Is anyone else noticing this, or is it just me? In the Windlight viewer, every shiny object now seems to have a random degree of brightness. Most look almost like they have Glow turned on. Some appear half way normal, but with ridiculously washed out specular highlights. Others appear blackened, with extremely high contrast in the shine. No shiny object looks right.
Adjacent objects with the same degree of shine can appear radically different from each other. Here are some screenshots:
My USS Defiant. As you can see, the whole thing appears to glow, with the exception of a few prims, which have the "half normal" effect I described above. In actuality, all the prims of the hull are set to medium shine, no glow. The base texture is just a simple brushed metal. The ship should appear gray and shiny, not white and glowing.
My sculpted Cylon. This actually has the same texture on it as most of the Defiant's hull, just a simple brushed metal that I often use as a placeholder while I'm working on the finalized textures for a given model, and it's also got the same medium shine on it. From a distance, the Cylon glows white, just like the Defiant. But when I zoom in closer, the brightness of the glow dims almost to a blackish tone. The overly high contrast makes the Cylon appear way too shiny. The only difference is the Cylon has a medium gray "color" on it (via the Color field in the editor), and the Defiant has the default white color.
My front walkway. This just has a very simple wood plank texure on it, with a low shine. Notice that each panel has a different amount of overblown washout than the next, even though they all have the same texture and the same amount of shine.
Again, is anyone else seeing this sort of thing, or is it just me? It seemed to start around 4 p.m. SL time yesterday, as best I can tell. At least that was the first time I logged in and saw it. I had been on earlier in the day yesterday, and everything was fine then.
I know there are server updates going on that are sparking all kinds of strange behavior across the grid, but I doubt that's the problem since I can't see how a change to the server software could affect client-side graphics like this. I also can't imagine that it's a driver issue, since nothing on my system has changed recently. The Windlight client was working just fine with my current drivers until yesterday afternoon. Anyone have any ideas?
Here are my system specs, in case anyone's wondering:
2.66 GHz Core2 Extreme (QX6700)
(2) GeForce 8800GTX
EVGA 680i SLI motherboard
2.5 GB DDR2 RAM
(5) WD Raptor 150GB hard drives
(1) WD Caviar 750GB hard drive
Tagan 1100W power supply
Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Exteme Audio