[sldev] Re: SL Target Audience

[Brad Kittenbrink (Brad Linden)]

Barney Boomslang wrote:
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Click here to unsubscribe or manage your list subscription:
> /index.html
>   
Please calm down.  We're not blaming anybody, twisting words, or 
ignoring facts.  We're trying to have a dialog explaining the reasons we 
made the design decisions we made.  And we're trying to collect more 
facts about how these design decisions have impacted our community.

I'm trying to understand what you meant when you said, "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."   Do you have any other specific 
complaints other than that the original ripple water was removed?

I'm not really interested in the debate about whether a particular 
revision of macbook pro is low-end or not.  Clearly the hardware is not 
low-end (if I'm correct, it falls under the recommended area on our 
system requirements page http://secondlife.com/support/sysreqs.php).  
However, the Apple OpenGL driver implementation is simply more difficult 
to support, and it is continually an effort to improve performance on 
Apple.  We take this effort very seriously.

-Brad