performance I think we should, collectively, be somewhat embarassed.

[Andred Darwin]

1 hour ago, animats said:

The real problem isn't old computers. It's new, low-end ones.  This is what US$89 buys today.

Gateway 11.6" Ultra Slim Notebook, HD, Intel® Celeron®, Dual Core, 64GB Storage, 4GB RAM, Mini HDMI, 1.0MP Webcam, Windows 10 S.

This is the era of the $1000 phone and the $100 laptop.

(That thing runs Windows 10S, the locked-down version that can only run programs from the Microsoft Store. Which is why the computer is so cheap. Second Life can't be in the Microsoft Store without routing all payments through Microsoft, which takes a 15% cut. Unlocked computers start around $136. What's the lowest-end laptop in current production that runs SL at all?)

 

Well, if anyone bought one of those for the specific goal of using with SL, they will learn really quick it was the same as throwing money in the trash... much better of, save a bit more money overtime, and get something on the specs of:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/144791565646

I'm not suggesting to buy on eBay, but a machine bought locally from a used computer store with at least some warranty will cost about the same with Windows or Linux (to make Henry happy! lol) installed, and a small SSD, on the same or close specs... would allow ALM On most if not all the time, a completely new SL compared to the one you mentioned (in fact completely new experience for everything else too).

 

Edited November 4, 2022 by Andred Darwin
Ebay link edit (thanks animats!)

[Wulfie Reanimator]

13 minutes ago, animats said:

The real problem isn't old computers. It's new, low-end ones.  This is what US$89 buys today.

Gateway 11.6" Ultra Slim Notebook, HD, Intel® Celeron®, Dual Core, 64GB Storage, 4GB RAM, Mini HDMI, 1.0MP Webcam, Windows 10 S.

This is the era of the $1000 phone and the $100 laptop.

(That thing runs Windows 10S, the locked-down version that can only run programs from the Microsoft Store. Which is why the computer is so cheap. Second Life can't be in the Microsoft Store without routing all payments through Microsoft, which takes a 15% cut. Unlocked computers start around $136. What's the lowest-end laptop in current production that runs SL at all?)

As a completely unrelated side-note, it's kinda funny how it's $90 when a 1-year license (included) for Office 365 costs $70. 😄

[Henri Beauchamp]

23 minutes ago, animats said:

The real problem isn't old computers. It's new, low-end ones.

The problem is about both, but yes, even looking forward and ”forgetting” about ”poor” existing SLers that cannot afford upgrading, what LL must take into account is how to broaden its user base, i.e. attract more users, including non-gamers who do not own and cannot either afford a gaming computer, thus why I think the forward renderer is important to keep around... Unless proven wrong by Dave Parks, in case he would succeed to code a deferred renderer that can outperform the forward renderer even on iGPUs (but seeing the first alpha PBR viewer, and even accounting for the fact ”poor performances” and ”missing occlusions” are among the ”known issues”, I very much doubt the final version will come close to what the current forward renderer can do).

[Candide LeMay]

As someone who goes through the effort of creating normal maps/baking textures/using lights in SL/etc even with the current materials system, it annoys me greatly that so many people have ALM off. It's like producing color tv shows when a large percentage of viewers have black and white tv sets (remember those?). It will annoy me even more if PBR materials are available and the viewer still offers non-ALM rendering. Broadening SL's user base with people whose hardware is unable to run ALM is not a benefit or desirable to me*. Others have a different perspective, but I'd argue Henri's desire to fly around with a 1024m draw distance is pretty niche and he can keep the forward renderer in his own viewer for that user case.

*I'm in SL to make stuff, that's my jam. If people can't see what I make it's no fun.

[Henri Beauchamp]

4 hours ago, Candide LeMay said:

As someone who goes through the effort of creating normal maps/baking textures/using lights in SL/etc even with the current materials system, it annoys me greatly that so many people have ALM off. It's like producing color tv shows when a large percentage of viewers have black and white tv sets (remember those?). It will annoy me even more if PBR materials are available and the viewer still offers non-ALM rendering. Broadening SL's user base with people whose hardware is unable to run ALM is not a benefit or desirable to me*. Others have a different perspective, but I'd argue Henri's desire to fly around with a 1024m draw distance is pretty niche and he can keep the forward renderer in his own viewer for that user case.

*I'm in SL to make stuff, that's my jam. If people can't see what I make it's no fun.

So, basically, you tell people not able to afford a gaming computer, or simply having a different usage of SL, where materials do not matter the least (and no, sailing and flying are not ”niche” activities in SL, by far !): sorry, but SL is not for you !

Congratulation, for the most selfish contribution to this thread !!!

[Modulated]

4 hours ago, Candide LeMay said:

As someone who goes through the effort of creating normal maps/baking textures/using lights in SL/etc even with the current materials system, it annoys me greatly that so many people have ALM off. It's like producing color tv shows when a large percentage of viewers have black and white tv sets (remember those?). It will annoy me even more if PBR materials are available and the viewer still offers non-ALM rendering. Broadening SL's user base with people whose hardware is unable to run ALM is not a benefit or desirable to me*. Others have a different perspective, but I'd argue Henri's desire to fly around with a 1024m draw distance is pretty niche and he can keep the forward renderer in his own viewer for that user case.

*I'm in SL to make stuff, that's my jam. If people can't see what I make it's no fun.

I bet more people run on those  non-ALM machines than you think and are probably a majority. I have capable hardware myself but I can acknowledge that most probably don't. I don't think it's right to cut those folks out just for that reason alone.

[Candide LeMay]

It's up to LL to make an informed decision and changes, not me. If they decide to drop the non-ALM renderer in future viewers I will cheer for that change. YMMV etc

[Andred Darwin]

16 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

So, basically, you tell people not able to afford a gaming computer, or simply having a different usage of SL, where materials do not matter the least (and no, sailing and flying are not ”niche” activities in SL, by far !): sorry, but SL is not for you !

Congratulation, for the most selfish contribution to this thread !!!

