High-end graphics features planned for Second Life
by Tateru Nino 
May 29th 2008 at 2:30AM
Filed under: News items, Second Life
Linden Lab is tinkering with a set of Second Life graphical improvements for high-end graphics hardware. Dave Parks, software engineer at Linden Lab has been working on a set of features tailored to the Geforce 8 set of GPUs. Users without the required hardware would not suffer any performance reductions as a result of the new features.
The featureset (which is available as an experimental branch called shadow-draft in the viewer source repository, for the curious), includes hard Sun-shadows, per-pixel lighting, support for an uncapped number of point-lights, and lighting costs based on screen coverage.
The new branch has been minimally tested and found working on standard Windows, Vista, and some Linux systems, with decent frame-rates. MacOSX does not appear to contain the requisite level of shader support.
The code is largely unoptimized and experimental, and none of the new features can be enabled by those with older hardware. Firstly, older hardware just doesn't have the ability to handle the features, and if it did would likely be so slow that you'd be better off going and browsing the Second Life Flickr group instead.
At this stage, the feature is quite an early one, and Linden Lab has reaffirmed its commitment to supporting as broad a range of hardware as is possible, aiming for overall improvements that do not make performance worse on given hardware sets.
That said, degenerate conditions do exist for some hardware combinations (we've experienced them ourselves). If you've experienced reduced performance going from a non-windlight viewer to a windlight viewer (with Windlight features disabled), you should file your observations, settings and system specifications in Linden Lab's JIRA tracker, so that Qarl Linden and others can attempt to pin it down -- such cases may point to other correctable performance issues in the viewer code.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Loki said on 4:40AM 5-29-2008
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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Tateru Nino said on 4:44AM 5-29-2008
Perhaps they are finding a balance. From a business standpoint it is not wise to focus on one to the total exclusion of the other.
Some sort of balance is generally required, though if you lined a hundred people up, you'd probably get a hundred different answers as to exactly where that balance should be.
Pavig Lok said on 4:43AM 5-29-2008
/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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Tateru Nino said on 4:46AM 5-29-2008
Some people have built the branch and enabled it. We don't have any screenshots of it in action yet (THOUGH WE WOULD WELCOME SOME! *HINT*).
Jamma Newt said on 6:41AM 5-29-2008
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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Damien said on 8:26AM 5-29-2008
Thanks for the link!
I never thought I would see the day we got real shadows in SL.
I sure hope they can code in correct shadows for sculpts though, or we could have some issues. Maybe even add "casts shadow" as an optional tag in the Features tab of objects.
Katharine Berry said on 11:08AM 5-29-2008
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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Jamma Newt said on 7:49AM 5-30-2008
Katharine, this is a wonderful set of pics and really shows what a difference shadows make in creating a convincing environment.
Looks as though alpha textures such as trees and the sandbox sign cast proper shadows as one would expect, although it seems like the edges are courser, maybe similar to the 64x64 low detail we saw in dynamic reflections on shiny surfaces in the past? (via the Debug menu)
A couple questions: can shadows be cast by local lights, or is this limited to just the sun and the moon? And have you tried rezzing more local lights than just the six we're normally limited to having active?
Could you use local lights to create an indoor space lit with plain white lights that would override some wild Windlight preset colored the sky outside (thus fixing some peoples' complaints about Windlight)?
(heh heh, i think i just need to figure out how to compile one of these for myself)
Katharine Berry said on 9:22AM 5-30-2008
It is coarser from that distance - but when you're closer to the ground it's a perfect replica. I could not find any way of getting both the full detail version and the original in the shot, however.
Shadows are only cast by the sun/moon. More local lights work and look good - you can see the effect of too much lighting at http://flickr.com/photos/katharineberry/2533660451/ . The colour outside was sort of pinkish. The bit in the middle is ten lights overlapping - it glows just a little bit too bright for my liking.
I'll upload a bunch more pictures I took.
Dedric Mauriac said on 12:47PM 5-29-2008
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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qarl said on 3:08PM 5-29-2008
Dedric - those are individual lights. yes, more lights will drastically improve SL's appearance.
Marianne McCann said on 1:35PM 5-29-2008
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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Dedric Mauriac said on 6:28PM 5-29-2008
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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Jacek Antonelli said on 10:54PM 5-29-2008
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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Tateru Nino said on 11:00PM 5-29-2008
Well, that has already been the case for some time. SL looks and feels completely different to people who can crank their draw-distance up over 64m, I can tell you!
Just the matter of draw-distance alone provides a significant division in in-world visuals and in the fundamental nature of the virtual world experience.
TigroSpottystripes Katsu said on 6:09PM 5-30-2008
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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TigroSpottystripes Katsu said on 6:10PM 5-30-2008
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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Gwyneth Llewelyn said on 8:17AM 6-10-2008
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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