SL 2.1 Shadow Controls

I had to do some searching to find out how to turn shadows on in the current SL Beta 2.1 viewers. The former instructions found on New World Notes, or Gwyneth Llewelyn’s SL 2.0 Beta still running too slowly on your Mac? No worries! are a bit out of date. It is easier now.

Juicy Bomb’s Second Life 2.0 Shadows instructions are good… plus all the cute clothes are fun.

Turning on dynamic shadows is done in the Developer’s Menu (Ctrl+Alt+Q) under Rendering.

First turn on FrameBuffer Objects. This caused my screen to go black, clear, white, and Non-Responsive for a few seconds. Then I was into a series of problems where the screen was cycling through black, non-responsive then responsive and I finally relogged.

My EVGA 8800 GTS is getting to be a bit old for this level of graphics. I hear the 9800’s are better. Some are saying the newer nVidia low end 200 series are not that great either, which I find hard to believe. Whatever, a relog got things going again.

Next Deferred Rendering needs to be enabled. My screen does another dance and I have shadows.

Once Deferred Rendering is on Global Illumination (GI) is available. That is optional. The Kirsten Viewer Tips article has more about GI and what it is and how it looks.

It puts a performance hit on my system. I go from 35-45 FPS to about 10 FPS.

The projector works nicely. 🙂