Bryn Oh’s Immersiva – photo using only custom Windlight settings and no post
In the old days, the Lab would roll out new features and then, well, kind of leave them half-finished. In the new days, the Lab rolls out new features and then pretends it’s looking for community feedback…but what that means is they have their finger on the roll-back button and they can press it or not. (Roll-backs are a whole other topic of course).
Windlight is a good example: it brought the visually rich graphics to Second Life that are usually reserved for games, but with an even wider palette well-suited to the surreality that we can find in SL. I remember during the test period being awed by the new look, but as it plodded through the tweaking phase we ended up with – well, with sparkles on the water really. The default Windlight didn’t look much different than the old SL, and it took too many mouse clicks to change them all the time, and then if you flipped the time of day it would revert to default.
A few builders realized that Windlight settings could completely transform the look and feel of a sim. Take a trip to Immersiva to see what I mean. Under default settings it’s beautiful, but under the presets that Bryn Oh designed it’s, well, immersive.
But the challenge with builder pre-sets is they’re a hassle to install. There’s no script you can place that you click which loads a Windlight pre-set automatically, or at least not that I know. And there’s no estate-level controls.
One argument against estate-level Windlight is that it would radically change the experience of geographic continuity. You’d be wandering from sim to sim and it would go from a sunny day to a dark and stormy night. But this argument doesn’t hold water for me: as an artistic and immersive tool, the environment is part of the palette, but it’s basically useless if you can’t easily let others experience it. For a builder, this leaves little option but to build for default: and I can tell you that you’d texture and build very differently in a foggy sim than a sunny one – it’s a completely different look and feel. I could even see the texture artists getting a whole new revenue stream creating for specific Windlight pre-sets, or offering texture packs with a preset plug-in.
Over on OpenSim, meanwhile, we have what I believe is the first estate-level Windlight system, called LightShare(TM). (Full disclosure, though: while we have no commercial interest in LightShare(TM), the developer of LightShare has done significant work for my company Remedy). From the Meta7 Web site:
LightShare is a ground-breaking new technology from Magne Metaverse Research that – for the first time in any virtual world – allows region owners to share their environmental settings with their visitors.
What does this mean? Well, now region owners can fully customise their regions’ environment – sky, water, clouds – and create amazing, mindblowing visuals or even more subtle changes to liven the mood.
LightShare is presented in a fully scriptable interface. It’s even possible to target LightShare settings at particular users. For example, a roleplay environment could make a certain users’ world go dark when they die. Or you can give people an entirely different environmental experience depending on where they are in the sim!
One of the disadvantages of LightShare is that it requires you to use a specific viewer. Whether the team will share the code to the main repositories for the viewers typically used in OpenSim I’m not sure.
Now, Linden Lab is working on shadows and mesh and who knows what back in the tinkering room run by Tom Hale and gang. In the meantime they’ve been sitting on a platform feature that upgraded the hardware requirements to access Second Life, but did little to change the experience on the Grid other than to be able to take better photos for Koin-Up or Flickr. But maybe the new team needs to look back at what some of the old team never quite finished.
This post is made completely heedless of what Windlight *does* to most people’s computers who are not geeks.
For more than a year, due to the *forced* incorporation of Windlight which I did not need nor ask for, like thousands of others, my Second Life was reduced to a crawl — I had to put it on 64 draw distance even to move a little, so that Windlight, far from causing a visual feast, reduced me to gray mud. Me and many other people without the persistence and need to wait on customers that I had.
And no, before you read for the snarky Doug Linden catch-phrases about people’s computers being so old they’re ready to start kindergarten, my computer was brand-new, and had the latest graphics card *that Linden Lab itself included in the spec list*. I just didn’t have a really high-end graphics card and a hand-built machine and endless geeky ability to keep tweeking my machine.
And duh, I knew how to tweak my game (yes, it’s so often a game when you’re at this level), by removing shadows, etc. etc.
Finally I shopped around endlessly in the regular mainstream computer stores about a year after Windlight and I finally found a machine that came with a graphics card on LL’s list. See, that’s the problem with getting Second Life to a million: people are not able to install their own graphics cards, it’s simply too risky, they don’t want to pay someone else to do it, so they buy machines with them installed already. And the list is extremely short: like one or two graphics cards listed by LL for SL are in computers you can buy off the shelf in Best Buy or some other chain. Because that’s what most ordinary people do, they don’t go to egg.net or whatever and build their own.
