On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 12:27 PM, Ann Otoole <missannoto...@yahoo.com> wrote: > There is no shine at all when lighting/shadows is enabled. Sorry. None > whatsoever. Full shine black is just flat black. Full shine white is just > flat white. Full shine textures are just the textures. It is completely > broken. And this, in turn, "breaks content" that was sold with the > expectation it was shiny.
Shiny enables specular highlights, not reflections. Physically the two are the same thing, but in raster based graphics they are separate. That weird metallic colored blob we had before was just a quick and dirt hack, with lighting & shadows enabled the viewer will do true specular highlights which depend on the angle of the light and the camera in order to be visible. > I don't expect to live long enough to see real time true reflectivity in > Second Life. Like latex that actually reflects. Would be nice but there are > miles and miles to go to get that gpu capability for real time translated to > opengl and then farther to go to show up in Second life. Or third life or > whatever this concept is called at that point 50 years from now if there is > still an internet (doubtful) and civilians are allowed to be in possession > of computers beyond what they are "chipped" with. OpenGL has been able to do reflections for a long time now, it's just a very demanding process since you have to render the scene from the point of view of each reflective object in addition to the camera's view point. Older games would cheat and just render one cube map for the whole scene and use it for all reflections, but that may not be acceptable in sl. Once again, the dynamic, user made content in sl is what holds us back. There is no way to limit the number of reflective objects in view and using more then a hand full would bring all but the current top of the line cards to their knees. What we need is fine grain control over how objects are rendered instead of just everything in the view plain been drawn in full (LOD'd) detail. The shadow maps & GI code does this with a distance based cut off. Having a distance / size cut off for reflections would help a lot with any over use of them. Adding in full impostors for all objects would be even better. Over all I'd say the viewer needs to start doing some serious resource management if we ever want to have a draw distance measured in kilometers. _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/OpenSource-Dev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
