SL Target Audience (was RE: [sldev] branches/shadow-draft missing llrender.cpp)

[Nicholas Chase]

Matthew Dowd wrote:
> To be honest, there is no problem with LL concentrating effort on 
> high-end machines *if* their target audience is just the high end gaming 
> community. However, if the target audience are typical home users (who 
> are likely to buy mid-range machines which may even today come with the 
> sort of hardware DaveL would regard as dead; and unlikely to be 
> replacing them as frequently as 3-4 years), educational users (again 
> buying mid-range machines, and typically laptops with embedded 
> graphics), business users (typically embedded graphics and typically 
> laptops) then needs to put most of its effort into getting it running 
> well on the hardware such audiences will typically have - not berating 
> them for not having the latest and greatest (but this shouldn't stop a 
> few programmers doing high end stuff in experimental branches....).

Here here.  One thing I keep hearing about There is how it can run on a 
56K modem.  Not that I think we want to go THAT far, but if we ever want 
SL to be ubiquitous, it should be usable on a machine that was made at 
least 3-4 years ago.  And even then you're letting quite a few people 
out.  I have several friends who I keep trying to introduce to SL, but 
we just can't get it to run on their machine.

Heck, I myself signed up for an account back in 2004 but the software 
wouldn't run on my machine.  It was 2 years before I came back.  At that 
point 2 years didn't mean much, because there weren't too many 
competitors.  Now 2 years is the difference between success and 
marginalization.  (Is that a word?)  The point is that we're getting 
people use to a 3D world; if they can't run SL, they'll find something 
else, and they won't be back.

----  Chase