paid attention to it it does look like a reflection that is put on the water 180 degrees from the vantage point of the camera. If you could offset the effect it would make an awsome reflection on the water.

Please please please Mr Linden man, can you make a water prim? That would be sooo freakin awsome! Pools and ponds that look like water instead of bad imatations of Monet paintings!

We would sing your praises to the hall of heros, your name foremost among great kings! Or something.

Maybe because it's not really that noticable but the effect is really cool?

Damned perfectionists...

Think that will be harder if impossible from the code side anyway, the cg code gets its information from the water texture and its alpha layer to show depth, this is created sim side when you level out the land etc, so really to match the water as much as possible the sims need to have their land leveled as much as possible