Lessons learned from WindLight
Posted on: June 13, 2008
I love seeing insightful concerns about exceptional achievements: the saga of WindLight (atmospheric rendering) is an exceptional example. Team WindLight had help from many Residents who shared their worries, and through months of office hours, debugging, and polishing the product, it shipped on a foundation of community trust — intense, copious amounts of valuable dialogue which is still being expanded on recently, e.g., Avatar Rendering Cost.
Throughout it all, we learned many things, including:
- Any change (good, bad, whatever) gets complained about. Most changes get used to.
- The most important complaints/questions rise to the top without effort. They should be congealed into a FAQ for easy access, which they were.
- Many complaints become moot. Some do solve themselves (or at least appear to). As in, "By the time you complain again… there's not a problem!" Or sometimes, fixing one problem also resolves a few more.
- Testing on a wide variety of setups is essential to better understand how people on different hardware see the world. The WL test lab was the first of its kind constructed @ LL. And boy, I heard a lot about color-matching, swapping GPUs, etc.
- Big names get blamed for other problems. WindLight (still one of the most popular search terms on the Official Second Life Blog) was blamed for server-side lag and a number of other devils which were completely unrelated, but it did lead to the positive introduction of ARC and more education about inworld resource usage. (Think of it as SL's virtual carbon footprints.)
- Asking questions and being curious is far more valuable than making wrong assumptions and statements and lamely passing it off as "news" — not targeting anyone here, but it happens in the media all the time.
- Embrace diversity at all steps in the process — actual examples count immensely. Instead of being confined to theory, WindLighters repeatedly checked out a plethora of inworld content. We went on "shader safaris" and dug into the dirt across a crazy variety of builds. Ultimately, we went through 100s of locations, and I photographed many for the record.
- Do your best to provide happy defaults (the preset day cycle), but give users the power to do what they want if they choose to. Strong starting points and expandable customizability go hand-in-hand. It's phenomenal that WindLight can express both photorealistic sunsets and watermelon clouds.
- Ongoing communication is the fulcrum which supports the initial announcement. Sure, WindLight press releases were a big deal, but even more important was the intimate and regular contact we had thereafter… culminating in the SUPER MEGA OFFICE HOURS! Don't just talk at your customers; help show them how what you're doing can invigorate their passion. As a result, we ended up having dedicated visitors who were much better educated about WindLight. These enlightened advocates preached the good word and corrected the fallacies made by others.
For more exciting perspectives, listen to the WindLight podcast we did.
Related Posts
Be my friend!
Stay up-to-date
Enjoyed this article? Subscribe to me and be auto-updated when new stuff is out!
box o' RANDOM FUN
June 13th, 2008 at 9:33 AM PDT
Wonderfully put, Torley! Working in I.T. in my real life, I can absolutely appreciate everything you've said here - it's about working together, the techs/designers/etc *and* the users; we can come out is beautiful, workable harmony and a product everyone can enjoy and understand.
I think I'm going to print these out and paste them on my office wall - a lot of them apply to working on any type of i.t./computer-related/programming project. Thank you.
June 13th, 2008 at 10:38 AM PDT
Yes, wonderfully put. I too am in IT, and I see a lot of this. Windlight, for me was an interesting experience. I was one of the FirstLookers (so to speak), and ran around a lot comparing particles effects, frame rates, and the like. That was all fine, but the thing that floored me was the complaining. One thing that became completely clear to me is that 90% of the complaining was being done by the same people and really amounted to just a bunch of "qqing," as the kids say.
That was when I finally stopped reading the comments in the official blog.
In the end, I think Windlight was a big improvement, and I think you all did a great job with it.
June 13th, 2008 at 5:48 PM PDT
You're not serious about the 'happy defaults,' are you? Most of us do not wander around staring at the skies and those defaults are STILL making avatars look ugly. Many, many Residents have put a huge amount of time and effort - not to mention money - into their avs and LL has apparently discounted that almost entirely in favor of the new shinies. Yes, we can customize our own lighting to combat that, but it provides no consistency of experience…we ought to be able to log into usable (for day to day activities) defaults and only have to adjust the environmental editor when we're after a particular effect. If there were even ONE default that prioritized avatar appearance over, "Oooo, pretty sky! Fluffy clouds!" that would be an improvement.
June 13th, 2008 at 6:34 PM PDT
"Any change (good, bad, whatever) gets complained about."
I know that many of the complaints from SL residents are frivolous and misdirected and that it is easy to become cynical about them. This is still the wrong lesson to learn and it is particularly the wrong (and unprofessional, I might add) comment to make about your users.
What LL should have learned from that experience and obviously hasn't learned yet is that, no matter how good, bad, whatever feature that you decide to add, you have to market it and you have to get the users to buy into it. You can't just dump it on them and wait until they get "used to" it. Windlight was a classic example of poor marketing. No matter how much enthusiasm you've shown and no matter how much you may like what you were selling to us, pretty sunsets and fluffy clouds were not the right way to market the feature. Too much emphasis was put on that. I had to try it myself and to discover that I could take much better pictures because of all the new controls and I had to discover the difference it made for a sim like La Reve. Yes, those aspects were mentioned also, but the message that registered with most of us through frequent repetitions was "look at the awesomelicious sunsets!"
Again, stop blaming your audience and summarily dismissing the complaints and start taking responsibility for better communicating with us. You're doing what I call pulling a Kramer, getting booed and then snapping back at the audience.
June 15th, 2008 at 7:34 AM PDT
@Izzy: Thanks, glad you think so and I'm happy it relates to your experiences!
@Loraan: Thank you, thank-you. I have many fond-and-startling memories, like the reactions we got when mornings (around 6 AM in the day cycle) were too foggy… more changes to come! (But, you know what I said about changes.)
@Ann: Which Ann is this? We (specifically Pastrami Linden who's master tweaker) got help from 100s of people who cared in deciding on the defauls:
» http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/01/10/windlight-survey-results-part-2/
» http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/12/24/windlight-survey-preliminary-results/
@Lem: Not blaming anyone here. Infact, quite the opposite. You misunderstand me.
June 15th, 2008 at 11:01 AM PDT
Torley, it is always possible that I misunderstood you but I am still not convinced in this case. Moreover, you are blaming me also when saying I am "misunderstanding" instead of taking responsibility for not having explained it well enough. Somehow, I didn't expect you to agree with me though or even hearing me, my comment was more addressed to everyone else reading it.