In other words, you don’t like the preference of the masses (who, like me, want a perfectly lit avatar at noon) and want to see your preference forced on everyone. Wouldn’t it help the popularity of SL to cater to the masses?

For many if not most residents, SL is all about social interaction, i.e. about people. Avatars should look as good as possible, despite the flaws of the current avatar mesh. With perfect avatar lighting (which some find a bit too bright), skin texture artists can apply shadows that look realistic without their creations being messed up by rendered shadows. Customers can finally look like the reference model on a skin vendor and don’t need to carry their own local lights around.

Same with clothing. All the carefully designed shadows and folds are pointless if one half of the wearer is rendered almost black due to environmental lighting. That’s not how we perceive shadows in RL. The avatar mesh is flat, our clothes don’t have folds, and a too realistic lighting destroys the illusion of not wearing skin-tight catsuits only. I think the current WindLight settings are a big improvement for all who value their avatar’s appearance over realism.

I agree that a better avatar mesh would also solve many problems, but high polygon avatars would be an incredible lag source. The current avatar mesh can be greatly improved with realistic textures, but that only works if the lighting is a bit overdone and leaves the shadowing effects to the skin & clothing artists.

I agree that SL, especially the WindLight version, are very performance hungry. But so are all contemporary 3D applications. Those who get only 15 fps in SL would likely be down to 5 fps in MMORPGs like Vanguard, if they managed to run it at all. 3D games / virtual worlds get ever more complex, so the user needs to invest in new hardware now and then.

I think it would be wrong to limit Second Life in order to keep the old minimum requirements. All new MMORPGs are barely playable on mainstream hardware at the time of their release, in order to still look acceptable 2 years later. I can understand that LL too have future technology in mind and want improvements to last for a while.

SL is still useable on older machines if the settings are tweaked a bit. Visible range down to 128, mesh details reduced, local lighting turned off etc. In addition, many users leave all the shiny but performance hungry video card features enabled, like anisotropic filtering or anti-aliasing. If that is turned off, the WindLight client runs acceptable on medieval video cards like a GeForce 6800 GT, and with 40+ fps on current mainstream cards like a 7600 GT.

That being said I also want to thank you for (partly) fixing the black band issue, I can now use it at he top of the top on Ultra settings.

For those having trouble WindLight is /very/ picky about what hardware it chooses to band (Bullseye, lol) on. My system is a dual Pentium D 3.0GHz with an nVidia GeForce 8600 (GTS 256MB) and I had to turn the sky down until the latest release which allowed me to crank it up to full. Your mileage may vary.

This is my impression of Windlight:-

Sky and sea are brilliant - could not be better. A very high degree of realism.

In general, lighting is poor. Far too contrasty, and some textures seem to be lacking detail. The ground texture where I live (Umber) is degraded and lacking detail. I noticed that hair too is actually lacking information.

I have downloaded the new update this morning, and find that I am getting a series of concentric black circles in the sky, covering the whole sky, so that if you look up, you see something that looks like a target. This makes Windlight unusable for me, so I will wait for the next upgrade before venturing in again.

My hat is off to the Lindens for designing this wonderfully (Sometimes irritating) joyful platform that I am able to express myself creatively in a digital form.

BUT I LOVED IT for its graphic!
It was so beautiful!
I wish it back.