Seriously, Dusan, if you care about SL growing, then you have to care about this problem. Windlight was crippling, and did things like take out the previous sun and its lighting which were actually quite naturally beautiful, and replaced them with a big runny egg sun that only looks good if you tweak the Windlight controls endlessly.
Few people do. Only a few fashion bloggers, Crap Mariner, and Zha Ewry, and of course the spamming Torley Linden, bother with this. It’s a tiny minority. Sure, I’m willing to go fuss with it for the sake of Bryn Oh’s show but it’s an awful lot of work.
OpenSim having an easier version of this leaves me unimpressed. It’s not what is needed to make OpenSim usable by normal people.
It would certainly be great to have a one-click (optional) way to set your environment settings to match the one an exhibit or sim was designed to be viewed.
Prok – I really won’t argue with you on this one, because you’re right. What’s even more infuriating to me is that if they were going to bother in the first place, why did it turn out to be so LAME. They shouldn’t have deployed Windlight at all.
What then becomes doubly lame is that having required people to upgrade, like yourself, in order to have anything like a decent experience, they didn’t even the finish the job with it. Since we have it now, shouldn’t we use it?
[...] LightShare is a ground-breaking new technology from Magne Metaverse Research that – for the first … [...]
[...] Only a few fashion bloggers, Crap Mariner, and Zha Ewry, and of course the spamming Torley Linden, b… [...]
I totally agree with all thats been said…..
I would love to be able to set the settings
and…..my computer has suffered..
…..and….. the ‘old’ sea made terrific lakes before they upgraded it. Now, land below sea level doesnt look like a lake/puddle or pond as it did before. The sparkles are crap.
Soror – big fail all around really. The slight sliver of advantage was traded off for higher system specs, and then they never finished the job and made it really useful.
And the coming shadows or whatever it’s called – I wonder what that will do to system requirements. Better be optional.
I did experiment with a viewer called Restrained Life a while ago which would let you change the sky settings instantaneously upon clicking a scripted ball. All that was needed was to click that ball upon entering the sim and it was done. Default custom skies for sims would revolutionize second life much like mesh will over time. I think keeping people in second life requires constant new stimulus and one such stimulus would be having endlessly different skies as you travel around second life. One mall is much like another under default midday and default ground textures. A mall perched on a hill with roiling black storm clouds as you walk up the path to it is at least more interesting. We want people to travel to a new sim and feel like they have discovered a new world. The custom sky is another tool for the artist. Imagine a landscape painter who could only create the ground, then when done with that they had to pick one of four skies.
My understanding is that this is (or was) a point of philosophy, in that the “world” was supposed to be a contiguous “place,” and thus having environmental settings have disconnects when crossing a region boundary would not make sense.
Before someone decides to throw stuff at me, I’m not judging, defending nor saying I think that decision is the one I would make, however I thought it important to provide the explanation I’ve heard as to why imposed Windlight settings were purposefully not implemented. What I’d heard in public fora is that this was not an “unimplemented feature” and was a conscious design decision.
A 2006 era computer struggles with Windlight. But modern ones don’t even flinch.
I’m all for backward compatibility. But the way to do it is to have the forward compatibility, and let the stragglers dial down their settings.
Advanced graphics is mandatory for serious contenders. Leveling the playing field is not.
Computer hardware ‘ownership’ is essentially an illusion. Your computer hardware is effectively X dollars per month, and steadily degrades until you need a new one to keep up with the pace of technology. Usually within 3 years.
Of course, one could keep a computer for say, 10 years ~ a time when dialup was still prevalent and AOL mattered. Platforms evolve with the times, or hang on a while and then fade. SL is now in the hanging on phase. Time to make a bid for the future.
For the record, I tend to do grey skies from Bristol, Verdigris… when I’m feeling lazy I do Sunset.
One of my goals for this year is to find more skies that I like.
-ls/cm
My Imac ran SL very nicely before the windlight update. Afterwards it became considerably slower.
