I love to see Second Life with all the features turned up to 11 (especially since most of us will never see such a thing first hand.) Here's what SL's Welcome Area looks like running in a recent build of KirstenLee Cinquetti's open source Shadowdraft viewer, using a modded version of AMD's Catalyst Radeon Mobility Driver. This comes to you from MyBrains Gottfried (who I think you'll glimpse here as the Snoopy avatar with the rainbow mohawk), who also recently shot this flashy SL machinima video for top UK electronica group Loverush.
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Looks lovely but is it perhaps wrong for machinimas to present Second life turned up to 11 since i assume only a tiny percent can see SL like that :).
Posted by: Loki | Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 01:53 AM
I agree on that. Heck even with a hd5970 I can barely breach the 20FPS mark with shadows enabled once there is anything much going on on the screen.
Heres to hoping LL will optimize the renderer and subsequently their prim tesselation routines (since with vertex lighting becoming obsolete, there is no need for the excess segments anymore).
Posted by: Psistorm Ikura | Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 02:38 AM
@Psistorm Ikura
Actually i think this machinima has some scenes speeded up. Its one of the tricks i sometimes use to get a smoother scene when there is far to much on screen for the viewer to handle :) Although it can be quite arty to speed up film.
Posted by: Loki | Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 02:44 AM
Loki, I really go back and forth on that question. If I ran screenshots and video of what Second Life actually looks like much of the time for me, I'd be running ugly gray blobby pics.
Posted by: Hamlet Au | Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 03:01 AM
I can get shadows working decently well on a secondhand dual core 2.13 machines with a Nvidia 8600GT card - yes a 3 and a half year-old mid range card.
On my other dual core machine with an Nvidia 260, machinima to the standard you show is easily possible with Viewer 2.
I get fast rezzing and low lag - but from reading comments on the various forums and blogs I do wonder why lots of other seem to have a very different experience.
Posted by: Hitomi Tiponi | Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 04:26 AM
Much of SL's core demographic is running legacy hardware... and by legacy, think less dual-core and more Pentium.
There's nothing wrong and a great deal right with leveraging the power of the latest and greatest GPU's, but at the same time, developers should invest significant time and effort to make sure that things purr at minimum specs.
Posted by: Arcadia Codesmith | Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 07:47 AM
Hamlet, you report this as if Kirsten added those effects. He didn't.
Deferred rendering has been part of Viewer 2 from the very beginning. That includes shadows, unlimited local lights, textured spotlights and ambient occlusion (aka. global illumination). There is nothing new in that video, and certainly nothing that is specific to Kirsten's Viewer.
But I guess praising Viewer 2 is not cool...
Posted by: Masami Kuramoto | Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 09:00 AM
I tried Mr. Cinquetti"s viewer a couple days ago. It looks ok, but not really that much better than Linden's V2. I think it's mainly useful for screen-shots.
It deleted all my other viewers settings and then made me do a reboot when I uninstalled it. So kind of a boo for that. A third party viewer should be nice enough to make it's own preferences directory or at least not delete what's in your current one.
Posted by: Lili | Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 06:02 PM
From that height, Ahern almost looks like a normal place, without a nare-do-well or drama-queen in sight :)
Posted by: Ignatius Onomatopoeia | Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 06:51 PM