Our Observations

Here are my Oberservatioins of the "First Look" Windlight system. For what it's worth!

1) Too foggy
2) Who stole the Moon
3) Natural lighting is no longer natural lighting
4)Found FPS drop overall by 10-20FPS (OUCH!)

May find more things good and bad. So let's share what we find and see if we can help out Lindens. By the way, Lindens, keep up the good work. Good direction but lots of work still before I would recommend pushing it into the production client.

There my 2 cents. Now go get another 73 cents and buy a coffee !

I've read that several people have taken performance hits with this client, were as mine has actually gotten better.. Not quite sure why there lol.. This client runs far better then the standard viewer.. Although the lighting definately needs tweaking.. The lack of a moon is something that needs fixing as well.. 3d clouds at higher altitudes would be a definate bonus too. The little band of weirdness at where the sky meets the sea is still there and detracts from the beauty of it too. Also when I move my cursor on something and click it. it actually moves the camera to it imediately, rather then the 2-5 second pause that I have with the current client.. Not sure what is differant in the programming there, but yay for that lol.
With some minor tweaking, and shiney fixes, and lighting, and i guess figure out why some people are taking performance hits where as like myself, the client actually runs far smoother.. This has great potential, and would be a welcome addition to an older graphics engine..

theres my 2 cents
Jeza

Be sure to fly up to 700 meters, watching along the way, to get the full experience.

The view near ground level is much better than the view from higher up.

It definitely looks like a system designed to represent a view from ground level has been stuck into a system it wasn't designed for and thus doesn't work properly in.

from what I could see here :
http://www.windwardmark.net/products.php

and here too
http://lindenlab.com/press/releases/05_21_07

LL acquired licences on both WindLight, which is what we are given to play with now, and NIMBLE too, which handles volumetric clouds and integrates to windlight technique.

Seems that NIMBLE or the SL NIMBLE part is still in development so no wonder why so far there still are no 3d clouds like before, but OMG looks at this :
http://www.windwardmark.net/products.php?page=nimble&sub=technology
and do stop crying about a crappy viewer that was only designed for crawling creatures , lets just be patient and remember this IS firstlook, meaning this is just a glance at what is still in the papers and brains

What sounds even more exciting is that this all is going to go OPENSOURCED, and I just only can applause LL for having made this choice and bringing another high end patented technology to the community ! I can't imagine what kind of improvements will see the light when the whole community works on developing it.





This was for the good part, on the draw side, I want to repeat here what I said about presets.
WindLight comes with a variety of sliders to make your scene look good. Using these looks a bit non obvious at the first approach, but I guess one can achieve good things if they take the time.

What seems to be real important to me is that the default and presets available out of the box when a newbie discovers LL for the first days, or when anyone discovers Windlight as the new live lighting system, well those defaults and presets should be done so that textures of things and avatars in world appear with a correct exposure , with no need to tweak things for the user.

This sounds particularly important to me, beeing running a visual based buisness in SL, and I think it is, generally speaking, so that the average new user feels visually comfortable and doesn't need to think "oh there must be some setting somewhere, my light is strange" , but rather thinks "OMG this world is beautifull, I want to see more, lets walk there oh and oh ! "

From a more buisness point of view, I think commercial sim owners should be granted the power to override people settings when they arrive in the sim, so that products are correctly exposed, but with letting to the user the possibilty to play with his settings if they feels so. Like, when you jump in the place, region has priority on your settings, but you're free to revert to what you want.





About hardware support, I'm more divided. Obviously this is a step that makes you want a better card if you can't enjoy all the features. Good, but not everybody can or want. So yes, I do think that either it has to be made so that ,without vertex shading support, the global feeling keeps satisfaying for older or cheaper cards, or you have the option to revert to the old viewing system.

This said, visual aspect and related technology are and have always been in constant evolution, as long as delevopers do take care of backwards hardware compatibility, everyone should be able to find a balance between their wallet and the crazy technological pace.


Well globally my feeling about it is WOOOT ! Ty so much LL for the gift ! lets give it a tweak and polish, and oh the major issue with it is that I spend my time gazing at clouds instead of working ! I guess you *LL* are not going to make up for *my* late

You fix that in 'Atmosphere'



Philip - it's always his fault!



If you mean 'light emmitting prims' hardly work any more - right, and a showstopper in my opinion.
If you mean the 'presets' are awful and nothing looks 'right' any more, I agree, but it's fixable with a lot of effort. The question is, should it be necessary to 'fix' the supplied 'default' preset?
Not in my opinion. Linden lab should have secured the services of a graphics professional with a correctly calibrated monitor to create a realistic 'default' preset, and for that matter some rather less lurid others too.



Bummer... not a problem here, or I wouldn't be persisting with it.

I tried to find something I could live with in Windlight but I just don't like it. It's going to be very hard to design things if its impossible to tell what the other person sees. My subtle texture and colour variations could look awful under another lighting set up.

Its a lot of fiddling for no real benefit that I can see. I hope they put off putting this on the main grid ...forever.

It was such a relief to go back to the main viewer after a stint on First Look.

I tried, I really tried but I just don't see the point of this.

IMHO the only way that Windlight is going to be workable is if the default preset is actually functional and looks half-way decent.

hmm.. fully updated my QT but could only see the uTube low rez version, the others simply showed a white screen without content, no issues reported by QT, even with installing loads of codex.