Windlight: what all the fuss is about

When the old Windlight First Look viewer for Second Life was withdrawn there were assorted howls. Then, after it recently returned in a fresh First Look viewer, the cheers outweighed the grumbling of "Oh great, features instead of bugfixes" despite the fact that there's been a significant shortage of new features compared to bugfixes in the last year and a half.

When an updated release-candidate viewer that contained a slew of bugfixes for some irritating problems, a lot of folks just plain didn't want to download it, preferring Windlight to bugfixes. So, what is it with Windlight?

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Windlight is something of an amalgam. It takes the Windlight technology that was bought by Linden Lab this year, and welds it to the second generation Second Life renderer. In its most recent incarnation, the rendering pipeline has seen yet more overhauling, so theoretically, Linden Lab is groping towards version 3 of their rendering system.

There are several advances in the way the new rendering system works that makes it an attractive option – and a few cons along the way.

Firstly, the new system makes more extensive use of vertex and pixel shaders for, well, just about everything. This has considerably improved the lighting model, but there are still some problems with it. Objects and avatars seem to receive much less illumination than (for example) the ground, making avatars and buildings look quite shadowed. As the sun is higher in the sky, the situation improves, but at the expense of the terrain washing out as the color values for the terrain start to exceed maximum clip.

On the other hand, water effects are just spectacular. You really have to see it in motion.

The new skies are also fabulous (again, you really want to see clouds scudding along, forming, reforming, and changing shape).

Both sky and water are individually tunable by the user at present (only the time of day/night is sent by the server and you can choose to override that. If you prefer a surreal, nightmarish vision of the End Times, you can have that too!

In future versions, we are promised that sim-owners will be able to set preferences to fit the mood of their places.

Avatar imposters (a kind of simplified 3D sprite system as is commonly used for particle systems) have been implemented to increase performance for distant avatars (essentially distant avatars are rendered as a kind of cardboard cutout, rather than as a full 3D model). In busy simulators, the performance improvement of this feature alone is quite noticeable.

Shininess for objects is – well, it's not really quite right. Yes, the objects are indeed shiny, but it's definitely not much like the cube-mapped shininess Second Life users are used to. This definitely needs a bit more work.

Another new feature apparently needing a bit more work is object-glow. It creates what appears to be an additive luminance bleed to an object, capable of totally washing it's textures out, even on the lowest settings, and washing out the fringes of immediately adjacent objects.

There's a panoply of options available to those with more advanced hardware. with most of the rendering options being able to be enabled, disabled or tuned individually.

In theory, those with older hardware have not been forgotten. Avatar imposters and pipeline improvements are supposed to give you a much better and smoother Second Life experience.

In practice, though, if you have an older video card with Shader Model 1.4 you might not even be able to get the Windlight viewer to start up at all, with a disappointing crash taking place just as the viewer tries to create it's first rendering context (that's just before the login screen) – signs point to some shader magic being indulged in before the preferences and settings are actually loaded.

This crash doesn't generate any crash-reports to Linden Lab, so it's uncertain if Linden Lab is aware of the percentage of affected users. We're not, but examining the hardware in use in the top 100 most common graphics rigs among Second Life users, there's a whole lot of older hardware in use there right now.

Lastly, some users are reporting that turning on atmospheric shaders in conjunction with other options is causing their user-interface elements to go dark. We're not sure how many people are affected by that.

In the final analysis, Windlight is, well, gobsmackingly gorgeous – but it really needs some of the rough edges polished off of it yet.

You can get the Windlight First Look viewer here for Mac, Linux and Windows. We recommend the use of a download manager to reduce download time. It's all coming off of Amazon S3 anyway, so you won't hurt it. Mac (universal binary) 71.4MB, Windows 33.3MB, and Linux 49.4MB.

First Look viewers contain major feature previews, but run against your live account on the main grid (Agni) rather than on the beta-test grid (Aditi). The new viewers get a much more solid workout on the Agni grid, but there's always the risk that they could eat your Linden Dollar balance, your inventory and your dog.