M is for Myg

I actually love Windlight, but I do not think it loves me, the reluctant techie. Two versions ago worked best for me, right out of the box. The last version didn’t work - at all - without constant crashes. I still have issues with the latest release being “sticky.” Which feels sort of like lag, only a quicker lag, if that makes any sense. It sucks, is what it does. I can lower the quality of the graphics from “high” to “medium” but then it doesn’t offer me much beyond the basic browser, which is less laggy. (Oh and btw, I have a Macbook Pro, 233 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2.6 GB DDR2 SDRAM with an ATI Radeon 1600 graphics card with 256 mb of V-RAM. I don’t actually know what that all means, but Alex tells me it’s significant.)

I tried using some of the sky settings recommended around the SL blogosphere, where folks such as Caliah Lyon and  Iris Ophelia talk about using the “blizzard” setting to help diffuse the light and get good avie photos. But waaaaah I can’t get my shit to look anywhere near as good, no way no how. (Photo below is borrowed from the New World Notes Iris Ophelia Post mentioned above. I sure hope they don’t mind!)

I’m just not real patient and I’ve basically got no clue what all those environmental controls can do. And to be honest, I don’t want to have to learn. I just want some presets that work right out of the box. It would seem to me, um duh, that maybe in future releases of the Windlight browser, Linden Lab might actually take some of the settings that are being experimented with around the grid and package them into presets that the impatient Windlight fan such as myself might just, ya know, use. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Anyway, the shot at the top of this post was me experimenting with the sky presets. (If you don’t know how to do that, huzzah! I commend your bravery: World->Environment Editor->Advanced Sky Tab.) That one is “surreal.” It gives you these crazy racing clouds in orange against a purplish sky. Not bad for a night of clubbing on the roof, for sure. As Hulk helps demonstrate here:

That photo is completely unretouched (I played with the other shot from last night using flickr’s picknik to mess with some of the softness and border, etc.) The light is very harsh. I wouldn’t recommend it for your basic SL functions, but hey a party can handle extremes, right?

I’ll keep experimenting, but in the meanwhile, if you’ve got tips or tricks for optimizing windlight settings, please do share. And hopefully in future releases we’ll get a browser that is less lagalicious and more avatar friendly right out of the box.

Oh, Happy Saturday!

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Tags: hulk, windlight, second life, settings

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 26th, 2008 at 1:13 pm and is filed under Hulk, Second Life, tips from Myg.