Apathy Of New Version Disaster

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This new Version of SL is a Disaster of LIGHTING & TONES

1. the noonlight is blotchy, too bright and too contrasty.

2. the midnight tones are so dark you cant see things anymore

3. all the skin tones of the Avatars have changed,
as well as shadows appearing where they werent before,
and details where they once were now being all washed out.

4. the contrasting facial features of the eyes and cheekbones
make avatars look like zombies



i attempted to adjust the graphic features and gamma settings
without any decent results

i upgraded/updated my nvidia drivers without any significant results.



it is astonishing to me that this significant and obvious
deterioration of SL's image quality has seemed to, so far,
gone all but unnoticed and barely commented upon.

doesnt anyone at Linden Labs notice the extreme diminished quality?

everyone online has noticed it.

so, without the apologists coming out of the woodwork
with phony explanations, how about fixing it?

you cant pretend it doesnt exist!
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oh and did i forget to mention the greenish tint other people are seeing?
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Thats because there was almost no lighting before now, so skin and clothing designers have been painting shadow and highlights onto their products - its no suprise things don't look right anymore.

Also, I've noticed no particular loss of quality, which would be why I haven't been reporting a loss of quality.

Be sure to try turning off Avatar Vertex Program. That was causing very funky colors for me. I also had washed out colors in Preview before reinstalling my video driver.

Now, everything looks excellent to me in this version. Looks like a big improvement.

I think SL runs more smoothly,looks the same to me graphics wise but maybe I was just enjoying the eye candy I was with last nite to notice

I'm getting half or less the FPS I was before the update, even with fewer features enabled and new video drivers.

This is so bad they really need to give people with older video cards an option to revert to the 1.9.1.13 graphics, before they introduced the new shaders. That was the fastest SL had been for me since 1.6!

The version is the best for me, gained about 20FPS from 1.9, love it!

Used to get 8fps in our store, now I get 20-25FPS..

So I would trade nothing about this update, avatar vertex is fine for me, lighting it fine, day is great, night is better then ever before!

If anyone has before (1.9)/after (1.10) pictures you'd like to post following upgrading your graphics card drivers, please do. They'd be appreciated for better understanding this, picture = 1000 words and all that.

I think that default midnight is too light!

It would seem at first glance 1.10 spells the end of SL for me for some time to come. My only option at this point to make SL usuable is to turn off the rendering of volume objects through the debug menu. With the absolute minimum settings now allowed, I'm lucky to get 2 fps, more often 0.7 and 0.8 fps when rendering any objects.

Afte updating the drivers, and then reinstalling sL (just to make sure) with no improvement, I started doing a little research. Apparently my Intel 915 chipset doesn't support hardware lighting, which under 1.10 as I understand it has two layers active at all times.

Am I correct in assuming this is the likely problem I'm facing? If that should be the case it would appear my days in SL are indeed over. As I'm on a laptop, switching out graphics cards isn't an option, and a new desktop simply for SL isn't an option either. My only hope would be for the Lindens to release a client with *no* hardware lighting for those of us who aren't willing to shell out a grand or two for a new system, but I don't see that as being more of a pipedream than anything else.

The System Requirements pages states pretty blankly that Intel intregrated graphics aren't supported. Really, those chipsets aren't much of anything for ANY 3D games. On the other hand, game-quality video cards have supported hardware lighting for quite some time - one reason it was added is because, for every card Linden Lab supports, it's basically "free" performance wise.

The upshot is, you don't need a super-expensive video card. the downshot is, your laptop won't run SL any longer... and it was lucky to do so before.

The first thing I noticed after the release was the moonlight, and I love it. It gives kind of an eerie twilight ambiance, but I can still see clearly.

I was afraid of that. *laugh* System actually did *really* well pre-update, getting 10 fps or better at 192 draw distance. Granted I hate local lighting off, but otherwise my settings were fairly high. If I got into an area with a lot of avatars, I'd have to drop down my draw distance but that wasn't too bad.

Back to the boredom of HL2, it seems.

sorry to hear that some people cant enjoy the new version. The lighting is beautiful.
Graphics Card + CPU + RAM + ISP Connection= How well you can play sl. Just a thought

Actually the new lighting is more accurate. My avatar skin is from the defaults and has no artificial/painted shadows. As I vary the daylight settings the shadows look ok. The amount of shadow complexity on my avatar looks tripled and it all looks right.

Previous to this my avatar's skin looked almost flat colored (no shadows).

It's a case of the real shadows (caused by lighting) interfering with the artificial/painted shadows.

I suggest you try this: create an avatar with high definition (lots of muscles and as many "bumps" as possible. Then view it under different daylight settings and angles. You will see many shadows (most of them accurate) that were completely absent before.

The image below is a before and after. I can't show all the differences because I can't find my other old screenshots. I had only this one left so I instead tried to match the content.

Except for the arm and bracelet I made, everything in the upper body area of my avatar as it appears here is from defaults and sliders only. The screenshots come from slightly differing angles however the daylight setting is noon, so the light comes from the same direction, straight up. The greenish hue is a light emission from the forearm so ignore that part.



