(Raw, unprocessed snapshot via Second Life's WindLight.)

It reminds me of the halcyon days when I programmed synth sounds. I'd often start with an existing one to save time, then tweak it to suit my needs. For example, I'd take a base piano, add some flanging to make it sound "spacey", then change the attack to make it crisper, place it within a vastly reverberant auditorium, and apply a resonance sweep to give it a very processed feel. Maybe even layer it with a downpitched gong to give it some metallic sheen. Heck, I remember playing with Mark of the Unicorn's Unisyn librarian & editor software, which used the joy of SysEx (System Exclusive) messages to transfer sounds to and from your synth.

One of my fave parts of the whole journey involved continuing to travel, and modding my mods — by the end of a good 15 min., I'd often end up with something that bore little resemblance to the original patch that I had sprung off of, and yet, it was indeed a distant ancestor. Many rewarding moments were had, and I created some hundreds of sounds in the process. There's almost no greater thrill than to look back and scoop your garden of art up in your hands — and as mighty as that may be, it's even more invigorating to share your art with the world.

Recently with WindLight, I've been feeling like I did when I was on my synths: I see all the sliders it has, a greater concentration of sliders-per-pixel-acre than anywhere else in Second Life (why can't particles be so easy and live to edit?), and I'm compelled to get involved and point-and-click away. Tally ho! The spontaneity of WindLight is fantastic. Almost all changes give you live, direct responsiveness in realtime — no one in their right mind can knock feeling like a deity by *gasp* changing the heavens and stars above!

This made me yearn for some extended controls, namely: I'm sick of how I can only click on one thing at once with my mouse. I have a whole keyboard and two hands with multiple fingers on each! I'd love to be able to map WindLight sliders to a fader box…

and then use those DJ-targeted controls to literally MEGAMIX THE SKIES!

What's more, we already have a Day Cycle Editor (which will evolve in the future, I'm sure). It specifically includes sky presets set to points along the course of a day. That temporarily, like a track of music. And then it crossfades between them, interpolating their values so you can use it to come up with "children of skies"!

In recent times, I've made over 25 WindLight presets, and you may've already seen a number of them on my Flickr photostream. Let me just say, how overjoyed I am. I already think about how we're planning to make sky settings share-able assets like stuff in your inventory. I don't think server-side-imposed settings will apply on the parcel level, but we're going to aim for replacing the base current functionality on estates, then evolving that like the mammals outlived the dinosaurs.

And even on parcels, wouldn't it be kewl (because I think of hack-y uses all the time) if just like how today, Resis have notecard givers that distro info on how to optimize your enjoyment of a given environment… well… what about including some sky settings and a note to the effect of "Play this!", so even if it's manual, you can see someone's house how they intend it to be.

Let that be the tip of a very gorgeous, reflective iceberg my friends! Make no mistake, WindLight is… luxurious.

(All the above SL images have been unaltered, save for some crap JPEG compression. They were taken inworld on a mid-range computer. Bigtime thanxies to to all the Resis who created these amazing builds in the first place, so I could capture their beauty as I see it. Which means yes, I'm doing this in hopes it'll inspire you to do even greater, more wonderfulicious things and feel good about yourself. Happiness must ensue!)