There really are Breath taking Improvements available for Second Life

I was reading Gwyneth Llewelyn article Breath-taking improvements and how to implement them where she made several really good points about the work Linden Lab is doing in the “First Look” viewer to keep the innovations of Second Life from stagnating.

With Second Life users are “fussin” so frequently to stop all innovations and stabilize the platform, and get rid of the “bugs” rather than innovate. Linden Lab seems to have reached for an interesting solution. Also brought the the forefront of thought is the fact, we often see only small changes with each update. One should understand many changes are made “under the hood” where we don’t really notice until suddenly when we actually get over 30,000 people concurrently using the grid, and it doesn’t practically shut the grid down.

Gwyneth point out the First Look viewer is more for people that are not so concerned about a stable platform, rather for those who know more about how to tweak their computers in an effort not to accept the Lindens default setting. Linden Lab has to “guess” at reasonable default setting on the general populations computers in an effort to give the greatest number of residents a more stable platform. Sometime these defaults are not reasonable for individual computers. True enough the Lindens have gotten better at reaching those default settings, but a knowledgeable individual can almost always tweak the settings to make Second Life run better on their computer.

Gwyneth goes into some detail about some of the amazing results we have seen applied to First Look,  such as the graphics rendering pipeline and a simplified explanation of how it works. She also points out that with

First Look mirrors are being made (not perfected) in Second Life.  She also goes on to discuss some of the features which are now possible, such as mesh-based objects. Which would change everything within Second Life’s prim-based model to polygon based economy; breaking the whole model and the assumption upon which Second Life’s economy relies.

The article is really good to make one think. If this little synopsis catches your attention follow the link at the top and read the original post.