And boom. Vertex shaders and shadows are gone.

1.9.1.23: had vertex shaders. Environment, object, and avatar. Had "shadows" option.

1.9.1.24: Gone.

Shiny on transparent? Gone.
Specular lighting? Gone.
Environmental shadows? Gone.

Man that looked nice while it lasted.

There's a 1.9.1.23 and 1.9.1.24 out? I'm in 1.9.1.21 and the autoupdater isn't doing anything.

Not that I can even turn vertex shaders on in 1.9.1.21. The thing instantly crashes.

Well, that -may- be why they pulled them ... but they really should update the MOTDs because right now, 1.9.1 has -less- graphics options than 1.9.0, not more...

Indeed, they should not pull the options for shiny, bump map avatar, disable far clip options. It is very nice to have such options when your frame rate falls due to being in a crowded area (or poor builds creating large lag). Sure some run people them the settings on full all the time, but some of us don't care for such features and would rather have it off or want more speed.

-DB

Said it once and said it again: options.... A one-size-fits-all situation just isn't going to work.

I suppose this could be an interim release, though. Maybe they should hold off on the release? :|

I'm really dissapointed to see them go if this is a permenant change for this release. Those new graphic features made SL look a ton better, now it's back to looking like ass, what happened?

The sun no longer shines as brightly on the ground, or prims, the cool blue fog is gone. Even the crappy shadows of prims are gone (I think this is a bug, because why is "Cast Shadows" still there?).

I ran fine with the new featureful graphics and they looked delightful. Transparent + Shiny was a long awaited feature and was awesome to finaly see implemented.

Also, I'm hoping this is a bug, but with water ripple off, theres no texture, it's just shiny blue stuff.

After telling people to upgrade their drivers because 1.9.1 adds new graphic stuff, are we really going to go back to normal cruddy SL stuff?

I noticed this as well, I had to manualy download from the page.

Well, that's ONE way to fix bugs (like "particles effects are now lit like other bright objects" and "particles no longer look shiny at certain angles": remove the feature (specularity, in this case) that caused it in the first place.

Does LL even TEST builds before releasing them? I mean, come on, LL, this is freakin' pathetic. Do the programmers even TEST their own code? These kinds of blatant bugs are SERIOUSLY stupid to be occurring--even in a preview release.

Combined with the known issues list STILL not being up-to-date ("llSetTextureAnim animations appear jerky" is STILL on it even though it's been fixed a few builds ago now; and some inaccurate/incorrect entries) and a lack of a preview tester bug database (at least), it's pretty obvious SL 1.9.1 isn't ready for its public release on Wednesday--and that LL needs more focus/discipline/motivation--something! I don't like the recurring pattern I see developing (worsening)...

Did you bug-report it?

Err... you really think this is a bug?

I posted above regarding the options for shiny, avatar renderings, and far clip They are back in the latest version. I had no idea as I was not prompted to update, untill I read in another thread that it was a manual update. Nice to have those options back....well except for far clip but I can live without that I suppose.

-DB

It's obviously not a bug. I was a little shocked for a moment when I read this but in fact it's a good move. If they would have released 1.9.1 in a condition like two previews ago it would have brought so many problems into the main grid. It was nice to see what's possible but those features are just not yet ready for release.

As I said then, though... kinda mud-on-their-face as far as all those "New graphics features!" MOTDs go...

Honestly I didn't see many problems with the shaders...

I guess we go back to the whole 'whats the point of 1.9.1' thing... oh right. capes.

We still have hardware lighting and flexiprims. That's a pretty good couple of feature-bumps for a 'minor' release number.

I'm totally happy for Vertex Shaders to be postponed for a while to get more testing; it was looking really shaky for mass-deployment this week (looking around these forums, the overlap between people for whom VS actually looked right and performed well yields quite a small minority) and SL were asking for a QA pummelling for simultaneously deploying three new 'features'. I'd still rather have seen VS become a Debug option for wider elite-testing, than totally ejected, but oh well.

I expect that faster, better, more-compatible VS work will be *the* focus for the next round of previews, where it can get more focused testing.

Heh.. That, or it'll become the next SpeedTree/Havok, etc.

occlusion culling was also still present, as a flag in the debug menu

Yes... SL 2.0, with Havok 3, SpeedTree, Shaders (hey, player-authored GLSL shaders attached as object properties, why not), scripted armatures, Mono, paint-on-object, nonhuman armatures, alpha-skins, terrain megatextures, mesh-modelling and impostered-draw-to-horizon. Due out next week. :3

What sucks about this one is we actually -got to see it- before it was put on the Infinite Shelf of Forever.

Oh yeah, OC, probably my favourite new feature of all (serious)... I dunno how I could have forgotten.

Ok well maybe not: For now, but maybe not later.





... I wonder if we can still get to them through the .INI file??

I dunno about you, but this one caused me some concern. I've been periodically working on a redesign of my av that uses a combination of alpha and non-alpha textures, and the new specular highlight really weirded it up.

For this reason, I'm glad to see them keeping the new shader system in development a while longer. It looked pretty (for the most part), but it still needs some work.

Wait, I'm confused, so Occlusion Culling isn't on by default in 1.9.1 anymore?


This is all really dissapointing.

Well, they did say that the 1.9.1 release is being postponed. Perhaps this will default to "on" again once they get some more work done on it.

No its still on by default, the debug flag let you disable it if you so chose. (there are some very very very narrow and specific circumstances where it could slow down more than it speeds up, somewhat like current SL's LOD engine but actually far less problematic overall)

Anyone else check their fast timers? I just did and had a WTF moment. My fast timers were so chaotic I uninstalled Siva and reinstalled to see if it would fix it, still chaotic. Here's my snapshot:

1.9.1(24) Fast Timers

I had no problems with framerates after I upgraded from my GeForceFX 5500 to my 6600GT till now, its really disconcerning and now I know why they pushed back the release date. They F'd up again.