I don't see Candide LeMay's point as being selfish, neither anything against someone that does not own a machine capable of running games in a meaningful way. She is just expressing frustration (her "thing" is to build in SL, try to see it with her eyes), and it can be frustrating (create something for indoors as an example, and one that fits both ALM On and Off, is really hard.. you finally learned a bit about Blender or alike, a lot of time to bake.... the object in-world with default EEP, too bright, too dark, more time to bake again, shadows, AO,  etc...), there are 2 distinct ways to see SL now (ALM, no ALM, iGPU vs discrete 3D Card) and the perception of both is completely different... whoever uses a machine with with less than a GTX 970 equivalent 3D card today (laptop or desktop), gets a very poor experience of all that SL can provide, that's a fact, not counting FPS, it looks really different without ALM.

Having ALM on all the time, at the very least, will reduce the gap on how SL looks after rendering, be that at 1 fps, or 170 fps, Dave and team based on the exchange between you and him on the thread you shared earlier, is not only aware, but keeping as goal to make ALM On (the renderer) as fast if not faster than the other option, even using an Intel HD.

This thread started in April, on a completely different note (how slow it was even on a gaming machine),  the performance improvement came out and wow, what a nice (and much needed) bump in performance... I believe they will do a great job with ALM... ALM is the way to go, time to get out of old school! (For a month or so after the release of the performance improvement, compared to other viewers, the official viewer was one of, if not the fastest available, quite a surprise, who would even think!  I also know you updated your "Cool Viewer" in some parts even before the official was released, so you don't need to highlight it.)

Whoever chooses to buy a computer not built for gaming, does so for a reason... gaming is not really their goal,  there are many other things the computer will do great and fit their needs.... be that limited by budget, choice or even knowledge... and to an extent, your argument about "poor" SL players... I don't really believe they are really that "poor"... if they feel its worth, plans can be made to get/upgrade to a machine that can actually play SL, take it a month, take a few months... a used machine (complete) with a at least a NVIDIA 1060 is not even close to be as expensive as it was when this thread started, in many cases way less than the current laptop/desktop they are using now... you don't need a $700 card or a $2000 laptop to run SL with a quite pleasant experience, of course, if you can afford it, you will be able to see SL at its best (not only SL, but almost everything else).

ALM On looks better, sells better, much better PR, does not look "old school", metaverse (in SL at least) looks and feels a lot more interesting (can actually make you want to see it, and much higher odds you will choose to stay):

https://www.flickr.com/groups/wonderful_sl_landscapes/pool/

https://www.flickr.com/groups/secondlife/pool/

https://www.flickr.com/groups/secondlifeofficial/pool/

Choice of computer is personal and limited by each ones budget, perception of worth, and usage needs, be that $89 one animats posted earlier, be a gaming "beast"... for the gaming industry today, computers without a "gaming" graphics card are not really their focus, SL actually, at least try and care... I am 100% sure all of them would love if it actually could be otherwise, it's a hardware limitation for today standards!

Edited November 6, 2022 by Andred Darwin

[NiranV Dean]

No i'm fully supportive of dropping forward rendering in favor of deferred rendering (although i wish they would put some more love into it), it is simply time.

We've had deferred rendering for more than 10 years now (13 years roughly and counting). Deferred Rendering also does not by any means need a gaming PC as it seems to be commonly believed, that is absolutely wrong. Before i was using a Ryzen and a GTX 1060 i was on a NVidia GTX 670 with an AMD FX 6200. When the GTX 670 died (due to a power outtage frying my PU and damaging my GPU) i had to switch to my old GTX 460 for a while and i was surprised to see SL run at "stable" 30 FPS with Deferred and shadows enabled, i say "stable" because these 30 FPS were... weird, it was like i had more FPS (probably around 40-50 FPS) but the Viewer was hard-capping it at 30 FPS for some reason, no matter what i did it would hard-stop at 30 FPS perfectly but even those 30 FPS with a poor mans 460 were astonishing which just showed that SL didn't need a powerful GPU at all as long as the little shader work can be done in time by the GPU. Remember that was with an AMD FX, the FX series was known to be complete trash single-core performance wise (sadly), before that i had an AMD Phenom X4 which had slightly better performance. The FX is 10 years old at this point. The Phenom is way more than 10 years old and these can run SL just fine, that was BEFORE the performance update, now with the performance update i'd imagine you'd get even better FPS. Sorry but if you can get 30+ FPS in deferred rendering WITH shadows, with ambient occlusion, with SSR, with DoF and everything else enabled in MY Viewer, which is arguably the slowest of them all on 10+ year old hardware then there is simply NO excuse. If you couldn't afford to get a PC capable of running SL (even just without shadows, again i had 30+ FPS WITH shadows, the biggest FPS killer) with deferred rendering on in the past 10+ years BUT you could somehow afford a trashy, Mac or Laptop that EASILY cost more if not outright twice the amount of a normal PC then its your own fault. That 460/670 + AMD FX was literally already a budget PC both together costing like ~300€ at the time of release, add the 16GB RAM i had at the time for another 100€ and we are looking at 400€ for a really really basic, deferred rendering capable PC. Even if we have to build the PC from scratch (assuming you already have a mouse, keyboard and a monitor or TV you can use) we are looking at maybe 600€ (with an expensive case). Yes it has been... hard to get GPU's lately due to cryptomining and other reasons but again you had 10+ years time to scrape together ~500-600€ to get something that works for SL well into the future. If you spent 500-1000€ on a laptop or mac that can't run SL then by all means that was a bad investment.

I simply cannot find anymore excuse to have the forward renderer around (unless they were going to upgrade it to forward+ and get rid of deferred). On top of all that forward has been slower for me for over 10 years. Turning deferred off either drops me a couple frames or straight up halves my framerate in some cases, it has been like that for many years (roughly around since i've had the GTX 670), i feel like it would be an edge case due to forward being slower with certain things (example: lights) but it has been happening on 2 different GPU's with 2 different CPU's and on practically every Viewer 2+. Yes, it didn't happen on Cool Viewer but Cool Viewer was also slower in deferred than most other Viewers for me, which i'd attribute to Henri having deferred off most of the time (according to himself) and making changes and optimisations mainly in and around forward rendering.

