PBR WOW!

[Henri Beauchamp]

2 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

So, will the eventual obsolescence of ”diffuse” maps mean that I will no longer be able to do that without more specialized knowledge and/or software?

It won't be obsoleted, or it would mean instantly destroying all the legacy contents of SL...

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Just now, Henri Beauchamp said:

It won't be obsoleted, or it would mean instantly destroying all the legacy contents of SL...

Right, but I won't be able to easily create content that employs PBR?

[Henri Beauchamp]

2 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Right, but I won't be able to easily create content that employs PBR?

Just as ”easily” as managing to use Blender (*), I suppose... 🤣

(*) People complain about the SL viewers complexity, but I personally think Blender got the most disconcerting, obscure, unstable (it changes dramatically every few months) and unusable UI of any software I ever used in my life.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 minute ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

Just as ”easily” as managing to use Blender (*), I suppose... 🤣

(*) People complain about the SL viewers complexity, but I personally think Blender got the most disconcerting, obscure, unstable (it changes dramatically every few months) and unusable UI of any software I ever used in my life.

It's not that I don't value the advances that SL makes in graphics: I can't imagine going back to pre-mesh days.

But it is a bit depressing the way each of these "forward leaps" renders more and more obsolete the older vision of SL as a place for individual creativity.

I suspect that this kind of specialization will also have the end result of further centralizing commercially-viable creativity in fewer and fewer hands (as the introduction of mesh did): there are probably a fair number of creators out there who will be unable, due to the economics and time-intense nature of it, to incorporate PBR materials into their materials. It will have, perhaps, the result of reducing further the diversity of choice for the consumer, and increasing the already pronounced tendency for monopolies or near-monopolies. (Vide. Maitreya, LeLutka, Blueberry, and Addams.)

[Zalificent Corvinus]

2 hours ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

How big a group devs, in your opinion, is needed?

People keep trying to compare SL to "AAA Games".

Ever checked the credits on any games, and seen how many devs they tend to have?

One of the "Saint's Row" games, had something like 70 programmers, 50 3d modellers, 50 texture artists, 40 sound guys, about 70 QA testers.

And that didn't include the people at the company subcontracted to handle all the vehicles in the game. and that was for a "grid" that's about 5 km x 4 km at most. say 300 regions, compared to mainland and the intercontinental seas, which are over 6500 regions.

Compare that with assigning one or two LL employees to do a project like EEP

2 hours ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

I didn't mean to put you on the defensive and rile you up

2 hours ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

insult laced rant

2 hours ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

pointless drivel

Yeah, right...

 

You obviously didn't read things, let's try again.

5 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Put in a new system for lighting, that NO customer asked for, that was poorly conceived from the start, poorly executed, delivered years late and still isn't working properly.

Put in a substandard implementation of a cut down version of something everyone else started using 10 years ago, and, despite it being tried and tested tech, make such a hash of it, that it's a laughable parody of the tech who's name it borrows.

Put in a system to help NPC's navigate around obstacles, that's so poorly done it causes massive region performance issues, and then fails because of the damage it does to the region.

Put in a webcam based auto-gurning system, that almost nobody wanted or asked for, then find out, after wasting a lot of time, effort, and money, that it was "too hard" and nobody wanted it, and cancel the project.

Each of those was a REAL LL project. Each of them was a mess,

EEP broke the default sky on more than 7500 regions, spent more than a year in Public beta RC, and was broken when released, and took over a year for some fixes to be made to the "working as intended" 1.0 release.

PBR, is proving to follow the same pattern, as detailed by various people in this thread. And in other threads.

Pathfinding, enabling a single pathfinding scripted npc on a region, for years after it was released caused massive drops in available script time, one could easily see a 30% drop in available script time, as animats reported on his home region of Valone, for example, and it's why he abandoned pathfinding for his NPC experiments and developed his own solutions that were only HALF as laggy as pathfinding.

The only reason I don't say it still does this is that I personally am not aware of anyone still STUPID enough to use pathfinding, but I'm sure there are, somewhere out there.

And the puppeteering thing, that got abandoned, for be9ng "too hard" and something only about 2 dozen people would actually use.

Those examples are not "insults" or "rants", just plain reality.

 

2 hours ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

*offers you a nice lavender tea*

Thanks but no thanks, I don't care for tea that smells like a cheap air freshener.

Edited December 16, 2023 by Zalificent Corvinus

[Candide LeMay]

45 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

It's not that I don't value the advances that SL makes in graphics: I can't imagine going back to pre-mesh days.

But it is a bit depressing the way each of these "forward leaps" renders more and more obsolete the older vision of SL as a place for individual creativity.

