The scenery just got prettier

Yesterday’s Linden Blog posting heralded a major step forward in the visual strength of the SL platform – Linden’s acquisition of the Windlight graphics technology from Windward Mark Interactive.

As Linden Labs say themselves, the short story on the technology is “killer skies”. The initial shots supplied certainly live up to that description:

508031345_d632e367cc.jpg
(Photo part of set created by Torley Linden – access the full set here)

The Windlight-enabled viewer is available “now” for PC users – though I can’t find the specific download link. No firm date on the Mac release as yet.

What’s not clear for Australian users of SL is the impact on bandwidth and whether lag will increase further. However, announcements like this do flag the oncoming wave of enhancements resulting from open sourcing SL. And here’s a YouTube video provided by Linden Labs to showcase Windlight:

Comments

  1. Hi Simondo,

    My (perhaps faulty) assumption is that the 1.16 update occurring in the next 24 hours will deliver the functionality. Ive updated the story to reflect the fact there’s no obvious download link as yet.

    😉

  2. Earnest Candour says

    Have to say, I’m pretty excited about this. It looks fantastic. Hope its as good as the video seems to indicate.

  3. Hi Simondo,

    My (perhaps faulty) assumption is that the 1.16 update occurring in the next 24 hours will deliver the functionality. Ive updated the story to reflect the fact there’s no obvious download link as yet.

    😉

  4. Simondo Nebestanka says

    Looks like a terrific addition to the platform. Not 100% sure but I got the feeling from the notes that it’ll be the viewer doing the work, so I wouldn’t expect much impact on bandwidth(?). It may require a hotted-up graphics card tho to reach its full glory!!
    /me starts saving now for a nice upgrade 🙂
    The funny thing about lag is so many things contribute to what we call ‘lag’. For instance I was getting a lot of ‘stuttering’ graphics recently and dropped my SL disk cache back to the recommended 200Mb and straight away that stuttering (which I decided to call ‘lag’) just disappeared.
    ps. Lowell is the PC viewer really available yet? (Torley mentions it will be a ‘First Look’ release but I couldn’t find it in the Download section).
    Cheers

  5. Simondo Nebestanka says

    Looks like a terrific addition to the platform. Not 100% sure but I got the feeling from the notes that it’ll be the viewer doing the work, so I wouldn’t expect much impact on bandwidth(?). It may require a hotted-up graphics card tho to reach its full glory!!
    /me starts saving now for a nice upgrade 🙂
    The funny thing about lag is so many things contribute to what we call ‘lag’. For instance I was getting a lot of ‘stuttering’ graphics recently and dropped my SL disk cache back to the recommended 200Mb and straight away that stuttering (which I decided to call ‘lag’) just disappeared.
    ps. Lowell is the PC viewer really available yet? (Torley mentions it will be a ‘First Look’ release but I couldn’t find it in the Download section).
    Cheers

  6. Earnest Candour says

    Have to say, I’m pretty excited about this. It looks fantastic. Hope its as good as the video seems to indicate.

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