(Note: This is something I'm actually working on. This will be moved over to STORM soon.)

How will it work, and what will be supported?

This feature will enable all users that enable Basic Shaders to see a subset of materials functionality present in Advanced Lighting Model. Materials support will not be toggleable unless you disable basic shaders altogether.

There will be some constraints to this functionality, including:

• Maximum number of lights will go unchanged
• Projectors still will not work
• Gamma correction will only be approximated

The performance impact won't be noticeable on the vast majority of GPUs that support at least atmospheric shading and basic shaders, and should generally be much faster on systems that have trouble with ALM. On top of that, this should enable materials to work in water reflections and refractions to some extent.

All existing material parameters will be supported.

How does this effect the SL community as a whole?

This feature will greatly benefit the community by enabling people who previously were not able to see materials due to either lesser hardware or because they were previously unaware of how to enable ALM on some viewers. There will also be some degree of per-pixel lighting as well, however to a much lesser extent than ALM.