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

[Tateru Nino]

Brad Kittenbrink (Brad Linden) wrote:
> 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.
>    
I was recently shown some dynamic reflections in SL from a bit of shader 
hackery. And not very complicated hackery, I was led to understand. A 
perfect mirror was implemented.
-- 
Tateru Nino
http://www.massively.com/
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