Where can I get Shadow Draft from?

Lol I meant the graphics card, not XP. People keep seeming to want to do things with older graphics cards that..well..just isn't supposed to happen with older graphics cards. And once again, this is not a completed product. If anything, it's gone as far as the creator wants to take it, and they just don't want to take it all the way until everything works perfect. It takes time to make sure things work for various cards and systems, and this is not a high priority project at all, as far as I can tell. (Along with the user made-ness, which I'm unsure about)

And bah, XP is 'higher' than anything else! *grumblegrumble*

It's LL made, it's Dave (aka Runtai Linden I think? ) that's working on it.

Edited to clarify that the code branch is from LL, they're not distributing a compiled client though so what is user-made is the actual executable, but the source it's based on is work done by a Linden.

I added to my post after you posted .

As long as it doesn't turn out to be another WindLight fiasco (affects lower/mid range cards even when it's *not* turned on) I think it's alright though, it just needs to be truly optional.

Dave did point out that the new lighting would eventually be separated from the shadows since that bit of it can run on older cards. And it all depends on what time frame they have in mind for it as well, I seem to recall 1-2 years from the SLdev disucssions.

Well, you see, as a pre-alpha sort of thing clearly one could not object that much, but the indication is that the system is very much specific to 8-series GeForce cards - Linden commentary was that SL would still run for the "cheapskates" of this world, and that "Second Life will still run on that POS laptop your boss let you take out of the recycling bin at work." (that POS laptop being one without an 8-series GeForce). https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/sldev/2008-May/009930.html if you don't believe me and no, it is not out of context... "GeForce 7 was introduced in June 2005, which means it would be starting preschool in the fall. It's old enough to talk in complete sentences, it's beyond obsolete." The arrogant tech-superior swine. No offence.

Hey Kitty, where did you get the info that its an LL thing? Or that Dave is the person working on it?

The name on the .txt help file is different.

<never mind, I will not return>

I don't believe Shadow Draft is something community made. I really don't think LL would bother putting up something community made in their own SVN so it has to be official (I thought it was community made at first too). Probably we should ask LL about it.

The core coding is LL origins, they are noted as being the authors.

They probably only tested/developed it on rig that has XP installed, as do the vast majority of SL users, including a nVidia GC.

I have heard that LL introduced shadows in SL some 2 years ago, if not more, but was abandoned because the vast majority of users systems couldn't handle it.

Even in its current form, this will do for machinimast, what flexi did for designers. Any serious machinimast will already have a system that can cope with the additional loadings.

That's really sad to hear. Why couldn't they have just left it as a graphics setting however, for someone to enable only if they could use it... or as a separate client for who could run it. I deeply hope this time they won't stop and abandon this idea, it's too good and it's not worth it we need shadows too.

I assume it's because then they'd be keeping support and bug fixes going for something very very few users would be actually taking advantage of. It's one case where 'I'd rather they fixed X' might really apply. If they have to keep that stable as well as everything else, then it takes more work, and more time, and if people aren't using it, it might not be worth it.

Of course, this is my assumption, and as I often say, I could be wrong.

Yeah I see your point and I think you are right, but however shadows are something that's becoming important now. I mean almost all games or other 3D spaces have them, and users notice and complain that the realism of sims is too bad without them. I mean having a completely closed building and having everything be lit inside like it's outside during the day... really doesn't look right. I think Linden does need one way or another to have dynamic shadows in and fix this already, as SL's realism on this point can't remain behind forever. They can't turn back on this one... I hope very much they won't.

Lets be honest.. eachtime LL introduce some eye candy, they get a blooded nose by the vast majority of the community, myself included, to make the platform stable first.

It is not surprising that they should have at least a few people experimenting for future add-ons, of which windlight and voice are but two that made into release. Shadows are viable, but will require better systems in which to run it on. Given the vast complaints of people being unable to get the client to run on unsupported cpu's, gc's etc.. it is hardly surprising they have put shadows on the back burnner.

If they introduced multiple clients with different capabilities to suit those with less than good systems, up to those that have very quick and powerful beasts, apart from causing additional work for multiple groups of programmers trying to stabalise each version with compatibility issues, it would perhaps create some sort of 'class war'. We have seen the stupidity of people that discrimenate against those they see as 'chump change grabbers' against those that 'pay their way', let alone esculating that with the 'haves' and 'have nots'.

At least LL had the forethought to release the source code into the community, so we can decide for ourselves.

Ok but once again, why would it bother older computers if such new features can be optional settings you turn on or off from Preferences? Normally that should fix everything and if your computer is too slow you just don't enable something such as a certain shader. Same should be for shadows I think. Or are the changes that big so they permanently change something in the client that makes it incompatible with some computers either way?

Shadow-draft should run just fine on non-supported video cards, you just won't get shadows at best if you try to turn it on or just plain crash, but without flipping the RenderDeferred debug setting it's just a plain internal build that closely resembles what we know as RC6. If you can't get it to log on and behave normally without flipping the switch then it's likely due to hacking it together from pieces of an official RC rather than the actual support files that are in the source drop.

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And as much as I love the shadows, they're not even close to anywhere that would hint at it being even "first look" ready even on supported hardware or anything the majority of people would accept as being "acceptable". Shadows on avies are little gray/black pixel dots, the last few builds have had severe problems with shadows overlapping transparent textures and HUDs were non functional and trying to click on them crashed the viewer in last week's build, invisiprim don't work or do work from build to build, etc.

