ALM Proposal / Work

[Charlotte Bartlett]

Going to be interesting how the workflow develops especially pipeline from Substance Painter for non avatar items.

Very keen to test it through along with probes.

[Jackson Redstar]

I  know this topic is about ALM and creators and how they build - but can we get creators when they include a local light in a build to not set it at Full Nuke then make everything  No Mod LOL that would be awesome!

[EliseAnne85]

22 hours ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

The latter would be way too slow and too complex for pretty much all users.

Still, what are the proposed minimum specs going to be for this?  Any changes in mind? 

I read on the forums some feel SL isn't appealing to the masses because it's too slow.  Well, imo, it's slow because there are way more triangles plus other things to rez than most "games" in existence now.  So, someone in this thread said SL has to appeal to the gaming crowd then because most laptops have difficulty with SL.  And, they do, I have a laptop too and for SL forget about it.  It's not going to run on my laptop.  I don't feel the gaming crowd will be here just because their frames per second jumped up.  SL takes patience and time and most gamers, imo, want fast action.  That is not what SL is - fast action in a little time.

I have mixed emotions about all this because there is billions of dollars worth of content already created and looks pretty good but can be laggy with all the maps and etcs that already exist.  I preferred windlight and it's slider system, not when windlight first came out a long time ago.  A long time ago, windlight was difficult to work with.  I'm not a big fan of EEP as  I was of windlight.  It's not as good, imo.

Edited September 25, 2022 by EliseAnne85

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, EliseAnne85 said:

Still, what are the proposed minimum specs going to be for this?  Any changes in mind?

That is the big question of course and it's time we discuss it properly although I don't know if any of us users have a good answer.

This turns out to be quite a lot more than making ALM mandatory, it seems to be a total revamp of SL's rendering software. ALM is of course kown to be hard on lower spec computers but that is only to a very small degree because of the normal and specular maps. ALM includes other improvements in the visual quality that add to the load too but apparently that is still only part of the explanation. Somebody who knows the viewer software better than me may correct me here but if I understand right, the main reason why ALM is so heavy on the clients is that it's very inefficient.

New rendering software may well turn out to be lighter, not heavier, for lower spec clients than even the old non-ALM option. In theory at least; I have no idea whether it will be the case.

Edited September 25, 2022 by ChinRey

[Jenna Huntsman]

1 hour ago, EliseAnne85 said:

Still, what are the proposed minimum specs going to be for this?  Any changes in mind? 

The answer is that there isn't an answer.

The minimum specs on the SL website have long been out-of-date. If you tried to run SL on a computer built to those exact specs, chances are the viewer wouldn't even run.

We're also talking about software that's still in development, so I could say anything, and it could be completely false tomorrow.

From what I know, the only "minimum" requirements are (that have any kind of solidity, anyway):

• Hardware support for OpenGL 4.X Core profiles (On Windows, and presumably Linux)
• Hardware support for OpenGL 3.X Core profiles (On Mac)

 

[Henri Beauchamp]

ALERT ALERT ALERT

They are doing it !

This is totally, utterly, dishearteningly crazy, but LL is removing forward rendering (non-ALM) support from their future PBR viewer. See this commit.

I urge users with modest PCs to publish here their frame rates with ALM (no shadows, no SSAO, no DOF) on and off (no other graphics setting being touched), so that LL, maybe, may understand how terrible is their mistake and how miserable they will cause many users to feel when logging into SL in the future !

ALERT ALERT ALERT

Edited September 28, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp

[Candide LeMay]

I've tested on a laptop with nvidia MX330, which based on benchmarks is somewhere around GTX 650 Ti (a 10 years old GPU) performance, so pretty modest.

Latest official LL viewer. Detected settings around High, draw distance 128m.

Went to Natoma/Ivory tower, which has a good mix of geometry and about 10 avatars.

ALM off: frame rate in the high 50s

ALM on (no shadows, AO or DOF): frame rate in the low 50s

 

Walked around some other sims with similar results: ALM on is a few % performance hit, if at all. And you actually see materials and lights if people have put effort into it.

[Rick Nightingale]

Here's my most used PC's stats. It's an HP G2 mini that I'm on right now; 16GB RAM, i7-6700 @ 3.4GHz, CPU/Intel GPU.

• At home, ALM off: 42 fps
• At home, ALM on: 22 fps
• At FGI, ALM off: 21 fps
• At FGI, ALM on: 15 fps and a bit difficult to move around, sluggish response

Shadows, AO and DOF off in all tests. Draw distance 120m, LOD factor 2, water minimal reflections, 1920x1200 monitor (see image below). I'm just turning on/off the ALM checkbox.

