Random Thoughts on Shadows

I haven't seen a lot of screenshots from the shadow client (and it won't work with my graphics card), so this blew me away. It's gorgeous. It looks almost like a real photograph. Except...

Well, except for the shadow prims. The shadow client has me a bit concerned, because -- unlike basically all the other graphical improvements thus far -- there's no happy medium. You can't make a build that looks great both with and without shadows: add in artificial shadows, and it'll look bad in a shadow client; don't add artificial shadows, and it'll look awful in a non-shadow viewer. Given the hardware requirements for the shadow viewer (and the fact that bad is still better than awful), the best thing to do is still add in shadows prims and the like, but still. The thought of having contradictory shading in my builds pains me.

Again, the shadows look fantastic. And they had to be added eventually. Still, there's a part of me that wishes they'd picked some other area to make visual improvements in -- that we'd gotten vertex painting or more forms of texture mapping or something. SL looks a lot nicer with shadows, but it'd also look a lot nicer with, say, normal mapping. (Oh, man, and don't even get me started on vertex painting. SL would look nicer and, in the hands of competent builders, run faster.)