I suspect that this kind of specialization will also have the end result of further centralizing commercially-viable creativity in fewer and fewer hands (as the introduction of mesh did): there are probably a fair number of creators out there who will be unable, due to the economics and time-intense nature of it, to incorporate PBR materials into their materials. It will have, perhaps, the result of reducing further the diversity of choice for the consumer, and increasing the already pronounced tendency for monopolies or near-monopolies. (Vide. Maitreya, LeLutka, Blueberry, and Addams.)

Well yes and no. A PBR material is its own complete inventory asset that you can hand out, sell etc. There are some in the inventory library already. I can imagine a market for ready to be used PBR materials (just like in the prim days there was a market for textures). You don't have to create the materials yourself to use them and you can also use them on prims of course, so in a way PBR materials might be a bonus to prim builders.

[Love Zhaoying]

33 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

2 hours ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

How big a group devs, in your opinion, is needed?

People keep trying to compare SL to "AAA Games".

Ever checked the credits on any games, and seen how many devs they tend to have?

One of the "Saint's Row" games, had something like 70 programmers, 50 3d modellers, 50 texture artists, 40 sound guys, about 70 QA testers.

And that didn't include the people at the company subcontracted to handle all the vehicles in the game. and that was for a "grid" that's about 5 km x 4 km at most. say 300 regions, compared to mainland and the intercontinental seas, which are over 6500 regions.

Compare that with assigning one or two LL employees to do a project like EEP

Even then, AAA game devs are working with content created for the game.

Good luck, with a sub-infinite (i.e. "finite") number of developers, getting SL to work like an AAA game if all the content is user-created!

 

[Bagnu]

12 hours ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

Does that mean you think the Lab should never do anything to change or grow?  Never try anything new.   Or does it mean you think you are the only one who knows how to make the platform grow and, of course, all the tech that they should be using? All hail Zalificent the All Knowing?

What would you suggest they do?  You don't like anyone's ideas in here.  You try to shut down every discussion started in good faith to come up with new ideas.  You don't like any decision the Lab makes.  Every suggestion is shot down.  Everything that has ever been done/tried is a failed attempt by incompetent, ignorant idiots.

How would you fix the problems you see in SL?  We have all read your scathing reports on how stupid everyone (but you) is.  So, let's hear it.  How would Zalificent solve SL's concurrency and tech problems?  You obviously know what they should be doing if you know that everything they do is wrong.

Should nobody ever do anything because... I don't know.  Because you say so?  In a perfect world, they hire you to solve all the issues. How would you do it?

Toss your ideas out here for the rest of us to see.

 

I wouldn't take anything tech related from Zalificent seriously. She has shown in the discussion I had with her regarding bit depth and banding, that she values her opinion more than fact.

I totally agree with you about change and growth. Stagnation is simply not an option.

[AmeliaJ08]

SL has to move forward, so much potential! There will always be resistance but that's okay.

Wish there was a little more competition (any competition) in the virtual world space to drive this but it seems to me that short of something catastrophic happening there's a lot of life left in the platform and a lot of reinventing to do.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

19 minutes ago, Bagnu said:

I totally agree with you about change and growth. Stagnation is simply not an option.

I don't think this is about the general principles of change vs. stagnation. I don't see anyone advocating for the latter.

Rather, it's about the choices LL is making, and their implementation. Any suggestion otherwise is a misreading or a misrepresentation.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I don't think this is about the general principles of change vs. stagnation. I don't see anyone advocating for the latter.

Rather, it's about the choices LL is making, and their implementation. Any suggestion otherwise is a misreading or a misrepresentation.

Most of the negative posts about LL regarding "direction", new features, etc. IMHO basically fall into categories including "lack of faith in LL", "lack of hope in a positive outcome", "lack of ability to accept change", and as you say "lack of support for LL's choices", etc. Lackeys.

[Frionil Fang]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

What you seem to imply, among other things, though, is that I am not going to be able to create my own textures for things anymore. That the creation of "base colour" maps is a very different process than the creation of diffuse maps (which I can now produce with relative easy in Photoshop or even some other simpler graphics program)?

Nothing stops you from making PBR materials by hand. Don't let the "you're supposed to use professional workflows and tools" attitude stop you from experimenting, just because you *can* do things in a more industry standard way doesn't mean you have to.

Yes, the base color (albedo) + occlusion-roughness-metal division is more complicated: you're not supposed to draw one single estimate of how the thing looks into one texture, but instead separate the components (base color is literally that, the base color, no baked in shades from surface details, no gloss, etc.) and let the engine combine the components in a more scene-appropriate way, but that is just a matter of understanding what detail goes into which texture rather than some impossibility that can only be accomplished via a 3D painting tool.

2 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

So, will the eventual obsolescence of "diffuse" maps mean that I will no longer be able to do that without more specialized knowledge and/or software?

