Ambient occlusion

Now that we get windlight and its realistic looking light , it seems the "light that bleed inside buildings" problem is getting a bit worse.

Here is my suggestion, we need two new tickboxes in the prim objects :

use occlusion shading.

Every day the sim would compute the occlusion map for all the prims of the sim that have this box ticked. here is what it would do:

occlusion mapping basically check for a point it's exposure to the sky, basically enclosed rooms and places that can't normally be reached by light would darken, while exterior buildings and walls would stay normal.

Now what is great is that it doesn't depend of the sun position, so you don't need to change it when sun change.

Here are two examples:

here is how it looks with only sun light, one single light.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/ba/Aocclude_insectdiffuse.jpg/494px-Aocclude_insectdiffuse.jpg


here is the occlusion map, that i repeat only need to be computed once as long as the prims will stay in place:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/9d/Aocclude_insectambient.jpg/494px-Aocclude_insectambient.jpg
note that it darken only the creases in the object and in the case of prim buildings it would darken the inside of the rooms for example.

And this is the final, with both light techniques combined:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f6/Aocclude_insectcombined.jpg/494px-Aocclude_insectcombined.jpg

I really really LOVE that idea!!

Reminds me of the HDR Lighting in Half Life2

sigh.. i guess peoples are more interested in flexi boobs

Those would be nice too!!

I'd like this also.

However, there may be even simpler ways of doing this. For example, if your avatar is underneath a primitive, then it follows that the lighting should be reduced? If this is the case then SL only has to look for gaps near to your avatar, and place reduced light sources on these. In other words, the sun/moon are treated as objects for the sake of occlusion culling (the feature that removes objects you can't see). If the sun/moon are occluded then they are "faked" by placing alternative light sources at places that light would normally spill in from.

Examples:
If you're in a completely closed room with a window, then there will be no ambient light, but a light source would be placed at the window.
If you are in a long, "underground" tunnel then no light will be rendered, except at the end points of the tunnel (or what you can see of the tunnel).
I'm in my home (a fairly tight but well occluded build) in my lounge. There is a door into the lounge which is currently open, the corridor beyond it leads to other rooms (but not outside). No ambient light will be rendered. No light sources will be placed automatically (assuming my house falls fully within my draw distance, which it does).

This would depend on what kind of data the occlusion culling algorithm generates, and additional code to find "gaps" or non-occluded zones, but could be fairly easy to do.

Lightmaps of course would be fantastic, but my concern is the cost of rendering them, and putting load on the simulator, as they're not easily handed off for client-side processing.
The above though is what popped into my head as "Ambient occlusion"

I don't know if the idea of calculating this once per day is really workable... but I CAN think of another good use for the data: rain. I gather that oldschool SL used to have rain, but it was scrapped because people hated when it rained inside their houses.

First of all: Windlight is gorgeous, and the performance is very OK on my 6800GT in 1680x1050 in "ultra" (since its not a first person shooter, dont need hundreds of FPS)

But yeah, with all that eye candy, the lighting system is really not enough.

Yes, SL is all dynamic content, so precomputation of shadow environment like in all other games is not really feasible.
..but if the owner of land could "lock" some prims, and enable a lightmap baking + occlusion computation. That would rule.

In the meantime, we'll run SL in "sunset" mode, since its so pretty