Second Life Dynamic Shadows

Not long ago I wrote about Second Life and Dynamic Shadows. They are a feature planned for the ‘next’ viewer. Well… that got pushed back because the Lindens had sex on their minds… well getting sex out of the viewer… mmm… how about eliminating sex from the viewer? Whatever, the Adult content filter has displaced shadows.

A Second Life resident, KIRSTENLEE.CINQUETTI, was tired of waiting and decided to mix up her own viewer form Linden Lab’s open source code. SL Photographers have been using her viewer to take some nice images in-world. Now that viewer 1.23 is coming as Release Candidate she has baked a new version.

Read a bit more and download the S17 Viewer on Kirstinelee’s site: S17 Viewer.

Check out the larger version of the picture on her site. What you are not seeing in the small image is the AV’s tentacles and the shadows from them. Pretty nice render.

Kirstenlee has a donation button on her site. If you plan to make use of the viewer or just like it, consider sending some money her way.

This is not an everyday viewer. You might be able to use it as one. I have not used it enough to know how stable it is or is not. I’m playing with taking some pictures. More about those when I see how they turn out.

Update 8/10 – KirstenLee S18 Viewer Review

The latest release of this view is awesome (S18-1  207). Great frame rates and way more stable. Even if I turn dynamic shadows on I can still move around (6 fps). I know that is slow but most of the jerkiness is gone.

To turn shadows on (the way I know) is to go into the advanced menu (Ctrl-Alt-d) Debug Settings… Find renderUseFBO and renderDeferred and set them to TRUE. Be sure you do it in that order. Your FPS rate will drop but you get some great shadows. To undo it set these values back to FALSE.

2 thoughts on “Second Life Dynamic Shadows

  1. Did you try the impressive Projected Textures feature (that is, “shadows from objects”, not only from Sun/Moon) – does that work for you?

    According to KirstenLee, her new viewer is actually built on Linden Lab sources only, so this feature should work, as I usually build my own viewer by compiling the same sources and Projected Textures work here – see my demo videos at
    http://www.youtube.com/user/OpensourceObscure

    Give it a try, hope it works for you as well.
    I wrote some more instructions in a comment on Kirstinelee’s site.

  2. Pingback: Imprudence Viewer 1.1.0 Review « Nalates’ Things & Stuff Blog

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