I just find it weird that they waited so long for this. Having done this much sooner could have made this decision (like many others) a lot easier. The longer LL keeps waiting with things, the more people keep getting used to something, the more they will see something we have as the defacto standard, the harder it gets down the line to make a change. 10 years after deferred was introduced people are like "but i never needed that for 10 years!" "it has been like this for 10 years, why now?", its because it was about time (~8-9 years ago already), the sooner we had made the switch the sooner we would have given people incentive to look for something capable of running SL with deferred. If we only had deferred 10 years ago, people would have been much less likely to buy something that isn't capable of running SL with deferred.

This has nothing to do with selfishness. This has to do with doing the right for the platform going forward which in the end means profit for everyone. I find it incredibly shortsighted to immediately put this down as selfishness, the goal of this is to make SL better for everyone involved in the long run, this means, you, me, LL, everyone. How is this selfish? Isn't it selfish to keep bogging down (like we have for the past 10 years) SL with compatibility with old stuff for those people that want their old stuff to look as bad as they did 10 years ago? (yea looking at that one Linden who got that deferred-shiny change into rolling) Their "we need to keep everything as it is" mentality has been destroying quite a lot of my things, when they were meant to preserve something right but they were meant to preserve old content, in the process destroying new, thats the other side of the coin. If going full deferred for the future is selfish, then staying fully compatible with old is selfish too, they are 2 sides of the same coin both will impact the other side negatively.

Edited November 6, 2022 by NiranV Dean

[Lucia Nightfire]

The PBR viewer causes my CPU usage to run at over 25% while Firestorm, also with ALM on, runs less than half that on average and my GPU to run 15 degrees hotter.

From what I see, there's no way to turn just that feature off in settings, either.

[Andred Darwin]

28 minutes ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

The PBR viewer causes my CPU usage to run at over 25% while Firestorm, also with ALM on, runs less than half that on average and my GPU to run 15 degrees hotter.

From what I see, there's no way to turn just that feature off in settings, either.

Do you remember where (what region) you took the readings (if so, could you share)? For me Firestorm, the official and the alpha stays about the same around 11% - 14% (11700KF + NV3060) while active... no noticeable difference in temperature.

With the 6700k processor + NV 1080 around 24%-30% (Firestorm after a while goes down to 15-20%)... didn't really measure temperature, since the machine was off (didn't want to wait for it to stabilize first...) 

Edited November 6, 2022 by Andred Darwin
Add and update readings for 6700K

[Ardy Lay]

I use an NVidia GTX 1070 to run Second Life Viewer.  It's fine.  I get to turn features on.  I use an Intel i9-9900K CPU with it.  This pairing exhibit 'the amazing moving bottleneck' phenomenon that commonly confuses Second Life Residents.

I have an NVidia 8800 of some flavor that hasn't melted yet.  You can't make me use it with Second Life Viewer.

Intel(R) UHD Graphics 630 performs slightly better, but I will only use it with Second Life Viewer when I have no other choice.

Intel(R) HD Graphics P4600/P4700 in my previous computer suffers mightily if my avatar is not the only one within the render frustum.  Nope.  Not running Second Life Viewer on this for any length of time.

I imagine many people put up with equipment I would refuse to use, because I have some choice and they mostly do not.

Also, all these comparisons are kinda moot unless the people running them are all using the exact same scene and avatars.  Without this we can only compare Henry's performance tests to Henry's performance tests and Andred's performance tests to Andred's performance tests, for example.

I can go to a club when it is otherwise unoccupied and see my GPU 100% utilized just rendering the venue and my avatar.  As the other staff and guests arrive the GPU usage stays at 100 % while the CPU utilization increases, and the frame rate decreases a little.  At some level of occupancy, which varies, the CPU hits some maximum that SL can utilize and then as more arrive the GPU utilization starts declining and the frame rate decline per occupant increases some.  Of course, all of this varies per occupant and what they chose to wear during the event.  At one special event, the guests were allowed to remove their clothing.  Shortly after that point in the evening I noticed the GPU utilization and frame rate increased, indicating to me that the amount of work done on the CPU per frame had decreased a little.  This is what I refer to as 'the amazing moving bottleneck.'

[Henri Beauchamp]

4 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

This has nothing to do with selfishness. This has to do with doing the right for the platform going forward which in the end means profit for everyone. I find it incredibly shortsighted to immediately put this down as selfishness, the goal of this is to make SL better for everyone involved in the long run, this means, you, me, LL, everyone. How is this selfish?

This is selfish because, by removing the choice to turn off ALM in order to be able to run the viewer better (or at all) for a particular use case (or for everything, depending on your PC), you simply exclude people from SL or degrade their experience in their particular use cases, and this just because you (and some others) think that everyone shall see the same thing on their screen: this is visual dictatorship !

I also do not see how leaving a simple choice (just like you have choice to turn shadows on or not in ALM) could be at all harmful or holding back SL's development !!!

You know me better than that, and you perfectly know that I am an eager early adopter of all new shiny features (just look at the Cool VL Viewer and how fast I backport every new feature to it: no other TPV is updated faster to integrate new stuff; the last one was Puppetry, that I released only a week after LL got a RC viewer out !).

However, I am also totally unforgiving towards regressions (for example, the anti-aliasing quality in ALM, even with a SMAA shader to replace LL's FXAA, is just too poor for my taste: it looks plain ugly when compared to genuine 4xAA in forward rendering).

I also am very worried that raising the bar in terms of computing power (*) will just reduce the SL users base.

I do not demand to stop developing SL (much to the contrary), but I demand freedom for everyone to use SL as they see fit, with the PC they can afford to buy !

As it is, removing the forward renderer is an impairment to SL adoption and user base growth.

