Lights, atmosphere; Action

Linden Labs will change the look of Second Life with new weather (lighting, cloud, atmospheric and water effects after) acquiring Windward Mark Interactive and its shader technology. Second Life will have a more realistic look. Beautiful sunsets, smog choked cities, tropical skies and science-fiction looks can all be created in the new browser and later within Second Life itself.

See Torley's slide show on Flickr.

When the new software is released I am keen to change the look of Dutch Business Parks. A Beta Browser is available which allows us to experiment with looks on our own computers. I cannot wait to see this in action and change the look of Dutch Business Parks, enhancing the atmosphere and general feel of the place.

Beautiful regions like Apollo or Svarga will definitely benefit from the new weather, but they represent less than 1% of the places in SL. You can fly over the mainland for miles and see a patchwork of buildings made to fit each small plot of land with no gardens or landscaping.

SL will look more realistic and bad buildings will stand out with the new weather. See Torley's slides for examples. Rather than increasing the realism of SL, the contrast between the sky and lighting will make the bad buildings more noticeable and draw attention that you are inside a computer game.

The custom built Islands made by professionals will benefit most from these changes. They can integrate the architecture, landscaping and planting with the weather. The average resident will find it hard to achieve the same effects with houses and gardens limited by prim usage.

With these changes it will become more diffcult for business to get started as the overall quality of SL improves. There will be fewer people who can do everything needed to make clothes, gadgets, vehicles, buildings or landscape simulators. There will be experts in different areas and an elite band will be providing the top quality goods. They will probably be supplying the people who can afford these services, i.e. the commercial companies coming in to SL.

Improving the lighting shows up other areas in SL, such as illumination, the sim terrain, particle and body shapes. The prims have just been tackled with the new sculpted prims.
- You can only have six illumination sources at one time
- Terrain is set at the corners of a sim and only 4 textures can be used over the entire sim
- Particles look pretty crude and it needs real skill to make a good looking particle source.
- Body shapes are based on one 'perfect' shape. You cannot go too far away from the perfect shape so you cannot reproducing some real-life faces. Orlando Blooms chin, Angelina Jolie, Dita Von-Tees forehead and Schwarzenegger's body shape are all difficult to do.
- Faces are made hardhiveer as you cannot change the nose length, or eye vertical positions.

I predict we will soon be seeing improvements in these areas.

Improving the weather has lifted the quality of one area of SL and shows up other areas as being poor. I am looking forward to these changes and the improved looks that we will be able to achieve, but not so much to the increased skill levels and time that will be needed to use all of this.