Do you have advanced lighting enabled?

[Saraya Starr]

Always on.

[Blush Bravin]

Always on as well as shadows. SL is just too flat looking without them. I have a decent machine .. not the best by any means and not the worst either. I can run two instances of SL at the same time with those enabled and do okay with fps. When going to a very crowded avenue with 40+ avatars I will reduce view distance drastically to keep my fps up and only run one client.

As a creator, I am constantly running additional aps with SL. I very often will have SL, blender and gimp all running at the same time along with a browser. Of course during those times I'm alone in my workshop.

[Coby Foden]

I keep Advanced lighting model always on, often shadows too. Those make Second Life look much better than without them.

[LittleMe Jewell]

For me it totally depends on where I'm at and what I'm doing.  I make sure it is on for exploring & pictures, but  always turn it off for busy events. Other times, it is random.

[Ceka Cianci]

I always have it on..I'm always taking pictures and running around the grid checking out different sims..

[Tari Landar]

If I am out exploring, I only turn it on in certain instances.....when something says it uses it, there are no other people around, I am trying to take a really nice photo, or I just want to see if it's needed.  

All other instances, I leave it off. I have even found instances wherein someone claims an item utilizes it, and there is literally no difference with it on or off-those instances are rather disappointing, lol.

I don't see sl as flat, boring, ugly, less pretty, less textured, less detailed...whatever else have you, that others say they see when they have some of the graphics options turned off. That might be attributed to the fact that when I started sl, and until almost the middle of 2009, I was working with integrated graphics on an older than dirt machine just barely scraping by(RIP poor Sparky). I was impressed by what I saw in sl, and loved it. Then hubby got me a graphics card....woah nelly, that was amazing, I could see WATER, like...something that looked an awful lot like REAL water, not just blue shadowy looking water...but...real water.

So, uhh, yeah, I'm not overly impressed with ALM being on all the time when for many things, it has little to no effect whatsoever (and yes, I do try with on and off, and more times than not, there is little to no difference, save an object here, an object there...). Some folks do amazing things, texturally speaking, that enhance ALM and utilizing it is a must. I like those things a lot. But, most, don't actually, so there's not much need for turning it on.  I don't keep it off because my FPS is low, or because it's too much for my machine to handle, I just don't like having anything running I don't need, no matter what I'm doing on my machine, lol (even unrelated to sl, I keep all running programs, apps, etc...to a bare minimum, even when unnecessary to do so) 

[Ana Stubbs]

I have it on all the time, even on my Atom tablet with integrated graphics, which hits 25 fps (but slows to a crawl if I leave the sim I manage).

I notice when people send me snapshots that most of them clearly don't. The same group of people seem to also have quite low expectations, so I design things to look great with ALM, and merely OK without.

Local lights are the biggest pain to equalise. I sometimes spend longer tweaking the lighting in a build that I did building the darn thing...

[Klytyna]

I've had ALM enabled since it was introduced.

4 hours ago, Tari Landar said:

I have even found instances wherein someone claims an item utilizes it, and there is literally no difference with it on or off-those instances are rather disappointing, lol.

That's because a lot of people, when they "enable" materials on their products made two massive mistakes.

1. They left the specular tightness setting (the first numeric parameter) at the LL default of 51, and the fake environmental reflection setting (the second numeric parameter) at 0, ideal for matte finish black plastic wheelie bins.

2. They created a specular colour map with an average RGB value of 64 or lower, so the "specular highlights" they get are too damned dark to be noticable.

 

[Magnek Fang]

I did, for awhile. Then I turned it off because my rusty old rig was starting to choke. A pity, really.

[animats]

Almost always have advanced lighting on. Shadows off, though; don't have enough GPU power for that.

[Janet Voxel]

Always on. I can see bump and textures just fine.

I think the problem is alot of people choose bad wind lights where you can’t see the effects though and just stick with them.

Thats another topic though.

Edited September 5, 2018 by janetosilio

[elixdude]

I always use advance lightning to achieve my skin looks oily/glossy since I love them.

Edited September 6, 2018 by elixdude

[Conifer Dada]

Earlier this year I got a new computer because my previous one ceased to do any of the things a computer is meant to do.  So I can answer the question in two parts, which might illustrate the variation in what people see on their screens these days.

With the new computer I have advanced lighting on all the time, including full shadows and reflections but not depth of field.  I do have different saved graphics settings but the only things that vary between those are draw distance and avatar complexity limit.  The graphics are amazing. Frame rates are generally quite good, the main lag problem being in rezzing times for mesh avatars.  Advanced lighting does accentuate the difference between well-made objects and textures and less good ones, I think.  I still have a 'system' shape / skin and I'm pleasantly surprised that it looks good in advanced lighting - better than many mesh ones (unless you zoom in really close!).

