1.1 Preivew (9/18/03) Notes

Partical system:

Oh my golly gosh..... This is going to revolutionalize so many effects in SL. While I have to say as a scripting newbie the LSL Referance made absolutly little sence to me, Dave Zeeman created a "all teh stuff" script that contained all the perameters commented and given to global variables which alowed much better experimentation with them (Thow it hit 7 pm way too soon hehe).

The particals are amazingly open ended. Using the base particals (as seen in your selection beam i belive) you can get them to fall, float, bounce, fly from one object to another, follow an avatar, etc... Change their color, there orientation, their spread, the number, the size, the ... its amazing. I learned a lot about particals once I got a hold of Dave's wonderful conglomerate script and cant wait to experiment fruther.

Shiney ness / Bump maps:

Not a whole lot can be said here that hasnt already except a couple new (?) observations...

1) Shineyness / Bump maps do NOT appear on transparancy objects. I couldn't test this with transparancy textures as all the ones I had showed up as not found.

2) The bump maps are currently limited to stone / wood textures and a couple others (Petrie dish / suction cup) thow im sure well get more soon or be able to create them.

Physics:

To laggy to test.

Groups:

To busy watching particals and crashing

Newview.exe has major problems for me.

Map looks cool but again, from here down the list of things to have checked mhy time was taken up trying to crash things by walking around with crouds or trying to figur out the partical system.

All in all?:

Amazing work, I cant wait for optomization and release, this is going to be realy fun to play with.

Wishes:

Shineyness / bumps need to work with transparancies.

PS: My Hollow, Cut, ADV-Cut, Twisted, Ajusted, Shiney, Bumpy, Physic's Torri (hehehe) didnt seam to do any FPS damage at all!

Oh, we have SKIRTS now. I put one on, trying to make a kilt. They are VERY realistic. When you walk, your legs hit the fabric and push it up. Great! I'd love to see a similar effect for hair. All in all, much better test than last week, lets test it again, say..this tuesday?

Thanks, we're working as fast as we can!

Physical objects are buggy not laggy - but should be fixed soon. We know about it. Performance on sims looks much better.

Let us know of any graphical glitches you saw - flashing colors on ATI, etc.

My avitar still didnt 'load'; I was a green blob (shaped right, but with grey-green clothing and skin).

ATI Radeon 9k

And im still getting crashes with cmd.exe popping up.

As far as graphical glitches go the Inu-Yasha shirt on my avatar got extreamly pixiliated at one point. I have a pic but my email server wouldnt let me send it, will try tommarow. (yes i shrunk it)

Avatar ajustments: I noticed my face looked.... off. I cant exactly say how but Ill log in and take a comparison photo of my normal face in as close as I can get to lighting / angle so you can see for yourself since I heard this mentioned.

Any word on the transparancy vs shiney / bumpmaped?

I didn't create the "all teh stuff" script. A linden did.

Well Chris you and your darn virus simulator rezzer or what ever it was lol, its no doubt you had the troubles ya did lol.

You are definatly a good tester for the physics performance.

I'd like to see that script ya got for that hehhe.

But anyway, now taht I was able to make it into this test, I say OMG what a awsome drastic change. Aside from the runtime errors :-0 , But that's what we were there for.

The landscape is just so sweet.

I wasn't really able to test and discover much as the crashes were often. and well Chris didn't help lol.

What I was able to play with was the famed particle system.

I only did a few things cuz I was eyeing the clock towards the end as I was crashin. But real nice. I love it.

Now we just need H2 lol

Crash, crash, crash thats about all I did. However I did get some spectacular photos.

Bump mapping was flashing off and on at a rate of about once a second. Also, it made little difference in overall world appearance, as you had to be fairly close to an object to see the effect. Didn't see any real reflectivity. Sound was cutting in and out as well. Severe lag; about 4-6 fps. Clothes never appeared on their own; until I opened the Appearance tools dialog.

Avatar distortion: The Avatar appeared normal when the Appearance dialog box is open. As soon as I close it, the Av's appearance immediately changes to fairly severe facial distortion of the type seen in the previous test. The client was being run at 1024x768. Desktop is set to 1024x768x32 @ 85Hz. Video card is a Radeon 9200 LE 128mb DDR with the Catalyst 3.7 driver. FSAA and Anisotropic filtering were disabled.

I don't like that new abuse report automatically popping up just because another Av walked too close to me. That sort of thing will always happen at events, and the popup is just an annoyance. Let's lose the auto-popup.

The particle effects were definitely the star of this particular preview, and for good reason. I didn't get to see them the last time around, so I was incredibly impressed and got some amazing screen shots.

Texture detail in this preview was also incredibly striking - between the subtle bump mapping on clothes (the lace texture zoomed in is amazing), and a texture on some wood and a box that I saw, I was totally blown away by the level of detail and realism.

