Windlight: good or bad for SL?

i think its a bad idea, alot of users (including myself) have an older pc with older graphics cards, as long as you can turn atmospheric shaders off, i don't think it will be such a BAD thing.

Older systems and older video cards here. I think the new Windlight Views will be a good thing. Those with High end graphics can have their gleaming new skies, those of us with older cards will be able to turn it off and have higher frame rates than we had with the previous views and/or higher detail in our environments.

I"m on a laptop, so yes, low end graphics card. Can't see the pretty clouds or the awesome water, but I hope those who can, enjoy it. Hopefully, Papa Noel will magically turn my laptop into a gleaming desktop...lol.

A good thing! Most us with older computers will probably replace them in a year or two. By that time, if we still come to SL, we'll be thankful for the innovations occurring now.

Honestly I believe it is too early in its development to label as good or bad especially since we can still log in to other viewers such as the Candidate, Regular, and Beta. I have an older ATI graphics card (Radeon 9700 Pro with the latest drivers and catalyst) and Windlight renders beautifully for me as far as the sky and water. In this latest release, the avatar and object color saturation seems a little better under the Medium/default setting it came with. Unfortunately, my card is either partially broken or a bug exists that makes the strangest distortions appear on my screen making it unusable. It's hard to describe; it's like a single pixel is stretched from a single point to make a triangle. It happens mostly when I pan around with the camera controls. I have high hopes for Windlight as it probably will attract the types of people who say "SL's graphics suck!", and wont use it for that reason alone.

2 year old puter and Second Life has made my system obsolete. There is no graphic support for the cool features of Windlight unless your system supports PCI Express architecture.

I have gone through all of the class settings and the only support is for Class 3. These are all PICe cards.

Thanks SL.

/mumbles.....adds it to the list of stuff being thrust down my throat.

Windlight is good for SL. The last major graphics upgrade for SL was version 1.1, which was back in October 2003. That upgrade gave us (among other things) more detailed terrain, shiny, clothes that move in the wind, skirts and males gained their ability to adjust their "package". After four years, a graphics update (in my opinion) was well overdue.

Fluffy new clouds hardly qualify as a "graphics update" .

(Yes I know there's new occlusion culling too, but so far that just makes things completely vanish after a while so it falls short of being an "update" as well)

WindLight is good for Second Life. It's not at all sensible to think SL should limp along at the speed of outdated computer technology. It's pushing into uncharted territory and everyone who isn't able to follow will catch up when the level of hardware as commonly owned by people rises to that point.

It's quite a bit more than that. The viewer is currently a First Look, too, so there will probably be improvements to the way WindLight behaves.

Blizzard don't take this point of view and they're doing very nicely because of it.

They function in an entirely different manner. You are comparing apples and kumquats.

They still resist calls for funkier graphics on the basis that plenty of people have older computers.

I like the environmental visuals. The sunsets are awesome...untill you look at a building and every little flaw that "wasn't" there before sticks out like a sore thumb. Or when you enter a building with no windows and the sun is still shining on the interior walls.

Don't like the way Windlight makes peoples skins and builds look.
Tired of waiting for textures to load with Windlight, it's the main reason I went back to the original client.
Don't like the search changes. Nothing wrong with the way search is.

Keep the water and sky like Windlight and everything else the same as the current client.

OK

The water is really pretty and the clouds are nice. But since Windlight, my FPS has dropped from 80 to 30. So I'm just not convinced whether the pretty water is really worth such a huge drop in performance. and I can get rather nice clouds using a mega prim.

The drop in performance is even worse when I fly up near the old particle clouds. My FPS can drop to 10 when I go near those things. The old particle clouds in Windlight are pure evil.

What's more worrying is that I disable all the fancy features and yet I don't get my 80 FPS back.


Mixed feelings...

SL is slow enough for me as it is.Windlight makes it worse,on both my 6 month old laptop and one year old desktop. Also,I must have crappy graphic cards,because I see no pretty water or clouds.

Yes most people I would imagine cant see windlight

also this problem coming too

cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/11/21/internet-gridlock.html

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/11/21/internet-gridlock.html

The way they have it at the present time: It's a terribly bad idea.