With the previous computer, advanced lighting would work but it slowed the frame rate and rezzing times down so much that I only really used it for doing snapshots.  I'm guessing a lot of people are still seeing SL the way I did on that old computer.

Edited September 6, 2018 by Conifer Dada

[Qie Niangao]

Always on, along with shadows -- but I'm fine with really low frame rates, which I get because my GPU is just an old GTX 660. Back when I got that card, it was a huge upgrade from whatever I'd been using before, so I turned on shadows and never looked back. Now I'll happily de-render every avatar in a scene--especially including myself--if that's what it takes to see all the materials and shadows from the builds.

[Blush Bravin]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

 Now I'll happily de-render every avatar in a scene--especially including myself--if that's what it takes to see all the materials and shadows from the builds.

Me too! I just can't stand the look of SL without them enabled.

[Talligurl]

Depends, I use it to take pictures, but often have problems trying to move around with it on, so I turn it off. I certainly appreciate the effects when trying to take pictures. 

[Gabriele Graves]

I always have it on as well.  If you have the equipment that supports it well, it's a no-brainer really.

[Prokofy Neva]

Not any more.

And you know why? You may hate this...

Because the creators doing this "materials" stuff are not very good, most of them.

They tend to make very grainy, sweaty, dark-looking things that I really find unpleasant looking, so I turn it off.

[AlexandriaBrangwin]

...I never have it disabled!

[Gunner Grun]

Off most the time because it gives edges a Saw effect and things don't look as clear.

[Peony Sweetwater]

I keep it on pretty much all the time - I like the extra depth and lustre it gives things. Probably the only time I turn it off is when I'm testing my products for how they'll look under different settings. Shadows however I do often turn off until I want them for photos - I like shadows, but it comes with a fair performance hit, and my sluggish internet already slows things down enough. Depth of field is only for some photos.

What can I say...I like shiny things

[Coby Foden]

On 9/8/2018 at 4:01 AM, Gunner Grun said:

Off most the time because it gives edges a Saw effect and things don't look as clear.

Hmm... that's strange. I see no saw effect on edges with ALM and shadows on. Everything looks good and clear.
Do you have any antialiasing on? I have mine at 2x and it smooths edges well, no need to go higher.

[Klytyna]

4 hours ago, Coby Foden said:

Hmm... that's strange. I see no saw effect on edges with ALM and shadows on. Everything looks good and clear.
Do you have any antialiasing on? I have mine at 2x and it smooths edges well, no need to go higher.

Pretty sure I remember Super-Whirly stating that ALM uses it's OWN Bespoke AA settings and basically ignores the ones on the control panel entirely.

 

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

Advanced lighting was absolutely unworkable on my 6 year-old iMac with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M, 1080p screen. If I wanted to take a screen shot with materials (and shadows) on, for marketing purposes, my frame rate would drop to around 5 fps. I would always have it off on that machine. Graphics with materials enabled would always work lightning fast on games like Portal 1/2 and the Call of Duties on it, though.

My PC with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti card, 1440p screen, actually makes the screen stutter when I have advanced lighting off, and looks more fluent when it's on, as if it has to work harder to calculate the world without materials. Maybe that's because of the architecture of the processors inside, which are more optimized for materials.

I did make a whole bunch of graphics presets, though--advanced lighting on and off for different circumstances in SL. Advanced graphics can make my computer crash, likely due to instability of Windows 10. I hardly ever get a frame rate drop when things get crowded--just freezes--unlike on the Mac, where the frame rate would go down first, before it would freeze up.

So, for crowded events, despite the stuttering, but just to prevent crashes, I have advanced lighting off. For average places in SL, it's on. For my own sim (highly optimized, I would like to add ?), I have shadows on too.

Praise to the Firestorm makers, who provided these quick access graphics presets. ?

From a creator's perspective, I hardly ever use materials, exactly for the reason of many people not having advanced lighting on with their every-day SL lives. Instead, I bake specular to the texture layers and some shiny parts have dedicated faces that are set to old-fashioned shiny:

The brass parts are a seperate face on the mesh object, set to Shiny Low, but they also have baked reflections and phong-like (Cook-Torrance) specular. Everyone, advanced lighting on or off, would see it exactly as shown in the picture. Baking reflections only works for small metal parts, though. On larger surfaces, it would look really weird, since reflections should change whenever the viewer angle changes. With baked reflections, they don' t.

Edited September 9, 2018 by Arduenn Schwartzman
Picture added

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

On 9/8/2018 at 3:01 AM, Gunner Grun said:

Off most the time because it gives edges a Saw effect and things don't look as clear.

I agree with Codey Foden. Saw effects are not an Advanced Lighting issue, but an anti-aliasing issue (and a depth of view issue--when enabled, things become more blurry and less sawwy).

Edited September 9, 2018 by Arduenn Schwartzman