Summer

We're going to need some input from coconut, remember how she felt about Windlight. Have some sensitivity people.

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Summer time is a nice time.

Jessyanne

I sooo knew there was a reason I got dual Nvid 8800 Ultra 768 vid cards!

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Penny Patton

I imagine there will be quite a number of people who will hate this development.

Joannah Cramer

Then he's an idiot with no grounding in reality. Wanting to play with deferred rendering on corporate dime is sure nifty way to spend one's time at work, but leaving your application look like shit for large part of your customers when it could be easily addressed... well, that has quite obvious impact on retention numbers. I'm quite fine with condescension when it's backed up by solid knowledge, but when it's just hubris and bravado to excuse laziness, it's another matter altogether.

Newsflash: people did shadows and/or per-pixel lighting long before 8-series nvidia cards* It's not hard, and it'd roughly what, triple amount of people who can enjoy the gfx improvements? And that generation he's "generously" supporting? It' has yet to make it to more than 20% of the gaming systems out there ( Valve - Survey Summary Data )

*) heck, doesn't even the open source viewer do them for that matter, since Ogre supports these things and they use it as renderer?

Chip Midnight

I just bought a brand new system in December and they didn't even offer 9 series cards. The 8800's were still the top of the line for most OEMs six months ago. He has a strange notion of "generous."

moopf

Woah horsey! I'm not saying he's right, I'm saying I can kind of understand his point. What I guess we have to remember is that by the time this comes out for real (and knowing how LL development traditionally goes, we're most likely talking quite a while) that 20% will be much higher. He's no doubt talking from that position - if it's going to take 6 months for this to get prime time not supporting series 7 cards most likely makes more sense. He's taking a typically techie view - that everybody should be running super-zippy up to date monsters. Look how long Windlight took to come to the main viewer.

I still use 7 series on my PC and laptop so unless I upgrade I won't get these new features either. I haven't upgraded because I've got no need to and what I have works perfectly well for my needs.

I might be tempted to upgrade just for Spore though, simply because. Not that I suspect I'll actually need to.

Atashi Yue

Lowest end 8000 series GeForce cards are about $36, but you have to have a PCI-e slot.

So he was perfectly correct in what he said, even if some didn't like how he said it.

Love

I like this guy. I mean, he knows Vista:

/me waits for Joshua or Cristiano to chime in.

I think adding advanced features based on a current video card is perfectly acceptable. You don't need them to run SL. Sure, it would be nice, but not necessary. It's the ATI people who should be pissed off.

moopf

Yeah, I know. I don't agree with his idea of "generous" either. But I guess he's a techie and many of those I know tend to speak in a way that make you feel like you should be thankful for them supporting something that's not state of the art but, shock horror, a few months old

I'm a techie, but I try not to talk like that, mainly because I have to wear many different hats and so that techie edge gets softened by dealing with end users etc. At least I think it does!

Michael Bigwig

Shadow casting and self-shadowing will be super cool, when the times comes the majority of us can run the code without screeching to a dismal FPS count.

Personally, I already either fake'n'bake my shadows, or bake them via sculptie. It takes a little extra work, but makes all the difference in a build, or product.

Examples of self-shadowing and baking below (pretty easy techniques if you take the time to learn them):

Attached Images

	Jib.JPG (16.1 KB, 80 views)
	LightingSimulation2.JPG (80.9 KB, 81 views)
	NJA_turntable_slarti.JPG (30.3 KB, 80 views)

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~Michael Bigwig
___________________Lead Designer, Glowbox Designs

Joannah Cramer

Yeah i can see where he's coming from, i just think he's mistaken and doing very poor resource allocation based on this mistake.

I'll have to disagree here -- what we also have to remember is, most people are notoriously slow with hardware upgrades. Especially when they can play perfectly good looking games on consoles nowadays, and the number of games that are both limited to PC and require hardware change... is low. It might take 6 months for LL to code that render path? So what, the 7-series cards won't disappear in 6 months, or a year or two. As will be the 8-series. So it makes much more sense in my eyes to focus on solid renderer that works on both of these (it has side-effect of improving appearance also on even older hardware) Then with the solid foundation in place i have no problem with adding extra render path for whatever they fancy.

By solid renderer i mean here the basics -- normal maps, glow maps, reflection maps. Dynamic shadows. Higher quality terrain, maybe even with improved texturing ability. Freaking light types other than spherical, even. Things that have quite more visual impact than ability to render whole million of face lights at once.

Verkin Raven

This is going to save me about several months of brute force manual hard sun shadow landscape baking work. And yes, I was really willing to go through with that, because missing shadows SEVERELY detract from the authenticity of a scene.