Pencil drawings aren't obsolete because photographs and sculptures exist. If the pencil drawing does the job you want it to do, great, you won't need a camera or lug around a heavy object just to convey every detail more accurately.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

11 minutes ago, Frionil Fang said:

Nothing stops you from making PBR materials by hand. Don't let the "you're supposed to use professional workflows and tools" attitude stop you from experimenting, just because you *can* do things in a more industry standard way doesn't mean you have to

Well, I hope you're right! I'll need to find some guidance on that online, however. Fortunately, there's no real rush.

[Flea Yatsenko]

R  Removing forward renderer is a big mistake. I didn't think mobile viewer needed PBR but judging by the requirements for the mobile viewer it probably does. My laptop is old and terrible but no way it's gonna run SL anymore, it barely ran it at lowest settings before. I do like the change to PBR. it's a lot easier to work with and for content creators who don't read wiki pages it's a lot more difficult to screw up. Making a shiny dress, it's easy with spec norm to start going crazy with spec values. PBR basically says "how much metal is in this material?" and if you turn it to full it's enough to at least make alarm bells go off in your head that your silk dress contains no metal. Unlike specularity which is a term most people don't even know what it means other than higher = shinier. But it's a lot clearer if something is metal or not.

I see why people are upset, SL moving towards a direction that is excluding people, like the minimum requirements for a game going up after release. I'm lucky enough to have a nice desktop but if I only had my phone and a laptop I would be in serious trouble getting into SL. I imagine a lot of people don't have nice desktops and are worried what's going to happen to their second lives.

If i had to use my laptop or phone for SL I would rather be able to have something usable and have missing textures than have nothing at all. Specially since I'm wondering how I can do customer service when I'm away from home with a laptop that can't log into anything. Then again my laptop is a netbook from 2011 so lol. Not gonna fault LL for that. Still won't have any means of giving inventory or anything.

I also have a crappy, super durable phone because I do volunteer first responder stuff and I need a phone I can drop in the snow or bleach if I have to call 911 and get body fluids on it.

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Right, but I won't be able to easily create content that employs PBR?

There are free and paid PBR texture libraries all over the internet. Since it's PBR it's a standard that works in several different game engines. If you can upload your own textures for things and apply them it's the same with PBR, just more maps. Content creators who don't read manuals could easily confuse spec strength and spec color maps, etc when downloading textures. You have to go out of your way to mess up PBR textures. If you're just doing basic texturing it's not like PBR is going to make this all go away. Just adds some more steps and your stuff is going to look way better. Biggest problem with PBR is going to be setting up reflection probes and lighting and that's where things are going to be a total mess. Interior scenes being blue from the sky or totally shadowed because no lights and no reflection probes is going to cause a lot of problems for people.

If you were painting your diffuse in something like photoshop you are gonna have problems though.

I would argue that PBR can actually make it easier to make really cool looking stuff without professional tools. I think people are just scared of change. But if you never made any content for a game (please don't kill me over that word), reading the wiki page for spec norm materials is a lot to digest. Downloading a PBR texture, selecting the GLTF file, selecting the drop down for the material you want, then SL automatically loading the maps, emission, and alpha settings for you and just pressing "save" is a heck of a lot easier.

5 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

SL has to move forward, so much potential! There will always be resistance but that's okay.

Wish there was a little more competition (any competition) in the virtual world space to drive this but it seems to me that short of something catastrophic happening there's a lot of life left in the platform and a lot of reinventing to do.

LL is never going to have viable competition. They have too much content. Even with SL's stability problems, lag, etc. it's extremely difficult to dethrone from it's position. Maybe things like Roblox but they went after a different market entirely.

SL has the content to let you do pretty much anything you want. Like, you can think of the most obscure weird stuff and type it into market place and you'll find it.

If someone wants to make a new open platform for content creators, they have to make it more appealing (profitable!) for content creators to leave SL, or at least add a new virtual world into their workflow. Or they have to pay people to make content. Both not very easy and very expensive. Even if you are a AAA studio and you pay for content you can easily end up with a GTA Trilogy: Definitive Edition situation where the content is all garbage anyways. Most of us probably remember that cringey stuff Meta did with their Metaverse stuff. That was a company several times larger than LL and that's what they gave everyone, lol

[LipstickAndDreams]

1 hour ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

R  Removing forward renderer is a big mistake. I didn't think mobile viewer needed PBR but judging by the requirements for the mobile viewer it probably does. My laptop is old and terrible but no way it's gonna run SL anymore, it barely ran it at lowest settings before. I do like the change to PBR. it's a lot easier to work with and for content creators who don't read wiki pages it's a lot more difficult to screw up. Making a shiny dress, it's easy with spec norm to start going crazy with spec values. PBR basically says "how much metal is in this material?" and if you turn it to full it's enough to at least make alarm bells go off in your head that your silk dress contains no metal. Unlike specularity which is a term most people don't even know what it means other than higher = shinier. But it's a lot clearer if something is metal or not.

