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Firestorm PBR Alpha viewer

Beq Janus

By Beq Janus,
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Beq Janus
Beq Janus

This has been the single most common complaint in these first few days. The vast majority of users do not have an HDR monitor and everything looks contrasty/cartoonish, it is proving very unpopular fo

Beq Janus
Beq Janus

When I asked recently about "best practices" in the Creator Discord I was generally dismissed and shouted down for even suggesting that there was a transition period. One creator cheerfully declaring

Henri Beauchamp
Henri Beauchamp

Not wanting to ”pollute” this viewer thread about creators related considerations, but such a stupid reaction makes me hope that LL will add an ”Incompatible with non-PBR viewers” check box for PBR-ma

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Aishagain

Aishagain

Posted
Posted (edited)
On 5/11/2024 at 5:07 AM, Coffee Pancake said:

They aren't going to be fixed.

At this point the LL problems with PBR have become Firestorm's problems with PBR, Firestorm are left looking bad for delaying a major platform advancement.

Meanwhile huge issues with PBR that have existed since day one, and no one will be able to ignore, are still present. In all viewers.

Firestorm need to release and just say "we tried".

This is a sad assessment of LL and its developers.  LL develop a feature...LL release the feature broken and only half developed...FS devs release a "best guess" fixed viewer...FS get pilloried for LL's failure.

Question: Why do LL release broken stuff?

Edited by Aishagain
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Flea Yatsenko

Flea Yatsenko

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18 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Firestorm devs are not "underestimating how big PBR will be." There are major issues that need to be fixed.

For example: https://jira.firestormviewer.org/browse/FIRE-33607

There are always going to be major issues to be fixed. And as more stuff ends up on the grid, the more it's going to fragment between PBR and non PBR.

I think the best choice for firestorm right now is to publicly release the PBR viewer, put in some notice on startup about PBR being new and having bugs, and install the pbr version into a different folder and not treat it like an upgrade but a separate version so people can use both.

The change to PBR is going to be messy. I wish it launched in a better state but things are going to be fragmented. There were mesh devs in here saying they wouldn't have any fallback textures and were only going PBR.

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Aishagain

Aishagain

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Posted (edited)
On 5/11/2024 at 11:22 PM, Flea Yatsenko said:

The change to PBR is going to be messy. I wish it launched in a better state but things are going to be fragmented. There were mesh devs in here saying they wouldn't have any fallback textures and were only going PBR.

And again I ask, in view of this attitude WHY DO LL persist on releasing such broken features to SL?

Yes, PBR would be a great advance for SL...if it worked as intended.  It does NOT.

And before you ask - Yes I have run the latest LL viewer.  It is no better and in some(several) ways not as good as Firestorm.

ETA: I went to the Arkipelago store on the Last Stop region at Fantasy Faire.  What I saw there made me realise that in most cases PBR is no improvement over what can be done at present in SL  (And yes I used both the release viewer 6.6.17 and the Beta 7.1.7 yadda (both FS) and I saw nothing that significantly improved my experience in ANY way.

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Qie Niangao

Qie Niangao

Posted
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On 5/10/2024 at 8:55 PM, Flea Yatsenko said:

We still have what, at least a year before non PBR viewers are blocked?

But they'll be increasingly obsoleted by content that's only PBR-visible. To wit:

Quote
  • To ease the workload for creators building for SL21B (opening on Friday, June 21st, 2024), Linden Lab has stipulated they do not have to include Blinn-Phong (aka “SL legacy materials”) fallbacks in their build if they opt to use glTF PBR materials.
  • This means viewers, in keeping with the expected behaviour, should only display the glTF materials, and should not under any circumstance attempt to display any fallback (as doing so will result in content rendering as grey or white objects).
  • This is likely to impact any viewers that do not support PBR materials (and content will not look “right”).

per ModemWorld blog's summary of Friday's TPV Developer meeting. Content that also has the Blinn-Phong fallback materials (or only those materials) will still be fine, but this greenlights omitting those materials and using solely PBR materials, for expediency.

I don't blame Firestorm for not wanting to handle all the support questions that will arise from a flawed PBR implementation, but as anybody can attest who's watched the beta group chat scroll by, there would be plenty of support questions even if PBR worked flawlessly. The better the product the less the support demand, but also the later and more urgent that demand, so release timing is a tradeoff.

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Coffee Pancake

Coffee Pancake

Posted
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28 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

But they'll be increasingly obsoleted by content that's only PBR-visible. To wit:

per ModemWorld blog's summary of Friday's TPV Developer meeting. Content that also has the Blinn-Phong fallback materials (or only those materials) will still be fine, but this greenlights omitting those materials and using solely PBR materials, for expediency.

I don't blame Firestorm for not wanting to handle all the support questions that will arise from a flawed PBR implementation, but as anybody can attest who's watched the beta group chat scroll by, there would be plenty of support questions even if PBR worked flawlessly. The better the product the less the support demand, but also the later and more urgent that demand, so release timing is a tradeoff.

They really need to have a lot of support material ready, and most of it is going to be "this isn't us, here is a link to the linden feedback page"

Sure, PBR can do awesome things, but most of the time, it's not a step up with the world as it stands, and most of that world is never going to stand any different.

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AmeliaJ08

AmeliaJ08

Posted
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I'm quite happy using the PBR beta even if I'm not consuming much/any PBR content simply because the performance is so much higher than non-PBR releases, it's a very pronounced difference.

Bugs are relatively minor but I can understand them not wanting to release something with even minor bugs and some of them are quite noticeable like the water issue despite not really affecting functionality much.

 

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Henri Beauchamp

Henri Beauchamp

Posted
Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, Stupid Elf said:

https://isfirestormpbryet.com stuck together a PSA

Err... There is one missing PBR-capable viewer (in excess of ALM and forward rendering modes, still working too), in this list, viewer which first PBR experimental release happened on the 2023-07-29 and first stable PBR release happened on the 2023-12-02...

Edited by Henri Beauchamp
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Qie Niangao

Qie Niangao

Posted
Posted
10 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Yikes, latest Firestorm beta seems very crashy... and I'm apparently forced to use it since the 73309 beta I was using is now apparently not allowed to log in? :(

Yeah there's a new beta. I installed it and used it for a while, didn't get viewer crashes, but I still get the same constant SLPlugin.exe crashes on my machine that started with the Linden viewer just before their first PBR beta. That's a problem I don't get with  PBR-capable Alchemy nor the CoolVL Viewer that also has proper mirrors, 2K textures, and all the stuff in the Lab's featurettes RC viewer. (Because I can only really cope with the v6 UI, I stick with Alchemy when I need to get stuff done; it has enough PBR to see what I'm looking at for now.)

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AmeliaJ08

AmeliaJ08

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22 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Yeah there's a new beta. I installed it and used it for a while, didn't get viewer crashes, but I still get the same constant SLPlugin.exe crashes on my machine that started with the Linden viewer just before their first PBR beta. That's a problem I don't get with  PBR-capable Alchemy nor the CoolVL Viewer that also has proper mirrors, 2K textures, and all the stuff in the Lab's featurettes RC viewer. (Because I can only really cope with the v6 UI, I stick with Alchemy when I need to get stuff done; it has enough PBR to see what I'm looking at for now.)

Mine complained of no outfits in inventory, couldn't reset to default character, attempting to take my body off and wear another caused a hard bugsplat crash :(

I'll investigate more tonight, I just like the performance of the PBR viewer which is why I was still using an older beta that just worked. It's super fast!

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