---------

(*) and on an especially bad timing, with computer parts having reached astronomical prices during the COVID and not even returning to their ”normal” price now, as well as with the inflation and the energy crisis, that will deter people from buying non-essential goods such as a new computer or video card to play in SL !

Edited November 6, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp

[Andred Darwin]

51 minutes ago, Ardy Lay said:

Also, all these comparisons are kinda moot unless the people running them are all using the exact same scene and avatars.  Without this we can only compare Henry's performance tests to Henry's performance tests and Andred's performance tests to Andred's performance tests, for example.

FPS, or any other measure posted, should not be used for comparisons between different players, its great that you pointed out, it depends on "where you are at, how many avatars", but I don't think is "moot" either, I like to share my setup and average FPS in discussions like this one (I have 2 machines I can use for SL, 11700k+nv 3060, 6700k+nv1080, and they both provide a quite nice experience, very similar... one is double the price of the other today ), that could be used by someone else as a base or at least more information in case they are trying to choose or upgrade a machine, many don't have any idea, and you may save quite few dollars getting a balanced machine that can fit your needs, many here at the forum even ask for opinions .... and avoid things like, "Omg, my $1000 laptop has the 12gen processor and SL runs like crap".... 

The link below never failed me and a few friends on trying to get a balanced machine, as long as nothing is under or over 20% (also saved a lot of money upgrading a current machine).

https://pc-builds.com/bottleneck-calculator/

Edited November 6, 2022 by Andred Darwin
Add link to bottleneck calculator

[NiranV Dean]

On 11/6/2022 at 7:26 PM, Henri Beauchamp said:

This is selfish because, by removing the choice to turn off ALM in order to be able to run the viewer better (or at all) for a particular use case (or for everything, depending on your PC), you simply exclude people from SL or degrade their experience in their particular use cases, and this just because you (and some others) think that everyone shall see the same thing on their screen: this is visual dictatorship !

I also do not see how leaving a simple choice (just like you have choice to turn shadows on or not in ALM) could be at all harmful or holding back SL's development !!!

You know me better than that, and you perfectly know that I am an eager early adopter of all new shiny features (just look at the Cool VL Viewer and how fast I backport every new feature to it: no other TPV is updated faster to integrate new stuff; the last one was Puppetry, that I released only a week after LL got a RC viewer out !).

However, I am also totally unforgiving towards regressions (for example, the anti-aliasing quality in ALM, even with a SMAA shader to replace LL's FXAA, is just too poor for my taste: it looks plain ugly when compared to genuine 4xAA in forward rendering).

I also am very worried that raising the bar in terms of computing power (*) will just reduce the SL users base.

I do not demand to stop developing SL (much to the contrary), but I demand freedom for everyone to use SL as they see fit, with the PC they can afford to buy !

As it is, removing the forward renderer is an impairment to SL adoption and user base growth.

---------

(*) and on an especially bad timing, with computer parts having reached astronomical prices during the COVID and not even returning to their ”normal” price now, as well as with the inflation and the energy crisis, that will deter people from buying non-essential goods such as a new computer or video card to play in SL !

You don't see how leaving an option to toggle back to an entirely outdated and "compatibility" focused renderer at this point is holding back SL's development? Look at the past 10 years! What noteworthy visual improvements has SL made? None. I'm not even talking about graphics. Meshes are a good example of how development has stagnated outside of graphics. They were added.... and that's it. They have never been improved, they have never been touched, they have never gotten new features to them. Meshes are still the same thing they were 2010. Did we ever get blendshapes? Nope, we could be adding custom shape sliders to our meshes or we could replace the ones from SL with custom ones (to keep "compatibility" but offer better quality). Animations. Have there been any... NOPE! Other file support? Future proof files? Nope. Can we remap bones? Nope. Skeleton? We got Bento.... which was literally just adding a couple extra bones... something that took so long to add but shouldn't have been taking longer than 10 seconds. Have we learned something from Bento? Did we improve something from Bento? No. We didn't get custom skeletons, we didn't get loosened skeleton rules, the animation formats are still trash. Meshes are still barebones supported and all of that because we have a CHOICE. Compatibility, the choice to use old and new, both are always "viable" but in order to stay compatible and keep both viable we need to keep the future down, we can't further develop anything because it would either out-develop old content and obselete it or straight up break compatibility. This has always been the reason SL stagnated so hard. SL's hard push to keep old things in tact, to keep the option to revert back, offering the choice between 2 systems, the old original and the new shiny one that is just a polished turd because it had to be dumbed down to stay compatible to the old system. Windlight, EEP, Meshes, Animations, Materials, Graphics, everything, everywhere is constantly being bogged down by the choice we have to use something old. In case its not obvious, i'm arcing out so widely across SL because i honestly don't even know where to start, there is not one example, there isn't 1000 examples, SL as a whole is the example, it would be easier to ask me to list things that haven't stagnated because the list would be pretty much empty (not counting the upcoming PBR rework and GLTF support)

And we didn't even talk about the elephant in the room. Offering the option to turn off Deferred means they officially support non-deferred. People not using Deferred will want to have a piece of the cake too, they want to stay in SL at all times and again they will not see a reason to ever upgrade because LL supports them no matter what. Why should they upgrade, SL works fine as it is! This will give off the wrong impression to users, this will lead to people complain, eventually taking up LL's time again for something that is unsupported and is only there to give people a barebones way of staying in SL which they don't see as such, they see it as full support and thus will ask for further support. They will want fixes for their non-deferred rendering too. They can't just tell them that they don't care because non-ALM is officially unsupported now because its clearly available as an option making it a supported feature.

You have to understand that people had 10+ (~13 now since deferred) years time to get an upgrade. Not a big one, not a decent one. A really small one, again a fully Deferred capable machine isnt/wasn't that expensive. You don't need to buy a 800€ GPU. You can get a perfectly deferred capable GPU for far less than 200€ and thats with the outragious prices. Lots of PCs are fine except the GPU which usually lacks so spending a couple hundred for a long lasting upgrade over 10 years should be possible.