FGI= Fallen Gods region, a fairly 'heavy' place to test.

Note that I use this PC a lot if I'm building in SL, or scripting. It's quiet, uses little power, and does everything else I need including running Photoshop, Blender, VMWare workstation VMs, NI Labview, Mentor ModelSim and other EDA software, QGIS and other map creating software... blah blah blah. It's quite a capable little PC. I use my bigger PC (with MSI GTX1080Ti) if I'm 'exploring/enjoying' SL, rather than working.

Edit to add: This is with the latest Firestorm viewer, which improved the framerate a lot compared to the previous.

Edited September 28, 2022 by Rick Daylight

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

1 hour ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

LL is removing forward rendering (non-ALM) support from their future PBR viewer.

We have no idea what the performance of the future PBR viewer will be like, comparing framerates of the current viewer with and without ALM enabled doesn't really provide any indication of how well the new viewer will run.

While I don't normally like to accuse people of hysteria, considering the fact that you started and ended your post with

1 hour ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

ALERT ALERT ALERT

I think it's fair to say you're being a little alarmist!

[Jenna Huntsman]

4 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

We have no idea what the performance of the future PBR viewer will be like, comparing framerates of the current viewer with and without ALM enabled doesn't really provide any indication of how well the new viewer will run.

While I don't normally like to accuse people of hysteria, considering the fact that you started and ended your post with

I think it's fair to say you're being a little alarmist!

To add on to this, there are additional performance improvements in the PBR viewer, as well as some that are in-development and should be merged prior to release.

From what has been said, I understand that attempting to do PBR in the forward renderer (i.e. non-ALM) would destroy your framerate, especially on lower-spec computers.

[Love Zhaoying]

27 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

I think it's fair to say you're being a little alarmist!

But the world needs more Lerts!

[Frionil Fang]

Out of curiosity, I dug out my ancient cheapo non-gamer laptop (Asus office laptop, circa late 2011-2012, this was my main SL machine for several years) and installed the latest LL viewer on it. Only ALM was used, no shadows, no AO, no DoF. 2x AA enabled.

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2670QM CPU @ 2.20GHz (2195.04 MHz)
Memory: 6050 MB
Graphics Card: GeForce GT 540M/PCIe/SSE2 (it's dual GPU and refused to start at all with the integrated graphics selected)

Window size: 1920x1028
Draw distance: 80m
LOD factor: 1.375
Texture memory: 512MB

Home location, everything has materials, lots of light sources, only my avatar visible:

• ALM ON: 18 fps
• ALM OFF: 31 fps

Sparsely populated club (10 avatars on screen, no limit on avatar rendering so everyone was being rendered), everything in the club has materials:

• ALM ON: 10 fps
• ALM OFF: 19 fps

These are considerably better values than I used to get back when the computer was in active service, I was perfectly happy with 7 fps with ALM enabled while clubbing (look, I wasn't at a club to get fps, I was using it to enjoy pretty polygons and chat and ALM was not something I would've given up even back then). I could just barely hit 25 fps with ALM off in a completely empty location outside a  background sphere and my avatar back then, too; my home location is much more detailed.

I'm just not going to be alarmed about 10+ year old cheap laptop hardware getting only 10 fps (which I still consider usable considering the image quality you get) in a populated location.

[Henri Beauchamp]

3 hours ago, Rick Daylight said:

Here's my most used PC's stats. It's an HP G2 mini that I'm on right now; 16GB RAM, i7-6700 @ 3.4GHz, CPU/Intel GPU.

• At home, ALM off: 42 fps
• At home, ALM on: 22 fps
• At FGI, ALM off: 21 fps
• At FGI, ALM on: 15 fps and a bit difficult to move around, sluggish response

Yep, exactly what I meant... Down to half the performances with an iGPU (or ”old” GPU: e.g. GTX 460 or 660) and ALM on is also what I am seeing, here...

 

3 hours ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

To add on to this, there are additional performance improvements in the PBR viewer, as well as some that are in-development and should be merged prior to release.

There is no way any of these improvements will compensate for direct rendering simplicity, on ”weak” hardware: Intel iGPUs and AMD APUs, but also (not so) old graphics card, such as anything below a GTX 960, not to mention even newer AMD cards, since they are so much weaker than NVIDIA's when dealing with OpenGL. There is simply not enough power in these GPUs to run that many shaders !

3 hours ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

From what has been said, I understand that attempting to do PBR in the forward renderer (i.e. non-ALM) would destroy your framerate, especially on lower-spec computers.

People with a modest/old PC cannot care less about PBR or ALM: all they want is decent frame rates and draw distance (sure, you can get better frame rates by lowering the draw distances, but then you cannot enjoy SL as you should).

