Shader Technology

Does the current engine have support for texture shader technology? This may be not as demanding on the servers as some suggested graphics feature suggestions, but it would enrich the grahical enviroment a whole lot in my oppinion. I know it is possible now to modify the textures, and also create animations, but that is simple. If the engine supports this, then I would say it would be a worth while wait for the next 1.x patch update. Allowing us to code up some shader texture animations with multiple layers would be a benifical feature to grab new commers to the game.

I hate to say it folks, but eye candy is much more attractive in the current day and age of both the Gaming and the VR world. If not now, I would suggest having a team (a section of LL) work on just this element in the future of SL.

Eh, just my 2 cents.

For the non uber-technical-geeks like me, what exactly is Shader Technology? (I have an idea as what it MIGHT be, but just want to make sure)

I personaly like how SL looks, not that it couldn't look better, but I think it looks pretty good for this day and age.

This is a pretty good intro to pixel/vertex shaders:

http://www.gamedev.net/columns/hardcore/dxshader1/

If you don't feel like reading it, since it is fairly technical, here is the important part:

There is also a lack of freedom. Many of the effects used in games look similar with the hard-wired T&L pipeline. The fixed-function pipeline doesn't give the developer the freedom he need to develop unique and revolutionary graphical effects. The procedural model used with vertex shaders enables a more general syntax for specifying common operations. With the flexibility of the vertex shaders developers are able to perform operations including:

Procedural Geometry (cloth simulation, soap bubble)
Advanced Vertex Blending for Skinning and Vertex Morphing (tweening)
Texture Generation
Advanced Keyframe Interpolation (complex facial expression and speech)
Particle System Rendering
Real-Time Modifications of the Perspective View (lens effects, underwater effect)
Advanced Lighting Models (often in cooperation with the pixel shader)
First Steps to Displacement Mapping

And there are a many more effects possible with vertex shaders, perhaps effects that nobody thought of before.

Oooo, interisting, thank you

If I'm not mistaken, isn't SL using Avatar Vertex? And is it not a Vertex Shader? Might be different technology. I wouldn't mind being able to see my avatars shadow, but I imagine this might make FPS drop because shadows would need to be rendered on the fly cuse of various shapes and sizes we can do.

Also some objects do have a shadow, just rather hard to see.

Maybe if I learn enough about Vertex shading I could help fix the ATI Avatar Vertex issue.

The avatar shader in SL is all rendered by the client software, so while technicly it is a "vertex program," it's all simulated as opposed to really being calculated by the proccessor. You can tell the software calculates it because it's kinda jaggy and fake-looking.

I actually did some research on the current engine SL is running on (Havok 1.2 GDK), and one of its features i saw was that it is able to do "Procedural Geometry (cloth simulation, soap bubble)". I guess there main reason why they did not add physics to our clothes was becasue it would take up much more CPU processor speed than the current Partical Physics engine does on the sims.

A) The shader technology may be the 'Normal Shading' stuff that's been recently developed for use in such games as Half-Life 2 and soforth, in which a single polygon can 'emulate' the look of multiple polygons, thereby enabling a low-res model to appear high-res.

B) Vertexes are calculated by SOFTWARE?! No WONDER SL has such high system requirements! Sheesh! That's what my video card is for! Why doesn't SL use my hardware?

Actually, it's not as intense as you may think. It really just guestimates where the vertexes should go and renders it there. That's why they're jaggy.

And why the hell is it 'guestimating' when I've got a perfectly decent graphics card that can put it -exactly- where it needs to be?

they do use some shaders, search the SL folder for .cg extentions, those are nvidia compiled shader programs

as to the vertex effects, the coordinates are done mostly in the graphics hardware, its the lighting thats done on a cpu for the simple fact that NO consumer graphics hardware can handle the number of lights present in even small areas of SL (most max at 8 for 1+ year old cards, 16 for the most recent.. and even modest views of SL often include 30+ lights)