Windlight and Release Candidates Disabled

From the Official Linden Blog: "If you are using our Windlight or Release Candidate viewer, you might have noticed that you are currently not able to login or download the latest version of either. We have found an issue concerning both of these viewers, that required us to disable them for the time we need to fix the problem."

Every time you log into Windlight, God kills a kitten.

Away from SL

I am away from home for the holidays, and won't be able to sign on to SL until January 3rd. I thought I would be able to sign on with this laptop, since I was able to in the past (but only at about 3 fps). Apparently at some point since I last used this laptop, my hardware stopped being supported. Now it crashes whenever I try to sign in. Not that big a deal really, since I don't really have much time to spend on SL. You can still IM me and I can respond through email. I might even give out my email address or AIM/MSN if you ask. Happy Festivus everyone!

Speeding up Windlight

I just discovered that if I turn on the "Hardware Skinning" option in the windlight viewer (which requires that "Basic Shaders" also be enabled), I get a fairly significant framerate increase. Where I'm currently standing, I go from about 29 fps to 40. This is having all options as low as possible, then turning on the skinning option. I am in Windows right now. The person here with me has a Mac, and says the option drops his framerate, so this might not work for everyone. I have yet to test it on Linux. Let me know how this option affects you, and what sort of system you have.

PS3 Home Preview

Check out this 25 minute preview of PS3 Home. It's kind of boring, he just goes through every possible thing you can do. In some ways, it seems to be a lot like Second Life, but there are some missing features and I think it's those features that make Second Life what it is.


What's missing (I think) is user-created content. Without it, it's really just a 3d chat room where you can own a house and put furniture in it. It's true that what I just described is how a lot of people use Second Life, but it seems like most of those people aren't really ones who play other video games. I doubt many of them own a Playstation 3. I think the people that do own PS3s won't really be interested in this.