Luca's talk on how to make Second Life more immersive

[animats]

Here's Luca Grabacr showing how to tune up your viewer to make Second Life look like an AAA game. This is a very good set of recommendations, and it should be easier to make those settings in the viewer.

She's using an NVidia 1060 graphics card, which is four years old and ought to be cheap by now. But it's not. Those cards are selling on eBay for twice their price at launch. There's a graphics card shortage.

[Penny Patton]

All of this is great information for anyone wanting to make their SL experience more immersive. It annoys me to no end, however, that we still need to edit debug settings to get a decent resting camera placement. When LL introduced the new camera controls Oz Linden contacted me and said they'd be including camera settings that are pretty much identical to what's suggested in the video as one of the default presets you could choose from.

Then, for whatever reason, LL released the new camera UI with a bunch of useless presets no one will ever use and these immersive settings were nowhere to be found.

I asked Oz about this and never got a response.

 

 

[Rachel1206]

12th of January 2021 it is expected NVidea will release new entry GPU. Among those a GTX 3060 with 6GB (and 12 GB) to around or just below 300 US$. A mobile version for OEM laptop manufacturers should also be official.

The performance of the 30XX card are much better than previous generations and have ray trace etc. and more interesting prices nearly half compared with previous generations of a GPU with ray tracing etc.

This should make previous generation 1060/2060 very cheap, as stocks have to be cleared out - so wait until middle of January 2021 before buying any GPU.

GTX 1060/2060 and expected 3060 are all more than fast enough for all modern games in full HD 1920x1080 and makes Second Life very fast and stable. Obviously 3060 faster and better than 2060, and 2060 faster and better than 1060.

People looking for 4K should step up to 2070/3070, prices starting at around 500+ US$ though.

 

Edited December 20, 2020 by Rachel1206

[Love Zhaoying]

Maybe, just always be in mouselook! That would be more immersive. *looks at mousies like Patch*

[KjartanEno]

9 hours ago, animats said:

Here's Luca Grabacr showing how to tune up your viewer to make Second Life look like an AAA game. This is a very good set of recommendations, and it should be easier to make those settings in the viewer.

She's using an NVidia 1060 graphics card, which is four years old and ought to be cheap by now. But it's not. Those cards are selling on eBay for twice their price at launch. There's a graphics card shortage.

I learned about the camera and focus offset debug settings a long time ago from some blog. I haven't found much use for the new camera presets system as I already have my own simple scripted camera HUD. She does make some nice recommendations in the video.

Yeah, I was looking to see what graphics cards are selling for now. I got my Sapphire Nitro+ SE Radeon RX 580 8GB for US$240 (including 2 games, Resident Evil 2 Remake and Devil May Cry 5) exactly 2 years ago on the tail end of the 2016-2018 crypto-coin mining boom as prices for graphics cards were finally coming down. And now, once again there are new RX 580s for sale on Newegg and Best Buy for over US$200 while a lot of newer models out of stock. There is no way I'd pay the asking prices for used cards on those web sites.

4 hours ago, Rachel1206 said:

12th of January 2021 it is expected NVidea will release new entry GPU. Among those a GTX 3060 with 6GB (and 12 GB) to around or just below 300 US$. A mobile version for OEM laptop manufacturers should also be official.

Wow, US$300 has become 'entry level'. Nvidia is programming the masses well. I'll just keep using my old EVGA GTX 960 FTW in my back up computer. It was once a 'mid level' card back in 2015, and only cost US$200. A GTX-960 is actually quite good for SL, especially if paired with a decent processor like an Intel i3 and some solid state storage for the viewer cache. I'd wager that there is a huge chunk of SL residents who are still on Intel integrated graphics, so what exactly is 'entry level' to them?

I'll grant that consumers are getting a whole lot more power with each successive GPU generation, but I don't expect graphics cards to become cheap again due to currency inflation, which is beginning to become a noticeable problem.

3 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Maybe, just always be in mouselook! That would be more immersive.

Well now, there's different kinds of mouselook! Let's see... in Singularity you can zoom the view while pressing Shift key (I think) right-click while in mouselook. Also in Singularity, you can have the first-person view 'realistically' moving with your AO as it moves your avatar's head position (not rotation). In Kokua you can have the viewer hide the attachments above the neck, so your mouselook view isn't ruined by the 'internal anatomy' of your head and hair. 💇‍♀️ 💇‍♂️

Edited December 20, 2020 by KjartanEno
correction

[Lyssa Greymoon]

2 hours ago, Rachel1206 said:

12th of January 2021 it is expected NVidea will release new entry GPU. Among those a GTX 3060 with 6GB (and 12 GB) to around or just below 300 US$.