The new skirt option is very nice, and an impressive technical feat on SL's part - good job on keeping it under wraps too, so to speak. It was a complete surprise, and opens up a lot of design ideas.

Tonight was very laggy for me, sometimes to the point of being a slideshow. Sound especially seemed to bring the client to its knees. Surprisingly, the particle effects light show in Bonifacio did not seem to have a negative effect, even when someone made wings out of particles.

One thing that continues to distress me about the 1.1 preview is the change to the facial appearance of the avatars. In a word, it is hideous. Please please please do not touch the way the avatars look facially. Everyone has spent a lot of time making their avatars look the way they want them to, and it will be avery distressing to have to redo this process again, without the ability to even get it back to how it looked before. I messed with the sliders for about 15 minutes, and could not get my avatar to look the way he should. I don't think this was a graphical problem (Geforce FX card), I think it was simply a change that has been made in the avatar rendering engine. If anything, they look slightly more cartoony, for lack of a better term, and it is not attractive.

1.1 continues to amaze and excite me each time I see it. There is a lot of new stuff, and it will be interesting ultimately to see how we all make the transition once it goes live. Thank you for again giving us a chance to see it in action.

"Non-flat" water was black and cut my framerate down to 1/3 of normal, even with no water in sight. GeForce 2 GTS w/ 128MB. The viewer froze once and had to be killed. Sound is still screwy... llPlaySound() does not follow volume control instructions and the majority of my sounds (in attachments or in inventory) would not play. Wierd Doppler effects with attachment sounds at high speed. Non-smooth application of impulses to avatars during flight: jetpack thrust appears to pulsate rather than being totally smooth as with 1.0.

When the beta was over and I logged back into 1.0, I retained the improved turning performance from 1.1 until I crossed into a different sim. I wish it wouldn't have gone away!

CATALYS 3.7 drivers recently came out, which seemed to fix all the problems that 3.6 provided wiht SL 1.0.*, and was fine with SL 1.1, except for my Avatar Change screen. The preview squares were reddish blothes. But other then that, I think ATI is starting to shape up.

I got to play with 1.1 for aboot and hour and a half and I spent pretty much that whole time playing with the particle system.

I'm FREAKING OUT ! This is going to be so good! It feels like the first time I ever logged in to SL, just the vast fields of possibility... my mind is botally tlown.

I'll do some screenshots below (you can only attach one file to a post).

This is a bumpmapped object. It's just a cube with the default wood texture, with the "weave" bumpmap turned on.

A closer look at the bumpmap

Particle effects have a source and now, optionally, a destination, so they can stream from one place to another. Here's an avatar (hi Cas!) dragging some particles. This shot doesn't do it justice, you really have to see this in action

Some particle snow. This was cooked up quickly and uses the default particle, and still looked really good.

Valfroth's volcanoe, with some particles.

YAY!

(quoth the kilt-wearing punk)

(this is what I get for forgetting about SL in favor of food shopping... heh. next time!)

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(edit) Wednesday's pictures look *fantastic*. I'm sitting here at w*rk, oohing and aahing.

Oh, and before seeing it, I was suspicious of the damped MoveTos and Scales, but I have to say, it looks so nice. And it really helps with the "reality" too, things don't just teleport around. It effects avatars too, so if you change shapes, it doesn't just pop in, you morph to it.

P.S. Those particle effects aren't all my doing, there were a lot of people in the area futzing around, I'm not sure who did what, I just snapped a lot of pictures.

P.P.S At one point I was standing around with 5 or 6 BIG particle systems going and had no noticable drop in framerate.

Wednesday, shame on you for not having shown us bump mapping and particle systems on a hollow cut torus... with physics enabled of course

The snow and the volcano were both my doing. Of course, I had super help from Ben Linden's "all teh stuff" script, if he did indeed originally create it (and i trust he did)

...mumblemumbleISABELmumblemumble...
...mumblemumblePOWEROUTAGEmumblemumble...
...mumblemumbleMISSEDPREVIEWmumblemumble...

Can we do it again tonight???? Puleeeeeeeeze?

I had been waiting all week since I heard we were going to be able to try out 1.1 again. TANJ!

How were you guys able to see and do all these amazing things? All I did was crash - crash - crash.

I was on long enough for someone to bump into me... I immediately reported that HORRIBLE abuse - THANK GOD for that pop-up box! (sarcasm)

PLEASE GET RID OF THE ABUSE POP-UP!

Remember that the abuse pop-up only pops up the first time someone does something to you. For the old timers, you'll soon discover the 6 things that it is detecting and then you won't see it again !

On the other hand, if you were seeing it again and again then that is a bug so please report it.

For those of you who describe the experience as "CRASH-CRASH-CRASH" could you please post what kind of graphics card and drivers you are running on? Thanks!

Thanks for helping us pull 1.1 together!
Cory