User:Torley Linden/Project updates

General

[2007-09-18] Creation Portal YAYZERAMA!

I am sick and tired of how dang hard it can be to find resources to knowledge, especially Resident-created gems. I love compiling link-lists with context so you know what you're getting; I'm also partial to only listing what I've actually used, so I can speak of my experience in it.

The point being, Rob Linden suggested I start a Creation Portal here on the wiki, and so I have — he setup the box on the very front page, and I'm going to expand the CP over time. This being a wiki, I more than hope you'll add to it if you know some of useful resources which fellow Resis would find handy. Not sure what that includes? Here's a rule of thumb I go by: if I discover something and naturally exclaim, "I wish I knew about this earlier!" then that's a very good sign of a tool, a help page, or another resource which needs more exposure.

WindLight

For almost-daily visual updates on how WindLight is coming along, Torley's Flickr photostream.

[2007-10-08] AVATAR IMPOSTORS are AN EXCITING PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT!

Take my word for it. :) "Avatar Impostors" (I know some of ya spell it "Imposters") is a new performance-boosting option that's part of WindLight's optimizations. It basically means that avatars that are relatively far away will be rendered as 2D sprites (think of classic video games) instead of in their 3D entirety, providing you with noticeable speed gains. This is especially noticeable when you're in LARGE CROWDS, and gosh, how many of us social types find ourselves in those situations? :D

Since Avatar Impostors is an option, you can turn it off at-will. How much of a gain can you expect to see? My experiences are still tentative, but I'm looking at the Ahern Welcome Area right now with 30+ avatars in a crowd:

Avatar Impostors OFF = 21 FPS
Avatar Impostors ON = 31 FPS

That's a big boost right there, and so far, it's typical of my experiences. Now, I'm gonna head to Little Japan which is literally packed with 100 avatars... I'm sure they can make room for one more since I'm a Linden. ;) So, let's compare again:

Avatar Impostors OFF = 14 FPS
Avatar Impostors ON = 28 FPS

Nice!

At lower framerates, relatively speaking, a boost of a few FPS is proportionally a lot more noticeable, as opposed to, say, 40 to 50 FPS. And that's with a FULLY-PACKED REGION! Keep in mind tho that because of other performance optimizations (like occlusion culling), that your results may and will vary depending on what's actually visible, and other Graphics settings you've chosen.

I did these quick tests on a Q6600 w/Nvidia 8800GTS (640 MB version), which is a fine card. I also did them with Water Reflections ON, which, for all its prettiness, does impact performance a lot. So let's compare that Little Japan scene again with Water Reflections OFF:

Avatar Impostors OFF = 18 FPS
Avatar Impostors ON = 38 FPS

An even bigger difference. It should be noted my system is fairly high-end, but I got it on a limited budget (more info here) and that the price of technology continues to drop as SL keeps progressing. Also keep in mind that part of this overall performance increase is due to other optimizations in WindLight.

So what's the downsides of Avatar Impostors? To be frank, avatars will look a little cruddier and jagged around the edges, but not by much. They may remind you of Monkey Island or other classic adventure games, heh. They'll also update less so their motion will appear jerky, but if you're in a very busy area with many avatars, chances are your viewer FPS will be low and update chunkily anyway, and turning on Avatar Imposters has the added benefit of keeping avatars within a few meters of you in their regular 3D selves. My personal recommendation? Keep Avatar Impostors on most of the time unless you have specific demands for smooth motion, e.g., you're filming a machinima with one lone avatar walking towards you from the distance.

Yes, I plan to include mention of this in a future Second Life Tip of the Week about how to negate lag and make your inworld experience fasterrrr.

And not to hype things up to much since THIS IS STILL A WORK IN PROGRESS, but I'm definitely using the viewer, live, rite now. It ain't vaporware — to show you this is certainly a substantial step towards improving Second Life's performance (always part of the important "Performance & Stability" duology!) for you, for all of us.

[2007-10-02] Back from vacation...

Lots of catching up to do, *ulp* EMAIL AVALANCHE! I'll find my way through. :)

WindLight's still being worked on. *checks on Project Manager Bridie's excellent updates* Looks like more bug-squashing is in the works. Part of the trickiness is that there've been more than a few odd bugs that came up on some system configurations but not most others. And there are many, many variations of computers that run Second Life. I'm sure a wider base of testing through the forthcoming public First Look will help — we really do appreciate the feedback — and Aric, in charge of Quality Assurance here, has mentioned that he'll help acquire additional testing equipment.

[2007-09-20] Better Preferences > Graphics tab is very, very nice

I know having 3 Graphics tabs with a kajillion options :p confused the heck outta many of you.

Now, in Preferences, it's a single tab with Low/Mid/High/Ultra easy presets, and a "Custom" mode should you want to have extra configuration like you can in the current main viewer.

So far, for the hour or so I've been playing with the improved Graphics Preferences UI in WindLight, it's a LOT better. Much more understandable and hopefully will help simplify your setup. I may post a picture soon, but we're still doing UI tweaking. Big ups to our Team for making this better.

And... from the Resident in me... about time this happened!

