RC 1.20 - Glow XXL euhm… feature

Using the RC 1.20 is a real pleasure for those who appreciate unexpected extra features. Besides the implementation of Dazzle - if you are lucky - you can also stumble over the following features:

Greyed out HUDS (or greyed out everything) - After a lot of complaining about HUDS being to distracting, Linden Lab decided to just colour all HUD devices in a neutral grey. This function can not be disabled. ‘Everything Grey’ can be disabled by enabling atmospheric shading under ‘graphic preferences’. (got these features on: Rezzable computer)
Non supported - This time Linden Lab decided to listen to the spouses, partners and kids of their userbase. Spending to much time on Second Life? No fear, the ’system not supported’ feature comes to the rescue. This feature can only be disabled by investing a decent amount of First Life assets. (got this feature on: laptop)
Glow XXL (new!) - To make virtual worlds future look even more bright and shiny, Linden Lab implemented the ‘Glow XXL’ feature. Let the glow take over your complete screen! This feature has different settings, which you can toggle in the Client (now ‘Advanced’) menu under the ‘debug menu’ and then renderglowiterations and the other renderglow options. To disable this feature completely, set renderglow to ‘FALSE’ in the debug menu. (got this feature on: desktop computer)

Yeey! Not. This means tomorrow I must set all my fears aside and stick my head and Veyron’s gift into the pc. Please, all cross your tails for me!

Should we start a ‘RC 1.20 documented features’ pool on Flickr? ;)

Tags: 1.20, release client, render glow

Yeey! RC 1.20 - Anti-HUD edition

Recent Comments:

alexx markova: i never found second life so horrible, sure sometimes i complain when things are not going so well or...

Winter Jefferson: Oh, lordy… my head and chest hurt. Vint, whatever shall I do with you? As I said on plurk - I...

Nadine Nozaki: Oss sure i do like people leaving a bite mark… But all i can think of it the moment before this...

Arteer: Haha, Vint. My Luddite husband was starting to get a little nervous thinking I’d be swept up by some...

Loaf: Well, I did it, but really don’t think 7am is my most flattering time of the day!

7 Responses to “RC 1.20 - Glow XXL euhm… feature”

Camron Kuhn wrote a comment on April 12, 2008

I think teh most amusing thing about all of this, is I am using it, have not had a single issue, am running more stable than ever. Not a single problem yet.

Peter Stindberg wrote a comment on April 12, 2008

Nicholaz BE-v continues to work like a charm. Hopefully still for a very long time, now that Nicholaz has unfortunately given up out of frustration….

Daedalus Young wrote a comment on April 13, 2008

Well it -is- a Release Candidate. So it is likely to have lots of bugs. It surely is not the latest stable version. If you just want to use SL, use the latest official viewer. If you want to hunt for bugs and make sure the next official viewer will be better, use the RC and file issues on JIRA.
About #3: Glow has been in the Debug menu for a very very very long time, it’s only more advanced now. And overall, it’s not fair meddling with Debug settings and then shouting it’s a huge bug. The average user will likely never activate the Advanced menu anyway, let alone play with settings they don’t know what they’re for.
If you want to list a real annoying bug however (and btw expected, it’s a bug in a new feature), try playing with the anti-abrupt-camera-change-camera. Especially, rez a cube (plywood will do) and try moving it around. Yay!

Vint Falken wrote a comment on April 13, 2008

Daedalus, no offence, but I think you might have missed the point here:

#3: I did not activate the ‘bugginess’. RenderGlow = True is the default setting. As you can see on the picture above, that default setting, made my Second Life unbearable. So, I started fiddling with the settings to get rid of the bug (referred to as feature in the blogpost). Besides having a good idea of what those RenderGlow settings do, I found that I could lessen the glow a bit, but it still looked horrible. The only way to get somewhat of a normal view, was turning the rendition of glow off completely, hence RenderGlow = False. Shortly summarized: It worked more or less correct for ages for me, with the new RC release the default version did not work for me, so I turned it off. The fact that I know how to turn it off, does not make it my fault that it does not work.

I must agree with you that is far from the latests stable version. But, as suddenly a lot of ‘mishaps’ appear that there were not before, and it does weird stuff concerning graphics on 3 out of 3 totally different systems I use, I do get worried. Especially if on all three it’s that bad that I can’t ’see’ the world, my HUDS or both anymore. If Lindens take out all these bugs before pushing it as the official viewer, that would mean they have drastically changed their way of working.

I am aware of your ‘I move something and crash’ bug. I did not have any problems with it (I hardly move things around), but a few I know do. I do question the usefulness of the anti-abrupt-camera-change-camera, as when shooting at a crowded (and thus slow) sim yesterday, it took me ages to figure out where my camera would end up.

PS. For this RC ‘bug hunting’ seems to be wrong terminology. It’s more like ‘make sure you don’t trip over one every 15 seconds.’

6600 GTS - My future looks bright. | VintFalken.com sent a pingback on April 13, 2008

[…] I had it lingering around for months now, a shiny, powerful and beautiful looking XFX 6600 GTS. I did not plug it in yet, because, the old one, a Sapphire Radeon X600Pro did not perform all that bad and frankly, I was being conservative. I know that by plugging in a new graphics card, the world around me would change drastically. Just as with real life, virtual life is how you perceive the world around you, and as ‘touch’ and ’smell’ functionality is still disabled, ‘view’ is one of the most important. But the outlook for the next official client - the RC 1.20 - left me no choice. […]

Ok, Vint, I read it (and it was late last night) as though you were playing with RenderGlowIterations up to a point it took over your screen, I didn’t yet see problems with Glow myself.

When I rez and move around prims, the camera for me starts ’shaking’. It’s like it thinks “Oh, maybe I should follow this prim!”, then thinks again “Oh no, it’s cool” and repeats that thought process. The viewer froze a few times, as with every camera move (ever so slightly) stuff comes on screen that was not rendered before, making moving even just one prim hell.

As for the bug overcrowdedness: the viewer (on Mac anyway) seems to crash if there are avatar impostors on screen. So while I was standing still, doing nothing at all at an event the other day, I crashed out of the blue. I mentioned that when back inworld and the response I got: “It’s true, you need to move around to avoid the bugs.”