Windlight: good or bad for SL?

PCI Express has been around for nearly 4 years now to my recollection. Hardly state of the art technology and something that would be too cutting edge for most program makers to utilise.

Maybe it has and maybe some of us are on a budget...

I recently upgraded my MB, CPU, RAM and HD's - but I had to do so on the AGP8x architecture because I already had the top of the range AGP8x NVidia Gfx card and could not justify the additional cost of replacing it when it works perfectly well, and with maxed out gfx settings, on the current SL and other 3d applications I use.

This will explain why the windlight viewer kept crashing my system - there was no mention in it's release that it was only compatible with PCIe

Make that 4. I have an ATI x1600. Fortunately I only saw this behavior once and briefly.

There are class 3 cards for the AGP bus. There are AGP versions of the NVidia 7600, 7800, and 7900, and of the ATI 1650, 1950, 2400, and 2600. Those are all sufficiently modern cards for full WindLight support, though they won't support the level of eye candy (not fast enough) that you'll get with an NVidia 8800. The last two ATI cards even have DirectX 10 support, not that it matters for Second Life.

To the best of my knowledge, there are no class 3 cards for the PCI (not PCI Express) bus, and it's not likely there ever will be. The PCI bus is just too slow for high-end video. AGP isn't nearly as bad; AGP 8X is approximately the same effective speed as PCIe x8, or half as fast as the PCIe x16 found in most modern systems.

Actually they updated the minimum supported requirements for the game with TBC, and will be updating them with WotLK as well. Admittedly, the gaming requirements for that game lag well behind the "curve" of technology and they intend to keep it that way. If you've seen some of the early alpha WotLK screenshots or trailers, you've probably seen the new fire graphics that are part and parcel of the updates to the games graphics engine. What they're studiously avoiding (and what most people talking about WoW graphics are whining about) is graphic bloat by reusing/recoloring textures which makes graphics load lighter and faster... instead of designing new textures and meshes for the thousands of items. As you can see with teh preformance differences- SL's method of "on teh fly" graphics loading and extreme number of textures in single places tends to produce a hell of a lot more errors and lag diffculties.

Which is something that can be accepted or at least tolerated by a smaller market. 9 million active accounts versus under a million active accounts is a big difference.

That said, in computer gaming it's generally accepted that computers become obsolete in 2-3 years. the only time you should expect your computer to last longer is if you're using it for web browsing and document production. If you play any games or put the computer through heavy daily use- expect to replace it every 2 years and understand that if it lasts 4 you're probably going to have difficulties with games.

This is, of course, a product of Moore's Law and Wirth's Law colliding.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law - Processor capacity doubles every 2 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law - Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

Such is the way of modern technology.

Not sure how to vote as I'm not sure about all the changes to the programme which make it a lot different to the normal one.
The difference between the 2 programmes is like chalk and cheese.
love June

I'm split about windlight.

Although I think that an update of the gfx subsystem is really due, by now, to keep up with the current state of 3d environments, and to increase immersion. There are a few things which worry me.

1. Like said before, the SL gfx subsystem hasn't really been updates since 2004, and since then SL grew exponentially. This means, a lot of the users aren't 'in it' for the great immersive gfx. (Although it's amazing to see what dedicated people have done within the limited possibilities). If (and only if) windlight forces these people to no longer be able to use SL without severely upgrading their hardware, this could antagonize that part of the population. Esp, as they're not 'here' for the gfx and scenery.

2. SL is about 'shared experiences'. A main component is that what I experience, is relatively comparable to what you experience. If windlight causes our experiences to wildly differ, based on environment settings, gfx hardware, preference setings etc. it will diminish this. For example, if one person on a romantic night on the beach, sees the moon reflected in the calm water, while the other only sees a blue flat area, it's a lot harder to be in the same mindset.

3. Actually an extension from point 2. SL is all about user generated content. Up till now, it was pretty easy to 'design for everybody'. An item looking good for the designer, 9 out of 10 times looked good for everybody else. Windlight could change this, where designers have no clue how their content will look for another person. Do you design stuff with windlight in mind, or with standard shaders? Do you add lighting effects in textures, or not? Do you colour you textures this way or that? etc. etc. Windlight makes designing stuff a lot harder, actually.


But i worry too much.

I'm fairly hopeful about it. When it first came out I didn't care, the frame-rates were horrible and the skies weren't that great. Now however the sky and water look fantastic, and if I turn them off I can get almost 3 times the frame-rate I would before.

Yeah there are some visual bugs still, but it's a firstlook so will get those fixed further down the line.

I think it will keep the graphically focused appeased for a while, and give us performance hungry a good boost.

my early experiences with it are:

They should improve shiny

They should improve local lighting (by the way I didn't use local lighting for 4 months, now I have to have it on all the time)

Ripple effects make my fish ripple madly, I can live with that

Underwater, NO! far too dark

My 'Heart' trees look flat but my neighbors sculpty trees look amazing.

Our eyes need to adjust to the new light.

On the whole I think it's a good thing.

