General

Today I got my hands on the latest and greatest addition of Second Life, Windlight. Lindenlabs bought the company behind it - good to see that LL has some money - and there's already a Firstlook viewer available to get the first impressions of how it might look like.

It's available for all platforms unlike voice and you can play around with it. Of course you need a somewhat decent graphics card to see the effects in action, seems it is programmed with vertex shaders, which means that most of the stuff actually runs on the hardware of the graphics card itself.

So, if you've got decent enough hardware and you play around with it, you might make pictures in game like this:

This shows a typical, default sunset at the sea. Note that this is no mockup picture, but taken in world, click on it for the larger version. Well, and here is another picture.

This is the default setting "midday". Looks also interesting, the clouds are rendered in real time and you can see them wandering around. Last picture for the moment is this:

Never looked a night more darker in Second Life than on this picture. Well, it still needs polishing, of course, the animation goes way too fast - it's more actually screaming "Hey, I am here!" at the moment to all of us, but when it is finished, this is for sure going to be a very good addition to the whole gameplay, even if the guys at the Second Life Herald disagree with me.