Massively^™

GOD DAM IT STOP WITH THE NEW FEATURES AND FIX IT SO I DONT GET HUGE SYSTEM CRASHING GRAPHICS HANGS ON MACBOOK PRO!!!!, i want them to think about me and only ME!!

Infact i thought they was not gonna work on new features and concentrate on making the viewer more stable? do they think they have done that already?

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/me wonders if anyone has seen screenies of this in action. It may well be alpha but some idea what it looks like at this stage would be informative.

On the graphics front I've been wondering when custom lighting and day cycles will be released server side for estates. After all that's been in the release candidate client for a long time now. Being a "release candidate" one would like to think it was preparing to go live, but unfinished and untested elements, like the whole other side of region lighting plans, make me wonder if we'll see it soon or in the far future.

Just my two cents.

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Re screenshots, didn't Dave himself post a few early glimpses a few weeks ago?
http://picasaweb.google.com/Runitai/DeferredRendering

As far as stability vs feature development, I would agree with Tateru about the need for balance. Any software team that entirely halts development of new features is going to find it harder to restart that work once some mythical point of stability is deemed to have been achieved, and be much later delivering new features than if they'd continued to work on them all along.

Just when can it be said SL has reached stability? When the last five hysterically screaming multi-posters on the blog are finally silenced?

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Sculpties do work correctly, from my brief testing. As does everything else - which results in some interesting trees. As the LOD on the trees decreases, the shadow makes it obvious - so trees rendered as two crossing textures show a cross as a shadow. It also seems to make HUDs vanish entirely.

It also brings my system (octocore Mac Pro at 2.8GHz, GeForce 8800 GT 512MB, running Kubuntu 8.04) to a halt if I accidentally turn the settings down again - I had to pull the plug on it because it was so unresponsive I couldn't quit or kill SL. I'll put up some pictures on Flickr when I'm done doing some encoding stuff. They'll go in http://flickr.com/photos/katharineberry/tags/shadowdraft/

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It looks as if I need to invest in a new laptop soon. I love how even the mountains with terrain casts shadows on itself. In those screen shots, I wonder of all those lit up balls are using glow, or individual light sources? At the moment, we are limited to about 5 light sources at a time.

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MacOSX does not appear to contain the requisite level of shader support.

Well, poo. Leaves me out.

It sounds like a neat, innovative project... that is quite simply too advanced for many -- maybe most -- of SL's users.

I recall there also being some controversy on the SL Forums (as rare as angry comments on the SL blog, I know) about some dev list comments about this feature and SL users being "cheapskates"

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Sometimes beginnings are not really that simple when it comes to graphics. It will probably be a bit of time before we see this come through. I would enjoy seeing the sun set for me and you, and watching the shadows move along. I am wondering if and when the shadows of the day will embrace the world of gray goo as the sun and moon moves. Will a shadow gradually become blurry and transparent as the object is moved closer to the light source, and further way from the target? How does it fair with alpha textures?

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It's interesting to think that the number of lights you see will be based on how good your hardware is. I wonder if this will significantly change the way builders light their scenes, or if they'll go for the lowest common denominator? (My money's on "lights to the max, baby!")

Of course, the fact that two people with different hardware will see a different SL -- different number of particles, different texture resolutions, different object smoothness, different view distances -- is a fact of Second Life already. I certainly wouldn't want LL to shun development of new graphical features just because some percentage of users wouldn't be able to use them yet.

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I think things woudl be much better if hardware suddenlly stopped getting so much better so quickly in terms of the quality of how programs deal with it, with so much more resource to waste on each new model programers tend to get lazy witht heir code, not optmizing stuff as much as it could be and such

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btw, on the first version I got my paws on that had dynamic reflections, the resolution of the reflexes was just abotu as good as the screen resolution, but it started to get more and more downgraded on each version after they removed that feature cause of the crashes it was alegedly causing to some people :/

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The ever amazing SignpostMarv Martin has made a short video showing these new features off:

http://signpostmarv.blip.tv/file/979660/

Very impressive. It makes me rethink my choice of hardware (mid-range Mac :) ).

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