Can We Just Have OUR OLD SL back, please?

You expect them to make the current bells and whistles work reliably for the average users until they add more bells and whistles.

Sounds reasonable to me. However there are a lot who do not feel that is reasonable.

I wonder then, Collette if the "bells and whistlers" are here for the long term or simply here for an "express train" of experiments before setting off in search of the next virtual reality with all the latest gizmos, leaving us in a collectively dusty litter-strewn wasteland of technology that doesnt work.

I've been away from SL for a few months, and I spent some of that time in another "virtual world" (Myst Online: Uru Live). From experiencing that and coming back to SL, I can say that I was immediately struck by how bad SL looks.

I don't (just) mean the user created content that looks like Tiajuana Barbie's Dream Brothel with misspelled price tags slapped on everything. I mean that the lighting, the atmosphere, the landscape, the buildings, and the avatars and their movements - even with fancy skins and shapes and AOs - all look horribly fake, flat, and tacky. It's not that it doesn't look "real" - it doesn't even look believably *unreal.*

If Windlight will improve this even a little bit by at least imposing some light and shadow, it will be great.

Yep and it seems many just want the old dented faded sluggish diesel pickup. Instead of disabling all this stuff many might as well just run the LIBSL limited viewer, especially if they are only here to watch dollars move around.

Voice is mandatory in the sense that all the viewers from LL that still work (other than the Linux viewer) have voice capability. Nobody is forcing you to turn on voice, however. And as somebody already pointed out, you can still run the Nicholaz old-school viewer (based on 1.18.0.6) for now, though I think that his BE-s (with voice, but without the Communicate box) is more solid.

I don't think that the Windlight client will go gold until it works at least as well as the non-Windlight client on at least 95% of the systems in use for SL. It's already up to the 75% level -- way better than the 25% level of the original Windlight First Look, which caused a big performance hit on just about any video card other than an NVidia 8800.

For the record, I have two systems that I use for SL. On my desktop with an NVidia 7600 (a reasonably modern class 3 card, but hardly state of the art) Windlight about matches the frame rate of the old client but is prettier, or I can turn off some eye candy and get better frame rates than with the old client. On my laptop with ATI Radeon XPress 200M integrated graphics (class 1, and slow in any SL viewer), Windlight is no prettier than the old client because I have to turn just about all of the special effects off, but it is no slower than the old client.

That's normal. SL expands to fill the computing resources available, in an attempt to provide the best visuals possible. It will always grab 100% of one CPU core (plus small bits of other cores you may have, as there are a few things in the viewer that are run in separate threads -- and actually that 100% might in reality be 25% of each of the four cores), plus a large amount of memory for textures. The memory number seems to depend in part on the amount of memory you have in your video card; if you have a video card with lots of RAM, SL will also want more main memory for textures. It's also based on the amount of RAM you have; if you have lots, SL will grab more than it will on a smaller system.

Now that people have multi-core systems with multiple gigabytes of RAM, perhaps some future SL version will have a quality slider that will let you throttle back the client's demands, just in case you want to save some of your computing power for other programs that you may be running.

Some people with dual-core systems have found that SL runs better if they use the processor affinity settings to restrict it to one core. (I have not found that to be true on my Pentium D system.) On a Intel quad-core system, I suspect that the best setting is to restrict it to two cores, both on the same die. All Intel quads to date actually contain two processor die, each of which has two cores. Communications between the two die are slower than between the cores on a single die.

To the pedants out there: in the specific context of integrated circuits, the most commonly used plural of "die" is "die". "Dice" is sometimes seen; "dies" is not.

In the REALLY old days, Torley was a man. Then Torley was a woman. Now Torley seems to be highly variable; might be man, woman, or beast, or even all three in the same five minute video. But in any shape or size, Torley is always cheerful and watermelony vivid.

My personal guess -- most of the LL developers are using Macs. The standard gamma on a PC screen and a Mac screen are different; the result is that things will look darker and more contrasty on a PC. Graphics tuned to look Just Right on a PC will look washed out on a Mac; things that look Just Right on a Mac will look dark and harsh on a PC. Most web sites split the difference and make their pictures look Not Quite Right on either.

The Windlight settings for things like ambient lighting are client-side, one possible improvement would be for the two platforms to come with DIFFERENT sets of default Windlight settings. The PC version should have the ambient light settings a bit higher than they are right now, to reduce contrast.

All the people I know who tried SL and left did so on the basis of "it's boring, there is nothing to kill". I don't know even one who left because of the visuals.

Many people in SL have put together gaming systems. For example I bought a katana-sword and it has some fighting system and an whole island devoted to sword fighting. Lots of people have sword related groups where they practise and then they try to beat others.

SL is really difficult gaming environment though. I have bought lots of swords, that are not scripted. Those swords are just decorations then. But even if they are decorations, I have to carefully adjust them so that they fit my avatar without sticking through my cloak or something. That is annoying, because I would like to just wield the sword and use it. I am not interested is the sword scripted or not - of course I expect that the sword acts like a sword.

Also its hard to game in slower environment, when content is loading and loading... And if I have prim hair, the laggyness makes the hair freeze in the mid-air and then the software halts. So the system needs some improvement anyway.

Interesting that people are moaning about performance on laptops.

I run SL (non windlight) on my Toshiba U200 Laptop.

It has Intel graphics which are not officially supported, however recent drivers have changed my SL experience from totally crap and almost unplayable (I was averaging 5 crashes an hour), to reasonable (can move around normally and maybe crash 1-2 times a week)

The processor is a Core 2 Duo (state of the art when I got the laptop, but now available on £399 laptops from PCWorld), and is totally stock apart from the upgrades to the operating system (from XP Pro to Vista Business) and a memory upgrade from 512MB to 1.5GB.

I generally only have bandwidth issues nowadays due to the variable quality of my internet connection (BT Total Broadband - ADSL)

If I had dual core or 1.5 GB of RAM I wouldn't be complaining about SL on my laptop, I'm sure.

But I have neither (I don't even think there was a thing such as dual core available to the consumer at the time I purchased my laptop).

Hey now! I miss ratings! lol I liked pretending I was special everytime I saw that number go up *sigh*, and it was working back then. Currently because of LL inability to make it work with Vista I cannot even log in



And if it helps, I do have a dual core processor and 1 gig of RAM on my laptop. Still won't work because Bill Gates and LL are in cahoots I tell ya! LOL

Well I suspect the problem is more Vistas inability to run SL as everything else that won't run on it, so before you whine to SL for not being compatible with Bill's recent mutant creation of incompatibility, make sure you laycrap at the Microsoft website first.

That happens from time to time with driver releases. at the momnet i using 163.?? and i doing ok not great. But maybe some time soon well have a better releas of drivers. Windlight seems to be a FPS problem. Causing fps to drop 1/3 or so these two don`t make a good combonation.

I was not "whining". I have looked at Microsoft's websites. I have also found articles dating back to Feb of this year when LL said that a working version of SL that was compatable with Vista would be out in a few weeks (from the Feb date). Which was around the time that Microsoft had there Vista launch party IN SL.

Lets use a little more then a gram of brain power here shall we? Vista for many is running without problems. But for others its related to others factors. Anyone that follows the window story and how many programs are having incompatibility issues. Would have been or does know its the lack of support for vista. The dev of programs incompatibility for vista is still a problem.....Sl coders ( well they are always breaking codes, but its not LLABS fault on this one). If your old enough to remeber XP also had a incompatibility problems with other programs, ( USB was another issue with XP).