Here's what I mean by that: my group made a city in the Suffugium region. We had the estate sun set to a fixed time of day, chosen very precisely to give us exactly the ambient light level and color we wanted. We tinted every single prim and designed our textures specifically to match the estate sun setting and give a dull, orange glow to the city, as if it were lit by sodium street lights (those orange ones you see in big cities). We accept that we're going to have to carefully design a new set of windlight presets to match the ambience we had before, and we're excited by the possibilities this will allow us.

Right now, we're stuck with the default day cycle included with windlight viewers. With the same fixed sun setting we had before, the "time of day" is now interpreted in the default windlight day cycle, and it's totally the wrong color and light level. There's no setting that'll come close to matching what we had before. Until LL completes the Windlight project, we're stuck with our sim looking completely different from the way we built it, and there's really nothing we can do about it.

I agree with you completely. I'd even say Windlight still has a beta-feature feel to it, being that it's local-machine/client dependent, and seemingly unintegrated with the rest of SL (in a way, it's just as useful as the "feature" of changing viewer skins. It makes it prettier based on your preferences alone, but no one else can see it, and it has absolutely no effect on the grid).

I could see those with computers/cards unable to support all, or even some, of the Windlight settings as being an issue. But here's my 2-cents on that:
It seems there are two systems for environments. The current, old system, and Windlight.
The old system is still the default.
Windlight exists seperately from this.
Switch and integrate. Make Windlight the default system, and the old system a fallback for users unable to render the Windlight settings of a particular area (additionally, but optionally: allow landowners to set a Windlight setting, AND an old system fallback setting to approximate the Windlight setting, so a beautiful starry mountaintop at night in Windlight could is seen at something like Midnight to someone who can't use Windlight settings, rather than Midday).

My #1 thing is being able to share/trade settings within SL. Sure, you can sell an xml file, but once you do, there's no way of stopping the person you sold it to from re-selling it, making it a freebie, or modifying you settings into something else and reselling that.

Agree with Lex - #2 is the biggest as far as I'm concerned. Not being able to take advantage of the cool WL technology makes it a total waste. The fact that users can edit their WL setting is probably irrelevant - most users are and will always be clueless. It HAS to be handed over to content creators and artists - which operate at region/estate level to set these correctly.

In fact I'd go so far as to say the WL design and rollout was a total flop becasue of that ... LL should have implemented WL at Estate level FIRST ( with a simple - basic - client override), which would have brought the VALUE of WL to 10000x more users.

This type of rollout LL does is just nuts ... excellent technology EXTREMELY badly implemented, or not at all.

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As per my post on another client-side Jira :

Common LL ... wrap this windlight thing up ... it's like half-implemented. Windlight is such a big thing its crazy to see it just hanging like this.

There should NOT be any popups when a user TP's to a new region with WL settings - that'll drive users nuts. At most a temp fading non-obtrusive message, or chat message, only IF client is set to not auto-accept server WL settings. I guess you could post a chat message if WL settings are changed to server with a 'click here' link to reset your previous ... kind-of like the message after TP you get and can TP back.

An additional client-side option should be avail to allow/prevent override of windlight settings when entering a server with WL settings (and the WL client should revert to its prev defaults when leaving).

Additionally, it'll be good to have a small colored panel-icon (sun+clouds or rainbow or something) ... like the small restrict push icons etc - to display when server settings are avail in your region and you have your local override on. By clicking the icon you can toggle between server and current client settings.

And can we have it on Monday please?

thx

We need "materials", for per-object and per-avatar settings, and we need to be able to save and restore day cycles reliably - they're still blown away every time I update the client.

But since almost everything is Second Life is made with a different texture/shiny/alpha/etc setting anyway...

WindLight shaders, however, are different and I'm not sure if putting different parameters would mean drivers have to do extra work.

And shiny and full-bright are examples of materials. Why would (for example) a "low contrast" setting (similar to full-bright, but scaled to ambient light) cause more lag than full-bright itself?

like wheather (rain, snow etc.) All functionalities should be availabel to a sim owner, so it will be possible to create a collection of themed sims. If LL were to deliver as intended Sl would offer many new improved experiences.