Nvidia has a very different idea of entry level than I do.

[Gage Wirefly]

8 hours ago, animats said:

Here's Luca Grabacr showing how to tune up your viewer to make Second Life look like an AAA game. This is a very good set of recommendations, and it should be easier to make those settings in the viewer.

She's using an NVidia 1060 graphics card, which is four years old and ought to be cheap by now. But it's not. Those cards are selling on eBay for twice their price at launch. There's a graphics card shortage.

The 1060 is still a very popular gpu, even for mining hence the used market prices.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

10 hours ago, animats said:

Here's Luca Grabacr showing how to tune up your viewer to make Second Life look like an AAA game. This is a very good set of recommendations, and it should be easier to make those settings in the viewer.

She's using an NVidia 1060 graphics card, which is four years old and ought to be cheap by now. But it's not. Those cards are selling on eBay for twice their price at launch. There's a graphics card shortage.

so whats the settings? since watching a video does not keep my brain focused lol.

[Rachel1206]

@KjartanEno and @Lyssa Greymoon It is for the 3060, which will be the cheapest of the current GTX 30XX cards. Will they make something like the current cheapest GTX 1050 series, trying to make a <200 US$ 30XX GTX, I guess so.

But the thing is, this should make the current line of GTX 10XX and 20XX GPU much cheaper. A GTX 1060 6GB is currently around 300 US$, I will not be surprised, if they drop to like 200 US$ or below rather quickly and then some good bargains can be made.

Edit: As a Scandinavian, I obviously benefit from low US$ exchange rate.

Edited December 20, 2020 by Rachel1206

[animats]

Another point Luca makes is that good lighting helps. She's showing us a house that's been properly lit in SL. Many builders in SL, especially those who build with Advanced Lighting Model turned off, provide no lighting.

Even very simple lighting makes a big difference. Here's a simple low-LI kitchen in a house in Bellessaria.

Very basic lighting. There's a prim cylinder in the ceiling set as a projector. Front is white, full bright, with about 0.2 glow, and the cylinder outside is black. That's all. 1 LI. The light's field of view has been widened to almost maximum, so the edges of the lit area are up near the ceiling.

Check out your own spaces with ALM and shadows on. If they go dark, you need some lights. If you have a store in SL, make sure it looks like open when seen at night with ALM and shadows on.

This is especially important with EEP on, because the default mainland EEP settings are too dark, even at noon. (Ambient light was set too low. You can change this for yourself, or for your parcel, but LL needs to fix it mainland-wide.)

[Paul Hexem]

5 hours ago, animats said:

Light lessons!

It's amazing how many stores I go to with ALM enabled and can't see anything because it's all shadows. Gotta set noon and derender their buildings just to see where I'm going.

[KjartanEno]

13 hours ago, Paul Hexem said:

It's amazing how many stores I go to with ALM enabled and can't see anything because it's all shadows. Gotta set noon and derender their buildings just to see where I'm going.

Or you could change your Environment to something like CalWL in a couple of clicks! 💡

I've seen some stores adopting a "light box" approach where everything is practically white. I agree that a lot of places are simply too dark because the store parcel/region uses a default day cycle, and I happened to get there at "night." The customer shouldn't have to change their viewer settings just to get around.

[animats]

Is there anyone at LL who is responsible for the aesthetics of SL? As has been pointed out here, the viewer defaults and the environment defaults need a tune-up, by someone with a good sense for color and lighting. That's not hard, but it needs someone with the appropriate skills and the authority to make artistic decisions. There are people in the game development and cinema worlds who set the "look" of a project and adjust the necessary tuning parameters. SL needs help from someone with those skills. This stuff matters.

(The answer is not giving the end user a huge collection of tuning knobs and expecting them to figure it out. We hear that in open source all the time as an excuse for terrible graphic design decisions.)

 

[Paul Hexem]

3 hours ago, KjartanEno said:

Or you could change your Environment to something like CalWL in a couple of clicks! 💡

 The customer shouldn't have to change their viewer settings just to get around.

Pick a lane.

[Ardy Lay]

On 12/21/2020 at 12:09 PM, Paul Hexem said:

Pick a lane.

I want the one with yellow stripes on both sides.