This isn't visual dictatorship this is simply the truth, people had more than ample time, everyone with capable machines had to endure this painstaking non-existant progress, the constant denial of new features due to "oldtimers" far longer than necessary. Sometimes compromises have to be made and the compromises we have been making the past 10 years has driven a lot of people away, skilled people, good people, they will never come back, they have found better places to be.

To be perfectly honest, if it wasn't for my own Viewer i'd be gone too. SL holds nothing of value to me anymore, its development has been spiting me for 10 years, Oz's bad decisions and unwillingness to support and make improvements have been turning me away from trying to help LL and SL itself simply doesn't offer anything anymore that is in any way special or unique. Its convoluted, it stagnated, it didn't give me any more candy in 10 years and now its simply too late, i don't care anymore. I'm just sitting here keeping my Viewer alive for people, because there are people who like it. It's not even for me anymore at this point. Anything beyond this is simply a waste of my time and skills. And that's coming from someone who has been enthusiastic about SL for over a decade, it is simply heartbreaking. Many feel like this, many felt like this, even Lindens feel this, some of the Lindens are really great people and they really want to develop SL, they see the potential, the future but are constantly held back. I just don't know anymore... it hurts.

[Flea Yatsenko]

I agree. I have been building in SL for a very long time and nothing has really changed other than mesh and materials. I remember how exciting it was when we moved from sculpty to mesh, it was unreal, like a new world opened up to us. When materials came out, it was great but it didn't revolutionize anything. It really just ends up having better shiny stuff for most people. But as a content creator, it's tough. Lots of people don't use ALM yet it takes more time, effort, and L$ to upload a material product because there's three textures instead of one and it requires more work. So you raise your prices to account for that, yet there are people who don't even use ALM and you're wasting your time and L$ on a feature people don't use.

I'd love for something to light a fire under me again. Like many others, I think they are just burned out because there just isn't enough excitement here. And then you couple it with constant maintenance and issues with logins and marketplace and it's no wonder this place isn't growing like it's capable of. Second Life is really amazing. I'm not here to hate. But it's currently just spinning tires, not going anywhere, because it's not a reliable platform and it's not introducing groundbreaking new features. SL has always been about people showing up because the community creates content that drags people into SL. This place is really cool and a lot of awesome people made it that way (Lindens and content creators). I would love to see people get excited about it and for it to start doing great again.

[Henri Beauchamp]

3 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

You don't see how leaving an option to toggle back to an entirely outdated and ”compatibility” focused renderer at this point is holding back SL's development?

It is not more ”outdated” than turning off shadows !!!  This is just a graphics setting, damned it !

Do you realize how totally illogical and nonsensical (and egoistic) is your reasoning ?...

Basically, you say: ”hey, I'm creating super nice shiny stuff with materials and all, so I demand that everyone runs with ALM on because I want them to see all my shinies, always, even 150m away, even if they can't actually see them because they are outside a building in which my shines are, and I do not care if their Second Life becomes miserable as a result, because they would run at 8 fps instead of 25 (1) !”

This is exactly like if you were a mesh trees creator who had worked very hard to obtain super-nice shadows and were demanding that everyone turns shadows on to be sure everyone will see your pretty shadows, even if they are actually never using SL in outdoor settings (where your trees are), and  even if they run at 3 fps as a result !!!

Beside, and mind you, I rarely ever use ALM myself, and not because it would run at lower fps rates (it actually performs slightly better in some scenes), but simply because I rarely use SL in places where there are materials around, or where they would actually matter or make any visible difference, while for these use cases (outdoors in main land, for example), I really can benefit from a better AA (2) and a lower texture memory consumption to increase the draw distance, and this by using the forward rendering mode.

I turn on ALM only in places where it does matter (a club, for example, where a lot of avatars are wearing stuff with materials, or some scenic sims making heavy use of ALM in their buildings). It's just a matter for me to type CTRL ALT D to toggle it on or off in my viewer, and I can immediately see whether it is desirable or not. It's my choice for my various use cases, and I deny you or any one else the right to impose me how I should setup the graphics in SL !

(1) And yes, that's exactly what you get with an iGPU or an old card.

(2) ALM's FXAA is just plain sh*tty, and SMAA which, AFAIK, is only available in Alchemy Next and the Cool VL Viewer, is just acceptable for textures (it does not blur them, unlike FXAA), but is no better than FXAA for anti-aliasing objects in the distance and/or while you move around.

Quote

You have to understand that people had 10+ (~13 now since deferred) years time to get an upgrade.

You have to understand that some people just cannot afford to upgrade a 5 years old computer (no need to go 10 years backwards to find GPUs that run ALM like sh*t, not to mention iGPUs), or even to buy anything else than an entry level computer without a discrete GPU (that, too, will run ALM like sh*t, even with a ”modern” iGPU).

You also have to understand that no, ALM does not always look nicer than forward rendering (AA is sh*t in ALM, period), and that some use cases (that are far from being ”niche” ones) benefit from turning ALM off. This is true even with a modern gaming computer. Should LL manage to raise ALM quality and add a toggle to turn off materials in the distance to save texture memory, for example (since they don't matter when seen from far away), then it would allow me (and many others with good computers) to indeed keep ALM on all the time; it's simply not the case for now !

3 hours ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

But as a content creator, it's tough. Lots of people don't use ALM yet it takes more time, effort, and L$ to upload a material product because there's three textures instead of one and it requires more work.

It's tough as well for users, if they can't run with decent performances and/or good rendering quality with ALM on. You are not in control of what people can afford as a computer to run SL... And I'm pretty sure that you'd rather see them buy your stuff instead of using that money to upgrade their PC... 😜

You must understand that the ”choice” they make by turning ALM off is not a true choice, but the result of a compromise; if the drawbacks for enabling ALM are just unacceptable (be it because of the PC power or because of a particular use case), I do not see why we should impose them.

 

Edited November 8, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp

[steeljane42]

1 hour ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

It's my choice for my various use cases, and I deny you or any one else the right to impose me how I should setup the graphics in SL !

