Windlight is here folks

Can't see those without a registered SLU account.

Oh golly. Well, I'll try photobucket again later.

coco

Thank you, Pastrami Linden, et al, for the very fist thing to put a huge smile on my face this entire otherwise extremely shitty day!

I'm with Kitty, my framerate is taking a licking, but it's still usable.. what I'm seeing is incredible, it's like really seeing Second Life for the first time.

Coco, I would imagine that there are a great many textures out there, particularly ones that were created and optimized specifically for Second Life, which will need to be re worked to look right under Windlight. I can see it now.. a new texture market explosion of "Windlight Optimized" textures..

The castle I'm looking at right now though, with time set to sunrise, is just stunning.

Clouds still seem to be following the accelerated 4 hour day/night cycle, so that's like watching time lapse, but oh well.. 'tis what it is.

I can hang with this, methinks, as my new "regular" viewer.

Oh, and yeah, the water is fantastic.

I don't need anything for Christmas now.. I've gotten it tonight!

Can someone double check something for me? I have a texture that isn't rendering (water texture) and before I file a bug report I'd like to make sure it isn't just me...

http://slurl.com/secondlife/The%20Botanical%20Gardens/229/71/27

(There should be water in that fountain, not grey boxes...)

Thanks!

I doubt it. We've just had two fabulous explanations for this in response to a similar post by Coco on another forum.

http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/showpost.php?p=41503&postcount=2
http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/showpost.php?p=41509&postcount=3

Putting the colour issues to one side - if the glare really is acceptable under midday sun, then I suspect the default prim texture will have to be changed because it's just too washed out.

Windlight definitely rocks BUT...................................

I have been so good and have a pretty hefty balance of $L now and I can see it is gonna be gone FAST. New skins, new clothes, and a lot of tweaking of shape now. But Windlight still definitely rocks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*blinks* I think.. I'm in love with this Windlight. If they had fixed the hollow prim issue, I'd call this a huge slice of SL heaven!

Everything ran really smoothly and now I can TELL things are culling properly. I could *gasp* orbit my camera without crashing and without that second or so lag as it tries to render things. I found my draw distance was really low, so I turned it up and turned a few other goodies on. Then it lagged a bit on moving, but not the camera. The lag was back to normal SL levels for me, thus bearable. For the same amount of lag, I'm getting better camera reaction times, pretty sunsets and sunrises, clouds.. Yeah, I can definitely live with that.

They fixed it so that the sky actually is more of a globe affect, so skyboxes don't see that horrible cut off at least not at 500m up.

I will, however, endeavor to crash it a lot.

I just went back to the normal viewer. Windlight is very pretty, but still buggy and (geez, I hate to say this) the new Search function sucks. I didn't think it could be harder to find things in SL but once again my expectations have been underachieved.

I've got a better idea, and a much more do-able one.

Make everything white.

Might as well, since whatever you choose to use may well become something else.

It's the color, not anything else about the nature of the texture itself. The texture in my example (in my current build) is a simple wall, with a plum color - an LFox texture (called "Aged" something) - and white molding. You just can't "rework" plum to keep it from turning into a garish "blood orange" no matter what you do, I don't think.

In Windlight at sunset, the plum color becomes an intense blood orange. Except on the walls not facing the sun, where they retain a plum color, albeit a sort of darker and grayer version. On the walls it does, it's all walls, equally.

It's just a whole different thing, and you should look on SLU to see what I mean. I didn't want blood-orange. So then you have plum up against blood orange, which is even worse than everything blood-orange.

So redoing the texture just would not help, really. Windlight will just change the color of your walls during certain lights, that's all there is to it.

I don't think there is anything you can do with color to prevent that; it's a matter of color. You can only choose to avoid a wide range of colors that are adversely affected, because the windlight puts its own color on things, and HEAVILY. It's like someone has shined an orange light into your room, a light capable of completely changing the wall color.

I haven't even checked other colors in the light.