What I want is to still be able to use forward rendering (without PBR) as I can do today.

 

1 hour ago, Frionil Fang said:

I'm just not going to be alarmed about 10+ year old cheap laptop hardware getting only 10 fps (which I still consider usable considering the image quality you get)

To me, anything below 60fps is sub-par and below 30fps is unacceptable... Especially when walking/driving/sailing around !!!

Equally, a DD below 256m (and 512m in islands, i.e. sims without neighbouring sims) is sub-par, and anything below 128m is unacceptable.

I'd rather switch off ALM (and double the frame rate or DD as a result) than enduring such low rendering performances !

Edited September 28, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp

[Candide LeMay]

You can have your 60fps with 256m draw distance, just not on old potato computers. I don't see a problem with that. You are not setting the rules for how SL "should be enjoyed" (and neither am I, but if I was I'd say materials/lights are more important than draw distance and fps over 30).

[Frionil Fang]

31 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

To me, anything below 60fps is sub-par and below 30fps is unacceptable... Especially when walking/driving/sailing around !!!

Equally, a DD below 256m (and 512m in islands, i.e. sims without neighbouring sims) is sub-par, and anything below 128m is unacceptable.

I'd rather switch off ALM (and double the frame rate or DD as a result) than enduring such low rendering performances !

People do have different priorities in SL, I guess. I'll personally be fine with ALM being removed, if it makes it easier to move forward with the viewer development and have more modern features instead of supporting ancient configurations forever.  I care about visual fidelity, not smoothness, and interaction between people, so 10 fps is perfectly fine... uh okay, it's not perfectly fine and I'd rather not go back to that kind of performance, but we're talking 10+ year old underpowered-as-new hardware here.

Also most of the people I know often go "lol I'm getting 7 fps right now" but that doesn't stop them from enjoying SL and hanging out at the populous locations, because they, too, are more focused on the interaction-between-people side than how smoothly it runs. Well, with the recent performance improvements it's more like "hot dang I'm getting 25 fps" instead of the old complaint...

Edited to point out: I'm not saying insisting on high draw distances and smooth frame rates by compromising on visual detail is the wrong approach. What I'm saying that expecting outdated hardware to be able to pull that off in a system as demanding as SL is a tall order, while demanding other development is held back because that hardware has to be supported forever.

Edited September 28, 2022 by Frionil Fang

[Rowan Amore]

While I didn't see a large drop in FPS when turning ALM on, it does ramp up my fan to high speed on my laptop.  I have an HP Omen which is about 5 years old with a AMD graphics card.  Since I'll be using this laptop for the foreseeable future, it does seem that having ALM on constantly might wear out things faster than having it off.   The only time I have it on is when I'm taking pics.

[EliseAnne85]

4 hours ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

To add on to this, there are additional performance improvements in the PBR viewer, as well as some that are in-development and should be merged prior to release.

From what has been said, I understand that attempting to do PBR in the forward renderer (i.e. non-ALM) would destroy your framerate, especially on lower-spec computers.

A problem with this though is the maps.  The current normal maps will not work.  So, that's billions of dollars of content that is already created that would have to upgraded.  

Also, builders need a good light to build and some of these EEP's are too dark or surreal and for photography, not building.  We need a good building light.

Risking billions of dollars of already created content is risky, let alone all that work to redo.  SL is tough work - it took me over 20 hours of work to do one texture.

It sounds like two viewers are better.  Make the PBR a premium paid for viewer and keep a good lighting viewer without EEP for building.  The premium PBR paid for viewer could be then designed for those who want to do high end things with their photography and help pay to keep SL inclusive not exclusive by having another viewer for those with less hardware capabilities.

I wish we could have it all for all of us but I am not so sure it's gonna to work that way without people having to spend money to upgrade their computer.  I don't have money to upgrade my computer.  I am currently disabled.

It just sounds like a very big risk.  I don't believe those with a gaming rig are going to come on SL just because they have a gaming rig.  That's like saying just because someone has a car they are going to Arizona.

[Henri Beauchamp]

1 hour ago, Candide LeMay said:

You can have your 60fps with 256m draw distance, just not on old potato computers.

Take any modern computer (a notebook, for example) without a discrete GPU, and you would be faced with the exact same problem with ALM !

It's not just ”old potatoes”, it's pretty much any non-gaming PC !

I will add that this move (lowering the FPS rates on ”modest” hardware) goes right in the opposite direction to SL porting on mobile platforms (that is quite feasible, as long as the rendering engine is not too heavy, or at least got a ”lightweight” direct rendering mode).

