New Second Life Windlight release: 1.19.0(79185)

The First Look release of the Second Life Windlight project has been updated with a number of bug-fixes wrapped up in a tasty new First Look viewer. What the heck is Windlight all about? Check out our feature on it here.

More details and a list of fixes and changes after the fold. This is the first Windlight build released on the 1.19.0 base code, which will please a lot of people to see. A lot of ATI problems sorted out, but only with the latest Catalyst drivers (8.1-57717, we presume), also some Mac performance and general lighting improvements.

The First Look browser is a beta-test browser that runs against the main (Agni) grid. If it eats your inventory, your files and your dog, that's at your own risk. The viewer is available from the First Look downloads page right now. We recommend the use of a download manager to save download time - it can cut 90% or more off the overall download time for many users.

Changes for this release (obviously on top of all the 1.19.0 changes):

• Get the WindLight lighting calculations to NOT wash everything out

• VWR-3101: Alpha textures are opaque at a distance and the transition is ugly and unreliable

• VWR-3123: WindLight: Avatars with attachments at higher altitudes sometimes aren't rendered

• VWR-3124: WindLight: Glow not working on some ATI 2xxx graphics cards

• VWR-3160: WindLight: OS X 10.5 (Leopard) has poor performance and multitexturing problems with shaders enabled

• VWR-3172: WindLight: Property lines aren't visible in shader water

• VWR-3268: WindLight: Ctrl-Alt-E (or AltGr-E) for opening Environment Editor makes typing ?-character impossible

• VWR-3373: WindLight: Daylight settings in Estate tools missing

• VWR-3529: WindLight: Saving snapshots to disk crashes viewer

• VWR-3984: WindLight: Certain snapshot options incorrectly capture a part of the screen

• VWR-4337 (aka DEV-9233): WindLight: Fallback shiny is partially invisible and (aka DEV-9327): WindLight: Invisible prims appearing opaque at a distance

• Crash when popping up Havok 4 Het-Grid notification floater.

• ATI 8.1 Drivers fail to link many of our glsl shaders

• Avatars are rendered in wrong region for a frame after crossing region boundary

• Setting Graphics Performance to Ultra immediately crashes viewer to desktop

• bump map breaks when terrain is not visible.

• WindLight on Macs have lackluster frame rates

• Snapshot UI improvement

There are presently 223 open Windlight issues, up 16 from from 207 last release.