Physically-correct outdoor light and photorealistic clouds in a few weeks?

I'll repeat. 70%.

Accusing them of lying is pretty strong, methinks.

Apples and oranges.

Would you prefer that they concentrated solely on fixing it and not look at ways of adding features (which, from the looks of it, was done outside of the company, so exactly NONE of the resources they are putting towards fixing bugs and stability (again... 70%!), were used for this. It's not like they said "Hey guys! Forget the whole "Fixing the inventory bug", we're gonna make the sky look pretty". I have a feeling it was more. "HOLY CRAP! LOOK HOW COOL THIS LOOKS! Can we implement it without pulling anyone off the fixing?"

Making SL look pretty could be key at keeping its user base. Except for voice, almost every change in the client has been in the way that SL looks. They have given us a new texture pipeline, sculpties, and now this new sky. Lots of new eye candy for us to look at.

As for the bug fixes, if you have been reading the release notes, you will see that there are many fixes going on with the new features. Also remember they are doing a complete backend revamp of the system. That will fix bugs, but also create new bugs. I am happy with the progress on both fronts. It is all in the balance, plus what gets finished when.

Windward Mark develops a fast rendering sky system. How can they market it? Plug it into the open-source SL client, make a YouTube demo, sell the company and the already completed patch to LL.

The demo video showed only changes to the sky rendering in SL which wouldn't have been too hard as the SL sky isn't all that complex.

If this is the case, nice work, Windward; I hope you didn't take payment in stock options.

Did I just take a wrong turn and end up on an SOE or Blizzard Board?

Well, let's see here...

It's a patent-pending, closed-source implementation of photorealistic sky systems which LL just bought. To do what with, exactly? Put in the OPEN SOURCE client?????

Yeah, that's gonna happen. Uh-huh. Sure thing.

..and monkeys will fly out of my butt.

I would assume that's why they bought the company instead of simply licensing the technology. You'd better hope those are small monkeys, otherwise your butt's in for a rather unpleasant experience.

He's got a point though, Chip.

With every step toward licenced voice technology, entrenchment of the $L, Speedtree, Havok, and so on and so forth... this isn't exactly a direct path toward open source that I can see.

Perhaps the diversion is necessary for relevancy; for a metaverse populated by billions these will be small financial footnotes. But in the short term, where World of Warcraft is actually 'competition' of a sort, I daresay these things will matter.

My point is only that this happening looks like a relative certainty at this point, given that the youtube video clearly shows samples of this technology already running in an SL client, and that LL actually bought the company. That makes for a different situation than with speedtree or havok. Also, LL's press release clearly states that it's going to be opensourced.

Bug list: http://jira.secondlife.com

Source code: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Source_downloads

Knock yourself out.

I wonder if they will have the moon cycle after they get this running? Would be cool !!!

And blind calls into a closed library don't give away the kingdom.

Suppose FMOD was not open source. Even though SL ships with the (compiled) library, you'd be hard pressed to derive the API via the narrow use that the open SL client makes of it.

More importantly maybe now LL have given in to to SuezanneC's demands to fix the sun she can stop posting essays on the subject!

On a personal note I run SL with absolutely all graphics enhancements turned off. I need to run my business and don't have the CPU cycles to waste on pretty pictures. I really hope that it's simple to completely disable these new options.

Nonetheless I still think it's pretty cool and look forward to taking a peak at the new sparklies. Although there are certain bugs I'd like to see fixed I'm not one of these idiots who think a large company can't work on more than one thing at a time.

Man... a world full of hexagons. What a life

The defaults are actually variable. When you run the client on a computer for the first time, it looks at your hardware and tries to decide what are reasonable settings for your computer. It will turn on many of the features if you have a fancy CPU and video card. So far as I can tell, however, anisotropic filtering always defaults to off.

The automatic detection isn't always correct. Make sure to check its setting for video card memory. And if in doubt, test VBO on and off on your own computer, and see which is actually faster.

Asthetically this will give SL a publicity boost. All the nice snapshots and vids that appear in the media look very outdated at the mo when compared to other MMO games. Looking at the graphics for Home and other similar platforms, I feel embarassed to be part of a world that has graphics that looked dated 5 years ago. Personally, I hope I cannot run the new atmospheric rendering at first as its a good excuse for me to justify updating my machine because it looks very tasty and I wanna see it!

It remains to be seen if the new system has controls to make the sun smaller and more realistic than it currently is, or if the new system only has sliders that range from "current enormous size" as a minimum to "engulf the universe", and halo intensity sliders that range from "solid opaque circle five times the diameter of the sun, like it is now" to "entire sky is replaced with a pure white featureless circle", or if it will include the possibilty of making a realistic sky, which most of the time does not look like something drawn by Peter Max on a bad acid trip, or the dayglo rotoscopic style of Ralph Bakshi's movie Wizards.

And of course I will always be able to complain that a part of the history of virtual worlds, the sky of early Second Life, has been destroyed forever. That's a perfectly valid complaint.

Plus of course there is such a thing as the law of conservation of bitching.

Pretty much that, when I'm working intensively. Nothing like lag on my end to cause problems with building and I'm finding my computer doesn't like particles anymore. Yes, I'm looking at getting another graphics card, since mine is pretty much outdated.

Otherwise, I'd LOVE the new effect! It'll be a lot more fun to fly through the sky that has a proper cloudy look. Just need storms and we're golden Imagine a lightening bolt hitting a physics enabled object!

$500 is tough, but I could do it...

Athlon 64 3200+ AM2 $55
Motherboard $60
2GB DDR2 RAM $90
NVidia 7600GS $65 (after rebate)
Case+ 450W PS $50
160GB SATA HD $55
DVD-ROM $20
Windows XP Home $90 (or Vista Home Basic if you prefer, same price)
Keyboard and mouse $15
Monitor free
(get castoff 17" or 19" CRT from flat panel upgrader)

Prices from newegg.com, rounded to nearest $5. And this assumes you own NOTHING that you can use in the new system. No, I didn't forget the CPU cooler; that's a retail CPU package which includes one.

If I didn't have to QUITE meet the $500 point, I'd upgrade the system to an Athlon 64X2 3800+ ($80) and a DVD burner ($35), taking us to a total of $550. With $600, I'd also upgrade to a 7600GT.

No, this isn't a fancy system; it's built with the least expensive acceptable components, not the highest quality ones. It has a no-name case and PS, and the motherboard and RAM don't come from a top-tier player. (The video card I quoted is from eVGA, which IS a well-known brand.) But it WILL run SL better than most computers that people have (not most computers that SL players or serious gamers have, different story).

(Added note to Intel fans: Yes, the Core2 Duo is faster, but it's not a player at this price point. The old Pentium 4 and Pentium D are, but I'd take the AMD processors over those.)

I run SL on a Compaq Laptop (I think the model is "presario" if I can trust the logo next to the on/off button). I bought new at BestBuy for $450 (on sale, with rebate), DSL hookup ($50 a month for cable is a bit much). Actually, hadn't SL in mind at all when I purchased it, I was looking for a computer that I could a) carry b) run MSWord and c) do email.

Of course, I freeze up at balls a lot, but I can move about the virtual landscape and chat with people, build, etc. Under normal circs, I really don't have a much worse experience than many.

I doubt very much I'll see the new clouds though :/

heh, yep, looks like I was wrong. Feel free to get your hopes up!