Debating on which hardware the "draft" should support would compare to wondering why an in-production movie exists solely on film and not on DVD. It doesn't make sense to support anything other than what Dave is using himself since it's simply about exploring what's possible and how to go about it. There's likely not even a commitment that shadows will ever evolve into a real main viewer feature. It could be that a few weeks down the line they decide it's simply not possible to get an acceptable performance even on brand new cards and abandon the whole attempt.

Like I said in another topic, dynamic shadows always seemed as something easy to make for me. There are a lot of games who have them and they work very well on slower computers too, though the system in SL would be different. Like I said however, they can't throw this one away. They gotten far enough and we can't stay without such features forever, so one way or another they must make them his time.

Hmm... maybe I better understand why the viewer is so unstable and incompatible now after thinking about this. Till now I accused Linden Lab that they keep the viewer incompatible with older computers because they have hidden businesses with computer brands to force us to upgrade to be able to run SL. Not saying that's entirely untrue but maybe it is true that it's probably hard to keep SL compatible at this level of detail. Problem is there are so many games with rendering more complex then SL, and there's almost never any hardware incompatibility with what I had in most cases. SL was the first 3D application I hear doesn't work with certain video cards so that surprised me, though to be honest I'm still not sure why each model of video card must determine compatibility like that.

Lastly, I would like to ask those who got the Shadow Draft system working: Does it eat much more FPS when shadows are enabled? Do things go much more slower? How much FPS did you loose with shadows compared to the one without them? Just curious hehe, many would be curious about this if it is an upcoming feature which I still hope it will be

SL doesn't have anything precomputed which is a rather big disadvantage compared to actual games where a lot, if not most, of the content will be tightly controlled and be static.

From 40-60fps to high single digit-15fps on a 8600GT. You can't separate the new per-pixel/all-lights lighting model from the shadows though, although it likely is the shadow portion that causes the rather dramatic decrease in fps.

My last card was a FX5200 so I'm really just used to that FPS range and it doesn't really bother me . I can imagine that others would find it unacceptable though.

It's also not going to be very representative of the end-product in any case, it's likely highly unoptimized for ease of debugging and Lindens indicated they're considering on still introducing artifical limits on the number of lights displayed at once and the last few revisions seem to clip/stop displaying shadows at a certain distance.

Yeah I'm sure they'll find ways to improve the FPS I hope. Best would be to let us select the maximum draw distance for shadows manually from Preferences. They should also make sure shadows are not rendered where they are fully hidden (such as behind a prim or out of the avatar's FOV). A shadow quality slider would also help, as lower quality shadows could further improve performance if needed. These could be the main way to improve performance with them.

Personally I would have found the best idea of shadows a black + alpha snapshot from the sun's position that would be projected over every prim, avatar and terrain in a way to simulate shadows. Even though screenshotting an entire sim every sun frame would be a bit hard, it could have probably been better if it was just one projected texture with techniques to fit them correctly. Or even better, a single snapshot from above that is stretched and skewed accordingly to the sun's position.

I got the whole ball of wax working on my system, even if I did have to drop back to XP, as it wouldn't fire up on Vista.

At that time of testing, Sim pings were fluctuating badly, along with packet loss, so judging the actual performance would not have been even an average.In any event, none of us can judge this, simply on the basis that it is not a release version, its not even beta.

Given the amount of time we spend dressing a lot of scenes with shadows and lighting effects, combined with lighting, atmospheric etc settings, it always seems to be a halfway house when an avatar comes into the scene that has no shadows. Using even this version of workable shadows will, in my opinion, lift the qualities of that layer of effects.

I don't believe enabling shadows at this stage of development, is simply to have it as a singular check box. Those that experienced the shadows to be no more than grey washed out pixels, perhaps do not have sufficient contrast depth on their screen/GC combinations. I adjusted my client environment settings and got some excellent results.
What is preventing me going full out with the shadows client, is simply that there are still quite a way to go to make it fully useable all the time, therefore some movies would appear too different to others. Until we can use it for all our movies, we will simply keep experimenting and updating as more versions are released (which I hope will be soon).

For me, with 8600 GT and Q6600 (Quad core 2.4GHz cpu) it went from 40-60 fps to an average of around 25, aside from when things were rezzing around me.

Odd that we'd get the same before range but such a different after range .

I'm using a very early draft though since it looks better in my opinion / more stable (fewer bugs) than the last ones so could be the later ones are more optimized already. I'll compile the last drop and see what FPS I get with that .

Usually I was running around 10-15 FPS, under normal conditions.

Zoomed way into the terrain, it cranked up to around 51 FPS.

Zoomed way out, encompassing an entire SIM, it dipped down to about 9 or 10 FPS.

Win XP Pro 32bit
Intel Core 2 Extreme Q6850 @ 3.00 GHz
2GB DDR2 RAM (I had a gig go bad on me)
GeForce 8800 GTX 768 MB

All settings up, with shadows.

I love it

8000 series are years old and very common amounst gamers, dirt cheap nowdays too, Local computers stores don't keep anything less than an 8800 on the shelf, I just priced brand new 8800 1Gb for $120, so brought a 9800 1Gb for $320 instead, Australia just seems cheap for computer parts I guess.
If someone is going to write code for a prototype software they aren't going to write it with backward and multi-card compatibility in mind, they pick their machine or something common across the market that isn't going to make the job more dificult or make the effect look crudy because it is working it's butt off to acheive it.

One of the main reasons LL have to do so much work on cross platform and GC compatiblities is because SL is an OpenGL platform. I don't profess to have been a fly on the wall of LL when it first started, but I suspect the OpenGL route was chosen because the source code is opensource. I don't suspect they ever allowed themselves to dream that SL could be this big, or have the effect it has on other innovators, in bringing this platform to market. Hindsight is a great gift.