Windlight is here folks

Just downloaded the viewer to my portable HD while I'm still at school (If I try to load SL on this thing it might burst into flames) and I'm so geeked to try it when I get home..


I want to go home NOW!!!

O.o

Mee too, but it has nothing to do with Windlight.

Do you have to uninstall your current viewer to run this, or can it co-exist? Mac question actually.

all it says on the blog is to uninstall previous windlight viewer, not normal client.. so iono

You would think so...but it is much more complicated than you think. Which objects do they deem worthy to cast shadows? Do we get an option in our prim to count it as 'static' or 'dynamic?'

Indoors and outdoors are different. You have to take into account many aspects...dynamic lights casting dynamic shadows is a relatively new technology--it's very cutting edge. Especially when we are talking about multiple light sources (and color too!)

Out door shadows--to be convincing in the least--have to follow a moving light source (the sun or moon). Real time light casting is a huge technology...and requires millions of lines of code, and some pretty heft hardware to pull of accurately.

Perhaps a place holder (bounding box) for an object--the engine could equate an object with a default shape, and cast this shadow in a direction related to the nearest (or brightest) light source...

Things get really tricky, really fast. The only way to make it ALL work is to have a real-time light engine--but these things are super difficult to get working right.

Perhaps we could have a system in place, where the sim rolls-over every night, and bakes the major 'static' structures....bah...see...that won't work. because the sun and moon are moving light sources...you can't bake them.

Tricky tricky. Games like UT3, Crysis, and Bioshock utilize this technology...but they are professional game developers working on DX, creating linear controlled environments...

*shrugs*

We are a long way away from real-time lighting in SL.

You can turn WindLight off, but that doesn't mean SL won't be slower than what you're used to, but it could be faster as well. The only way to know is to download and try it for yourself.

It coexists next to whatever version you're currently using so you don't have to switch.

In the old version it would be unchecking "Enable Avatar Vertex Program", but that's no longer an option anywhere .

Try clicking custom and play with things a little bit to see what, if anything, makes it go away? I'd make a guess to try unselecting "Hardware Skinning" first.

I just installed the new client.. went in-game and my jaw dropped when I saw the water. It seems as if performance is actually better now than before, but I am not sure yet.

Oh my gosh .. I have just wasted half an hour staring at virtual water... ha ha. Thank you so much LL!

This is what I mean about cartoony avatars. Against that great Windlight setting, the avatars look like cartoons against a fake setting. Lovely scene, but . . ..

Oh, and you can post pictures directly to the thread:


Sorry, I should have used a different picture and not used yours.

I will probably crash every 2 seconds after I say this - but prior to downloading and running Windlight I was always crashing when I hit sim crossings, but with Windlight I spun into the ground once, but was able to TP out, and most of the time was able to run across sim crossings as if it was just any other crossing. Granted, as I said, I will now crash every two seconds. This is in response to "Everything ran really smoothly"

Yes, I TP'd somewhere and it took forever for one of the avatars there to show up on my screen. I saw the name floating, but no avatar.

ah yes that sounds familiar, thanks. I'll have another go tonight.

i had a feeling this was not going to be easy lol.

I removed the previous Windlight version and installed the latest one, apart from having a completely white Login screen, once logging on most of the sky appears yellow to me with the exception of the clouds. I don't see the water ripppling or reflections or refractions or any of the things i'm supposed to be seeing. Any ideas?

Is this a graphics driver issue do you think?

More importantly as SL general platform improves and demands more ......will it get to
a point that we'll need to upgrade our computer performance just to host SL?

well after talking to Joppa Linden about windlight and being teased that I was not seeing the cool sky and such, he just had to say the stars twinkled, that got me, I decided to try windlight


well... it is totally cool, BUT, my system can not handle it
When running at low settings, I lag like I am in a sim with 100 people. So lo and behold I had to switch back

Now I know what I want for xmas, an UPGRADE!!
one that can handle windlight for sure

here is a snapshot of water, heh, yeah I know silly me, but the reflective water was cool, and think, this is on low setting.

I do believe it to be a driver issue. All last night and most of this morning, I could either have pretty skies or pretty water. Not both. Having Atmospheric Shading on disabled the pretty water. Turning it off caused the water to spring to life. However, after I went and downloaded and installed the latest drivers for my video card, both water and sky came together to create a landscape that I'd been dreaming of for months.

So yes....I think it's a driver issue.

If you installed the previous WindLight it might have some lingering settings left?

For a PC:
%APPDATA% (type it into regular Explorer like that) and open the "Second Life" folder, then "user_settings)
For a Mac:
Library/Application Support/Second Life/user_settings

Delete settings_windlight.xml and it should start with fresh, default settings.

