Shadows in Second Life with Kirstens Viewer S 21

Our home and the stables on Fort Serenity Ranch

I've heard so much about the outstanding performance of Kirstens Viewer I was prepared to be disappointed. But nope, it's just as good as they say. I recorded a video in ultra graphics setting with a decent drawdistance (around 350 meters). My FPS stayed around 15 - 20, which is a very good result on my laptop,  just for using the ultra settings while recording.

To enable shadows in Kirstens viewer you just select it like the other graphics settings, nice not to have to memorize another set of advanced or preference settings.

There were no  problems with transparent textures at all in this viewer. I suppose the good old alpha layer annoyance is still there, but when recording shadows with Phoenix even textures not overlapping each other had bad transparency issues, like going invisible or flickering.

I must say I'm not sure how much of that is Kirsten and how much is in the regular v2. Even with the brilliant perfomance of this viewer I will use it mainly for video recording and photos. Wish I could put my finger on what it is that makes the v2 interface so uncomfortable. I worked hard on getting familiar with it when the first beta came, so it's not just the fact that it's an unfamiliar interface. Now I use it so rarely it could play a role I suppose.

Found a beautiful new free dress!

A customer in the store tipped me off about this beautiful dress from House of Dashwood. It was soo pretty it called for instant dancing in Wiladma Island where we are setting up a new home in Annashire Village.

Not only did I find this dress all for free, I found a new place full of neat clothes to buy too :o)

Medieval us

This is what we used to look like back in the middle ages. It was cold and we had to huddle up together like that in front of the fire :o)

How to use shadows in Phoenix Viewer in Second Life™

I managed to get shadows to work in Phoenix! It looks great, but it does slow down the FPS. I had no problems recording this video with PlayClaw tho.

Here's how to enable shadows:

• Advanced menu (if you don't see it bring it up with Ctrl + Alt + D)
• Debug
• set RenderDeferred to FALSE  (default)
• set RenderUseFBO to TRUE
• set RenderDeferred to TRUE
• set PhoenixShadowsToggle to TRUE

Graphics have to be set to Ultra to see the shadows. (Once I saw them I could lower to High, but that still gave me the same low FPS.)

When I disabled them I crashed first time, but the next time I started by setting RenderDeferred to FALSE before disabling the other two. That worked. I have no idea what those settings really do.

My own shadow didn't seem to be visible except where I had prim clothes. My boots cast a shadow. I'll have to experiment with that some other day.

I recorded the video on our porch in Fort Serenity where the Mayan Adventure begins. The Macaw parrots come from Animania.

My acting debut!

I did have a little role as an extra, as a duck, in a former movie by this amazing director/producer/machinima creator, SodaLemondrop. But in this episode you can see me along with some outstanding SL actors running fast and watching movies. I had a kinda brutal character (sat on little child).

No lines but I did get a smile from somewhere :o)

Anyway you have to watch them all from the beginning. There are 7 episodes so far and they are all great!

RedZone stopped from displaying alts

From  JIRA VWR-24746 a very welcome statement:

Soft Linden added a comment - 02/Mar/11 12:58 PM
Hey, all. I got the go-ahead to give an update on zF Red Zone specifically. Again, thank you for the ARs with specific info about violations. These have been very helpful for letting Lindens know what's going on.

Tuesday morning, we removed zF Red Zone from the Marketplace for a second time. We removed the in-world vendor distributing the item as well. We determined that zF Red Zone was still in violation of our Terms of Service and Community Standards.

We asked for removal by no later than today of all zF Red Zone functionality that discloses any alternate account names. That is, even if consent is asked, the service may not act on the consent. In addition, we asked for removal by no later than Friday of the interface for and any remaining implementation of the zF Red Zone consent mechanism because it does not comply with our policies. If these updates are not made, we will take appropriate steps to remedy the violations.

As before, we appreciate your help in keeping an eye on content. If you find that any merchant's product is not in compliance with our TOS or our Community Standards, please file an abuse report about the product. Do this even if you filed against a previous version. Include a specific explanation of what you believe is a violation, and ideally select and report the in-world object at issue in case it behaves differently than what's in the Marketplace. Before reporting, make sure you have first-hand knowledge of the issue. Support can best react if you explain specific steps to reproduce or confirm a violation.

.........

Thank you Soft Linden. I now feel a lot safer when it comes to LL's attitude and ability to stop any threats to our privacy.

Thanks also to all those that have worked so hard to make this happen. All the GreenZooners, No2RedZoners and SLU posters (I am a lurker) that have spread information and fought to keep calm and reasonable in an inflamed debate. And a special thanks to Theia Magic for working so hard to make sure no one was accused unfairly and that no one got away with lying their way into the list of greenlisted stores.

Anyway I hope that this is the end of the alt disclosure. That RZ changes into a device that bans griefers and copybots and nothing else. That zFire Xue himself decides to remove names from his database and let it all be over. The hole in the media functions are still there, but that will probably be acceptable if Phoenix includes the option to agree or not agree to be connected to a specific URL (even if masked a bit to protect media stream providers). It would be great if we all could get back to some normality again. 

Almost normality. We have our own tragedy on Fort Serenity with the inworld search engine not showing us when mature is checked. It may lead to us having to give up one of our three sims, Fort Serenity Ranch, that Major McCaw has landscaped into a beautiful western world. That really hurts :(