Can We Just Have OUR OLD SL back, please?

Okay, I know some of you love the fancy-schmancy new software and stuff - BUT a year ago (despite what some people will say) SL WORKED!
I personally could NOT give a toss for wind/cloud/waves (others do I guess) BUT I am paying for it (and a healthy-sized monthly tier also) - If experiments in software/social interaction/education etc are to be done then let The Lindens design a completely different world which they can call "Crash Planet".
Meanwhile, can we just have a world where we can expect our hair to stay in place??
Do others feel like me? Or am I a voice in the wilderness who is seeing a new "force" or generation of users willing to put up with this just so they can stare into a computer-generated sunset?

I find windlight works much better than the official client.. maybe your alone in the dark... nah theres gona be tons with you.

Same here.. windlight works wonderful ther than ne graphical glitch i've had (The things totally goin invis bit)..... but right now neither will log in for me

How far back do you want to go? Pre Sculptie? bring back ratings?

Generally, Windlight makes a lot of content from Linden Labs look great, while making a lot of user-created content look worse. The reason is that people creating content for the older (current) viewer were optimizing to deal with that awful lighting system. The things that compensated for the old bad lighting system are going to look worse with suddenly different lighting.

In the short term, a lot of user-created content is going to look bad (and sympathies to people who find their hard work become suddenly obsolete). In the long term, when user-created content starts to catch up with the new things in Windlight, all of Second Life is going to look much nicer.

This is one of the growing pains of progress.

Id go back to May 2005.

In general this does seem to be hapening.. but in one build of mine in particular its quite the opposite.. check out my post in the gallery 'Windlight First Look' thread and you'll s waht I mean

I build that to take advantage of what I had at the time, wich wasn't windlight. However, that whole build, including the african house and roman bath not pictured looks awesome, even moreso inwindlight ^^

I am not old to say the least - just hit my 1 year birthday last week - but I have to say I am really enjoying the changes, yes windlight is great to look at and I enjoy the aesthetics but I have also noticed that many of my creations are really looking sweet in Windlight. Also I had a building manic state this weekend under the windlight viewer and found that it was easier - rotations worked better, textures stayed put, never once got a ghost or invisible prim (and have always gotten at least one when in a building frenzy) and finally I can see shadows that I had always expected on the side of a building that was away from the sun.

I have had some of the problems in the past but am glad that SL is always evolving, changing and moving forward into the future and not stagnating. With the breadth of technological changes how can we all not expect to have a few glitches with new offerings - that is how it goes in being in the forefront and making new ideas. The industrial revolution produced a lot of mistakes, but we learned from those mistakes and moved forward giving us the modern things we use in every day life that most of us would not know how to live without.

In my experience in the last year I have noticed, as the population is growing, that I am now always able to log on within seconds of hitting the icon button. Never get logged out for no apparent reason, never lose inventory items and creation of all things has gotten easier and smoother. Im an old guy with no computer experience besides using Word and Excel products and totally dig on this thing we call SL - hell now I am even helping newbies and other residents with how to navigate around and build and that makes me feel pretty good.

Lindens keep moving forward - maybe just spend a little more time releasing viewers as options and waiting to make mandatory until you pretty sure of the stability. Cant wait to see what the next wave of future enhancements bring.

I've progressed quite far enough ta! Anyway, if I want clouds, waves, wind, snow, rain etc I can stand outside. I prefer my computer generated world to look computer-generated (a bit like Tron) but that i spersonal.
I just wish things WORKED or were checked before being offered.

I'm with Jig on this one. I know windlight is wonderful for those of you with graphics cards that support it, but for the rest of us, the world will be WAY worse than it is now. If only they would use the current renderer as the "fallback", things would be fine, but instead they've tried to reproduce it with windlight and failed miserably.

For me it is bad enough that I expect to leave SL when the windlight client finally becomes mandatory like voice did. Hopefully that won't be for a while, but we never really know, do we?

I hear you, Ava. I always wonder "is this the version that will finally make my poor PC go kaput?" I'd love to get a new computer, but it's just not in the cards for me. And I suppose I could quit SL/cash out and cut a few other corners, but um... then I wouldn't really enjoy the new PC ARGH!

Maybe we could all chip in the "cost of a latte" (that seems to be the going analogy rate for cost of using SL and enjoying it) and buy a "community PC". We can all choose 5 minute slots, every other day to use it. Sound good?

-=- In all seriousness -=-
The more it grows, the more people who come aboard. The more people, the more strain. Then it seems as though the common theme is "Whoops! That plug/addition worked to get in more people. Now our system is borked for [insert time-frame here].

