Are You Happy With The Current Sky?

I was wondering, aside from being a somewhat more realistic sky just for those
who have the latest hardware, what was the thinking behind implementing WindLight.

Were a large number of residents requesting this feature?

I'm happy with the sky the way it is...and I would prefer LL resources be
put into existing issues which largely have to do with performance and support.

At the very least, WindLight should be an option.

- Infrared

It had better be an option. There was nothing wrong with the old sky, and if it lets me keep my frame-rate the same then I'd rather have it over Windlight. Windlight doesn't even look THAT great IMO, give us colour changing options for the existing sky and it's just fine.

The only thing 'outdated' about the viewer is LL's short-sighted development, which seems to lack any understanding of improving what exists, and instead just wants to cripple it to get slightly better things no-one cares about added in.

I mean, 1.10 had vertex shaders a whole age ago, what happened to them? They looked better and for some systems IMPROVED performance. They promised they'd work on it and make them available for Mac too, where did that go?

You need an option for being happy with the current one but also being quite happy with the new stuff, assuming the work the bugs out.

/me abstains from voting.

You don't think they'd spend all that money to buy out a company only to have it be optional?

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/05/21/windlight-atmospheric-rendering-comes-to-second-life/

I d/loaded the new sky option a few days ago and for the most part I was impressed with it.

However... as a content creator I was alarmed with the radical change it had on all of the textures.

With our current 'sky settings' people have the option to force the sun to sunrise, noon, sunset etc... but they also have the option to 'Revert to region default'.

I would strongly recommend the option to revert to the region default setting remain.

In fact I would prefer upon teleporting to an island/parcel the system automatically revert to the existing sky settings set by the island/parcel owner which will allow the visitor to see exactly what the creator intended them to see.

~Sky~

i do appreciate the photographic opportunities available thanks to WindLight, but i dislike many things about the implementation I've seen on FirstLook. my biggest irk is with how it changes the appearance of our creations. we had four variables to consider before, but now the lighting options seem endless making it difficult to predict how your designs will look under conditions which may well vary from sim to sim.

my eyes are like halogen lamps at night time, but i figure that's a bug. my skin colour goes from pale to puerto rican depending on the time of day also. not good. not good at all. =(

I don't recall any large demand from us for them to buy a company to radically change the sky for them. Forcing users to accept something they don't want, just because LL paid money for it would be idiotic. They should instead consider if buying a company just to change the sky was the right course of action.
It's about giving the users, ie; the CUSTOMERS what they want, not spending money on whatever they feel like and forcing us to make do with it at the cost of our entire game experience.

I voted yes but it's not the sky that I like better or worse, its the lighting model.

The windlight lighting model as is (this may change of course) is WAY too harsh, ther eis no subtly. The current SL lighting engine can actually lok VERY nice. But windlilght blows out highlghts 10x worse and flattens the contrast of all individual textures. And this is even after spending atleast 30 mintues adjusting controls to tame it as much as possible.

Oh and I am also not going to be happy about giving up 15-20% of my frame rate to this. Hopefully THAT will be fixed as well.

So give me the new clouds and atmosphereic effects, but keep the current lighting model (Well fix the jerky sinset lighting changes of course )

I made a Jira entry regarding this if you want to vote for it: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1037

I voted no because I thought you meant the current WindLight sky.

I liked the sky just fine until LL screwed up the sun. If it weren't for the current sun I could vote yes, but owing to its presence, I can't really vote yes. Slow texture loading making the clouds to appear as gray textures is also a problem with the current/old style sky.

The 'new' sun was in fact the WindLight sun with singularly inappropriate settings, installed as part of the preparation for Windlight.
With judicious tweaking you can get a far more realistic result. You can also screw it up horribly. Earlier today I managed to produce a cubic sun! But then I'm gifted...