"Inside the Lab" podcast with the Windlight team!
Second Life is looking a lot more like First Life. The new viewer based on Windlight technology completely rewrites the lighting and rendering of the world -- more realistic lights means better looking textures and skins, and a world that looks and feels more real and up to date.
Linden Lab's own Melissa Linden sat down with the Windlight team for a wide-ranging discussion on what Windlight can do for the user experience, how well the new viewer works with creaky old graphics cards, the extra features Windlight adds in for free, and what new things are to come. More on all these things ... after the break.
Windlight was a small development company working out of Boston, working on a next generation shooter, when a chance meeting at the 2006 Harvard Business School Cyberposium led them to Linden Lab. Windlight showed them the new tech they'd invented -- Windlight for lighting models and Nimble for volumetric shaders (fog, clouds, etc). Linden Lab was interested, a deal was struck and the Second Life viewer took a giant step into the future.
The sky was the first thing to feel the Windlight magic. Though people were used to the old, flat lighting, it could be better. Light in the real world doesn't come just from the Sun and other light sources -- it gets reflected by every object it hits, comes at you from all sides. This is called radiosity. By implementing this realistic light scattering, scenes began to look more like someone would expect, without a performance hit. Due to the work they did, scenes render faster than before.
Part of this acceleration was a better understanding of just what things are visible from where you are. If you're in a room, spinning around, the stuff outside is stuff you'll never see. Windlight simply removes those things entirely while you aren't looking at them. Distant things used to be drawn completely, though very small.
Windlight now can use stand-ins called "avatar imposters" -- small pictures of distant avatars -- that are not updated as quickly as nearby ones and are just a snapshot of that distant avatar. As you and that other avatar draw near, that small picture is replaced with the actual model. In brief, if a picture is as good as the real thing, but the picture renders faster (thousands of times faster depending on the complexity of the avatar) -- Windlight uses the picture.
Sunsets. The Windlight team is just pleased to death about them. Deep, rich colors -- a certain weight to the atmosphere that you might find in an oil painting, and only rarely through the computer screen. People look at the sky and the sunset and want to build their favorite spots in the entire world around them. Machinima makers love the ability to set a distinct mood by using Windlight to make the sky of their imaginations.
It would be all too easy to imagine that these up-to-the-second graphic features wouldn't be available on older video cards. That might have been the case, but they understood that not everyone has the latest and greatest, and did custom rendering engines for cards going back several years. The Windlight team did additional custom engineering to ensure that Second Life looked as marvelous on the MacBooks as it does on Windows or Linux.
Windlight is a huge triumph and an important milestone in Second Life's future. The day where you can play "Real life or Second Life?" with screenshots is not just approaching -- it's here.
