Windlight is here folks

just thought i'd say its here & u can download it now http://blog.secondlife.com/

Close the windows and pull down the shades.

Cool. Normally I've had bad luck with First Look viewers but Windlight may be the exception. Oh...what to do, what to do.

There's a First Look forum for discussing the First Look Windlight client in.

This new Windlight client also has the new Search function in it, so you get twice the testing goodness by trying it compared to the release candidate 1.18.5.

I've been away for a bit, someone mind telling me what this windlight I keep hearing about is (the last thing they added before my hiatus was voice)?

It's an update to the graphics system that will make everything look either 100% better or 100% worse.

I find that margaritas have a similar effect.

I'm assuming it's going to murder those of us who have to turn things to the minimal graphics settings?

Sheesh, I don't know if I been drinking the SL Windlight Kool-Aid, but its surprisingly smooth running and is a awesome update in the graphics.

I am pleased.

The water looks amazing! And I own a sim full of it!

Yeah, that. Wow.

I lost at least half my frame rate just to get SL to look the way I'm used to (shiny, water shaders, no windlight). It looks like I get full reflection at no noticeable drain, but I'd rather have my steady 10-15 FPS back .

The guess was that 20% would be able to make full use of WindLight, the rest would have varying experiences from better performance at "old SL" (no WindLight) to worse performance and worse visuals.

thank god i'm in that 20%

The new water effects on the ultra settings are simply mind blowing!

Kitty, are you talking about the previous beta release(s), or the new one Chaos just pointed to in this thread?

Today's release.

the water is amazing! everything looks so beautiful, but alas i too will prolly not be able to run it..my fps dropped way low to about 2-4 fps . i also noticed(unless its time for a new monitor)that avatars look darker than norm. oh well won't stop me from poppin in and sittin on the beach with a banana daq while the hub plays around with the settings

OK, I just checked Windlight out.

In many ways, it is beautiful. (For example, the water.)

But at this stage, everything is UNBEARABLY bright, and everything has this fringey, frizzled, tortured electrocuted edge to it. And the trees look funny.

But that is not the worst thing, oh no.

This is the worst thing:

A plum-colored wall looks deep orange at sunset. While its adjacent wall is still plum-colored.

Do you have any idea how bad plum looks next to blood orange?

Whereas without windlight, it stays more or less the same shade.

Kill me now.

coco

I am taking pictures, and I will add them here, if I can figure out how.

(Can someone tell me how?)

Well I'm finding the FPS hit too much on a really fast PC. I've reverted to the previous client.

I hate the unpredictable lighting effects on textures in Windlight. My beach becomes an illuminated panel in the midday glare and my anime avatar looks just ridiculous at certain times of day. Nothing has changed since our last look at Windlight in that regard.

The new glow attribute won't work/show if WindLight (Atmospheric Shaders) isn't enabled. I hope that's a bug, it worked just fine with the old viewer .

(Visibility under water is down to barely a few meters as well )

Glow won't fix the problem I'm trying to post pictures of.

I have a chandelier in there, with light-feature enabled, and that doesn't help. I tried putting it in glow and it just turned the chandelier fuzzy.

How can I attach my demo pics? how the heck are other people posting pics?

coco

They don't allow internal attachments here so I use an external site to host them. Like imageshack.us or photobucket. Photobucket provide a forum friendly link right after upload so you can just copy and paste the pic into your message. (Edit: ImageShack do too, but I think their way is slightly less intuitive.)

I don't use photobucket anymore; not since they took offense at my bewbie scarves.

It was a general comment, not in response to your post . I was looking forward to glow .

Upload them somewhere (Flickr, http://photobucket.com/, http://imageshack.us/, etc) and then just paste the URL or use the [ img ] [ /img ] tags if it's a direct link to a picture, like: .

I've just downloaded the new viewer and had a play with it. I have one thing to say.

O. M. G.

It probably doesn't hurt that my home location is in a water sim. The water effects are breathtakingly beautiful (quite literally). And I'm sure it helps a lot that I'm running a new, high-end gaming machine, so I can take advantage of the maximum levels of mindblowingness. My home and store have never looked as gorgeous as they do under Windlight - the water surface reflections, the refractions, the way that light now behaves like *light* rather than some sort of weird shadowless dream-vision. I am Offically Impressed.

Windlight is not without it's quirks even so. I had to tweak the settings a bit to get it looking great, and I won't even try to describe how the seabed looked under the default starting settings (*shudder*). I have no clue why things look heaps better with the "basic" button checked, or why I can't get the stunning water effects and the atmospherics (clouds and the like) happening at the same time - it seems to be one or the other, weirdly. If I have both checked, I get cool clouds but unappealing water. Given my location, I'm opting for the water effects for now, but it'd be great to be able to use both at the same time.

Kudos to LL for this one. There's still a few bugs to iron out, but if this is anything to judge by, it's gonna be STUNNING.

UPDATE: Here's a pic of my place under Windlight
http://www.flickr.com/photos/95715875@N00/2026971476/

OK, photobucket took the first picture, but won't take the second, so I just gave up and posted the pics on SLU.

Here's the link:

http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/showthread.php?t=2860

coco