Why doesn't SL water have waves and swells?

[RangiUtu]

1 hour ago, Drayke Newall said:

If those clouds shown there are rendered by the viewer for that specific scenario (and not a particle effect from a hud), it looks to be the clouds LL removed that existed in SL many moons ago. At least their appearance seems to be the same. 

Basically, pre windlight days to a little past, second life's viewer had its own generated clouds. These clouds were not generated server side but strictly by the viewer itself, so if someone turned them off it wouldn't affect another persons experience if they had them on. Similar to how the water is rendered in the Crystal Frost viewer I mentioned. These clouds were togglable, however, were removed from Second Life ages ago because they would cause a mere 5-10fps drop if used (on 2013 computer tech mind you) - 5-10!, that's the fps loss of having the chat window open in the viewer now. 

The windlight clouds I was talking about were integrated into windlight which LL bought and we use now with EEP. LL just decided however to never introduce the cloud, blizzard, dust or rain systems in windlight into SL of which were and still are top quality systems. Consequently, we have to rely on laggy particle and temp prim effects to get the same result. Now, given EEP (windlight update which still uses windlight) has been released and these removed functions not added, I think it is a case of LL just dont know how to add them back in. The actual windlight volumetric clouds are shown in the below vid.

Now, what is sad is to compare the above Nimble clouds from 2006 which LL bought the rights to and have had since 2007 and compare it to MS flight simulator 2020 Ultra setting clouds. The nimble clouds look, on par with MS flight simulator 2020. So LL have a tech that is graphically comparable to near Ultra settings of a modern AAA flight sim (certainly of the quality of very high), is stated by WindwardMark in their demonstrations of the cloud system to not be lag intensive, yet Linden Lab simply cant be bothered using it. Here is the comparison below of which I have made the MS FS2020 quality to match the video 360p quality of nimbles video, however, keep in mind the nimble cloud video quality is compressed further due to being so old so isn't a true comparison.

It comes back to this whole water topic you started. The tech is all in LL's hands to use and SL could be comparable to modern games. Linden Lab however just have never understood why they should. 

Clouds in my photo were rendered by that viewer. No one can see them but me. Developer Beauchamp really had an imagination and desire to do something, anything, that LL refused to do. The clouds you've shown are what we could see in a perfectly run SL, along w your water photos. Oh well. I'm not at all shocked about lab decisions anymore.   

[Henri Beauchamp]

On 7/15/2023 at 7:32 AM, Drayke Newall said:

Basically, pre windlight days to a little past, second life's viewer had its own generated clouds. These clouds were not generated server side but strictly by the viewer itself,

Nope... The Classic Clouds had their own position generator on the servers, and cloud update messages were sent by the sim server to avatars around, so that everyone could see the same clouds rendered in their viewer, if they had them enabled, of course.

When LL announced they would shut down the Clouds, I immediately captured the cloud messages to see how I could generate them viewer-side instead, and after a bit of reverse-engineering, I came up with the cloud generator code that I implemented in the Cool VL Viewer and which activates itself whenever the sim server is not sending any cloud update message (OpenSim grids sim server can still send them, at least in non ”var region” sims, but then the Cool VL Viewer can also generate the clouds in those).

The generator uses the Wind update messages to move the Clouds around (everyone in the sim receives the same Wind messages), but the ”puffs” are generated randomly and are therefore not rendering the same in two different Cool VL Viewer instances (i.e. everyone using the viewer in the same sim would not see the same clouds). I also made the Classic Clouds altitude configurable (there's a spinner in the Graphics prefs for it) instead of fixed at 192m like they were with SL's clouds.

I don't like it when nice features are removed... So, I keep them every time I can in my viewer; another example would be animated Linden trees... 😜

[Drayke Newall]

4 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

Nope... The Classic Clouds had their own position generator on the servers, and cloud update messages were sent by the sim server to avatars around, so that everyone could see the same clouds rendered in their viewer, if they had them enabled, of course.

Well there you go, never knew that. When I talked to Torly Linden about them years ago he too suggested they were viewer side.

Good that you managed to keep them by converting it to viewer rendering though. Still wish some form of cloud was introduced with EEP, but then I also wanted many other things included in that as well.

Considering that the clouds in your viewer are rendered all viewer side, I am surprised LL havent tried to do the same.