Physically-correct outdoor light and photorealistic clouds in a few weeks?

I. Want. This. So. Bad. I. Can. Taste. It!

YAY, WEATHER!!!!!

\o/


My guess is that it will be parcel by parcel, with 'fades' of tens of seconds when you cross borders (sun to snowing, &c &c).

I'm PRAYING there are regionwide, nay, continent-wide means of controlling the weather via LSL - I want weather fronts to sweep in from the North...


Ah, and don't forget, you'll get ALL the performance back from not having to render the pesky existing clouds.

Likely there's enough performance in that to do wonders....

Wrong.

Looks cool. I look forward to playing with it in a few weeks.

Windlight looks brilliant. A significant enhancement to the SL visual environment. After Windlight I'd like to see cast shadows as the next improvement.

Phwoar!

still no shadows i guess?

Because if there is one thing I need (teleporting issues, asset server, lag, llgetinventory bug, texture troubles, editing troubles, shoes up my bum), it's better looking sunlight :-/

Mari

Well, it certainly looks pretty. At least on the souped up systems that they rendered the sample pics on. I can render photo-real skies too, if I take long enough... But I seriously doubt my Mac Mini will see this as an improvement or will be able to cope with it in real time.

I also gather that this is entirely client side, since they can bundle it in a First Look client. Apparently, there is user CP that you use to affect your own personal experience? Which means soon no one will agree on what the weather is, or what SL looks like, unless we share "environment settings"? Suzy Goth can have her gloomy, rainy skies, while Mary Sunshine has pink sunsets and rainbows? Humph. What if the sim owner wants to set a specific mood with weather? Do they have to set up a notecard giver at a telehub, informing all visitors they for the desired effect, they need to load a specific set of environment settings?

*sigh* While it is nice for those rendering pictiures or doing in-world movies, I expect that my low-end sysetm will have me staring at cloudless, cartoon-solid skies for a while, until I can afford a better computer. From the comment in the blog, lower-end graphics cards won't be able to see the new clouds. And we can't keep the old sky, once this hits. Which means I will lose a rather nice current feature. I wish they would clearly state what they think the new recommended entry point is... "Minimum 512 MB VRAM and a dual-core CPU", perhaps? Or maybe a nice desktop Cray Supercomputer?

I love pretty skies, but I don't care to get forced to upgrade just to keep what little I already have.

Yes, try explaining that to countless thousands of residents who don't even know how to edit an object other than to adjust prim attachments.

They'd have to make it so you had to switch on shadows.

Sounds like a good feature. Makes Skybox living worth it again.

Your whole post could have been summed up with that!

It's no different than bumpiness, shine and light sources. Those default to off if I remember correctly. I can't totally remember because I've had those on for so long now!

Wow! This is gonna be waaay more user-centric that I had guessed! I hope there's an easy way to always default to what the sim manager sets up, because one of the things I love about the Apollo sim is Dane Zander's carefully constructed theme, down to the permanent sunset. I can't wait to see what he comes up with.

I guess we could get this, since LL owns the company. On the other hand, we have been waiting for all the other stuff Aaron mentions for a few years now. At this point, I'll believe it when I see it.

Believe it. Go look at the blog and check the "teasers" they have on the blog and youtube.

Pretty cool if you ask me. Weather and more dynamic environment works for me!

1. a client that don't crash every 10 minutes because of extremly sloppy programming
2. hability for SL to handle basic texture
3. doing more the 12 FPS on a avarage computer
4. Cancel the illegal deal with shady data mining company (age verification)
5. a ban on any extra feature until the client is fixed and optimised

Why don't you make a competitor for SL? You seem to know what LL needs to do with their business!

Ok, I'm 75% sold. The 25% unsold part comes from the thread a couple of years ago showing 2.0 render shots. I really hope we do get this. Maybe if we are really lucky, we get the long range draw distance too.

They are realy into VR as there are tottaly disconnected from realty -> They PAYING consumer.

SL is 2 thing:
1. The best idea ever for a VR software
2. The whorst piece of software ever made. By any software standard it is no yet an alpha

Open your eye, see the sky, see the pretty sculpty... spend 3000$ on a computer to run at descent frame rate and pray it won;'t crash everytime you move

If you're so dissappointed by LL as a company and SL as a platform then why are you here?

I spent about 500.00 on the setup I have now (2nd hand from a buddy...5 year old video card) and I do pretty well with only minor sacrifices to the graphics quality and it's doing pretty well.

It's not perfect, but it's not like there's a viable alternative out there!

70% working on stability issues, according to the blog.

Seventy percent.

almost three quarters.

How much more do you want? The receptionists? The janitors?

I'm pissed that SL doesn't run right on my comp (crappy Intel chipset garbage), but I'm not going to spite them for trying to add to the experience, when it's not at the cost of other stuff, which this obviously isn't.

The aquired another company (as I understand it. I could be wrong) to implement it.
This has nothing to do with bugs. It's just something that will make the SL experience better.

Feeling lucky? Wanna bet? I say First Look with this within two weeks and then its the new viewer by Winter Solstice. I'll put some $L on it..say 100?

My natural cynicism leads me to believe this won't implement into Second Life as well as the screenshots imply, and won't work on any 1+ year old computers, including mine.

However, my non-cynical side is currently going *squeeeeee THERE MAY BE RAIN/SNOW IN SECOND LIFE SOON!!!*

Sadly there is no viable alternative yet (that is why i am still there). But a lot of other (real) companies are planning competive alternative. (maybe this is why LL push so much for new features). But you cannot built a house on quicksand. No matter how mature the technologies they are buying is. it cannot stand on grade A quicksand.

As for a 500$ buck computer running SL... this i wish to see.....

SL users as spoken (Open Letter), LL lie and said they have listened. What i see is 2 years old bug NOT been fixed and tons of new feature to will render an already extremly imature and buggy client even more useless.

I am willing to believe this...as it stands, I run the current client on a 3yr old eMac with a whopping 32mb of video RAM, and 1gig SDRAM...and I have shiney/bumpmap/local lighting enabled (I sacrafice terrain detail as a compromise) and do so out to 128 meters.


Just sticking up for the old computers...carry on.

(edited to add: eMac = $700 computer...monitor and system all in one case)

I have an old Dell which I rescued from a trip to the dumpster at work. I rebuilt it, and as of today, it can still run SL. Impressive for an old Dell Optiplex GX-150. This machine is old. Not just a little aged, but its Pentium III, 512MB of RAM, originally ran Windows 98 old. I'm not sure what it originally had for a processor, but I put in a 1ghz Pentium III, which is the fastest processor the motherboard could run. The only other modification was a GeForce 4000MX, a truly craptastic card I got cheap. BTW, its a PCI card, because I simply couldn't find a suitable AGP version. This machine isn't even a $500 machine. More like a $200 machine.

I'm not gonna lie about performance. I can run SL at a playable framerate, but I have every graphics setting turned down. Its not pretty, but it runs. If we do get these new fancy clouds, I will try to push that relic to show me clouds.