Tuesday, May 29, 2007

"Sunrise, Sunset..."

There's now a First Look viewer that has the WindLight sky/weather display code!

I had to try it, of course. Cheyenne's land on Forsaken has a gorgeous view of sunrise and sunset. I headed for the coast, set the world to sunset, chose "Coastal Sunset" for the WindLight settings, and...

...saw a fuzzy cyan disk above the horizon.

Now, I've never actually watched the sunset from an island shore, but I'm pretty sure the sun remains a class G star, no matter where you watch it from. Time to ask about this one. Maybe I fiddled with the cloud cover?

One thing that definitely seems weird is that when I tried sunrise, the light seemed to still come from the west. It is a puzzlement.

I can say that the lighting on objects around me was great, and (aside from that direction question...) was much as I'd expect in real life.

I don't have a picture of sunrise or sunset. Yet. I do have a picture I took of myself in the light of sunrise, though. There was a contest (that I'll probably miss) for retro clothing, and I had to try for a hippie look, having missed the chance to really be a hippie by something over a decade. (That may be fortunate.) It's more faux hippie, to be honest; I should have gone for a long dress rather than tie-dyed T-shirt and jeans with a peace symbol. I still think it came out well, though... especially because I saw mention of the fact that the Linux client startup script by default turns off a bunch of OpenGL rendering features, and hence remembered to undo it.

UPDATE: Duh. The First Look client runs in its own directory, with its own shell script. I haven't run it with the OpenGL options enabled yet. More news as it happens.

1 comment:

Ville Winkler said...

Also a pretty nice sunset can be witnessed from the Milky Way Ranch's roof (19,122,37) - someone even has placed a couple of chairs for use. Sadly a nearby mountain pretty much blocks the best view.