On more scrutiny of the before and after, it would seem that those with artificial shadows are now wrestling against the intensification of natural/realistic shadows.

Further checking, yes, turning avatar vertex off will make your artificial shadows look more like they used to I think but that will be only on your screen. Anyone else who has avatar vertex on (as I do) will see the blotchy shading.

It's not the shading and shadows of skin textures. the new lighting model harshly emphasizes every crease and hollow in the av mesh - it's like LL has aged us several decades. it would be one thing to turn off the effect, but you can't. disabling vertex program makes very little difference.


guess which is the before and which is the after

color me unhappy.

Between your before and after pics, I would prefer something closer to the after pic (looks more natural), but not as intense.

I have a suggestion that might help considerably.

The current crop of graphic card drivers come with a lot of adjustment points. If you're using an Nvidia card with the latest driver then that adjustment is under "color correction."

Use the *advanced mode* and make the gamma curve (the diagonal line on the grid) arch upwards a tiny bit. You will need to tweak the curve some to get palatable results. If you're playing SL windowed you can have both SL and the adjustment dialog window open at the same time.

I took a cue from you saying the word "harsh," so I figured either LL softens the lighting a little bit, or we do. Hence the gamma adjustment.

I don't recommend fooling around with the contrast setting of the monitor. Gamma correction gives better results.

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all of the above comments are very interesting ...

my original comments here were based on the
default settings of my computer, monitor and SL settings ...

personally, i dont believe in spending the time,
to either tweek my computer nor a programs' systems operation,
in order to accommodate its various inherent deficiencies ...

often times, going thru that process only
compromises other operations, in my opinion.

if something doesnt work the way it was designed and intended to,
or doesnt the way it is supposed to, then i either discard it completely,
or look for something better.

of course i do beleive in system updates and upgrades,
which is all together a different type of tweeking.

no doubt, each person sees things on their own computers
slightly differently than what others may see on theirs,
depending on their personal tastes, what they are willing to tolerate,
as well as the age and type of computer they are operating

my computer was custom built for me ...
its a psi express, 3.2 pentium processor,
XP, 2gigs ram, 256mb nvidia card, 10k rpm hard drive, dsl connection ...

so it is not your run-of-the-mill mail order,
nor your average buy-it-off-of-the-shelf desktop.


so ...
on Wednesday, when and after i downloaded and logged on to
SL's new version, the changes *for the worse*, were instantaneously
like the difference between night and day.

as i initially stated above, there was no improvement
even after installing the ForceWare Release 80 Version: 84.21 upgrade.



however yesterday, Friday, after downloading SL's latest NEW NEW version
of the new version, there is now an obvious enhancement to the loss of quality
that i was addressing in this topic.

chalk it up to my imagination only ... or micro-chip ghosts ...
or that SL's Linden Labs actually did something about it within 36 hours ...

i am grateful ... for whatever the reason.
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Going on about how awesome your system is means approximately jack, really.

PCs are not standardized beasts. Two apparently identical systems can run very differently based on trivial differnces.. More to the point, video cards especially can differ, even two that are supposedly the same (since even if they use the same chip, the actual board design will often be by two different companies licensing use of the chip).

In this case, I suspect the problem was in the new shader engine, and not all video boards running it equally well. This would explain why so many people don't have a problem (as opposed to the Great Grey Gridstorm of 1.7)...

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it is really amazingly awesome that you don't have a problem ...

however, it means specifically jack, really,

when so many people and sims do have problems

inspite of the system they are running.
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I'm loath to advertise as such, but I might mention that our female skins were deliberately created with far more subtle shading on them than most in anticipation of the new lighting.

Additionally we just didn't like the exagerated shading a lot of skins had, and felt that some skins tended to make everyone look identical - ie: like the skin rather than their own unique av shape !

The downside, experience has shown, is that if you have a poorly adjusted shape, the skins won't hide this - the pictures of our model at our store show just how good you can look but be prepared to adjust or seek help with your shape for the best effect, and I'd say this is true if you want to improve your appearance in any skin with the new lighting.


CJ Carnot

Tete a Pied Skins.

Yes, but the point of your thread was asking "why are you all so apathetic? DON'T YOU KNOW A GAME IS AT STAKE!"

Well, we're apathetic 'cause so many of us are NOT having problems, and it is far more useful to consider what differences between the setup of those who do, and those who don't, and fix those problems thereby, than whine.

The new shading also makes your skin look more like, well, skin.

That's less than ideal when it's supposed to be fur.

How about a new "Shininess" slider in the appearance editor?

I certainly am one of those who has no problem since my skin has no artificial shadows.

The kind of lighting techniques now used in SL are pretty standard as far as graphics engines go. These techniques were never meant to work well with artificial shadows except when their positions are fixed (like daylight).

Since the player now has control over creating such lighting sources we have to think in a larger scale because people want to put lights in all kinds of positions. This means that the use of artificial shadows has to be curbed or adjusted to work with the new lighting.

This lighting also forces us to be more attentive to the *shape* of our avatars since artificial shadows will no longer hide the fact that some people have misshapen heads.