Cezka Straaf

Uh huh, actually it was Vaalith Jinn who came up with the local texture system, not LL.

It's a wonderful addition to SL builder's toolboxes, i tried it out and it looks amazing, metal for instance has never looked so real. Unfortunately, there is a pretty massive down side to the way this is currently implemented. By forcing users to turn on the "Advanced lighting and shadows" options you're drastically increasing the GPU workload, which in my case lead to some pretty substantial lag, and i like to think of my system as fairly high end, i7 hex core cpu, 16gb of ddr3 and an aging but still powerful GTX 460. From what i have observed only a small fraction of second life's user-base (about 10-25%) can even use the above mentioned settings on a regular basis in midly crowded areas without their systems grinding to a halt, adding specular and normal maps to it would only make things worse, and would render the new features unusable for most people.. kind of a wasted effort at the end of the day. A proposed suggestion could be to split off these advanced lighting options into multiple sub categories, like; Advanced lights, Advanced shadows, Advanced materials. users would not be forced to turn everything on and could pick the options they actually want. And so be able to enjoy the new materials without for example, shadows, which i know are the root cause of the graphical lag i suffer from with advanced lighting. I know it's not a perfect option, some of the above mentioned features are tied into others but i'm sure a lot of optimization can be done here.