Windlight and Particles

Yesterday I posted something on the JIRA about particles not displaying properly in the current relase of the First Look: Windlight viewer. Basically I'm not seeing enough particles no matter what my max particle count is. In the below snapshot there is a comparison of the same effect in Windlight and on the Release Candidate viewer. My issue was a duplicate (oops--there wasn't one that I could see dealing with that problem when I checked, but apparently I'm not good at using Jira) but I attached the snapshot to the original issue.





That brings me to another point I wanted to mention. Second Life currently has a little bit of a problem keeping particle textures in memory or whatever and ready to be displayed on the effect. This makes short particle effects start off as grey rectangles before the particle texture loads and can be quite annoying for trying to make a short particle effect look nice because even after the texture is loaded once it might need to load again the next time it's used. There is a workaround for this for creators: the particle texture should be put onto a prim. For example, for my chain lightning staff I am working on I put a tiny cube inside the staff. The cube has all the particle textures I'm using and even though it's hidden by the rest of the staff the texture still loads and the particle effect never has any problem with showing grey blobs instead of lightning.

Windlight Firstlook

The Windlight Firstlook is available. I'm testing it out currently and I am having mixed feelings which mostly lean towards extremely displeased. The environment looks great. The shading on prims looks fine.

Avatars look awful.

Dreadful.

Ugly.

Any type of shading or shadow on any avatar for me looks awful. It's like the shading is not blending at all. Ugly lines going across the avatar. It's like doing a gradient with only eight colors.


I updated my video card drivers. I tried all kinds of settings. If I turn off all the shaders I have no problem, but then it looks worse than it does in the old client.

Blah.

I was really, really looking forward to Windlight and now that I can't use it without grimacing whenever I see a person while nobody else seems to be having this problem is kind of upsetting. The environments looked really nice. The reflections were nice. Everything was nice and smooth on pretty high settings, but no matter what the avatars looked so poorly shaded.

I posted on the SL forums, so maybe someone can help me.

edit: of course jira is not loading in my browser either.