Windlight: good or bad for SL?

This simply isn't true. People with PS1 were playing and buying new games more than two years after its release.

I bought a PS2 game yesterday, when was it released?

No it's not comparing apples and oranges, you're talking about the most succesful online platform out there with WoW. SL is an online platform. To say it's an unfair comparison is absolute balderdash and you're only refusing to discuss WoW because it totally, completely and absolutely undermines your argument.





The argument with the faster pussycat crowd is that anything over two years old is obsolete or shouldn't be worried about. Financially it would be economic suicide for LL to listen to this crowd.

Try rezzing a few prims or creating a push weapon in WoW. There is not enough similarity between WoW and SL to make a fair comparison. By your reasoning, it would be ok to compare a Honda Fit to a Mack truck purely on the fact that they both use the same roads. Until WoW allows user created content to be introduced in world on the fly, comparing it to SL will still be an unfair comparison.

There are times when SL comes close to being photo-realistic.

Anyone that can say the same of WoW really *really* needs a reality check.

Oh please, they are both looking to attract consumers. I'll wager quite happily that the one that relies on people having the latest and greatest hardware won't be very succesful. It's hardly rocket science. The issue isn't how the work, it's how they attract consumers.

Well, based on that line of reasoning, Habbo Hotel should be kicking ass on all online games.

Oh come on, you have to draw the line somewhere, habbo hotel is a pile of pants

The fact is, you can't run a huge world based on two year old hardware, it's not viable. There's not one succesful platform I can think of off the top of my head that makes anything more than two years old obsolete. Microsoft don't do it, Blizzard don't do it, NCsoft don't do it and LL don't do it. You see that common denominator

I don't see a qualifier there that would limit everyone to only those people who buy everything hot off the assembly line.

Either SL is a game and "everyone" simply means "gamers" in which case you can expect people to throw their puter out with the trash every year and buy a new one, or SL is a platform and "everyone" literally means "everyone" and it needs to run well on puters that are far behind the cutting edge curve.

If people are seduced by eye candy and *want* to upgrade that's one thing, but the minimum requirement for SL without it shouldn't increase just for the sake of having that eye candy in there.

I guess I will agree to disagree here. My fastest machine is mostly technology that is just over two years old. The only exception is the twin 8800GTS cards I put in this year. Even with all the "two year old technology", my machine can run the Windlight client with all settings maxed. Fps drops a bit, but its still very fluid motion. Even if I didn't have the newer cards, I would still be able to use SL.

At this point, not being able to see the Windlight features does not seem to be a restriction on older or lesser computers. I don't think they have raised the bar on minimum requirements yet. From what I can see, if your computer doesn't support the new features, the new client will run and look very much like the old one.

Which sounds absolutely fine to me!


Where should the line in the sand be drawn?

PCIe? AGP? PCI? EISA/ISA?

Heck, I should have the right to connect to SL via a PPP connection over a 300 baud modem from a 80x25 character text-only amber-screen vt100 dumb terminal?

I just bought one less than 2 years ago, don't you go telling me it's obsolete already!!!! =(

Seen any new PS1 games for sale lately?

Well the opposite is the "make it run on my 5year old office machine crowd" of course, who don't want to see fast 3D graphics, many just want to IRC chat or watch a $ balance ticking over from sales or bots.
We need a compromise in betweeen because to many SL is a game and Gamers are buying stuff from businesses, if we are to exclude gamers by stagnating development, SL will just become a skirt & boots shopping platform for those who can camp enough to look good while socialising.

Bad purely because of the implementation. In theory it could be good.
Imagine it's your first few hours at orientation island. It's noon, and you have probably left all the settings at defaults till you know what's going on:

- Only the nearest few avatars will be rendered. Everyone else will be a slowly moving blocky 2D image making you wonder how 3D SL really is, and stopping you seeing many "pretty" avatars.
- Many of the textures will be bleached out, probably including your own skin, so you won't get that "wow I look great" feeling. You'll get. "Why is one side of me black and the other side really bright?", and "Why is the path and the beach bright white?"
- Linden trees and vegetation will also look very blocky and cut out until you get close to them, and they spring in to full rez, adding to that "is this really 3D?" feel.

In short, although the sky may look pretty, just about everything else will look ugly and appear to rez only when you're about 10ft away.

I agree completely with you Fluf. Strange thing is that I did see in an earlier blog entry that Linden wants to address the high contrast issue, but I can't find it anymore on their things-to-do list.

Bring on the: TREE IMPOSTERS!!!

I agree the tree seem to have a problem, but that's probably fixable, but as far as I can see the world looks the same if not better under windlight, even skins. I keep taking snapshots and giving them to non windlight users and so far all are very impressed. The windligh viewer runs no worse than my normal viewer or the Release Candidate.
Of course if the sky is red or purple things are going to look funky.

I like it, been using mostly. But when attachments are up the butt again. I fear that windlight is far from ready to go live. Same issues and problems from the first release early this year. We are not even close.

Or just hire someone with a high end computer to give you pictures of everything you're working on as you work on it.

I find that textures take forever to load for me in Windlight, and my graphics card can't take advantage of most of the features anyway, so I hope I'll be able to keep using a non-Windlight client for the time being.

I will not use atmospheric shaders until I have the hardware to make it playable, but you can still switch them on briefly for a snapshot or quick reference frame.