[sldev] Anyone from the time of Dynamic Reflections still here?

[Brad Kittenbrink (Brad Linden)]

Tigro Spottystripes wrote:
> Stickman escreveu:
>   
>>> I would like to know what happened exactly, at first it worked perfectly
>>> for me, then it stopped being supported cause it was crashing some
>>> people, then it started working worse and worse for me and eventually I
>>> couldn't even find it on the client at all. Is any Linden around that
>>> was around back when it all took place and knows the details of what
>>> happened?
>>>     
>>>       
>> I remember those! They were fun to play with.
>>
>> There were some issues if you went into mouselook with "show avatar in
>> mouselook" clicked, but they otherwise seemed to work well.
>>
>> I wasn't paying much attention at the time. I believe they were in an
>> RC. But I don't think they ever made it out, did they?
>>
>> I have a number of screenshots in my inventory about those... Here we go:
>> http://stickman.mach5.org/temp/sl-reflect.jpg
>>
>> Is that what we're talking about?
>>
>> -Stickman
>>
>>   
>>     
>
> I think so, but I can't tell if those were already the versions that
> started misbehaving, I got a couple shots from the good version (and
> perhaps a one or two from when it was bad, I don't remember) on my
> galery at ProfilesLive (
> http://www.profileslive.com/profilepictures.asp?id=4766 ) . I remember
> for some versions it reflected well, but the reflection map position
> snapped to coordinates several meters apart and somtimes it would
> reflect a point very far in the sim, there was also a time when the
> reflections where fuzzy no matter what resolution you set them to be,
> then the reflection was only updated the moment you turned Dynamic
> Reflections on and then stayed frozen, after that I think it would show
> some random scrapings of the video memory, and when Windlight arived, or
> perhaps some time later, it started messing up the screen if used in
> combination with Athmospheric Shaders, and eventually it was gone completly.
>
> I think it was a First Look and not a RC client, at least at first, but
> I have a slightly fuzzy memory of a debug setting for it reaching the
> main client even after the option in the Advanced (I think then it was
> called Client or perhaps Debug, I'm not sure) menu was gone, but that
> too was removed several versions later.
>   
Well, I think I remember some discussions about whether to maintain 
dynamic reflections when we began integrating Windlight, and the 
decision was 'no'.  At that point, I think it was a debug setting in the 
release client, but the feature had been stagnant for some time.

If I recall correctly, the reasons for leaving it unmaintained were that 
the existing implementation was rather unscalable (in terms of video 
memory usage and extra rendering passes) and could "never" have been 
brought up to releasable quality.  Work on Windlight integration broke 
it, as the same code was now being used for the Windlight water, but not 
being maintained for compatibility with existing dynamic reflections.  
The debug setting was removed shortly thereafter.

I may be recalling some things incorrectly here, but I think I got the 
basics right.

-Brad