ripppled water borked?

I dont usually complain so close to an update, but I noticed this post:
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and its a non-reply forum so i thought I would start this thread.

I like rippled water though it lags a bit so i have it off unless I need it. I noticed with the new update that it seems quite uh, different than beore and doesnt perform as well. Is everyone having this experience? Or is it just me?

Previously the turning on of rippled water was a 3-5 FPS "hit" for me that was totally worth it, especially on moonlit nights.

Today I find that it's:

- virtually invisible at night (the water looks more rippled *before* you tun it on)
- its a repeatable 20-25 FPS "hit"

I usually get ridiculously low FPS but today after the update I was getting 27-32-ish kind of FPS and when i turned on rippled water it drops to 5-7 FPS. Turning it off gives you the old FPS back and its completely repeatable by toggling back and forth. A very consistent and large FPS drop.

The fact that I could not evven see it without turning the sun on I found kind of distressing also. moonlight walks onthe beach was one of the main reasons I liked it.

Maybe we should get to choose from the old way or the new way when they change something in the client.

Sigh, they could have had a preview, but nooo.

So are you getting the same beahviour though? I am not sure if it is borked because of the ridiculously high FPS that I was gettting in the first place.

I did notice that the turning bug (now with us since 1.6.0!), is still the same as ever and drops my FPS from the ridiculously high one I mentioned to practically zero. I am beginning to think that no one at the bug factory has ever even looked into that one.

25 FPS + <hit right arrow button on keyboard> = 0.5 FPS

I think if I am ever able to turn to face someone in SL without my client freezing I will die of shock!

I like the new updated rippled water better. It looks more like separete waves not long breakers. You can see the shore effect move differently.

I made some changes to the shader that made it about 30% faster without changing the look very much. If you're seeing slower performance and significant visual differences besides extra ripple when viewing from under water, it's probably a bug.

Can you post a screenshot and some system specs?

Thanks for jumping in, RL. Maybe you could post the old shader so we could try switching the two shaders and take some shots?

I havent noticed a FPS drop, but to me, the new shader is visually less pleasing. I'll try and dig up some old shots to compare with some new ones.

In Umber, before the update, I was getting between 10 and 30 fps with local lighting switched on.

After the update I was getting < 3 fps.

The previous Umber performance was exceptional, and seemed to be the result of a previous update. Now it's gone back to the way it used to be, with slow framerates, local lighting switched off and draw distance back to 64.

Ripple water at night looks almost solid color..

does ripple water still crash the client at high altitudes?

The ripple water looks less good to me now.

I don't get too much slow down with ripple water on.

I don't get the FPS drop when I turn

I get slow rendering times and lots of gray.

Wait.. What? I mean.. Huh?

It looks worse or better?

When things look less good that means they look worse.

When things look "more good" that means they look better.

I was gonna rewrite that message better but you responded too fast!

I was trying to make my avatar do stuff while reading the forums.

Let's see, the ripple water doesn't look as good now as it used to.

Not a big change, but it sure is sad to see things get worse.

I swear I see the facets in objects more pronouncedly than I did six months ago.

It's real pronounced on shiny objects, the shiny on spheres in very obviously made of straight line segments.


I don't have good pictures from the past to compare it to.

There's an old saying, Zap, "less is more". That should really confuse you.

These should be the files for the old water shader if you want them. They go in app_settings.

http://hyperupload.com/download/9b372967/old_shaders.zip.html

If you look through Snapzilla, there are hundreds of pictures of the previous water effect. I agree, the new one is not as appealing visually - it looks almost plasma-like. It is not horrible, and is still a nice effect - the previous one was just more visually appealing I think.

PLASMA--that's the word I was looking for. I was thinking, "If I colored it green..."

Maybe I'll get used to it, I don't know, it's too soon for me to tell. However, given my graphics card, I experienced no depreciable performance hit from the previous water effect. If the new ripple water works out as being way more accessible instead of a "slide show", I'm all for it, but I'm going sit on my hands and see.

Haha sorry its late and my brain didn't compute, all the things you said after seemed like pros to it and I wasn't sure where you were at.

Anyway sorry, and shiny has always been weird for me

I love the new ripple water!!

Now I can have ripple water on and NOT crash a high altitude!!

yay! GJ!

O hay I was having that problem too--I've gotta check it again! (When asked by Catherine Omega, I noticed myself last crashing in a spaceship, in a skybox, etc.) Guess that fix wasn't explicitly mentioned, but if it makes that difference...

I love the word borked... it doesn't have any meaning, but it expresses itself very well onomatopoetically

I haven't been having any troubles with ripple water, thoug admittedly i'm not a good person to talk to about doing tests for bugs or linking a visible problem with possible culprits.

I have been crashing at high altitudes though, you say it's due to the ripple water? I just thought it was because everything within 5 sims was being streamed to the client even though my draw distance is 96m...

In my specific instance, I became aware I was crashing at high altitudes on clearly-noticeable basis. I wasn't sure what might be doing this, but I looked in the SL Forums (here, whee!) and saw some of the threads relating to it. I gave it a spin, and turning off ripple water stopped me from crashing. Not sure why but I did send a bug report.


P.S. borked is nice, but I like "bjorked" even more.

The new water looks like iridescent glop to me and is disporportionate to the land. The old rippled water was much better. Why did it have to be changed... arent there more important things to improve?

I turned off ripple water and it looks better than this new iridescent wavy glop, but I wish i had the old ripples back.

Go back to the old water!

As an update on my performance with the new ripple water, I had it on for most of the evening without dropping to the extreme lows I had earlier in the day, although I wasn't aware I had it on until I walked down to the water just before I logged off so I am not sure what the FPS would be like if I had it off.

The funny thing is I am having such ridiculous readings that I am not sure I trust the debug anymore. I am getting hugely high (for me) frame rates like 25 or 30 and *zero* packet loss with a ping that is sometimes less than 50! This is literally two or three times better than I usually see on any of these indicators (usually my ping is in the 200 - 500 range for instance).

The really wacky part however is that *subjectively* the SL experience "feels the same" i.e. - good but not great.

It's not a problem in that I am used to the kind of experience I get out of my machine, but it just makes no sense that my stats have improved so dramatically yet performance seems reasonably unchanged.

My conclusion is either I am just not reliable as a reporter of subjective performance, or there is a conspiracy by Linden Labs to make us *believe* we are getting better performance by "fixing" the stats.

This makes me either a liar or a paranoid, so I wouldn't trust anything I say.

I think some more has to be changed than just that, because I got a weird black mass (like some kinda leathery oil) when I just change the waterF.cg and waterV.cg files.

I'll ask Runitai... so we can do some more A/Bing.

Go underwater and look up through it at the world - SIGGY LIKE!

I sooo want a pure water island sandbox just to play with ripple water builds :>

Underwater look up at avatars/prims now is so much diffrent \o i like.

Wonder tho if it where possible to have a "light version" of ripple water and a more aggressive one in option selection?.

Ripple water is a very nice addition to SL, shame vertex water always make land textures look like crap in comparison in pretty much all games that use it : p