Welcome to the Second Life Forums Archive

These forums are CLOSED. Please visit the new forums HERE

FirstLook Windlight v1.18.5.73655
Lexxi Gynoid
#'s 86000, 97800
Join date: 6 Aug 2007
Posts: 3,732
11-15-2007 14:41
From: Brenham Beale
I'm getting higher framerates when in Fullscreen mode, which is a first. On top of that, going into Wireframe mode doesn't drop my framerates into single digits. In some situations, I actually get better framerates in that mode.

I don't know what they did but I'm getting better framerates with the First Look viewer than the current release candidate (I made sure the graphics were the same, which was basically the High quality setting).

I get the feeling LL may very well be able to bring out both Havok4 and WindLight at the same time in the next major version release. Looks very promising.

Yes, I'm doing better with the First Look than the normal viewer. Didn't crash (yet; and I'm sure . . ) and was able to successfully navigate sim crossings in a flying machine.
_____________________
Her Royal Highness Buttercup Meow the XXI
Lexxi Gynoid
#'s 86000, 97800
Join date: 6 Aug 2007
Posts: 3,732
11-15-2007 14:43
From: Brenham Beale
Doing that did work, although I find it odd that Avatars that are closer get impersonated while others much farther away don't get impersonated.

These Avatar Impersonators remind me of old school 16-bit RPGs though.

Cue the Final Fantasy battle theme! It's Garn as RedXII!

Wow . . that is great! :)
_____________________
Her Royal Highness Buttercup Meow the XXI
Haravikk Mistral
Registered User
Join date: 8 Oct 2005
Posts: 2,482
11-16-2007 02:27
I'm fairly pleased with the Windlight viewer, I can play on almost Ultra settings (I have to bump down draw distance and object detail but that's same as pre-Windlight) and get much the same frame-rates that I did before.

I do however notice that with Atmospheric Shaders (ie Windlight itself) turned on, nightime isn't actually all that dark. Day-time is also rather bright, I think that the default day cycle should be darker on the whole, as local lights don't look very good without a "Night-time brightness" 0.00 equivalent.
To see what I mean here, turn off Atmospheric Shaders and go into "Hardware settings", set night-time brightness to 0.00, local-lights have a much nicer effect when you do this (though unlit areas become very dark).

I am however probably going to switch off the new skies and water reflections. While it's very nice, I'm interested to see what kind of frame-rate I can get without now that we have faster culling, trees, avatar impostors and so-on.
_____________________
Computer (Mac Pro):
2 x Quad Core 3.2ghz Xeon
10gb DDR2 800mhz FB-DIMMS
4 x 750gb, 32mb cache hard-drives (RAID-0/striped)
NVidia GeForce 8800GT (512mb)
Stephen Zenith
Registered User
Join date: 15 May 2006
Posts: 1,029
11-16-2007 02:36
From: Haravikk Mistral

To see what I mean here, turn off Atmospheric Shaders and go into "Hardware settings", set night-time brightness to 0.00, local-lights have a much nicer effect when you do this (though unlit areas become very dark).


I guess unlit areas *should* be very dark at night :)
_____________________
Hiro Queso
503less
Join date: 23 Feb 2005
Posts: 2,753
11-16-2007 04:01
Well I spent most of yesterday building with Windlight, and so thought I would share how I got on. I mentioned earlier in the thread that I crash in double figures using the regular viewer and suspect it's a Vista compatibility issue. Well using Windlight yesterday, I only crashed once! A vast improvement, and even that crash may not have been down to the viewer: I found that I was unable to modify my own prims, and upon checking the perms, they had changed to no modify. Relog fixed it. So either

(a) I've been very unlucky with crashes on the regular viewer
(b) I've been very luck with lack of crashes with Windlight
(c) The Lab have fixed the problem for both viewers re:Vista compatibility
(d) What ever is at the root of the vista compatibility issues in the regular viewer is not present in Windlight.
(e) Something else that escapes me.

I'm going back to the regular viewer today, and then Windlight again tomorrow - and that may eliminate (a), (b) and (c), though I appreciate this is not an ideal statistical sample size lol.

My general thoughts on Windlight: I do like the way light falls on the outside of the builds; the high contrast makes for a more realistic look. However, it's that high contrast that makes the inside of buildings look terrible, and I think that negative outweighs the more realistic 'outside' look quite substantially. Until we are able to set how specific prims render light, I think it is much better to turn the contrast way down - it is much easier to create high contrast effects outside with textures than it is to eliminate unwanted contrast inside. I also found that building with such high contrast started to get very heavy on the eyes after a while, and it isn't as easy to see fine details as it is with the regular viewer.

As for the sky & water, well they speak for themselves, they're gorgeous. But for building, even with the crashes, I will probably use the regular viewer more than Windlight while the contrast is so high.
1 2 3