#Black dragon second life update

When you’ve got that, note how the grating not only casts shadows on the floor but also breaks up light falling through it into individual patterns of sunbeams. When watching it, be aware that while the camera is moving, everything else is static, other than the grating in scrolling across the ceiling of the room. Prior to releasing Black Dragon 2.4.1.9, Niran produced a video demonstrating the effect. While not true volumetric lighting in the strictest sense, it still provides a good graphical representation of the effects of objects on sunlight. Niran’s work on bringing a form of volumetric lighting, as I’ve previously reported, builds on the Godrays capability Tofu Buzzard developed, to provide a more realistic look to how sunlight can look under certain circumstances, such as when being filtered through the branches of a tree or through the grid of a window frame, where the light rays might be broken-up into streams of sunbeams. Niran’s revised horizon line between “sky” and “sea”, seen in Black Dragon 2.4.1.9 with deferred rendering (ALM) enabled

Images of all the horizon rendering adjustments Niran has made can be found in his blog post on the release, linked to at the top and end of this article. With Black Dragon 2.4.1.9, Niran has addressed this, and a few other horizon-related rendering issues so that – and again when running the viewer with Preferences > Display > Deferred Rendering (ALM) enabled, the horizon now appears as a horizontal line, as shown in the two images shown here, taken from Rebeca Bashly’s When Life Gives You Apples … Run. The familiar concave horizon line between “sky” and “water” seen when running the viewer in “deferred” mode (ALM enabled) … One of the visual irritants in Second Life when running the view with the Advanced Lighting Model option (which Niran still refers to by its more technical name of “deferred rendering”), those living at altitude in-world (or flying at a few hundred metres above sea level), is the way in which the line of the horizon between “sky” and “sea” forms a concave curve across the screen, rather than a flat line as one might expect.

However, do note Niran’s recommendation to set texture memory to 512 Mb (the default upper limit for SL viewers, set several years ago to avoid OpenGL issues which might occur when setting large memory allocations) and the scene memory to 256 Mb. With Black Dragon 2.4.1.9, Niran has attempted to “split” how video memory is used by the viewer into two adjustable “pools”, one for global textures (which include UI elements), and one just for just the current scene texturesĪs I’m not a graphics or viewer rendering expert, I can offer no opinion on this approach. constantly switching between blurry and clear as they are swapped into and out of memory due to lack of space). The idea here is to provide the scene textures with their own “pool” of graphics memory, so they are no longer competing for graphics memory with all the other textures obtained from the region and the viewer’s UI textures, and should thus result in fewer issues of visible textures being “thrashed” (e.g.

With the 2.4.1.9 release of Black Dragon, Niran has split how graphics memory is used between “global” textures – which include all the UI elements, etc., and the graphics memory currently being used to render the current scene – what you are actually seeing in-world at any moment in time. Up until the 2.4.1.9 release, Black Dragon, like most viewers, offered a single slider for setting the amount of video memory which could be dedicated to texture processing by the viewer

The is generally set to 512 Mb by default. Generally, the viewer has one slider for setting a limit on the amount of texture memory, which encompasses everything you see in the viewer, including all of the UI elements. The first of the changes Niran has made relates to the way in which graphics memory is used with textures.

#Black dragon second life update

Taken together, they are part of a larger update Niran has been planning, but as he comments in the release notes, he wanted to get these particular changes out to show people, and will save the rest for his upcoming version 2.4.2 release. The update also includes a number of other fixes to some long standing rendering issues that Niran has been attempting to fix.

On Tuesday, March 10th, NiranV Dean released version 2.4.1.9 of his Black Dragon viewer, which includes his recent work on volumetric lighting for Second Life, which I reported on at the start of March.