Verkin Raven

Also, supporting the 8 series is "generous" ...? What the fuck?

Joshua Nightshade

Well he was right, Crysis sucked.

Cristiano

The downside is that if you were to use texture baking, everyone could see your work as intended. With a feature like this, a much smaller group will see it with the lighting/shadow effects.

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"At least he died doing what he loved most - blogging on the Huffington Post" - 30 Rock

* slu stuff *

Brenda Connolly

He came off like a smart assed techno jerk as far as I'm concerned, but showing smarmy condescion towards one portion of the customer base or another is not new for LL so it's no big deal. As for the pictures, they look very pretty, just like the Windlights. But neither is going to make me run out and by a new Video Card. Harrumph. *takes her X300 and goes home.

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Cattrina Careless

::shrugs:: I liked him. That aside, you also have to think about the audience he was writing for. They are also techno geeks and he doesnt have to temper his speech as if he were talking to end users.

Verkin Raven

I fail to see how the 8x series is weak, especially the cards with the G92 chipset. Is LL going to pretend SL looks better than Crysis? *snork*-BAHAHAHAHA!!!

Also, I understand that a good portion of folks can't see the new tech, which makes presenting a scene as intended a pain in the ass. If I baked shadows that looked just as good, but people had shadows turned on, you would get two shadows for one light source.

I guess this would "work" if the baked shadows were created accurately against a locked estate sun, but with the normal shadows turned on, it would be twice as da- Wait a minute, you could use the hardware shadows to help create baked shadows!

Joshua Nightshade

Yeah isn't the 8800 the fastest video card on the market at all right now?

Jessyanne

I hope so. Or I'd be mighty pissed I just dropped all that money on them

Joshua Nightshade

This has been a huge problem for me as I've built out my sim. I'm using megaprims as walls around the sim itself to drastically alter what it looks like. I realized early on that according to LL's metrics the majority of users keep their draw distance at 64m, meaning that these megaprim walls (and much of the background decoration) will never render for most of SL.

Not to mention the glow and post processing effects that the sim relies heavily on.

In the end, after initially grappling on whether or not I wanted to cut the sim in half into a 128*m box to make sure it draws or not, I decided to say fuck it, I'll make the sim look awesome for those who can see it, and those who can't won't be unable to shop or anything anyway.

Verkin Raven

The higher end 9X are faster, but as far as I've been able to read it uses the G92 chipset and doesn't have any new rendering tech, just more balls.

A G92 8800GTS 512 is extremely potent now. Not THE best against the better 9X, but it shouldn't be unreasonable to expect it as a high end card. I bought one a few weeks ago, it chews up everything unless games have some insane graphics settings (like FSX on super dense scenery which would require a computer not yet built to render at max because of the nine zillion trees.)

Gonta Maltz

Yeah in just a few months even my 8800 GT will be a dime a dozen. If you want shadows in SL then go out and spend the $60 or whatever it'll take to upgrade your computer. Unless you're computer hasn't been upgraded in 5+ years, in which case: what do you expect?

SL can't forever run on the same spec computers. Having "high-end" graphics options is no different than most video game engines.

I don't imagine there being a LL released binary (ready-to install *.exe) for quite awhile. If people are going to try and argue that SL needs to have glorious shadows with bumpmapping and HDR lighting with motion blur for all users then they're out of touch with how computer graphics go, especially with the nature of SL content.

Ran Garrigus

Nvidia just recently got to the 9 series, relatively speaking, and reviews suggest that for the most part they aren't _that_ much hotter than the 8800GT in terms of performance. The very best card out right now is essentially SLI-on-a-single-card, and even that's not really tremendously better.

So to call supporting the 8 series "generous" ... he must mean the entry-level cards in the series. At least, I hope that's what he meant. Because if he thinks the 8800GT is going to be at best mediocre at handling per pixel lighting and so on by the time it's ready for the main client, there must be something wrong with the implementation.

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• Old Fashioned -- Occasional SL fashion reviews.

Brenda Connolly

But his remarks DID reach the end users. Part of my complaints with SL and LL as a whole is they won't decide, and announce what they want SL to be. Do they want it to be the Cutting Edge Semi Niche world that is primarily inhabited by the techno elite and serious computer hobbyist? Or do they want it to be the next internet, accessible to the broad range of users, where the silicon heads can tune it up to their hearts desire, but the average person, like me, who wants to just play for an hour or two a day, without getting a computer science degree? Just let me know, I'll take my business elsewhere for my entertainment.