A Better 'Second Life' - Windlight Atmospheric Rendering

Linden Lab's Second Life is getting the atmospheric rendering tech Windlight and the 3D cloud simulator Nimble from Windward Mark Interactive. Realism is the first thing the developer has to think about when a life sim such as Second Life is their main title. Here's why, as NextGeneration reports.Linden Lab's Second Life is getting the atmospheric rendering tech Windlight and the 3D cloud simulator Nimble from Windward Mark Interactive. Realism is the first thing the developer has to think about when a life sim such as Second Life is their main title. Here's why, as NextGeneration reports.

Although Linden has also acquired "all associated intellectual IP and interests" of Windward Mark, as the same site says, Alliance: The Silent War, Windward Mark's title in development, will not be part of the deal and will continue to be developed separately by Windward Mark.
So what will The Windlight technology do for Linden's Second Life? Mainly, it will add realism to environments, while Nimble's job will be "simply" rendering more convincing clouds. And it sure needs it as Second Life is a 100% life simulator – some countries even use it as a voting platform. Just think how some nice clouds could influence your judgment when electing your president... Kidding of course.

Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka also proposed the open source model: "Our core development team is tightly focused on improving the Second Life experience in terms of stability and scalability, but open sourcing has enabled external developers to integrate additional enhancements that are also hugely valuable; WindLight is one of these."

Man, Epic must be quite upset for Linden not to choose their Unreal Engine 3, huh? Not really actually, you see, although UE3 can do so much more than just make shooters look good, it's mainly used for action, not just strolling in the park or on the streets like in Second Life. Linden Lab hasn't acquired more powerful technology than that, but the most appropriate for what Second Life is all about.

All the developer had to worry about until now, was rendering the big city, and now it's not even the developer's worry, but Windward Mark Interactive's.