The Shadows popup menu hints at what I think is the most intriguing details of the new lighting system. The screenshot of me at the top of this post uses Depth of Field to blur out the background-although I will note it was remarkably difficult to get my avatar into focus for that screenshot.
#Kokua viewer cant move scripts from one object to another Pc#
The effect is similar to focus effects seen in many console and PC games, and while it feels out of place in Second Life-it makes me feel like I have a vision problem-it may have uses for screenshots and other places effects can matter. If you move your camera to a point, that object will shift into a sharper focus, but other things (including stuff close to you-like your avatar) will shift out of focus. Depth of Field seems to be a huge performance hit, and basically, blurs out things in Second Life that you're not looking at. That might be true, but if so it's being bogged down by a bunch of other things that I probably don't particularly want it doing.)Īmbient Occulsion seems to make for more contrast in parts of objects that aren't illuminated, and produces much smoother and fuzzier shadows from the sun and moon. (That 20-22 fps is already substantially lower than the performance I got under Viewer 1.x and SnowGlobe, so I don't really believe the Linden's claims that Viewer 2 performs so much better than Viewer 1.
On my admittedly-aging computer with video hardware gamers would sneer at derisively, enabling shadows essentially cuts my frame rate in half: where I would normally get 20-22 frames per second in a typical scene, I'll be around 10 or 11 with shadows enabled. They also seem to deal with alpha layers in textures pretty well: if you see a tree with swathes of leaves done using a semi-transparent texture on a prim, the shadows will enable light to shine "through" the leaves. Lighting and Shadows is the basic setting for enabling shadows-Linden Lab calls these "high quality" shadows and they seem to be sort-of right: they move dynamically with the sun and moon, respond in real time to moving objects and avatars, and deal with moving "flexi" prims just fine. When users look in their custom graphics options (Preferences > Graphics > Advanced) there are three new checkboxes and a pop-up menu-if they're available, then Linden Lab thinks your video hardware can support it. Although the new capabilities aren't available for every graphics system that can run SL-it looks like you need something supporting OpenGL 3.0 with at least 512 MB of video RAM-users can choose to enable them and take a look. With Viewer 2.7.1, Linden Lab has finally rolled out shadows and lighting effects in its official viewer. (Kirsten has actually added 3D support recently, which gives me a headache just to think about.) Some third party viewers-most notably Kirsten's Viewer-took the idea and ran with it, but Kirsten's viewer has always been described as "bleeding edge madness"-it's for folks with high-end graphics hardware, and the few times I tried to use it, the viewer crashed on launch. Linden Lab apparently implemented more realistic shadowing in their official Viewer but never enabled it because it so seriously degraded the viewer's performance. Years ago Linden Lab apparently implemented some sort of client-side "foot shadows" that can appear around the feet of avatars in the morning or evening-basically, the only time you notice them is when they're hanging in midair where they shouldn't be, because an avatar is sitting, using a pose, or something. You can see this effect all the time in Second Life: lights that magically shine through walls, through stone, through avatars, through…well, everything.Īnother thing that makes Second Life lighting fake is the lack of shadows. It illuminates nearby surfaces, but it also has this amazing nuke-yoo-lar ability to penetrate solid objects: it you set a strong light on the solid roof of a building, the roof isn't going to block the light from coming inside: stand under the roof, and you will be strongly illuminated by a light that shouldn't be able to reach you. Lots of people wear invisible prim "facelights" to highlight their faces-fires, video screens, lamps, vehicles, and all sorts of other things can emit light.īut it's tremendously fake light. The sun and moon count as light sources, so users can encounter (or make!) up to six other light sources. One of my peeves with Second Life is that while it offered up to eight lighting sources in a particular "scene"-that's a limit imposed by OpenGL, if a video card can support them-the lighting is horribly fake. Lou at home, seen through the new tricks in Viewer 2.7.1.