You Light Up My Life
I adore the new local lighting and flexiprims. I made a bunch of glowing stuff, and wrote a script that cycled a prim through various colours and intensities - I can now have a flickering torch that really flickers! I left the script running on a prim while I was working on something else, and the effect was like having a TV on just out of my range of vision. Eventually, it annoyed me enough that I turned it off. But it's still a really neat feature.
I was so amazed... I thought that the reason avatars were suddenly appearing so crystal clear and beautifully detailed had to do with the upgrade, and it does... but not in the way I thought. It seems that the update set everyone's avatar mesh detail to the highest setting. Oops. I played around with it anyway, and the results are below the crease.
As you can see, I'm still loving the shininess thing. It really makes everything so pretty to look at. So much in SL is just gorgeously rendered. I spent an astonishing amount of time watching a shiny flexiprim (it looked a lot like the silvery stuff from Terminator II) as it oozed in the wind. The only real drawback to the flexiprims, that I can see anyway, is that as they bend and sway in the wind, they don't move things that are attached to them. My immediate thought on seeing the swaying prims was a field of flowers blowing in the wind... but I guess it'll only work if the head and stem are one prim, otherwise, the stems will sway, while the flowers themselves remain stationary! Not the effect I was looking for, although I imagine it would be pretty amusing.
The flexi-skirts and capes look really nice. Actually, nice isn't the right word. They look realistic. So much so, that I didn't even really notice them, until others pointed them out. Unlike the capes that stick out at right angles whenever an avatar inclines their upper body; those stand out as an eyesore! FlipperPA was at Travis' birthday party sporting flexi-hair, which was extremely cool too.
The upgrade also raised everyone's preferred draw distance, but I spotted that almost at once, and dropped mine back down. I turned the avatar detail down for Travis' party, which I believe may have helped me avoid being bumped off too often, although I rotated my camera gingerly whenever I had to. :D
As much as everyone bitches and moans about update-related lag... I'm not sure how much of that I'm actually seeing. I expected lag at this party, and was not disappointed. I experienced some earlier, specifically during the Building Shelter game, but I think that may have been due to network troubles on my end, and not caused by the software or the server. The problems have been resolved and a valuable lesson has been learned about downloading multiple episodes of a television show while running the SL client on the same connection. :P