1 hour ago, Candide LeMay said:

You are not setting the rules for how SL ”should be enjoyed” (and neither am I .../...

That is why CHOICE is important: everyone is using SL in a different way, and LL is going to remove a choice (better FPS rates and/or draw distance at the cost of slightly less ”realistic” scenes).

53 minutes ago, Frionil Fang said:

What I'm saying that expecting outdated hardware to be able to pull that off in a system as demanding as SL is a tall order, while demanding other development is held back because that hardware has to be supported forever.

I am not ”demanding other development is held back” but simply that LL keeps the same direct rendering mode as we have now (i.e. without PBR) available. This is quite feasible, even if it involves two different sets of shaders and some branching in the render pipeline: I already did it with the Cool VL Viewer v1.28.0 when LL shoved EEP down our throats while its shaders and render pipeline were still largely unfinished and caused a large loss in performances: with that viewer, you could choose between the Windlight and the Extended Environment renderers.

Edited September 28, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp

[Rowan Amore]

5 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

builders need a good light to build and some of these EEP's are too dark or surreal

Second Life Marketplace - Firestorm Default Sky Windlights for EEP

If you go to my personal lighting, you can also lighten most EEP settings using the ambient color box.   There are also 3 or 4 sets of EEP settings from Fox City for 1L each.  Tons of lighting suitable for building.  

Second Life Marketplace - Satomi's 2016 Windlights EEP (Old Imports Only)

[EliseAnne85]

11 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Second Life Marketplace - Firestorm Default Sky Windlights for EEP

If you go to my personal lighting, you can also lighten most EEP settings using the ambient color box.   There are also 3 or 4 sets of EEP settings from Fox City for 1L each.  Tons of lighting suitable for building.  

Second Life Marketplace - Satomi's 2016 Windlights EEP (Old Imports Only)

I am going to quote your whole post because I was going to ask who has the best *EEPs I can try for building.  This is most appreciated.

  *If anyone has any suggestions for great EEPs for building, please send me an IM as we'd be going off topic.  I'd appreciate help with it.

Edited September 28, 2022 by EliseAnne85

[Solar Legion]

If you are going to go Chicken Little Mode and have such a "eye catching" header and footer to your alarmist post ... Perhaps it would be best if you did not let others know that your preferred Draw Distance is absolutely insane for any sort of day to day use.

[Frionil Fang]

19 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

A problem with this though is the maps.  The current normal maps will not work.  So, that's billions of dollars of content that is already created that would have to upgraded.  

Most normal maps exported from tools are already in the correct format, and have been for a long time. I always wondered about glitches in my baked normals at certain kinds of polygon edges, but considered that just a SL quirk (it was) and accepted them. To me it sounds like the PBR mode will *fix* normal maps.

 

24 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

I am not ”demanding other development is held back” but simply that LL keeps the same direct rendering mode as we have now (i.e. without PBR) available. This is quite feasible, even if it involves two different sets of shaders and some branching in the render pipeline: I already did it with the Cool VL Viewer v1.28.0 when LL shoved EEP down our throats while its shaders and render pipeline were still largely unfinished and caused a large loss in performances: with that viewer, you could choose between the Windlight and the Extended Environment renderers.

I suppose, though where will the resources to keep the old render path functional come from, if not from cutting back on working on new features? I guess that's a job best left for a third-party viewer to fill.

[EliseAnne85]

3 minutes ago, Frionil Fang said:

To me it sounds like the PBR mode will *fix* normal maps.

 

Fix normal maps without re-doing them?  I'm not sure what you mean here but in the main blog in this thread is says old normal maps will not work.  

[Frionil Fang]

2 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

Fix normal maps without re-doing them?  I'm not sure what you mean here but in the main blog in this thread is says old normal maps will not work.  

Quoted for convenience: "Normals will likely be MikkTSpace, as per the glTF specification, but work needs to be done to see if supporting this could lead to clashes with the current normal maps rendering. This does mean that current Normal maps will not work on PBR materials."

I had heard only about the part of switching to MikkT normals before, and I honestly have no idea what they mean by "will not work on PBR materials" since all the normal maps I've gotten out of Blender for years have been MikkT normals already. The change would make my existing normals work just as well if not better. Maybe I'm missing some important detail, wouldn't be the first time.

[EliseAnne85]

5 minutes ago, Frionil Fang said:

since all the normal maps I've gotten out of Blender for years have been MikkT normals already.

I think it's saying if you didn't make your normal maps in MikkT aka on Blender, they won't work.  

That would make SL created items Blender exclusive then...?

I was wondering why some of my groups had been offering Blender classes now.  Blender classes for tinies groups seemed new to me.

Edited September 28, 2022 by EliseAnne85