Except for LL, since it's their platform. So should they decide it's time to up the minimum reqs by removing some low end options, which would be removing that renderer, then I suppose you'll be free to try and maintain it in your viewer somehow.

Options are good, that I agree with, but when some options start to affect the progress, it's time to drop those options. LL doesn't exactly have a big dev team as is, so if it becomes a matter of upgrading SL to be at least a tiny bit closer to the modern standards (and not taking years with those updates, like bento, animesh or EEP took) or maintaining some of those old options, then I'd rather have LL try and move forward.

Also while SL is not exactly a MMORPG, but it's similar enough in a way that it's an online service that has been around for a long time. Some of them did, in fact, made huge engine/graphics upgrades and as you can expect, those upgrades did increase the minimum reqs by quite a lot. Did it affect people on the low end machines who couldn't run their favorite game anymore? Absolutely. But I'd say it's the lesser of evils than just let the game die because it's not up to the current standards anymore.

1 hour ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

And I'm pretty sure that you'd rather see them buy your stuff instead of using that money to upgrade their PC

Depends on the product those users might not be buying that stuff anyway. Never seen reviews on the MP where people complain that something is "just a black texture", for example a latex catsuit that only looks good with ALM on? And yes, those are much better than those ancient options with baked "white reflections". So there are cases when some creators would actually want people to upgrade their PC first, so they'd finally become potential customers after seeing their creations as they are meant to be seen.

[Gavin Hird]

13 hours ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

I'd love for something to light a fire under me again. Like many others, I think they are just burned out because there just isn't enough excitement here. 

I think the key to understanding the lack of enthusiasm in SL is twofold:

a) The moving of creator tools outside of SL. Sure, all the old creator tools are still there, but unless you use them for anything but very basic build elements, you are basically laughed out of the place. In the Marketplace any such creation would be doa.

Mesh creation requires a completely new level of skills and a much more complicated creation process before anyone sees the result. – Even then, you often compete with professional creators with models that has been repurposed from other environments. PBR materials dials the complexity even higher, and most likely requires the creator to subscribe to tools with a monthly cost that exceeds the willingness or ability to pay for a hobbyist.

The consequence of this is the collective build and creation effort where everyone could watch and participate, and which characterized the first 10 years of SL, is more or less gone. 

b) The centering of the SL event calendar around US holidays and "shopping seasons" is not very exciting for the rest of the world. In addition there is a language barrier to participation outside of the Anglosphere. 

The message being, SL is for Americans primarily. The consequence for that is recruitment outside the US is slim to none.

[NiranV Dean]

9 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

It is not more ”outdated” than turning off shadows !!!  This is just a graphics setting, damned it !

Do you realize how totally illogical and nonsensical (and egoistic) is your reasoning ?...

I don't demand anyone to run with shadows and neither do i demand anyone to run 150m render distance, in the later case thats pretty excessive. Deferred rendering however is not just a sub-part, its not a feature, its an entirely different rendering path which has been around for over a decade now. I would like everyone to run on Deferred though as it puts everyone on the same basic page. We obsoleted turning off vertex shaders (aka pre-windlight). Did it hurt SL? No. Deferred is marginally slower than the full windlight forward rendering (if shadows and ambient occlusion are off, it hardly matters on any mid-range hardware of the past 10+ years, i ran deferred and shadows back when it was only publicly available through Kirstens Viewers on a GTX 260 @ roughly 15-20 FPS). Any and all GPU's should be able to run deferred nowadays and all the way back 10+ years. If any GPU cannot run deferred for whatever reason (such as intel iGPU's or partly AMD GPUs bad performance due to bad OpenGL support) then you simply made a wrong choice (i bet you paid more money for that than a PC would cost nowadays).

Also you are using SL's bad optimisation as a reason not to enable deferred which is funny, considering that the reason SL is so badly optimised is the very choice you defend so much. Many of SL's problems are attributed to a choice we have, a choice that in turn means a compromise and this compromise has always hit the higher end of the spectrum. You simply cannot expect even the oldest systems that barely run SL to be supported forever. I have never in my life complained that when any of my games updated, reworked and enhanced their engine or visuals and in the process obsoleted older hardware, even if it made the game unplayable for me, i either endured it, found a way to continue playing (through mods or ini tweaks) or simply came back later when i had a better PC.

Also, i don't see the reason you are making such a fuss about this, you have a choice too, you can keep supporting the option to turn deferred off. Your Viewer is known for old hardware support and is commonly one of the first Viewers recommended when it comes to older hardware. After all users have a choice, that is either leave SL and come back later or use a different Viewer that caters to their needs, it is not a true choice as you say but what is the difference anyway? compromise on graphics or compromise on viewer choice, there is no difference there. You are just moving the compromise from point A to point B, the compromise stays which is simply unavoidable.

9 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

You have to understand that some people just cannot afford to upgrade a 5 years old computer (no need to go 10 years backwards to find GPUs that run ALM like sh*t, not to mention iGPUs), or even to buy anything else than an entry level computer without a discrete GPU (that, too, will run ALM like sh*t, even with a ”modern” iGPU).

10+, Henri its 10+ years. Not 5. I ran deferred + shadows back in 2009 when it was a crashy hellhole with a GTX 260 and an AMD Phenom II, the GTX 260 is 14 years old. 14 years Henri. I ran deferred with a GTX 260, a 460, a 670 and now a 1060 and apart from having more VRAM available for more textures to load (which LL still doesn't even support) the performance has never really improved, not a single time did i get something that classifies as "better" performance upgrading the GPU (and neither did i with upgrading my Phenom II to an FX, infact performance was slightly worse...). Any and all improvements came from LL's side (and an upgrade to a Ryzen).