The water is pretty, and some builds look terrific in, say, sunset light. Others, the color change is rather total.

coco

P.S. I think windlight is beautiful, too, but it doesn't work like actual nature does. I think basically what we will see is much more plain builds in the future, with a greater reliance on whites, blacks, and basically unobtrusive colors. Kind of blanded out. You just can't fight mad color coming from the sky, I don't think.

why new skins, shapes, clothes with Windlight?

/me is confused.

I am very glad it is BACK! When it was first introduced, it had its problems, but was still usable, and then they took it away for so long and gave us the dreaded Voice First Look! I speculate it will improve and if your PC is up to it, the views it provides are astonishing!

Errr. Did they fix the vanishing inventory problems?

Indeed. My avatar looks the same as it does with the regular viewer. Water looks nice. The sky looks fine. However I don't care being I never look at the sky and water normally. I downloaded the firstlook for the other stuff (faster avatar loading) but they seem not to be any better then before.

I have 2 comments on all this:

1. Windlight is great, eyecandy or not, it is excellent.

2. Windlight makes all the other graphics look a bit silly. LL has to update at least the avatar graphics to keep the visuals balanced.

I guess thats what I thought it was an environment change

water/ sky/ etc.

Very nice ... if you got the time to wait for everything to rez. Takes a very long time compared to the current viewer.

The lighting effects from Windlight do add some different lighting effects to everything on the ground. I been through night and day though with no reason to think I would have to change my avatar or cloths in anyway. Sunrise really adds a orange tint to everything but goes away once sun rises.

Windlight isn't working for me. Downloaded, installed (three times now) and it crashes before it ever gets to the log in screen, every single time.

my god that is beautiful!!

wow that will make me come to your shop!
can i bring my fishing pole?



oh for those with fps issues, click the hardware button in preferences and unclick custom, it fixed my fps issue. still a rather dark ava but hey im due for a shoppin trip

First Impression. Nice water. Scenery seems to shows less 3D depth. Seems Flatter.

Other impressions (besides being sad over losing natural color):

The trees look funny, somehow. And everything has a kind of frizzled edge, crispy, elecrocuted edge somehow.

And did I say it was BRIGHT? Man alive, living on the beach, now I wonder if my eyes can take it. (And usually - irl and on SL - my trouble is having things bright enough!)

I hope they get this frizzly fried-edge looking thing fixed; I have no idea what could be causing that.

coco

SL was already too bright.

I noticed that a bit too.

Other than that, NICE Water!!! Anyone notice- when you're on the bottom of a water sim looking up at the surface, you get a refraction effect? Nice! Now if we can only get water to act as water.

Another few years & it WILL look like "Crysis"

Aside from that, I noticed my frame rates were about the same yet it seemed to take things longer to rez. I'll chalk that up to the "Clearing Cache" bit that went on when I started up. I'll try again later & see if it does the same.

PS: All my graphic settings were on Ultra. Your experience may vary.

Also on Ultra and a fast machine. Reminded me of the FPS game Far Cry. Kept expecting a trigen to pop around the corner. Kept my shotgun handy.

Seriously, I also live on the water. Beautiful skies and waves. Very murky under the water though. My house and furnishings had some strange tints, as others report.

As to avi looks... Under the mid day sun, very expensive skin and hair appears to be a cousin of Ruth. At other times OK, but not stunning. I think it is because there is no subtlety in the application of light and shadow. Very harsh to my eyes.

FPS took a bit of a hit, but workable.

This was at 128 distance. When I opened draw distance to 512, the lag monster ate me!

My underwater front yard WITHOUT windlight (sun at noon):




My yard WITH windlight (sun at noon):




This is the fallback for those of us who can't render the shaders. It cannot be adjusted.

You might also notice what looks like image artifacts in the windlight picture, darker spots in the dark gloom. That is what Linden grasses look like underwater from more than a couple meters away. It almost looks photonegative.

So yeah, I'm not going to windlight.