I don't think going back would do a whole hell of a lot of good. I think it's how they perceive cause and effect of changes they make.

And, well, having a PC that's run by my cat on a treadmill

GO LUCY GO!! *puts another treat on the stick*

You can pry my sculpties from my cold dead hands!

I have been slowly starting to dislike Windlight in it's current format. I can't get it to stay on my settings and I loathe the default. Textures don't load well, when they load and prims don't always rez, even within the draw range! I know this is basically in beta, but it's become one giant pain. I find myself staying in RC because of the 'little things.'

If they'd fricking fix the stupid camera hating the hollow prims, I'd be a lot happier, but I've seen release after release without that critical (to me) fix. I'm spending entirely too much time herding the camera around when I'm retexturing prim skirts. Grrrr....

Sorry, cranky because I spent the better part of nearly three hours trying to texture seven prim skirts. That usually only takes me 30 minutes! *sigh* But no.. it had to go halfway across the sim.. and without the constraints being disabled.

Yes! Bring back the ratings and the good old days when men were men!

Which SL were you on at that time?

This week last year a bajillion stores were closing because of copybot, and there was a whole new level of anger towards LL over their reaction to same. Meanwhile, people first learned about "rebaking," when after an update to put texture loading into the sims themselves caused "Missing Image" to become the new black. There were alsos oem great unplanned outages, and the ever wonderful "gray goo" attacks that regularly took out a kajillion regions. Even knockin down SL a time or two. It was, IMO, one of the more rough moments in SL, an was some of the stuff which caused the "Project open letter."

So um... a year ago? Maybe not so much.

Mari

Ha. I see my machine sorta like The Bluesmobile. One day it will just spontaneously fall apart.

Is voice mandatory now? If so I will soon be banned because I have never used it and never will.

I am still waiting for the mandatory webcams that we will wear on our heads.

You can use Nicholaz Old School 18.0.6 Pre Voice Viewer.

Well I like sculpties but they do cause some issues sometimes.
Windlight I don't have it, I hope they don't make it manatory.
Voice never use it only updated it because I had too.
I was here in 2003. I really don't want the prim tax back.
Yet I do figure we are part of experiment, very long extended endless beta
and we pay for the services that allow us to create content and the world around us.
I do wish there were bit more easier fixes on improving the quality and possiblities in
SL without one bug or major issue after another but Life sometimes like that, even
Second Life.

I have to agree. Last year was a rough year.

From my point of view, LL was doing a pretty good job with updates and adding new features BEFORE v1.5. 1.5 was (in my opinion) the first really bad update. Later, we got the abomination that was 1.7, which was much worse than 1.5. Since 1.7, updates (again, my opinion) have been hit or miss. Now, having said all that, it seems to me that the latest Windlight viewer was the first new viewer in years to actually IMPROVE SL performance. I hope they don't find a way to screw up this one before it becomes the standard viewer.

*bump*

WindLight significantly degrades performance on older video-cards, even with all the new things turned *off*. Pastrami talked about it in the Q&A session before LL even released the current First Look so they're very much aware of that fact yet don't really care.

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Optimizing content for WindLight could turn out to be a very pointless task as well. Would you optimize again the defaults? Or people who run around the grid with everything in watermelon colours? Or the big portion who doesn't have WindLight at all?

Not as far as I know, we don't have to use it. It's still just an option that you can choose to activate or not.

For what it's worth, even though I worship and admire Nicholaz for working his ass off in SL, I still LOVE the new Communication window. And while the new Search does have some issues, I'm tickled by the new interface.

Sure, you have a valid point, but unless Windlight or these newer technologies cause harm to LL's bottomline, they are here to stay. Windlight, the Voice Chat system (personally I like voice, but I don't believe for one second that it has absolutely nothing to do with SL's poorer performance since it came online), and other advancements that have appeared over the past year or so are tied to deals LL feels are essential to its growth. An outside company provides Voice, I think Windlight was also from an external developer, etc. It's more about making the right connections and business deals for Linden Labs than upgrading service in any meaningful way.

Technically speaking, was SL more stable and generally better in terms of quality of life for residence a year ago, sure. Are we going to get that back. Not unless keeping the new stuff costs LL too much money to keep.

I like windlight... it's pretty... and I already planned on upgrading to an 8800 in the very near future, so that doesn't bother me....

BUT.... I'd rather get Havok4 first... I want Havok4!!

lately for me, SL has been more stable most of the time except the last week, and also with all the login issues.... that's kinda getting to me...

a bajillion?