This video of mine is 12 years old. It's recorded with a GTX 260 (again 14 years old, it was 2 years old at the time of recording) Back then i recorded with trash like Fraps and Camtasia, both of which absolutely murdered my framerate while recording (until i got a 460 and it was less impacting). Deferred with shadows can run on 14 year old hardware Henri and somewhat "usable" by SL standards, turning off shadows and ambient occlusion would easily give you a decent framerate. That was 12 years ago, we've got massive performance improvements now and we got a lot more options to adjust things to our liking and we've also got more ways to keep our framerate somewhat intact.

9 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

This is exactly like if you were a mesh trees creator who had worked very hard to obtain super-nice shadows and were demanding that everyone turns shadows on to be sure everyone will see your pretty shadows, even if they are actually never using SL in outdoor settings (where your trees are), and  even if they run at 3 fps as a result !!!

I suppose that's the point you are trying to make but it doesn't make any sense what you are saying. You cannot achieve any "nice shadows" since shadows are something that is done by the Viewer modelling a tree for its shadows (how would nice tree shadows even look like?) would most certainly result in a tree that doesn't look nice. And the reason it runs at 3 FPS is not because of shadows its because the tree is trash and the person doesn't know how to optimise, which has been the case for practically the entirety of SL as a whole but again we have choices right? We can choose to ignore optimisation, we can choose to ignore LOD's, we can choose to spam 1024x1024 textures on everything, we can choose to upload an animated tree with a million polygons and 256x8 faces. Deferred actually runs quite decent for being so old and unoptimised considering what deferred has to put up with in SL, i can tell you that Unity breaks a lot faster with far less and that isn't even with full realtime lighting!

9 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

(2) ALM's FXAA is just plain sh*tty, and SMAA which, AFAIK, is only available in Alchemy Next and the Cool VL Viewer, is just acceptable for textures (it does not blur them, unlike FXAA), but is no better than FXAA for anti-aliasing objects in the distance and/or while you move around. 

I think you are missing the point of FXAA and me as a whole. FXAA was never meant to replace proper MSAA. No other AA other than SSAA can truly replace proper MSAA. FXAA was used because it was a free and easy solution to offer and it does its job decent enough. It's not meant to be perfect, its just meant to reduce jagged edges to an acceptable level at virtually no performance cost and it does so damn well, at the cost of texture blurriness but i'm willing to take that compromise. Infact i have always preferred FXAA over practically any other AA method, SMAA is slow and does a worse job at the very thing its supposed to do, TXAA is absolutely horrid, MSAA is slow and often not available (due to deferred rendering), SSAA is a complete no-go unless you have over-the-top hardware and hundreds of FPS to spare. A good TAA implementation + FXAA has been so far the best, its relatively fast, doesn't have the ghosting of TXAA and smoothes edges extremely good both in motion and in stand still. Only big downside is it blurs even more than FXAA alone. Does it matter though? No. I prefer the "blurred" textures with FXAA because it has a similar effect to water mipmapping, without mipmapping the water texture is incredibly sharp and noisy on distance which looks incredibly bad, mipmapping helps with that. FXAA does a similar thing with textures, a lot of high-repeat textures look super noisy on anything but very close up, noisy to the point they become hard to look at, FXAA blurring these textures is actually a good thing for less repetitive textures it is hardly a problem, the blurring is barely noticeable and with SL's 1024x1024 texture limit doesn't blur much of anything anyway.

But again we got FXAA as a compromise, performance vs quality... deferred was incredibly slow. It was for the longest time (until the performance update). Deferred has never really seen any improvements both in optimisation nor in quality (evident in how bad shadows and depth of field still looks) because very few people were using it because no one saw a reason to, it was slower, it didn't offer much new and lots of people couldn't run it at their desired framerate (and because lots of people assume that deferred automatically means shadows, which it doesn't). Largely due to the CHOICE of not needing to use deferred it was never further improved, which in turn meant less people use it... its a vicious cycle. It's why a lot of new things fail, if they don't get popular they die but how do you make something "niche" popular? By making it better and more readily available, but that's not the case because there is very little market because, you guessed it, very little people are using it. You don't spend time and money on something no one uses and no one uses something no one spends time and money on. A first step has to be taken and this first step must be an incentive to use the new thing. Materials could have been this incentive but its bad and dumbed down implementation turned a lot of people away from it, so does the missing optimisation for it, you can't run Materials anyway, not with 1GB of max texture memory allocated to SL, just look at all the LL Viewer reports that the Viewer keeps constantly reloading textures!

Everything bad that ever happened to SL i can attribute all the way back to compatibility or choice. Oz was in a sense right, options are bad. Sometimes. Some options should simply not be given.

I will certainly not support turning off deferred (infact i never did, the only reason i still offer this option is to turn deferred on, in case it ever got disabled for some reason) and my users didn't have a problem with that. In fact they are glad, even people who can't use my Viewer because their hardware is too weak don't complain. They simply chose to use a different Viewer until they got an upgrade, which according to them never even came to mind before (again because prior to using my Viewer that is commonly known for requiring better hardware) they never had any reason to, Firestorm doesn't give them a reason to upgrade, it outright crashes and refuses to work for most people that try to do fancy stuff on old hardware, whereas weirdly enough my Viewer manages to do that just fine, just at a suboptimal framerate while doing so.

I'm pretty confident that A: SL will not die. (remember it has been dead for 10+ years) and B: It will hurt people less than you think. We have seen LL make much worse decisions for much worse reasons and SL hasn't really changed despite people complaining and threatening to leave. What LL is doing wrong (for the probably 100th time) is not officially announcing their decision to remove the deferred toggle. They are not giving people a warning that old hardware support will be eventually faded out and that's where i see the problem. Something like this should have been officially announced soon after the decision was made to give people a warning and some extra time.

[Gavin Hird]

10 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

It is not more ”outdated” than turning off shadows !!!  This is just a graphics setting, damned it !

Do you realize how totally illogical and nonsensical (and egoistic) is your reasoning ?...

TBH Henri, SL is the product of a commercial company and they need to develop it as they see fit. – Sure we may not agree, but IMO too often has the company been hampered by TPV creators sperging over their particular feature or take on how things shall work.

