One of the stats that Second Life™ designers want is to know how many people now have Advanced Lighting Model (ALM) enabled on their viewers. Essentially that tells us how many people can see Materials.
From past articles you may remember last year the Lab got a new reporting system. The team using it to create management reports is loaded with creating previous reports and new reports that reflect important management information. Somewhere down the priority list is reports for things like ALM use.
On his recent visit to the San Francisco Oz learned more about using the new system. He is hoping to create the hardware reports that TPV Dev’s and general SL users need to guide their efforts. He describes his current talent level as more dangerous than productive. But, we do have some hope of the ALM numbers being released sometime soon.
I love the ALM however I rarely use it except for special occations and screenshots, because on a daily basis my laptop just runs smoother and crashes less (it overheats easily) without it on. I hope they don’t slow down developments even if this goes for the majority of users, because imo the shiny stuff helps attract new users, and in 2-3 years what is considered shiny now, will be common then.