WindLight has returned!
November 15, 2007 2:37 am
Oh, thank you, Linden Gods, for giving us, poor avies the WindLight again! Now, go and fetch it! (And be sure to uninstall any previously WindLight versions first!, they say.)
Major changes compared to the ‘old’ WindLight:
- Classic clouds are back.
- The moon is back.
- Fallback (aka non-shader) WindLight is now much faster and of higher quality, which ensures those with older hardware still get fast, beautiful new skies.
- Photorealistic water.
- All objects can now have a glow attribute assigned to them. (Think debug menu, render glow.)
- Avatar imposter system. The claimed results: up to 40% fps increase in crowded scenes. (I’m taking a deeper look into the avatar impostors settings in a separate post.)
- Upgraded graphic preferences tab. (Actually, they just merged Graphics and Advanced Graphics.)
WindLight viewer source code will be made available soon. (For those who can actually read source code. ;))
And then there are the ‘minor’ drawbacks such as:
- Shiny doesn’t look the same as before. We’re working to get it very close, if not better.
- NVIDIA beta drivers 169.04 currently do not support shaders.
- Some of your colors and textures might appear overexposed or washed out with the new lighting framework.
9 Responses to “WindLight has returned!”
“Shiny doesn’t look the same as before. We’re working to get it very close, if not better.”
Well, I’ve never been happy with the “old” shiny anyway…I think anything would be an improvement. It makes stuff look like it was coated with a thick layer of varnish instead of being polished, you know?
I downloaded and installed last night, much better than the last First Look, makes me want to go buy some water front property..
Well, I know my lamps looked a bit metallic before, and now they really look like ugly plastic with a white haze. Even more varnish, this means? (I only ran some ‘water’ testings up to know, did not explore the lightning of objects, shadows, … yet.)
But at first glance it did look good. (Or at least ‘better’. ;))
I have my hopes up high for the view once I plugged the card. (Geeh, I make it sound that simple! ;))
check it out in all its glory on an interactive surface in this video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra50XTelwro
A few other items of interest…
Using some resolutions, the background textures don’t resolve correctly: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shoshanaepsilon/2043409676/
Also, there is a new thing called Avatar Imposters. I’d recommend to LL that they start using these more than 10 m from the camera — they are too obvious at 10m. Yes, its true that you can turn Imposters off, but that turns them off everywhere. (They are a performance enhancement.)
The lighting is still off, but with some tweeking of the environmental sliders, you can get what you want. I’d like to see a “revert to default” setting on all the presets … ie, You set the sky to “Barcelona”, then tweek stuff and decide you don’t like it. I want to be able to return to default Barcelona without relogging!
Ah, clean install? I’ve learned from the previous WindLight Firstlook and made a duplicate before I started editing.
Strangely enough, it prefers not to safe my water colour. (Maybe the client dislikes pink? *sobs*)
Ow, and regarding the f*cked up background textures, I had that earlier already (non-windlight era) when using render glow… i think it’s just the graphics card that can’t cope?
We should ask Kailie / Katarina Malthus ?
There IS a known (at least internally, haven’t seen it on public Issue Tracker yet but will link it up if I do) bug with taking high-res snapshots & glow, and high-res snapshots having seams (particularly noticeable through water).
ALSO… Avatar Impostors kicks in depending on your Avatars Mesh Detail setting. If you want to increase the distance at which avatars become impostors, set Avatars Mesh Detail to HIGHEST (all the way to the right).
[…] Shoshana Epsilon mentioned not liking Avatar Impostors showing up in stead of normal avatars starting at a distance of 10 […]
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