First Look client released!

..and it's bloody lovely!



Check the blog!

And *someone* might be interested to know that the size of the sun is now adjustable. To what extent, I don't yet know

Got it and it is going to be really cool. OFr right now though where is the sky when you go up? There is no sky around my skybox just balc and blue lines that shove through the roof. Anyone know how to fix that?

Otherwise beautiful, really beautiful and it runs fine.

I got it and it crashes (closes, actually, with no error) in about 10 seconds. I guess I'll have to wait for something stable.

I did get a couple glances of pretty sky before the crashes though.

It crashes for me before a single frame is rendered, consistently (Dual Xeons, 1GB RAM, XP Pro SP2, nVidia 6600GT/128 w/latest drivers). Crashlogs sent. Going back to the 'stock' client.

Truly stunning! I'll have to wait for a few more releases though - it's slow as hell, and more unstable than dick cheney with a shotgun

I tried it and got the lighting effects OK - looked beautiful - but the sky didn't perform too well - couldn't get any clouds and vertical joins could be seen. Also shiny objects had less gloss - I did check 'shiny' was on.

Still, it looks very promising and I only hope my comp is up to it.

Tried it and was getting about 1 FPS. All of the improvements from the earlier first look clients where pretty much gone with the last update and now this makes the super laggy regualr release look blazingly fast.

P4 3GHz
2 GB RAM
Nvidia 8800 GTS with 320MB

I love the way it makes the sky look. I hate the way it makes everything else look. If you get the gamma correct for a certain time of day it will be wrong all other times of day. Often things are completely washed out, way over-saturated, or the contrast is way over the top. I also really don't like that the settings are all client side so that no one will ever see the same thing, or even the same time of day. I'd really love to see it linked to the standard SL time of day and the effect on prims to be much less severe. I hope it gets more work before it hits general release. Since it's all user definable and those settings can be saved as presets it would make sense to have each parcel feed the presets to any clients on the parcel so that what people see can be synched and under control of the parcel owner.

I've been using it for the past hour or so. I've noticed some wierd or unexpected effects. At the moment it is daytime at ground level but on my skybox at 750m it is a pitch black sky with no stars, and from the horizon down is a wierd blue pattern that is kind of like waves or water perhaps. A bit better than the muddy brown before, but still doesn't look very realistic.

And I've also noticed the colour of normal textures on prims, even terrain, being washed out like a camera with the aperture too wide. And I'm seeing very weird texture interference on some prims.

FPS is a bit lower, and it's taking a bit more horsepower from my computer GPU.

Overall though, not bad for the first First Look in the series I think.

-Atashi

I got it to work, but (like Chip said), the contrast is way too high. During the day, its not so bad, but at night, its pea soup fog. I'm also noticing that draw distance seems to be cut. Granted there are few here who can run SL at 512 without a serious hit in fps, but it seems that even at 512, I see ocean about 1 or 2 sims away.

I have to admit, I like the new sky. I watched sunrise, and it seemed a bit more natural. The stars faded, and once the sun was up, the fog turned into an almost natural looking daytime haze. The First Look client didn't crash, and there was a minimal, barely detectable performance hit. I have to test this on a few other machines.

Yeah. It's incredible! I did notince the washed out effect on surface objects - in some of the settings. I actually ended up reducing the brightness on my monitor. That helped a bit. Adjusting the gamma and saturation controls helped, too. I didn't experience any kind of instability or fps issues.

You have to have vertex shading enabled for it to work as promised. As soon as I figured that out, all the other issues (except the overexposure) went away. When they get it right, I suspect we're going to truly appreciate the light effects.

So far, I'm blown away. But I'm easy. Once they tweak it up a bit, I'll bet even the skeptics will have to admit that they're impressed!

looks like Im gonna need a new vid card.... BTW I didnt see an option to turn it off.

I hate it. No clouds at all on my Mac Mini, and the sunsets and sunrises look like a bad acid trip.

Wow. I've been sitting in Svarga just watching the sky. I was playing with the settings and turned the whole sky to negative colors. Scary! There are some presets in there too. I imagine this probably will cause a few video card upgrades.

@ Ceera play with the settings as per the blog .. I'm seeing great results with P3 1.13/1GB Ram/Nvidea GforceFX64 .. and awesome graphics on P4 3.4ht/2GB RAM/ATI Mobility Radeon X600 laptop .. keep playing with the sliders.

I agree with Chip 100%

I agree with DoC 100% and need some new threads.

Works fine at home but on my work pc I can't get the clouds. The "Vertex Shading" button is greyed out.

I have an Intel 910GL express chipset graphics card (internal), 128mb memory.

Guessing that's part of the problem?

Broccoli

I can't see the clouds, but that's not the worst problem. The worst problem is the hideous jagged horizon at the draw distance. If I could cover that with fog, I'd be happy enough.

I don't want to get a better video card at this time when everything else about SL is fine (if it ain't broke, don't fix it), so I floated a feature request over on jira to permit those of us on older video cards to either use our own static wallpaper or revert back to the old clouds and weather. If this seems like a good idea to you, please log in at jira. secondlife.com and vote for it at https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-935. Many thanks!

I noticed that too, but guessed it was just a 'feature' of First Look.

I still don't like the client deciding for me that it knows best what settings to adjust my graphics to, and not being given the option to review or deny its recommendations.

Broccoli

I waited until this morning (UK) to download it to avoid problems with peak times, but can't see the clouds either

It looks as if I am in a box before it all fully rezzes.

I love this client! WOW no problems yet Sky looks lovely

A clean install of SL always does that.

(a clean install usually resets the "mature" filter on parcel searches too - not sure if they changed that this time around, but expect an imminent outcry from traffic-losing merchants if they didn't....)

First impression of Wind Light is that I'm going to have upgrade my computer's
memory, CPU, and video card (which I just upgraded to play in SL!) if I want to
continue on the Linden Path to Success and Fame.

I've got a 2ghz CPU, 1 gig RAM, brand new Nvidia GeForce 7300 / 128M RAM.

My avatar crawls...there's a weird band of color along the horizon if I position
myself 30 meters or so up, and the draw distance is extremely shortened.
Wouldn't dare extend as things are very very slow as it is.

However...I _can_ sit on the ground and enjoy the pretty clouds. =)

I pray they get it working better than it is now. If they were to release
it today, it would be game over for me.

Edited...

Well spent another hour in with First Viewer. Horribly lagged/slow.

Flew up to about 100 meters (Well not really flying...). The horizon line is this huge wide band of color. The horizon looks fine when on the ground but go up...and it gets weird.
It changes to all different colors when choosing the Key Frame Presets.

Local lighting no longer works.

But worst of all! When I fly up there are no more cool foggy clouds
to float in. They used to about 170 meters up. But it's all gone now.

Oh...but the sky is pretty. Meh...I value moving smoothly much higher
than eye candy.

Here's some screenshots which were taken after everything was cached:

http://img255.imageshack.us/img255/6088/snapshot044yh8.jpg
http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/4205/snapshot045wf8.jpg
http://img503.imageshack.us/img503/114/snapshot046pu9.jpg
http://img174.imageshack.us/img174/9549/snapshot047qp1.jpg
http://img49.imageshack.us/img49/5966/snapshot048tz2.jpg

- Infrared