If they were able to make and keep it so everyone could use it- in other words keep the system running correctly by repairing the majority of the things gone wrong in sl- then it would be ok. But we all know that's asking for way too much.

Bottom line: Bad idea

I don't use it, because it doesn't work on my hardware. Or to be precise, it works worse on my hardware than the current client does.

When Windlight was first introduced, I knew it would make my computer obsolete, and I started saving to but a new one. Many months later, I am on the cusp of buying that new system. And even then, the Lindens working on the project can't clearly state that it wiill work well on the new hardware that I will be buying.

From what I have seen in the First Look clients myself, and in the pictures others have posted... Any decision of 'good' or 'bad' will rest on how fast they shove it down our throats, and how many of the glaring bugs in the current implementation get fixed before they decide "it's good enough on most mid to high-end systems, let's release it!".

It will make a HUGE difference in user experience between those with Windlight-capable hardware and those with lower-end systems. Water, skies, and avatar appearances all will be totally subjective. Until they get it to where a sim or parcel owner can define default settings that everyone will experience unless explicitly overridden, then there will be NO way for builders or other content creators to have any idea how good or how bad a product will look. If you don't have a killer system, you may as well give up on building and selling content, because you'll be blind to how the high-end customers will see it.

[/QUOTE Unfortunately, my card is either partially broken or a bug exists that makes the strangest distortions appear on my screen making it unusable. It's hard to describe; it's like a single pixel is stretched from a single point to make a triangle. It happens mostly when I pan around with the camera controls. I have high hopes for Windlight as it probably will attract the types of people who say "SL's graphics suck!", and wont use it for that reason alone.[/QUOTE



Unfortunatly I too have this exact problem. I love Windlight but since the latest update I can't use it because of this bug. I have a Radeon 1600XT with 512 megs of ram and 2 gigs of sys ram. There is no way i should be having this problem. I have tried to disable WL but it doesn't help. I have had to fall back to an older viewer to feed my addiction

I thought FPS was now capped at around 45 FPS to match the physics and stop inefficient load? Or put another way, if you achieve FPS over this you are not getting any better performance/quality than you would at 45FPS. The knowledge base itself says that 30 FPS is as smooth as broadcast television and is a good framerate to have so you're not losing out at 30 FPS.

As regards Windlight, I love it but I am running top end. I cannot express how beautiful parts of SL now look and I literally now do sit down and just pan around and enjoy the eye candy on offer. For those who haven't downloaded it or are running low spec you have no idea how much better SL looks and I hope you get your new PCs or download it soon.

There are some rendering problems and bugs with it still but as far as performance, I've found it to be just as stable as the main viewer. I'm no graphics expert so excuse me if I don't know the appropriate term but, there are the occasions when you pan back to something you were looking at and half of it has disappeared and then trees are not rendered at all well with half one side of a tree appearing as if in shadow while the other half is in bright sunshine even though the tree shoulkd appear as an even light rendering or a blended fade. A lot of my terrain textures are not being reproduced properly if at all in some cases. Overall though it's a positive move forward and a lot more stable than most SL introductions. In time when people have upgraded PCs and/or GFX cards it will be a lot more stable and less glitchy and you'll see what a welcome introduction it was.

hi =)

i have the same problem. disabling the open gl vertex buffer objects fixes that problem, but you loose a few fps

edit: seems to be an ati problem since 3 people with ati cards have that bug

Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+ (1999 MHz)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP (Service Pack 2)
DirectX version: 9.0c
GPU processor: GeForce 7300 GT
ForceWare version: 162.18
Graphics Memory: 256 MB
pc ram 1 gig


not a super computer by any means, windlight with everything maxed out it runs great
i've been using it since the 1st day it was put out and never went back, its the most best thing to ever happen to second life, well since i joined at least....

Well I guess if we shouldn't upgrade the graphics this year , should we ever upgrade it or stay in C64 mode for the next 10 years, till everyone has upgraded to 21st century computers.
When the opposition turns up with windlight like graphics, real performance, customer support and a new world to build/explore, SL oldbies can stay in SL 2007 and sell retextured prims to each other till they pull the plug.