It was on May 21st 2007 that Linden Lab announced that it had aquired the Boston based company Windward Mark. This company, founded in 2003 by 5 Harvard students, was specialized in making revolutionary virtual world rendering algorythms. In short, they were the perfect partner for Linden Lab to team up with, to make Second Life even more beautiful than it already was. And they called this new feature Windlight. The first pictures that were released looked really beautiful !! More realistic skies, moving clouds, better sunsets, much better lighting on the clouds ... as a SLotographer I was really looking forward to this and since then have been landmarking perfect spots to make nice sunset photos in SL. They even made a teaser movie and put it on YouTube.com which made me drewl.
So, obviously they released a FirstLook viewer with Windlight about a week later. Although it was still buggy, it looked very promising. Then apparently the priorities shifted and the Windlight FirstLook viewer had to be replaced by a FirstLook viewer with Voice in it, mid June. Well, I can understand that. Apparently Voice was a project a lot bigger than Windlight.
Not to worry, Windlight would be available again in a few weeks, as Zen Linden said in his Linden Blog entry. However, it's now almost 2.5 months later and there's still no Windlight available. At the newspaper we have gotten numerous questions about it, but to be honest, we don't know anything more about it than all you wonderful people do. But apparently it's more and more becoming the new buzz word.
Even on August 2nd, Torley Linden said that Windlight was 'around the corner', in her blog about postcards from Second Life.
So, what is the current status on Windlight? Can we really look forward to having this new feature within a couple of weeks? Or even days? Well, the only people who know the answer to this, are the Lindens themselves. But to be honest, I've become somewhat cynical about this, especially after reading Ian Linden's blog entry about bug fixing.
Since the start of 2007, residents have been complaining that Linden Lab was focusing on the wrong issues. With Windlight, Voice, Sculpties, age verification, ban on gambling, they seemed to forget about one thing: stability.
It has been a much heard complained that the stability of Second Life has been going down much and that LL was not paying attention to this. At least not enough. That they were too much fixed on getting new features out.
All in all I guess the Linden family has finally made a choice. Work on stability, bug fixes and better communication and wait some more with new features like Windlight. And to be honest, although I'm very much looking forward to having Windlight, I do agree with them that the stability issues and bugs are so much more important. They do have my full support if they are really picking it up like this. I would be most happy to go another half year without Windlight, if they really could make some noticable improvements to SL stability.
What about you? Windlight or Bugfix?
Remember, you can't enjoy Windlight if you're stuck, or walking into the ground.
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