High-end graphics features planned for Second Life

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Sculpties do work correctly, from my brief testing. As does everything else - which results in some interesting trees. As the LOD on the trees decreases, the shadow makes it obvious - so trees rendered as two crossing textures show a cross as a shadow. It also seems to make HUDs vanish entirely.

It also brings my system (octocore Mac Pro at 2.8GHz, GeForce 8800 GT 512MB, running Kubuntu 8.04) to a halt if I accidentally turn the settings down again - I had to pull the plug on it because it was so unresponsive I couldn't quit or kill SL. I'll put up some pictures on Flickr when I'm done doing some encoding stuff. They'll go in http://flickr.com/photos/katharineberry/tags/shadowdraft/

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Katharine, this is a wonderful set of pics and really shows what a difference shadows make in creating a convincing environment.

Looks as though alpha textures such as trees and the sandbox sign cast proper shadows as one would expect, although it seems like the edges are courser, maybe similar to the 64x64 low detail we saw in dynamic reflections on shiny surfaces in the past? (via the Debug menu)

A couple questions: can shadows be cast by local lights, or is this limited to just the sun and the moon? And have you tried rezzing more local lights than just the six we're normally limited to having active?

Could you use local lights to create an indoor space lit with plain white lights that would override some wild Windlight preset colored the sky outside (thus fixing some peoples' complaints about Windlight)?

(heh heh, i think i just need to figure out how to compile one of these for myself)

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It is coarser from that distance - but when you're closer to the ground it's a perfect replica. I could not find any way of getting both the full detail version and the original in the shot, however.

Shadows are only cast by the sun/moon. More local lights work and look good - you can see the effect of too much lighting at http://flickr.com/photos/katharineberry/2533660451/ . The colour outside was sort of pinkish. The bit in the middle is ten lights overlapping - it glows just a little bit too bright for my liking.

I'll upload a bunch more pictures I took.

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