It's not easy keeping things up to date, in terms of 3D engines and the like, but Linden Lab is really pushing Second Life to its limits. Windlight added some great atmospherics to the world but it fell short of realtime shadows, the problem with which might be that most builds aren't water tight and could leak light in places, resulting in something very ugly or perhaps LL was waiting to see how hard the new engine would hit everyone's GPU.

We're still using trees we were used to seeing in the times of Everquest, there has been no mention of SpeedTree recently, but again, the problem is that the current rendering engine handles overlapping transparent layers improperly, it being OpenGL based. It'd make rendering trees a very awkward affair with branches appearing incorrectly due to the extensive use of transparency mapping, something that SL doesn't handle well at all.

Visit this location inside Second Life

Functionally speaking, SL is great though not without problems, my issue here is aesthetics. When most people decide to sample a 3D world in 2008, amongst the first thing(s) they look at are the graphics. Understandably, in a world where most of the content is generated by its users this presents problems as there's no way to make sure everyone works to a certain standard. Instead, said critics look at the things like the default appearance of avatars and the first few areas they're exposed to. The general consensus amongst residents is that the base skins for avatars, as well as animations (walking as an example), are sub par. The mainland itself is also horrible as has already been made clear by the user base.

This is no good as most people will download the Second Life client and, if they aren't impressed in the first ten minutes, may never return. We can speculate that something may be done about it in the future but looking at how little has been done about it in the past, we shouldn't be holding our breath. Perhaps LL are working on implementing euphoria physics, something that'd allow the client to create animations on the fly. Granted, many people won't care but the ones who are used to seeing well animated models in their games will, and these people are the ones who tend to be the most vocal. Competition in the gaming industry has raised the bar for presentation and LL would do well to take note.

What are the other problems inhibiting future progress?

• Would SpeedTree put tree sellers out of business?
• Would Euphoria physics put the animators out of business?
• Should we care?

I'm just wondering what direction LL is planning to take SL in. Yes, "graphics aren't as important as gameplay" I hear some of you say, but the fact is that they are as important. Second Life needs to continue to impress people if it's to achieve the goal of becoming as widespread as a standard internet browser (lofty to say the least), though I wonder why LL aren't making use of engines like Unity 3D to create a browser based client for Second Life.

Opensim is coming along nicely, though every MMO gets its own version of Opensim at some point. People use packet sniffing to try and emulate the server processes and eventually mimic everything completely. The only difference with SL is that LL are actually helping with the project and not trying to shut it down.

SL continues to grow but things can change very quickly. While Playstation Home is not a threat, it being on a different platform altogether, it will inspire developers to challenge LL in the race to create a real standard for 3D worlds. Does SL have to lose some excess baggage to keep up?

I leave you with another video, this one is of the shadow draft client in action, filmed by Ayumi Cassini. Hopefully we'll see this in the official release soon!