where has gone renderdynamicreflections

Hello all,

I use the last version of sl realease candidate viewer. I wanted to make some mirrors and use the renderdynamicreflections in debug options as shown here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3MrkOsE8nY

I didn't found it.
Is it normal ?

Thanks for your answer.

since windlight the function for this is in preferences under the graphics tab, check the custom box to reveal the options, it's not called renderdynamicreflections but it is a combination of presents, or just set the graphics option to ultra and everything is set up for you, that is if your graphics card can handle it.

There's renderreflectiondetail and renderreflectionres, too. You can have it look as it is in that video, but the reflections of avatars we had briefly ages ago are not there.

My Graphic card is a Nvidia 9600GT so I think it can shows reflections and the check reflection details->eveythings is checked and all sliders at maximum.
Whatever I can do, I can't obtain the mirror effect.

The reflective prim surface option that the OP is seeking no longer exists. It never did work right. It failed to reflect anything that was closer than about 1.5 meters from the prim surface, and the angle of incidence and reflection was so far off that if you looked straight at the prim surface in mouselook, it was impossible to see your own reflection.

The reflective water surface in Windlight is completely different. It only applies to the surface effect on Linden water, and is not a property that can be set on a prim.

The week we had real reflections on prims was a lot of fun.

Yes, of course renderreflectiondetail/res would be on water - my bad for bringing them up.

Thanks for the answer. If I understand well, it's not possible to get reflection in the current version of windlight.
Do tell me, I remember that OpenGL (I think this is the basic 3D graphic layer used by windlight) manage with reflection, so I don't understand what are the technical limitations.

I think it is a matter of the potential complexity of the calculations.

The reflections on Linden water are fairly simple to calculate. For a given sim, there is only one plane of reflection - the water plane for the sim, which will always be level in the x/y plane, and at a fixed z-height for the sim. And for a given client, only one point of view - your current camera position. Adding surface ripple effects is a minor change to the actual reflection calculations.

Now try that for reflective surfaces on prims:

* Prim face can be at ANY possible orientation.
* Can have multiple prim faces in a scene with reflective properties.
* Multiple prim faces with reflective properties can reflect each other, so reflection calculations not only have to be based on what the client camera sees, but also on what is 'visible' from the position of every reflective prim face!

So, a single reflective prim face at least doubles the complexity of calculating the scene, and additional faces would increase complexity by something like the number of reflective faces squared, since each face has to calculate with all the other reflective faces in mind...

In high-end 3D still-image rendering applications that allow real reflective surfaces, like Poser or Daz Studio or Maya, there are controls for how many "reflections" are calculated for a given surface, before the next surface the ray traces to is considered non-reflective. This prevents the calculations from zooming to infinity when two mirrors face each other, and the viewpoint is between them and looking at one mirror.

Turning on real reflections in a 3D rendering application that alows true ray-traced lighting and reflections slows it down to an extent that real-time 3D rendering of a scene is impossible, on anything short of a supercomputer.

In the attempted reflective surfaces option for SL, the LL programmers couldn't even figure out the additional complexity for correctly calculating the reflections off a single randomly-oriented prim face, let alone multiple faces. And the client-side lag when you turned that feature on skyrocketed, even with only one prim face set to reflective.

You may see 3D games that SEEM to have real-rime calculated reflections, but those all have the majority of the content fixed in position and pre-rendered, and they only have to recalculate from that to add the positions of the few moving elements, like your avatar. It's far simpler for a 3D game that has no user-generated content to do that sort of pre-rendering of a scene. But in SL, that scene can change at any moment, as someone rezzes a whole castle that wasn't there a moment ago, or moves a whole sim next to the one you are in.