[2007-09-18] Things that must be done before we can ship

We've spec'ed out a bullet point list, "Launch Criteria", of deliverables that are required before we can re-release our First Look. Most of them are done or well in-progress. Some of these must-dos are obvious, like no easily-reproducible crashes. Some are a lot more specific — fine-tuning the default day cycle continues. One big graphical thing we've needed to address was local lighting being too bright during the day; I'm going to look that over personally in the next build.

WindLight will expose flaws in older content because of its increased realism, but it'll also make a lot of stuff that was semi-crappy look way better. For example, the default avatars like this (which date back several years) clearly have a richer depth and presence, and skin tones don't appear so flat and stale.

WindLight is going to be a big shot at addressing why Second Life doesn't look as good as "other games" on the market, and don't forget about all the old code cleanup too, it was a very conducive project for our devs to get things done that they've wanted to for ages — for your benefit.

ETA still looks like "within a few weeks", depending partially on if any nasty showstoppers come up. We really want to get this right for our community. I'm understandably hesitant to lock down a time until we're suresure, because we don't want to disappoint.

THANX TO EACH AND EVERYONE WHO ASKS ME ON A DAILY BASIS "WHEN WILL WINDLIGHT BE BACK?"... it shows you care, and we sure give a damn too. I am inspired by the dedication and passion our WindLight Team, including relatively new Lindens who came from Windward Mark Interactive when Linden Lab acquired them.

[2007-09-14]

A picture of some of the new WindLight user interface.

[2007-09-12]

Guess what folks? We're going to be simplifying the Preferences > Graphics tabs. I've seen some mockups and they look exciting. Tentatively (meaning THIS IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE), we hope to have a "master slider" that controls others. Of course, if you're an advanced user, we want to give you the choice to fine-tune the nitty-gritty, but all those buttons and sliders have puzzled Residents for ages, so it's time we do something about. Count this as a usability increase.

I also chatted with Pastrami and BigPapi Linden and it sounds like the reflections are deliberately an "expensive" operation, so while they sure are pretty, in already-sluggish areas, you'll likely want to scale them down — at least, that's what I've been doing.

[2007-09-10]

Our new reflective water is so pretty, but why oh why does it cause such a big FPS hit on my 8800GTS? (Typically I see a difference of 5-10 FPS in geometry-rich areas.) Note to self to inquire with Runitai (maker of the original ripple water!) and other graphics gurus about this.

[2007-09-06]

It's common for me to wake up early and start working to the tune of the sunrise — unbelievably conducive for WindLight, as you can imagine.

But today, today we have Grid issues right now (as I pen this), which sucks.

I'll make good use of this time and share more with you: "WindLight" has gone beyond "atmospheric rendering" because in the process of adding various optimizations, we're also going to make usability improvements — changes to the Preferences' Graphics tabs. I know they're confusing and tend to elicit reactions like, "What the !@#$ is a 'Vertex Buffer Object'?" Thus, we aim to simplify, and help you have better control over your choices.

There's some neat tech coming out, like "avatar imposters" to improve your framerate in big crowds by using less resources to draw further-away avatars. That means they will walk kind of jerkily and look like old-skool video game sprites, but the performance tradeoff may be very well worth it. This, of course, will be an OPTION so if you have a beefy rig and want to turn those imposters off, that's your prerogative.

Like I've mused on occasion, glow (aka RenderGlow) is being added as a build parameter on a per-texture-face basis. It currently isn't saved into the simstate, meaning I have to set it upon every login and teleport (if I've made an attachment like my hair glow), but it looks delicious, save for some blockiness. There are additional glow debug parameters to play around with, too.

By the way, there's some serious weirdness I'm experiencing with Preferences > Adv. Graphics > "Enable OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects" on. It's supposed to give you a net gain in performance, but I often see it decrease my performance, or make my framerate stutter when I zoom and turn around. If you're seeing the same thing, feel free to email me with your system config... it's in our internal Issue Tracker (not the public one) but Runitai Linden, who's has the same type of graphics card as me — 8800GTS w/640 MB, but his config is SLI and mine isn't — isn't seeing this.

So, overall, crunching down on critical bugs and getting us primed for our First Look re-release continues. We're severely concerned with performance.

Internally, there are currently 284 WindLight issues, most of them bugs, with 170 of those fixed. I reported 98 of these, with 61 resolved.

I reckon this may be one of my fave WindLight shots yet.

[2007-08-31] A lot has changed

Wowzerama, so many moving pieces. Mid-week, we had a broader internal discussion about WindLight and future First Look programmes: we need to message clearly that First Looks are subject to much change, but at the same time, uphold a level of quality so they aren't badly buggy. As a pragmatic result, WindLight Team is focusing on squashing the most important bugs so you'll never know they were problems in the first place.

I know there was some panic when WindLight first came out, about how much it colored things too strongly or wrongly. A number of those were definite bugs, and some of the others are subjective aesthetics we can adjust. Appearance-wise, a lot has changed. It is really challenging to do a well-rounded default day cycle: Pastrami Linden has been super-open to our feedback, has been adjusting relentlessly, and I'm going to give his newest presets a spin over the long weekend.