I am much more concerned about, on the viewer side, the complete lack of (visible) work to support future Mac users, something that will abruptly cut out 15% of the user base and up to 25% of all creators from staying in-world.

[NiranV Dean]

7 minutes ago, Gavin Hird said:

I think the key to understanding the lack of enthusiasm in SL is twofold:

a) The moving of creator tools outside of SL. Sure, all the old creator tools are still there, but unless you use them for anything but very basic build elements, you are basically laughed out of the place. In the Marketplace any such creation would be doa.

Mesh creation requires a completely new level of skills and a much more complicated creation process before anyone sees the result. – Even then, you often compete with professional creators with models that has been repurposed from other environments. PBR materials dials the complexity even higher, and most likely requires the creator to subscribe to tools with a monthly cost that exceeds the willingness or ability to pay for a hobbyist.

The consequence of this is the collective build and creation effort where everyone could watch and participate, and which characterized the first 10 years of SL, is more or less gone. 

b) The centering of the SL event calendar around US holidays and "shopping seasons" is not very exciting for the rest of the world. In addition there is a language barrier to participation outside of the Anglosphere. 

The message being, SL is for Americans primarily. The consequence for that is recruitment outside the US is slim to none.

Counter argument:

Mesh creation is actually quite easy and quick to learn (making bodies however is a different thing, that requires decent sculpting skills and some know-how about human anatomy). Mesh content is everywhere because it is actually quite easy to get into SL... unless its a fitted mesh, but that's because the tools (or lack thereof) are simply bad they are basic at best and often require paid extra plugins (such as Avastar). I tried it, downloaded the official skeleton example for blender, smacked my model on it, retargeted the bones, everything was matching up just fine, bring it into SL, it was twisted and broken, stretched, axis were wrong... requiring a lot of additional extra work to fix, work that shouldn't be necessary if SL wasn't so.... limited.

Look at VRChat and NeosVR for example. NeosVR akin to SL offers all tools ingame to create everything and i mean ALL tools, we are talking about editing things on engine level through the ingame UI. We are changing internal mesh file parameters via the ingame UI, that is practically unseen levels of freedom, SL is a joke compared to it. NeosVR is incredibly user unintuitive, much more than SL is due to the extreme complexity of said tools (mostly due to the lack of documentation and tooltips though). Did it stop people from creating content there? No. VRChat. Offers less customization than NeosVR but does so in the engine it is build upon -> Unity. It's an external engine that you have to download and work with in addition to texturing, image editing and modelling tools but it offers everything in one place, all the tools for setting your stuff up are right there, sure you cannot live-edit them (unless you script options in the world or add customisation to your avatar) but did that stop anyone from making stuff for it? No. I wouldn't mind if SL started offering external tools similar to Unity Engine at the cost of non-live edits. They would make setting up stuff a lot easier or more centralised and would also allow for deeper edits. Both NeosVR and VRChat use PBR and as borked as Materials is your Materials content translates very well to PBR and the other way around. I straight up imported a model for VRChat for PBR into SL with the original PBR textures and it looks pretty decent (apart from the missing 4K texture support).

[Gavin Hird]

5 minutes ago, NiranV Dean said:

Counter argument:

Mesh creation is actually quite easy and quick to learn (making bodies however is a different thing, that requires decent sculpting skills and some know-how about human anatomy). Mesh content is everywhere because it is actually quite easy to get into SL... unless its a fitted mesh, but that's because the tools (or lack thereof) are simply bad they are basic at best and often require paid extra plugins (such as Avastar). I tried it, downloaded the official skeleton example for blender, smacked my model on it, retargeted the bones, everything was matching up just fine, bring it into SL, it was twisted and broken, stretched, axis were wrong... requiring a lot of additional extra work to fix, work that shouldn't be necessary if SL wasn't so.... limited.

Look at VRChat and NeosVR for example. NeosVR akin to SL offers all tools ingame to create everything and i mean ALL tools, we are talking about editing things on engine level through the ingame UI. We are changing internal mesh file parameters via the ingame UI, that is practically unseen levels of freedom, SL is a joke compared to it. NeosVR is incredibly user unintuitive, much more than SL is due to the extreme complexity of said tools (mostly due to the lack of documentation and tooltips though). Did it stop people from creating content there? No. VRChat. Offers less customization than NeosVR but does so in the engine it is build upon -> Unity. It's an external engine that you have to download and work with in addition to texturing, image editing and modelling tools but it offers everything in one place, all the tools for setting your stuff up are right there, sure you cannot live-edit them (unless you script options in the world or add customisation to your avatar) but did that stop anyone from making stuff for it? No. I wouldn't mind if SL started offering external tools similar to Unity Engine at the cost of non-live edits. They would make setting up stuff a lot easier or more centralised and would also allow for deeper edits. Both NeosVR and VRChat use PBR and as borked as Materials is your Materials content translates very well to PBR and the other way around. I straight up imported a model for VRChat for PBR into SL with the original PBR textures and it looks pretty decent (apart from the missing 4K texture support).

You did not make a counter argument, only confirmed that mesh cannot be made inside SL.

Also, low poly mesh creation with proper materials and texturing is not straightforward.

Sure you can take a typical creation tools for static rendering and whip out a medium to high poly model with half decent texturing, but try deploy that in any numbers in a region and everything grinds to a halt, whether it is the viewer or region that crashes first. 

 

Edited November 8, 2022 by Gavin Hird

[NiranV Dean]

14 minutes ago, Gavin Hird said:

Also, low poly mesh creation with proper materials and texturing is not straightforward.

You'd think that but its incredibly easy actually.

It's actually so easy to that i made a quick tutorial for what is essentially a couple clicks.

 

[Gavin Hird]

1 minute ago, NiranV Dean said:

You'd think that but its incredibly easy actually.

It's actually so easy to that i made a quick tutorial for what is essentially a couple clicks.

 

Don't be fatuous.

Try and explain how easy it is to game studios that use months on end to create game props and meshes that both look good and have as little budget as possible both in mesh size and rendering time.