If It Ain't Broke...

As you may already know, I HATE change, and this applies especially to changes with the Second Life viewer (the version of the SL program we use to access our "other" life). Such a strong word for a girl, you say... hate?? You actually HATE change? Perhaps you mean that you just don't care for it very much.

Nope. I HATE it. As they say, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Right... I suppose it's LL job justification. After all, what is a development team to do? That's right: create CHANGES. Change for the sake of change. Let's improve something that is already just fine as it is.

Well, most of you have by now seen the notice on your log-in screens. We have been advised that we MUST upgrade to the new viewer by next Thursday or else. OK, so I added that last bit, but you get the idea. We have all seen this before. The last time they said we would NOT be forced to use the new viewer if we didn't want to. A couple weeks later we were given the ultimatum. Now it's back to the same routine once again.

I figured I may as well just do it now rather than wait 'til the bitter end. It's Sunday morning, and not much else is going on here anyway. I went to the main Second Life web page and chose the latest version, v1.22.11 and let it load. After I installed it I logged on to see if there was much of a difference. Ummmm, YEAH, there's a difference.


The HORROR... the HORROR...



The first thing I noticed, to my HORROR, was that now the water looked rather cartoonish, and it was transparent enough that when looking at the sea, all the surrounding underwater landscape was ghosted on the water. I knew I would have to do some tweaking, so I set forth to conquer my preference settings and maybe even tinker with the Environment Editor if necessary (World > Environment Settings > Environment Editor). I should caution you here to go easy with these settings, because unless you really know what you're doing, you can screw things up royally.



Enough whining, you say? SHOW us what you mean...
Okay, okay. I anticipated this, so I took a few screen shots to illustrate my point, and to show the results of what I did to fix it. BTW, you can click on all of my images in this blog to see them in a larger format (Oh? You already knew that?? WhatEVERrr... )

The first one shows how things looked initially. I set the light settings on "sunset" because I thought it would add a little color to my otherwise bland-looking diatribe.

Notice the not-so-faint outline of the surrounding underwater terrain:



If you look, you can see an island and where it extends under the surface of the water. This is progress?? I thought they were fixing things. Hmmmm...

Notice, too, that you can see my legs beneath the water's surface (pic was taken behind my house. Not a bad view, eh?).


This was when I decided to open the Environment Editor. I took notice that the Water Fog slider (which controls the water transparency) default setting was at 4.0; I pushed it to the right until I hit 8.5, and the offending underwater terrain went away. So did the clean look of the water. Now the water was looking a bit yucky, thick and slimy, and possibly crawling with critters that I could only imagine nibbling at my virtual toes.



Not liking this look at all, I reset the slider at 4.0 and went to my preferences window (Edit > Preferences). I went to the Graphics tab and clicked the Custom button to bring up further options.

I suppose it might depend on your computer's configuration as to what the default settings will be, but in my case, the Quality and Performance setting was set at mid range. This was fine for my older viewer, but now things were looking a bit flat and unexciting. I felt that with these so-called "improvements" things should be looking a lot better. I tweaked my level up to High, and right away I noticed a difference. The water had much more texture to it, yet my draw distance only increased from 96 to 128. My concern here was that I did NOT want to see clear across several sims; I wanted to keep things looking fairly distant.

I actually liked the results:



You'll notice that by setting the Water Fog level back to where it belonged, I restored the transparency of the water, yet the increase in the general quality of the imaging made things look so much better than the old viewer did!

The problem is, these improvements are not without their trade-offs; for me, lag increased just a bit. Not a lot, but for those with older or slower machines, this might be an issue. I will just deal with it. It's not too laggy, and it looks awesome now.

One other thing I noticed was that at certain times, the picture could appear to look "washed out," or almost over-exposed, especially on my avatar's face. I turned my face light down to the low setting, and this seemed to help.

Another thing... I don't know if this is something new, or if I had just never noticed it before: the clouds in the sky seem to move as if there is a wind! Nice effect. I hope it works well for all of you, but I'm sure they are already hard at work "fixing" things again. Oh, well... such is our Second Life.