Speaking of presets, I've created 22 water ones to learn the system better, including "Raw sewage" and "You're in luck" (guess what that looks like? Heh...).

I'd also like to take this time to EMPHASIZE that even if you don't have a fancy graphics card, you'll still be able to see so-called "fallback mode", meaning WindLight shaders will be off and you won't get the pretty new clouds and atmospheric lighting, but the general environment should still look better than the current main viewer's one, so consider it an improvement for just about everyone who can participate in Second Life, even on slower hardware. Also, those who don't want WindLight to tint scenes so strongly (even when we've done more tweaks) can go to fallback mode — it's a simple checkbox, "Enable WindLight Shaders" in Preferences. You'll understand it when you're actually using it within a few weeks, I hope.

And yes, thanks to issues like VWR-960, your "Classic Clouds" are still an option, so you can turn them on and off as you wish.

[2007-08-27] Ripple water custom settings

Like the sky, we've added the ability to customize the look of ripple water. Like the sky, it's viewer-side for now but we eventually want to make this all share-able assets like any inventory item. I'm having a great time changing parameters like the glassiness of the water, not to mention you can alter the normal map to come out with some really tripped-out FX. Keep referring to my Flickr photostream for more examples — I'm so excited for the time when you get to enjoy this hands-on!

Also, it looks like (subjectively) stuff with WindLight shaders on is still too bright at certain times like noon. Pastrami, Bridie, hopefully some QA engineers, and I will be going on a "shader safari" to investigate further this week.

To those of you who sent in questions re: deprecating scripting calls, we haven't decided what we'll do with some of them yet. Some will stay for the time being like llCloud, because we're keeping the classic cloud layer (see VWR-960) until such time we have a full 3D replacement, dubbed Nimble, for 'em. We do want to make a lot of the finer bits scriptable — imagine a rock concert scripted with songs to coincide with dramatic sky changes? But that is further down the road and relies on current work to be done first... so let's keep going. :)

[2007-08-25] Internal testing continues

Info can be caught, like a cold, only healthy. So what to do if you find the info on this page useful? SHARE IT WITH A FRIEND!

Sometimes, I leave blog comments filling in gaps, but those tend to get lost, so why not focus on this page? I can do both.

Anyhoo, I continue to both formally test WindLight and informally use it everyday. Internal bug-churning continues; I recently announced, within Linden Lab, an internal First Look as it were, to precede the public FL. My concerns right now? Partially to do with aesthetics (subjective, I know... tricky tricky!) because I'm finding a number of scenes look too white or washed out, e.g. noon with local lighting. HARD to understand if I don't show pictures or if you're not actually using it, but...

We have fallback mode ("shaders off"), which doesn't have clouds, but still looks better than the current sky, and is supported even if your computer doesn't have a fancy graphics card. And it doesn't exhibit the really bright overcasting of the WindLight Shaders, so I toggle on/off for relative comparison. We'll keep adapting it, Pastrami Linden has been tweaking the default day cycle because he cares so passionately about making it photorealistic. Yes, photorealistic. The ripple water has gone through several iterations too: you may've heard reflections got added as an option (understandably, negates performance on slower computers), but the most recent one looks SEXIER than ever. (I can remember when we got the first ripple water added, it and it looked like "liquid bling".)

So, it's the weekend now. I'm casually sauntering inworld and doing everyday stuff. I'm also warmly concerned about overall performance, we have some bugs to work out with that because we earlier, and continue to find issues that counteract the gains done with the aforementioned optimizations. Everyone on the team wants us to be plus, positive with that, so not only do you have prettier skies, but a better experience (that's the word!) too. Wider testing tends to reveal more, so I'm looking forward to your help come public First Look re-release.

LOTS LOTS LOTS of changes have been made since last public FL: WindLight so please don't base final judgment on that. A number of crashes were fixed. (We hate those!) I know shiny was dull in early releases, well now, it shines. Even better, it uses less CPU power ("single-pass shiny"). A lot of known WindLight issues were already fixed internally, and in our release notes, we'll document all the other changes that happened behind-the-scenes so you get a more comprehensive understanding of the work that went into WindLight.

You can keep observing this page for updates. Login to the wiki from the upper-right-hand corner and then click the "Watch" tab, or just bookmark it in your web browser.

If this section gets too long, I'll move it onto its own page. Thanks for keeping on going with me. +^_^+

[2007-08-20] When is First Look: WindLight coming out again?

Hopefully in a few weeks. I earlier hoped it would come out by the end of August, but it doesn't look like we'll hit that. The WindLight Team has been very busy fixing bugs (including those I've reported), and today, we just launched an internal testing round for Lindens (because previously, it was mainly just the WindLight Team using it). I apologize for the delay because I know how anxious a lot of you are, particularly from comments I've been getting on my snapshots.

Also for emphasis, you should know (if you don't already) that WindLight isn't just about "pretty skies" — performance improvements, rendering optimizations, and code cleanup to improve the viewer are an important part of it too. It's a false dichotomy that we spar between bug fixes vs. new features, and I am dogged (and obsessed) about improved performance & stability (aka P&S) for Second Life.