WindLight Firstlook _ what are your bugs so far?

Have to say, haven't noticed any problems at all, but then I'm running a top-end set up

Inc

You aren't. It's starting to annoy the crap out of me. In fact, the too aggressive culling sent me right back to the RC viewer instead. I put my draw up to what I have it in RC/Regular viewer. In the RC viewer, I see the sim ground within that range. I also see all the objects within that range, which isn't the case with the Windlight version.

Something I also noticed is that it seems based on avatar location NOT camera location. If I disable my camera constraints, move to another part of the build/sim, things do not rez for me there half the time.

Hate the "new and improved" search feature. It wasn't broke so why fix it?

Hi,

Because the main blog is already closed, here my observations. First, some positive notes:
- No problems running WindLight Firstlook, at least not more than usual. I run it in best quality modus, with 256 m draw view. No crashes or unusual lag. My PC may be somewhat better than average though (see below).
- Water reflection is awesome, really! The sky/atmosphere, well, much better but not such a huge improvement as the water.
- The "Avatar Impostors" enhancement seems to work very well, I was surprised how smoothly I run in crowded places.

Now some critical points, some of them may be due to suboptimal settings, but even then the defaults should be better:
- Light and reflection are terrible in most day situations. Like looking into the summer sun at noon on some greek island.
- Related to this, the brightness and shininess of objects/textures seem to be a huge problem that will be hopefully addressed for the final version.
- As already reported, the underwater scenery is now awful and completely unusable. Also, sometimes the water won't display, like the water-bug in old times.
- What I truly was shocked now, is how bad terrain/land looks with WindLight. Not only the problem with the standard terrain textures being of insufficient quality for WindLight, but also the terrain shaping feels often very unrealistic compared to the looks of water and sky. I think this is the most urgent issue that has to be improved.
- The quality of the avatars looks varies a lot... Newer photorealistic skins look not bad, even if they now have this kind of artificial "Poser"-like artificial looking . Lower quality skins look still bad or even worse, of course.
- Many trees and stone textures and all prim water look bad to awful too.
- And most textures for buildings, clothes, objects will need a complete overhaul

So, yes, I do like it, it will be a great step towards the future, but if light/brightness, terrain looking, prim water/landscaping and texture quality in general, don't improve quickly, then no thanks - I'll stick with the older viewer instead of living in a world that hurts my eyesight because of huge quality contrasts.

An at last, I can now better interprete the beautiful Windlight scenery pictures you see: they are all taken with big linden-water surfaces and large skies/horizons, mostly at sunset or sunrise, with big shadowas covering all the terrain details... No wonder they look great - but if you live your day-by-day in the WindLight world with no water around, the average experience is far away from this elaborated high quality pictures. Kind of a little bit dishonest commercial advertising

Note: here my hardware specs:
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 (Unknown model) (3407 MHz)
Memory: 2047 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Build 2600)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 7600 GS/AGP/SSE2 (256 MB)
OpenGL Version: 2.0.3
LLMozLib Version: 1.1.0 (Mozilla GRE:1.8.0.12_0000000000)

I've encountered a few bugs which I'm reporting to (or finding on) the JIRA as they come up.

Firstly, even if you can't see any water reflections, it has a huge impact on frame-rate (well half for me but probably less for higher-end). This seems odd since I can't actually see any water at all:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3219

Fog doesn't work with basic-shaders enabled:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3116

Land that is well beyond my draw-distance is still rendered:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3188

Low-detail trees are wrong size:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3186

If you've experienced any of these as well then do please go to their links and vote on them and post your system specs and overview of settings (draw-distance, object detail etc.)! If these issues don't effect you then please post your specs anyway!

My regular viewer has always worked that way, Ken. I've mistaken parcels for seacoast property plenty of times, until I learned to double check them on the map.

Had a little time to look at it yesterday. I don't know if these are bugs, probably not. Draw distance can't be set separately? My world is suddenly much smaller and emptier. The stuff I can see is pretty, though

I was building and went to stretch a box. Pulling the side handle only pulled out one side, rather than both symmetrically. I really rely on that for absolute positioning and adjusting so I logged out and got back in with the old viewer.

I used windlight for the first time a couple nights ago, so I havent been in there enough to observe too many bugs yet, but I did find one, and sent a bug report.

I made a half sphere 10x10x10- and stuck one of the library grass textures on it, I had it in the middle of the water trying to make somewhere I could sit to be completely surrounded by water to take some pics...anyway - when I walked up on the prim, my legs disappeared into it, even at the highest point of the prim, my feet were still missing. As I walked around the prim, I seemed to sink further down into it.
It didn't happen when I made a cube, I walked around just fine on those.

I also noticed the very slow rez of textures, and quite a few avatars with "missing image".

(1) I can concur with Right-click on name bubbles or attachments no longer will get you a profile like in previous versions.

(2) The default setting for underwater murkiness is too high (at least for me) but it can
be fixed:

World menu > Environment Settings > Environment Editor

Click Advanced Water Settings

Adjust the Fog Density Exponent to whatever you prefer (I'm using 1.0)

Then click Save to the default preset. If you dont do that it will revert the next time you log in.

Daniel

Sometimes parts of objects not visible - and sometimes complete avatars not visible (name and group tag showing).

Can anyone shed any light of a problem i have?

Having successuly removed the earliest Windlight version and installed the new one, and having played around with it a bit .....i found that I can't use atmospheric shaders. This means i don't get the lovely sky effects....but i do still get the water effects.

