SL WindLight: Second Life But Not As You Know It

The Graphics look fantastic.

You should always be cautious with new viewers; it’s possible you might suffer inventory loss due to unknown bugs. If you have items you don’t want to lose, consider trying the first look viewer with an alt instead of your primary account.

A few people I know changed their lives for the worse after becoming addicted to games like this and Evercrack, so I’ve stayed far away.

Looks great, also runs great on my machine. A few have posted that it has overloaded their systems but not here.

I tested it yesterday evening . Started out w Default graphics, then max’d out the settings on what I’d consider a relatively dated PC (Northwood CPU running at 2.4GHz, one gig of ram and an AGP 6600GT videocard w 128Mb video ram).

Crashed once over the course of numerous changes to the preferences made in the span of about a half hour; and I’ve had more crashes with the current “stable* client in that time lately, so I was impressed. The biggest hit came when max’ing out the view distance. Default was 96m but I pushed it to 512m. Didn’t crash, but definitely slowed things down.

All that said, I think “light” (coming from prim objects) needs tweaking; some things were washing out too much in daylight. I also wish the visual distance would taper off as if in haze. It was actually too clear so the cut-off was visually apparent. But it’s still in dev. I suspect these issues will be resolved.

Being a long time productive resident in SL, this is major leap forward graphic wise. The original First Look Wind Light viewer (About 3-4 months ago) was flashy but needed a lot of work. This one a giant improvement and is very close to release quality. Great Job.

The First Look viewer is actualy the Second Release with Wind Light. There was an earlier first look a few months back that had it.

Yeah, but now the architecture looks like ass. I had this problem when I renovated my house room by room — when I painted the walls the trim looked bad and when I fixed that the carpet needed to be upgraded and then the next room looked like shit whenever the door was open.

The sad truth is that everything has to be upgraded at once.

I should have mentioned that I use a 24″ widescreen LCD monitor set at 1920 x 1200. The Windlight client defaulted to 800 x 600 so I slowly ramped up to match (and was surprised my videocard could handle it, tbh).

@Eric - agree. But that’s a user issue.

I was interested in how the “sculpted prims” would look and they held up nicely. But those require a level of ability most users don’t yet possess.

The first photo looks like the steroid body of Barry Bonds.
A bloated, hardened boar.

I don’t play any video games but I need to admit that it looks awesome. In the future it would be cool if they also allowed some of the green screen effect (like the movie 300).

Awesome, now the griefing ops will have much more realistic flying dongs to terrorize the populace.

Actually this upgrade won’t help flying dongs much. It’s more of an upgrade for the environment. It’s a ploy to distract you: Is that a flying dong? Wow, pretty clouds!

My take is the artist shares DNA with Ingres or has thing for his permanent verticle smile…..

The Firstlook-Windlight viewer worked great for me and looks fantastic, but I will have to adjust some of my textures. Windlight seems to blow out color while the sun is high and on some texture even oversaturate the color beyond what i had originally intended. The environment looks more realistic than the old viewer by far, but I think older textures will have to be updated to match the new lighting conditions.

The quality and scenery is amazing. Can’t wait to try this out.

I don’t play SecondLife anymore - but from the looks of these new graphics it might be worth checking out again.

I believe that graphics induced crashed on iMacs and Mac Pro’s (same video hardware) were addressed in a recent patch via software update.

I don’t play in these virtual worlds, my world is virtual enough.

Looks beautiful. I wonder if they will do photo-realistic strip shows or gambling dens too since that it is the only source of user activity in this otherwise desolated virtual land.

@Joel - according to market research, strip show related activity is something like 17%, iirc. And gambling was banned months ago.

Most of the activity growth seems to be in education. I’m personally finding more engineers in SL. Not surprising to me, since the modeling tools - unlike any videogame of which I’m aware - are parametric based. That makes them closely related to the CAD tools I use to model the products which people buy at small retailers like Wal*Mart and Target.

@csven

hehe… you should say ‘…those tiny mom and pop stores… ‘

The graphics look good, but not nearly as good as Oblivion and that was released a year and a half ago. I’ve spent a long time playing Oblivion. The trees in SL still look like they’re made with two intersecting planes. I could understand that in 2003, but in 2007 I’m expecting more.

Definitely an improvement but agree totally it makes other aspects even more dated….

The water is out of scale! Look at the sizes of those ripples.

Techdemo showing the WindLight in Second Life:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mcv49fwApeU

Secondlife WindLight on a Smartboard interactive whiteboard
edit delete - Video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra50XTelwro

Hey Eric—those trees that look like two intersecting planes? They look like that because they ARE two intersecting planes. Those are user-created trees, composed of a picture of a tree uploaded into Second Life and pasted onto two prims (those are the building blocks in SL) which are then intersected and linked together. It has nothing to do with the 3D rendering. The system renders those objects exactly as they have been created. You need to look at Linden-created trees to determine how Second Life renders trees. I am a little curious, though. How much user-created content is there in Oblivion?

Looks amazing ! Can’t wait to try it out, but I hope it doesn’t affect the speed…

Doreen - Linden trees don’t look any better. Whether there are 2 or 3 or more planes in the trees, Windlight’s shadow casting punches up the artificial shape. A real disappointment, when almost everything else looks so great. Time for a new round of Linden (and user-created) trees that suit the new light.

I wasn’t really saying that the Linden trees looked better. I believe they do, but they rendered very, very slowly in the Windlight viewer so it took a while for them to get there. I just wanted to point out that the really bad two-prim tree was accurately rendered—exactly as its maker made it.

That said, I absolutely LOVE the Botanical Straylight trees, no matter which viewer I’m using.

Besides some minor/major bugs* I think it turned out great: reflection of all, including avatars is what I always hoped and prayed to the Linden Gods for.

*wish we could already trade in WindLight settings*

*depends how you compare them to the new functionality and how important you find graphics overall. =)

I agree stuff looks great … except ..

my FPS went to about half of what it is now when at the ‘recommended’. To get back to the same level of distance detail as my ’standard’ viewer I had to go to the ultra setting, and at that point FPS went to 6 fps compared with 15 normally.

But yes .. we live on a tropical island and it olooked great at sunrise .

now .. all we need are proper lighting shadows!!