Comments on: Pushing the limits

By: tutorial | enabling shadows in SL™ : Ana Lutetia

tutorial | enabling shadows in SL™ : Ana Lutetia — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 02:01:12 +0000

[...] shadows in Second Life® in Massively, by Vint Falken, in New World Notes (by Hamlet Au) and by Gwyneth Llewelyn I was really curious and wanted to [...]

By: Ancale Bellah

Ancale Bellah — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 18:35:30 +0000

Hi, i got a MacBook Pro, 2.4 GHz, Intel Core 2 Duo with a NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT, 256 MB. If i try to set the second Debug Setting on True it always switches itself back to false. This is on the Snowglobe viewer. What am i doing wrong? It would be nice if you could give me an advice.

By: Ancale Bellah

Ancale Bellah — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 11:35:30 +0000

By: GwynethLlewelyn

GwynethLlewelyn — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:10:18 +0000

BTW, I've tested shadows on Snowglobe too. They also work on my old ATI Radeon X1600 and actually the results are a bit more stable than on Kirstens Viewer, although not so good looking. So now it seems that the Lab finally released a client that is faster both in the texture downloading/rendering and also incorporates shadows and a better lighting system than Kirstens Viewer It will be interesting to see what happens next — will Kirstenlee Cinquetti incorporate Snowglobe's texture code into her own viewer and make it even faster?

By: GwynethLlewelyn

GwynethLlewelyn — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:40:39 +0000

Vivianne, the purpose of the post was just to give a taste of what's to come, and currently there are two things everybody can see right now.

Snowglobe with ultrafast texture download (download links to the bottom right)

and

Kirstens Viewer with shadows and the new lighting system (which ought to work on more cards than LL's officially supported ones).

Both are available today to everybody; both are a glimpse of what the future has to offer; more than that, I'm afraid it'll be up to Linden Lab to allow us to speak about it.

By: Vivianne Draper

Vivianne Draper — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:32:24 +0000

its nice you are excited about something you can't talk about and the rest of us are not special enough to see. Was there a purpose to this post other than to let the rest of us non-special people know that we are the have nots?

By: GwynethLlewelyn

GwynethLlewelyn — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:33:47 +0000

Aki, I hope so, I hope so

In the mean time, I've been happily trying out Snowglobe — I hadn't clicked on the “Get HTTP textures” tab on the Advanced Menu, which has now popped up on Snowglobe's latest incarnation.

I have only one word for it — WOW. I should make a movie out of it…

By: Aki Shichiroji

Aki Shichiroji — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:26:51 +0000

Hehe. Hopefully our shared NDA frustrations will be quelled soon Of recent released news, I'm pretty happy with the release of Snowglobe, as well as the beta release of the site thus far (though it could of course use some work still).

While I won't argue that there are a lot of areas that do need to be fixed right now, I view this and next year as positive change compared to last, and hope LL continues to develop and impliment positive change for both the immediate and extended future.

By: GwynethLlewelyn

GwynethLlewelyn — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:08:12 +0000

Oh, I should warn you, if your computer is not even able to enable Atmospheric Shaders, then you're out of luck — that's the least you need for shadows to work.

And since it might not be obvious for many, under the Kirstens Viewer, the option to enable shadows is under Edit > Preferences > Graphics > Hardware Options > Enable per-pixel lighting and shadows (while you're at it, make sure you have Enable VBO and Enable FBO active, too — these will just improve rendering performance, sometimes dramatically so).