Where's the pie?

thanks for that, I will try it today


*update*

I've tried it, and it is working well for a good length of time without the distortions. I posted on the blog about it where Torley gives a tutorial about the Lag Meter and Windlight Viewer.

I have a computer that can handle windlight, however I have noticed that my draw distance is effected even if using the nearist draw I have to wait for it too long..
Yeah the sky and the top of the water look great, but underwater I can not see.. And I have a scuba area on my land.. Even wearing a mask with lights doesn't help! I just can't see and using windlight that area I spent weeks on is useless! So unless this changes no I'm not going to use it.

2ndly and most importantly! The avaitars look horrible!! All the work that went into making skins, finding the right one.. Getting your look right is out the window!!
Windlight gives the avaitars that truely cartoonish look!! The only setting in world that might flatter in Windlight is midnight!!!

Sure you get pretty skies and floating clouds and sparkling waters.. but Im not certain this is a good tradeoff..

Need shiny too, come on.... and full brite... omg... No Im not impressed other than the pretty sunsets & rises... woopeedooo.. "sigh"

Um... if it's on your land, why not change the settings to suit the location? You can fix the underwater thing pretty easily. Heck, you can fix the whole thing, sun placement, clouds, water stuff, the whole 9 yards.

It's nowhere near perfect, yes, but it's not been released yet. Remember we're using a First Look viewer. One can safely assume that this is NOT the final product.

As for designing for the lowest common denominator, re: Computer age...

I disagree completely. They should be designing for the middle, or slightly above.
That's the only way to move forward. As new advances in processing, graphics, yadda yadda occur, we're going to have to upgrade. Designing for only the highest-end computers is ridiculous. Designing for two- or three-year old technology is just as ridiculous.

There is a little hope.....I just found a Visiontek X1550 PCI. Yeah! There are not many around but It is supposed to work and is listed as a Class 3 card.

Bought mine this morning at Best Buy, US$139.00, on sale US$52.99! What a piece of luck! Also Tiger Direct has them in stock.
Better hurry tho, lol.

/me sits patiently at work, lovelingly stroking the box, wishing it were time to go home.......

I had no idea that DX9 PCI cards even existed. I have no idea how good it will work, but this is indeed a rare card. Shader Model 3 support will at least get you ripple water.

Shh! Don't say that! The folks that can afford the shiny machine wiht the shiny 300+ dollar video card will whine loudly. THEN the elitists like Osprey will come out and swat you!.

Good, bad, indifferent, its going to happen, since LL never met a useless feature or eye-candy that they didn't bump ahead of fixing the bugs. I can run it....looked at it, went 'Oh, eye candy at half the framerate' and went back to my old client.

Blizzard has the right idea, which probably explains their playerbase size and income, relative to LL's.

Half the frame-rate,
Super-ugly avis,
All my shiny turned to invis or glass...

...so I can look at clouds?

Nopies thanks!

Before Windlight ...



After ... without settings maxed out (which my computer handled nicely)



Some of the trees look a bit odd from certain angles and, weirdly, the floor in one (not both) of the upstairs rooms has gone invisible. But still ... OH MY.

This is very much on my mind, which is why I have been avidly following this thread/poll. The numbers are telling me to design for windlight and I have started to photograph my products in windlight, and stating so in my SLEX listings.

I think the situation is much like other entertainment technologies, movies, music recordings, HDTV and the like. The more sophisticated technologies demand higher production values. I welcome the challenge.

Where were the really impressive clouds? In every picture I see of Windlight, I see realistic clouds instead of the puffy ones in normal viewer. But after spending about 20 min with the Windlight viewer, I do not see the clouds! Is it a sim based thing or is it grid wide? I don't really understand.

To answer the OP's question, I think it could be good for sl. As long as there would be an option to turn off windlight for those who have older pc's or notebooks.

I wonder what the correlation is between "people willing to shell out for SL goods" and "people willing to shell out for computer upgrades" is?

By the way, there was a thread here that mentioned somewhat abnormal PCI (apparently not PCI-E) video card that's Windlight capable, regularly around a hundred bucks, on sale for 50 dollars. So there might be some hope of upgrading an old, video challenged but otherwise still working for you computer. Regular price I think was about an hundred bucks.

People refer to Windlight as producing fluffy clouds but so far as I can tell it produces flat clouds on a sky dome. The look nice but I'd say the old particle clouds look more "fluffy": to me. Fluffy makes me think of 3D. Windlight clouds look like movies on a dome.

If you keep flying and looking at the sky, do you pass clouds by in Windlight like you would in real life, or will the cloud at the horizon stay at the horizon no matter how far you travel?

I've gone back to the pre-Windlight SL. I like being able to move, turn around, have my whole house rez with all the textures, etc.

so picky, you are ..

Well seeing most ot the population won't pay some one $1US for an hours teaching then it's not surprising they don't want to upgrade their camping income machines.

Just downloaded it out of curiosity. So far looks pretty dang nice. So I'd vote "sure it's good for SL."

[Edit: UGH on the FPS! Normally I'm around 70-80 FPS; Windlight knocked me right down to 15. Jittery and hard to even move.]

Which is the best JIRA issue to mention FPS?