Anyway to cut a long story short, by using Windlight viewer, things seemed to have gotten sluggish in terms of movement and rezzing etc etc. I've made a decision to use the normal SL viewer whilst working in SL.....and switch to Windlight version when chilling out or being lazy.

My problem, having switched back to the normal SL Viewer....i notice that the water is now the same as that of the Windlight version....and yes, even my normal SL viewer is behaving slugglishly.

How do i get a SL viewer without Windlight in it? Show i remove the current SL viewer and try and download another copy?

Any tips welcome

The only thing I noticed, is i cant run it on high, everything moves in slow mo..but i absolutely love the new windlight, altho when other av's are rezzing near me, they have fuzzy edges, but it eventually clears up. I actually seem to run better tho, than the other version, and so many cool settings to play with..thank you LL!

I encountered faint white lines across my screen in Windlight, sometimes vertical, sometimes cris-crossing diagonally. It seemed they only appeared when I was facing the sun and I thought they might be some sort of attempt at lens flare. If they appeared while I was flying it almost seemed like I was going through rain or snow. Any body else see these?

I had my settings at Ultra. I am on a Mac G5 Quad, 3Gb ram, ATIx1900 card.

Wow...

This is great... I hope LL takes a look at this, or at the very least I should copy & paste and send it off to them. I posted because I am curious, and I'm guessing that a lot of these bugs are a result of operating system, and not the WindLight feature itself. I'm seeing some of the things you guys describe....but not to any serious degree. I keep my draw distance set lower than I would on the other viewer.... but if I want to take a distance shot, I don't have any problems turning it up and getting a good image. I did lose my hair after TP'ing around a few times..... relogged to get it back LOL

I'm guessing LL has a ways to go to get this feature juuuuust right, but it's beautiful and I think the potential is awesome. I hope we'll be able to use this Firstlook viewer a bit longer than the last one....I was soooo bummed when it wouldn't work after the updates.

Well I have a slight feeling that the windlight client is stabler then the regular one, but will need a few more days to know for sure. Neither slower nor faster on my system.

For the rest I can only envy the people with high end machines, as I play SL on a laptop with embedded intel graphic chipset. Its a dual core centrino with 2 gig memory laptop, but the graphic performance is very low-end, so I dont even get to check any of the Windlight settings, they are greyed out. No pretty water, nor pretty sky, but if the client is stabler then the old one, I for one will say YAY

Cheers, Marcel

Actually, this bug is inherit to all the SL clients. Just check the region of your bum for more details

Okay, figured out the aggressive culling issue, but the daylight contrast is my biggest gripe. If I want completely like RL, I'd just walk outside to get the eyestrain that way. Yeah, that is what happens to me with the default region setting... And while I love pretty, if I can't see it due to the eyes hurting, it's of no use to me. I'm going to twiddle around with the settings to see if I can't get it a little less bright and still keep the clear colors.

As I read all the many complaints all I need to ask is what did you guys expect? Don't you know by now every time they bring out something new it's either not complete as is the case here or it's bugged to the hilt.

Stay with your regular viewer until they finally complete this new one. I would say stay with your reg viewer so you don't go thru' all the bugs on the new one but I can't say that as the reg one has many of its own problems as we well know.

What good is it to be able to see nice pretty water and sky but the game runs terrible as is everything else?

First thing I noticed, one can no longer choose where to login. On the login screen, the option for Home/other sim is no longer there...

Preferences --> General --> Start Location --> Checkbox "Show Start Location at Login"

It is not checked at each clean install of any viewer.

I was having that issue...I deleted the regular Second Life Application Data folder and was then able to get in. Unfortunately, it looks like crap on my computer. Everything seems to consist of irregular bands of color, with no gradient between. I have a decent system, meeting or exceeding the stated recommendations, so I don't know what the problem is there.

Ann, it looks as though you have your graphics card set to 256 colors is all. Check your resolution, kk?

I've seen lots of inventory issues, one in particular that was very embarrasing.. I had just put on an outfit, and went out to a party.. Immediately upon arrival, I noticed the skirt part of the outfit was missing, and I was standing there in my bikini undies.. color me red!!! I checked inventory and it showed that the skirt was "worn".. By this time several guys commented on my cute bikini undies.... yikes!! I quickly put on a pair of pants, and they did rez and stay rezzed.. I removed the skirt and tried to re-wear it, to no avail... I've never seen that happen in the regular client... Since my house and club are very close to a water sim, and are up 170m, the sunsets and cloud effects with the Windlight client are unbelievable... Other than this one "bug", and some other less weird inventory issues, I think the Windlight client is as near to ready for release as any other client version LL has released... YMMV

Tas

Actually, I'd say this is wrong. Yes, this will have bugs in it. Lots of them. However, the point is to try it out anyway, and report those bugs. Let the Lindens fix them.

If nobody tries it, especially on the wide variety of operating system versions, graphics cards, drivers, cpus and preferences, most of these bugs would never even be known about.

More importantly, Ann...

Where did you get those trees? They're gorgeous!

Bodhisatva, In the edit menu, there is a check box, "Stretch Both Sides"... click that and you'll be able to do what you want to do.


For me, everything works great, except water. For some reason, it just won't make the pretty for me. Anyone else got this?

It's not set to 256.



They're by Joan Monstre, jmDesigns.