However, I do like Windlight. It allows for extreme sky and water settings. If you fool with it long enough, very realistic settings are possible. Of course my draw distance is way down to accommodate it all.
The feature in itself is what I think of as an Easter Egg type of deal in-world. Its only for the people who have a need or strong desire to use it. Most people won’t, so that is why LL probably never went further with it.
Was it worth borking people’s computers for? Its fun but no.
Desmond is full of shit, as per usual.
A new computer purchased in 2008 *with the specific graphic card listed on the website* did not, repeat DID NOT work well with SL and ground it to a halt BECAUASE Windlight was FORCED on us. Desmond is one of those heedless and arrogant tekkies that simply can’t accept that what is pushed out to mass stores is not up to speed for SL.
I’m not talking about getting out of date within three YEARS. I’m talking about getting out of date within THREE MONTHS goddamn it. That is the norm for me and many people *buying in normal regular stores*. I even had a friend once build me a computer, for another reason, BTW, and even that custom job played SL crappily.
The geeks at SL simply won’t get over this ideological barrier, and there are always smug geeks like Desmond available in the chat groups and forums to back them up on that sense of smug superiority. What does it take to break through this wall?! If the Lindens would test their software by having 10 people across the world walk into the nearest mass chain store selling computers, like a Best Buy, and see how their game plays, they’d have a completely different viewpoint than what they get tinkering with their custom machines in San Francisco.
This idea that computers “have” to become obsolete “within three years” is silly Silicon Valley tech talk, of course, becuase there is nothing that says computers have to be different than televisions or vacuum cleaners or cars and not even last two years, which is what I usually find they last with heavy use.
Until Second Life can be willing to have a “pro” and “consumer” version of “heavy” and “light”, it will go on being a very small niche world with no 100,000 concurrency, let alone a million. This is the single most important thing the Lab must do.
And Dusan, get off your point about how “Windlight doesn’t work anyway”. Oh, it works *good enough*. Sure, I can make all the purple skies and whatnot. At first, I used to tinker with that and take fancy real estate pictures. But I found it was pointless because my customers weren’t going to bother with fussing with Windlight. Normal people don’t use Windlight, like they don’t use voice, despite all the hype and the inflated numbers. They just don’t. Only people like Crap Mariner use Windlight.
Windlight should not have been put in, unless it could be put in as a separate software, that they should have even sold for more.
Again, what I want to reinforce is that Windlight was not possible to turn off. Yes, you could reduce draw distance, and not use its prefixed settings or monkey with it, and yes you could turn off shaders.
What geeks can’t seem to grasp about the Windlight forced march, however, is that the ability to even have it as an option meant a new threshold of graphics competence that pushed the existing supposed acceptable requirements beyond their performance level. You couldn’t just not have pre-Windlight capacity; you were forced to accept its capacity and dumb down your computer just to live with it.
I’m amazed I put up with this for a year. It’s like Mitch Kapor says about masochists among early adopters, I guess. Sad.
just a little correction. Only our grid is able to use this function. It has not been generalised yet.
Laurent
the idea behind that is allowing a sim owner to customise the sim settings to fit the sim moods : a foggy forest for exemple.
Our implementation allows those settings to be sent to one avatar directly. This could be used for RP for exemple, without the need of an addtional Hud.
the settings could be reversed at will by the viewer obvioulsy.
Well, you forgot to mention meta7 is the ONLY opensim platform LightShare™ is available on.
To reply to some stupid arguments on here (mostly by profoky).. Wind Light was never forced on anyone. To see windlight you will have to have your basic shaders and your athmospheric shaders on on your graphics preferences. Plus, there is NO possible way a different windlighr setting would slow down your computer, as it’s merely a change of values. (colour the sky red, colour the water blue, brighten stars etc.) Windlight is ALWAYS present if basic shaders and athmo shaders are turned on. Changing the values should never slow down your viewer -.-
Therefore, sayin windlight should have never been introduced is a useless argument. Virtual worlds are games, gamers have the right to be able to see a virtual world as beautiful as possible. Innovation should NEVER be stopped! IF it means that you need to upgrade your hardware… then you should gladly accept/tollerate that -.-
If you are looking for a mere chat / social platform, go look somewhere else (I heard Facebook is popular).
