[sldev] Re: SL Target Audience

[Barney Boomslang]

Hey,

On 5/29/08, Eric M. Tulla (BigPapi Linden) <tulla at lindenlab.com> wrote:
>  That means you're biasing it in the other direction.  If you keep the
> renderer at a level that is greater than the old one, of course it will be
> slower.  However, the entire point of this discussion is how the windlight
> renderer (without the fancy stuff) affects *low end machines*.  Low end
> machines do NOT have the capacity to render all the pretty stuff at anything
> close to an acceptable frame rate.

Sorry, but I have to call bullshit on that one. The lower-end machines
(I'm running a first-gen MacBook Pro, I fail to see it as "lower-end"
in any definition) had ample capability to run for example rippled
water. It worked and it looked good.  Now to get a framerate that is
near what I got with pre-Windlight, I have to turn the look of the
world into stoneage-ugly.

To say that those "old" machines (again, this is a first-gen MacBook
Pro Core Duo machine we are talking about) are not up to show the
"nice stuff" with Windlight just says that you dropped an efficient
way to do rippled water for an overly expensive implementation without
keeping the old one around as an option (for example as an "pre-wl
shaders" checkbox in the graphics settings). And then you blame the
machines and users.

Sorry, but that is twisting words to get the effect you want while
totally ignoring all hard facts and realities. Older machines where
perfectly capable to have better looking water, a capability you broke
with the windlight release deliberately, as you (well, the lab) have
proven yourself with the pre-windlight releases.

bye, Barney