I've mentioned a few times in the past that I think the position expressed in the "Open Letter" of slightly over a year ago--that enhancements to SL be postponed until bugs are fixed--was, and still is, short-sighted in the extreme. While bug fixing is important, and indeed LL announced that it was devoting a considerable majority of its resources to bug fixes, LL can't afford to stagnate while on a never-ending quest to fix all bugs in SL.
Nonetheless, one can count on any LL blog entry that permits comments being inundated with the very same short-sighted demand, whether it's on-topic or not.
Since the Open Letter, we have sculpted prims and Windlight; the former is a major advance in both the ability to make objects that would be insanely difficult and inefficient to build up out of the old, and the results of Windlight can be seen in just about any exhibit of SL photography.
Today the LL blog shows another major advance, I hope soon to arrive on the main grid, that wouldn't have happened had LL taken the advice of the "Open Letter" signatories and the endless kvetchers in the blog: compiling LSL scripts down to C# byte code using the work of the Open Source Mono project. The video in the blog entry compares a Mandelbrot set generator using the old LSL system with one using Mono. The Mono version displays, zooms and displays again dozens of times while the old versions barely manages to get through the initial computation and display of the set as a whole.
Now, fractal generation is highly compute-bound, and may not be representative of what scripts "usually" do; I don't know enough about scripting in SL to be able to say. That said, surely this will cut down considerably on lag, one of the things that is endlessly complained about. Had LL devoted themselves solely to bug fixing, as is continually demanded, it wouldn't have happened.
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