One Year in SL

A lot of people will post on their blog each year and do a "year in review" kind of thing. I could do that, but then this post would just be "I swung a sword around". Ok, I could probably write something more interesting than that, but I prefer to talk about technology and cool toys than my life, so instead I'm going to review the past year in SL in terms of new features.

Voice Chat
When LL announced this feature, there was a lot of criticism about it. People liked that they could keep real life completely separate from Second Life, and voice chat was somehow going to change that. Reading all this criticism, I thought it would really only be used for business/education and maybe at the SL clubs where people might be using SL to find people in real life. So I was fairly surprised at how many people in C:SI use it. I always have it on and listen (I really haven't noticed that it causes more lag as a lot of people who leave it off say), but almost never talk. It's not that I'm shy about people in SL hearing me talking, it's that I'm awkward about my roommates hearing me talking to myself in my room all the time (and also they are often asleep during the times I play SL).

Sculpted Prims
I remember one of my first reactions to SL was, "Why are the framerates so low even though it looks like a game from 5 years ago?" When I first saw the screenshots of the photorealistic fruit using sculpted prims, I was optimistic that these would vastly improve the look of the world. It turns out that after all this time (8 months?), they aren't really that prevalent. Sure, you see them around, and those Straylight trees look amazing, but it hasn't had the effect I had hoped for. I think the main problem is that it's so hard to create them. You need external software, most of it costing money, that takes time to learn to use. Also, it's not just the model for the sculpted prim that makes it look good, but also the texture. If LL adds some capability to create sculpted prims in-world, I think we'll see a lot more usage of them.

Let me take a little interlude here to mention something I've noticed about the builds around SL. I don't claim to be the best builder, or even a very good one, but when I do build there are two things I pay close attention to that very few other people seem to. Let me say that I'm mainly talking about buildings and architecture here, not prim clothing and accessories and such. First, I always make sure my texture repeats are adjusted. I have seen too many buildings where there is a long beam or pillar and a texture has just been dropped onto it, turning it into just streaks of color. Also, if I have adjacent prims with the same texture, I tend to adjust the texture offsets so that there isn't a visible seam. This brings me to the second point, which is placement of prims next to each other. I always position them exactly so they do not overlap. I hate that look when you have two prims overlapping and there's that flickering when you move the camera around. I see that all over the place, along with stretched textures, and it gives things a really unpolished look. Anyway, I'm done with my little rant.

Windlight
Ok, this isn't officially released yet, but there's been preview viewers out for months now, and I think it's getting close to being released (even thought the last update turned my Wave into airport landing lights). I think Windlight is fantastic, and I can't wait to see what they do with it after the initial release. My reaction to the first release way back in the summer (?) was, "It looks very nice, but it's so slow!" However, it looks pretty and seems faster. I have been running the Windlight viewers exclusively since they started releasing them again, and I've been pleased with the stability and quality (although other people seem to have had much worse experiences, so I guess I'm lucky). I'm really hoping for realistic shadows soon.

There were some other features released in the past year, such as the new search (I really like being able to browse what's for sale before I teleport there), and there's probably some others I'm forgetting. The three I wrote about though were definitely the most significant. LL has pledged to move away from new features and focus on stability, so I don't know how many features we'll see in the coming year. Havok4 is getting close, and it looks like Mono might be on its way as well. There are definitely a lot of cool things they can start adding onto Windlight and Havok4 once those are released, but who knows how much of that we'll see. While I like stability and not crashing, I'm also a little disappointed that we're probably not going to see as many features coming out once the ones in the pipe are finished.

There was one minor feature I kind of like that was there for about two days back in November, I think, and then disappeared without explanation. For those two days, friends on the minimap were shown in yellow instead of green. I kind of want to put this feature on a milk carton: "If you have seen this feature, please call 555-2419. Last seen November, 2007".

And finally, if you read my previous post then you can probably infer that my computer is now back to normal working order :D