Flo/Sacha – thanks for the clarification. It makes it a bit less of a breakthrough in a sense if there isn’t a licensing scheme for other openSim Grids, but a great example of what can be done.
I won’t argue about whether Windlight lopped off more of the ‘bottom’ than it added to the top. Prok’s comment that it was a forced march is decidedly subjective, or the term is anyways. A new policy for third-party viewers could be called a ‘forced march’ by some, the change to Havok 4, or a new SL Web site – technology can be viewed as either enabling innovation and a process of continual change or a forced march, it depends on what subjective value you place on the PARTICULAR change.
I agree with Desmond that you need to be able to have forward compatibility with the ability to dial down. There are multiple constituencies in SL – for the immersive aspects, you come to expect more game-like graphics, which is why I think everyone is so hot on Blue Mars. But the enterprise or education markets, say, I still have clients using Flash5, and the turn-over on new machines isn’t in 3-year increments, it’s in 7-year ones, not to mention the slow pace of IT departments in deploying software, graphic driver and other updates.
Having said that, I’m struck by the challenge of maintaining a ‘world’ and can understand Joel’s comment about the Lab wanting to maintain a sense of contiguous geography. But I also imagine the decision process was a bunch of Labbies having coffee outside in that Levi’s park place, chatting, and one of them says “Oh, I wonder if we should have estate-level Windlight” and the other says “Naw, drop it, Philip wouldn’t like it and he’ll go on and on about how it’s a world blah blah”.
Now, Prok is saying no one WANTS or USES Windlight but that’s my very point – it’s not EASY to use, no one builds for it, why would you bother….I’ll bet 90% of the Grid doesn’t even know where the little drop down menu is with the Windlight pre-sets.
It was simple really:
- Windlight should have had an option in the menu just like you do for adult content where you can click a box and turn Windlight on or off, which would toggle the basic and atmospheric shaders or whatever it is that Flo is describing
- There would be a secondary button saying “allow estate presets”
- There should have THEN been an option for estates to send presets to the viewers.
- As a final alternate, there could be a scripted in-world object which you can click on that changes the presets so that you can do it on an “as I’m wandering” basis but leave your basic set-up the same.
I’m undecided, however, on this option that LightShare has for sending pre-sets to individual users but hey, would certainly create a range of more game-like interactions.
This is incredible. It will make such a difference for the installation of art exhibits and themed builds etc and its use could be applied to theatre and countless other things too. Wonderful!! They so have to pull this into Second Life.
I hear what people are saying about what windlight can do to a system. I have a pretty high end gaming system so I cope well with it, but for those on a bog standard system, yes, windlight can be laggy. A switch on/switch off option would be great. But regardless of lag, windlight was and is amazing graphics progress. And we cant expect the platform to stop progressing just to accommodate slower/older/basic computers. I agree there should always be an option for a basic level of running for these PCs, but I am all for forward progress.
Josue: Windlight IS optional. As mentioned above, you just need to turn off “Basic Shaders” and “Atmospheric Shaders” in the graphics preferences and you will see the world without windlight.
Flo
Statistically, most people are luddites, and a scant few are early adopters. Change is scary to the former, innovation is what motivates the latter, even if it involves a little risk. It is amusing to see symptoms of this playing out in this thread.
Lightshare is not going to be of interest except to those that are the kind of people who do the creating in the “your world, your imagination” corner of the metaverse. Lightshare allows a region owner to use scripting to control the atmospheric effects (sky, water, clouds, etc) so they can go beyond what could be done before.
This is probably a bit too esoteric for the pedestrian virtual world visitor. For the builders, scripters and virtual world artists frustrated by the inertia of LL, seeing the agility of a small startup like MMR that is willing to risk their time and resources to create some new innovations may be a welcome addition to the metaverse. LL have seemingly been focusing on the enterprise level moguls versus the more artistic crowd of the masses, so there is plenty room for others wanting to pick up the ball and give it a different spin.
Maybe worth mentioning that the Imprudence client makes it trivial to change Windlight presets. The Oxford University WW1 Poetry sim (Frideswide) benefits enormously from it.