How's Windlight doing?

I'm wondering about the coming graphics upgrade, from what I've seen of it there's a lot to look forward to. Is there a blog dedicated to it?

LL has been pretty quiet on the subject of Windlight lately. I think they are focusing most of their efforts on stability (yay!). Between Havok 4, the numerous server bug fixes, the new Search, and IDV, I would imagine Windlight isn't getting much time devoted to it right now. The community made it rather clear they wanted fixes over new features, and so that's what we are getting, for the most part.

I still wouldn't mind an update, even if it isn't their current focus. Some of those screenshots were staggeringly beautiful.

They were beautiful. The staggering part was due to overindulgence in Scotch.

P2

I think we're going to see another Windlight First Look viewer VERY soon. I'm on the edge of my seat and dying to see it in action.

Specially as it introduces some improved graphic optimization too, so not all just extra overhead.

You can see quite a bit of windlight info in Torleys just released tips on photography (http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/11/08/tip-of-the-week-guide-to-high-quality-photography/) about windlight settings so that probably indicates its looming.

The viewer is pretty close to completion but also has the new search functionality included, and is apparently being 'stalled' till after a 'normal' viewer release introducing the new search functionality. Guess it would be way too much to give us two new features in one. Hopefully they're not holding it all the way back as a Christmas gift .. or worse.

Sounds pretty exciting. I'm also interested by the "Avatar Impostors" feature, sounds like takes far away avatars and turns them into images that update less frequently, rather than rendering them in 3D at full-speed all the time.
I just hope it uses threading or it could just end up making things worse by over-working our processors even more =(

Yes the "Av Impostors" is something one would have thought logical to have around long ago, as it must reduce the distant 3D rendering by multiples, and could have already gone a long way to reducing lag. Surely its pretty trivial to automatically store some 2D sprite representations in the dB and swap them for the av model at distance. I expect it might be a bit imperfect at first, but hopefully should evolve pretty fast. But even so, I'm pretty sure I'll have it enabled most of the time anyway.

Hopefully the excitement building about Windlight is not another false build-up like in August when Torley hinted it should be released "next month" (September).

Exactly why they are allowing a RC release with the new search to hold them up with a WindLight release is beyond me, surely it shouldn't matter in which order they are released.

I thought the whole point of opening the Boston development office* was so that the Windward Mark people could integrate their technology into the SL client. Hmm....

*http://lindenlab.com/press/releases/05_21_07

Touche!

Windlight Project Updates

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Torley_Linden/Project_updates#WindLight

Sounds like they are nearing a Firstlook. That should be fun.

No blog update about this yet, but http://secondlife.com/community/firstlook.php

v1.18.5.73655_WINDLIGHT!!!