As for turning anything on, it might decide your puter isn't good enough to enable it by default (Edit / Preferences / Graphics tab - Check Custom and enable the different shaders for the different effects).

And making sure drivers are up to date never hurts either .

In other news....has LL released any information in regards to users being able to transfer their Windlight settings amongst themselves without resorting to a notecard system of some sort?

Also, with Windlight in SL....does this mean we may be getting the Windlight enabled particle rain, sleet, and snow systems at some point in the future?

I was speaking to a Linden about this last night and about the graphics in general, THEY TO WANT SHADOWS and are looking into it. As for weather yes that i think is next on there list (the graphics teams list) the only obsticle they have ran into is that it would rain inside buildings, and snow would just fall thru prims.

Windlight will bring us a nice lot of lovely new shint features. and fixes

This may be a stupid reply--but by default the new Windlight will be optimized to your system--sometimes this shuts down features or graphical settings...make sure you go into preferences>graphics, and make sure all your settings for WL are on.

That's what I had to do anyway. I had to click 'custom' and set things according to what I wanted because my system was like 'oh no you didn't.'

..and before anyone says it, yes, I have the latest drivers installed for my video card, and no, I don't have issues with them in the normal client or in any other game or application.

My av, which has low shiny, and just barely looks reflective normally now is highly reflective. I can't hardly see the textures themselves. It's almost like low shiny became somewhere between medium and high shiny.
Blown glass Talarus

The sky no longer ceases to exist at 700m, but now, above 1024m, you have sky but black ground below the horizon.
Where's the ground? (No WL)
Where's the ground? (With WL)

Invisiprims also blot out the water and parts of the sky.
Water-eating Invisiprim

The water and sky are horribly banded, and the terrain textures look like they became 256-color palette-ized using an awful color palette. The cloud layers also look terrible.
View from on high
EGA Graphics, anyone?
OK, who smudged my screen?
Come to the Dark Side, Luke
Better WITHOUT the WL shaders
Particle sun?

As for the water, I get the ripple effect, but it looks very cheesy at any distance greater than 20m away.

Won't work on my PC... Can't even turn on basic shaders without it crashing.
Nvidia Geforce 6600, 256MB...
2 GB RAM
My drivers are about 14 days old...

On the regular client, everything except draw distance is at max... and when we last had windlight, so was that. Now, if I touch it, it's crash to desktop before I even think about clicking Apply or OK

So, it's no windlight for me... for now!

Any ideas?

I just installed and tested the First Look/Windlight viewer; I have to say that I am impressed.
The sky and water looks amazing. My graphics card is fairly aged, but it still looks good to me with it set to Ultra.



I have about three problems with it though.

(1) Local lighting? Where is it in Windlight, and does it not work like the regular viewer? My avatar looked kind of creepy and dark even with multiple facelights.

(2) High in the sky, I can see what appears to be the ocean, and I must say....it looks ridiculous. Midnight is a joke at 500M and Noon also looks silly with that strange dark, wavy blob which appears to be the ocean.

(3) Camera controls are rough for me with this viewer; it makes my graphics look weird and makes me crash sometimes.

I think we can all agree that Windlight will be nice when the issues are solved. Having great water effects is not worth the tradeoff yet. Shadow problems on the avatars and the flat look of land and tress and building needs work for sure as does the water in the void spaces. There is some kind of balancing act needed. Extremes of lighting from too bright to too dark are annoying.

thanks to the folks above, i updated latest drivers. I downloaded the windlight version again and whilst i got a mass of "sh!t" at first ....once i unticked "Atmospheric Shaders", everything seemed to be alright. The water efffects are truely beautiful.......its's now on a par with HipiHi water effects.

Things i did notice however: hard to determine property lines in the water. can''t see much below water level......very dark!! Objects take much much longer to rez, FPS rates slightly down.

I'm not sure by unchecking "atmospheric Shaders" i'm missing out on beautiful skies and clouds. I guess that despite the updated drivers, my computer being 2 years old probably can't handle all that SL has to offer.

It looks like for everyday practicalities, i'll just use the normal viewer........for chilling out moments i could revert to the Windlight viewer

When you enabled atmospheric shaders, did you see a crazy dark mess over the sky whenever you moved or turned?

My puter is 5 years old (it was a beast in 2000 though), and I can run everything on ultra...and get around 5-10 fps. I'm surprised my Geforce FX 5600 actually supports some of these shaders...strange.

Just tp'ed home and the void water is there but the water on the sim is all dried up. Love it when they decide to reimplement old bugs .