I see why people are upset, SL moving towards a direction that is excluding people, like the minimum requirements for a game going up after release. I'm lucky enough to have a nice desktop but if I only had my phone and a laptop I would be in serious trouble getting into SL. I imagine a lot of people don't have nice desktops and are worried what's going to happen to their second lives.

If i had to use my laptop or phone for SL I would rather be able to have something usable and have missing textures than have nothing at all. Specially since I'm wondering how I can do customer service when I'm away from home with a laptop that can't log into anything. Then again my laptop is a netbook from 2011 so lol. Not gonna fault LL for that. Still won't have any means of giving inventory or anything.

I also have a crappy, super durable phone because I do volunteer first responder stuff and I need a phone I can drop in the snow or bleach if I have to call 911 and get body fluids on it.

There are free and paid PBR texture libraries all over the internet. Since it's PBR it's a standard that works in several different game engines. If you can upload your own textures for things and apply them it's the same with PBR, just more maps. Content creators who don't read manuals could easily confuse spec strength and spec color maps, etc when downloading textures. You have to go out of your way to mess up PBR textures. If you're just doing basic texturing it's not like PBR is going to make this all go away. Just adds some more steps and your stuff is going to look way better. Biggest problem with PBR is going to be setting up reflection probes and lighting and that's where things are going to be a total mess. Interior scenes being blue from the sky or totally shadowed because no lights and no reflection probes is going to cause a lot of problems for people.

If you were painting your diffuse in something like photoshop you are gonna have problems though.

I would argue that PBR can actually make it easier to make really cool looking stuff without professional tools. I think people are just scared of change. But if you never made any content for a game (please don't kill me over that word), reading the wiki page for spec norm materials is a lot to digest. Downloading a PBR texture, selecting the GLTF file, selecting the drop down for the material you want, then SL automatically loading the maps, emission, and alpha settings for you and just pressing "save" is a heck of a lot easier.

LL is never going to have viable competition. They have too much content. Even with SL's stability problems, lag, etc. it's extremely difficult to dethrone from it's position. Maybe things like Roblox but they went after a different market entirely.

SL has the content to let you do pretty much anything you want. Like, you can think of the most obscure weird stuff and type it into market place and you'll find it.

If someone wants to make a new open platform for content creators, they have to make it more appealing (profitable!) for content creators to leave SL, or at least add a new virtual world into their workflow. Or they have to pay people to make content. Both not very easy and very expensive. Even if you are a AAA studio and you pay for content you can easily end up with a GTA Trilogy: Definitive Edition situation where the content is all garbage anyways. Most of us probably remember that cringey stuff Meta did with their Metaverse stuff. That was a company several times larger than LL and that's what they gave everyone, lol

I said earlier somewhere that SL is just Roblox for adults. The more that people deny that, the worse things are going to turn out for the platform.

[Rowan Amore]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Well, I hope you're right! I'll need to find some guidance on that online, however. Fortunately, there's no real rush.

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/PBR-Survival-Kit/25501141

[Bagnu]

1 hour ago, LipstickAndDreams said:

I said earlier somewhere that SL is just Roblox for adults. The more that people deny that, the worse things are going to turn out for the platform.

I just looked up Roblox. Sorry, that is NOT my SL in any way shape or form. I want NOTHING to do with anything even vaguely like that.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, LipstickAndDreams said:

SL is just Barbie Roblox for adults.

 

[Bagnu]

Lol, playing Barbie Dressup is DEFINITELY an important part of SL in my opinion. 

Edited December 16, 2023 by Bagnu

[Chic Aeon]

19 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

You do remember that sansar failed, and they fired most of its team, right ?

Didn't fail because of the tech. By the time they sold it was running beautifully.  I was there every day and most of the day

[Chic Aeon]

Here is a really good (or bad depending on how you look at it).  

Note this is a gorgeous clock, not knocking the clock at all. Happily it comes in both PBR and regular versions.

Clock in FS non-PBR.

Clock SAME EEP in Linden viewer (it just updated again it seems)

PBR viewer with EEPs adjust to look better. Note there is no longer a GAMMA setting in EEP it has been replaced by something to do with EEP. 

 

Honestly the "better" part of the equation isn't working for me. 

 

[Love Zhaoying]

Not mentioned often, but swear I read early on that part of the point of PBR is that it's a "standard" and so will somehow (I don't recall or never understood) have an an advantage. From that point of view, "better" isn't necessarily a factor.

Ready for the deserved corrections to my often-wrong statements! 

[Chic Aeon]

7 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Not mentioned often, but swear I read early on that part of the point of PBR is that it's a "standard" and so will somehow (I don't recall or never understood) have an an advantage. From that point of view, "better" isn't necessarily a factor.

Ready for the deserved corrections to my often-wrong statements! 

It is an industry standard, but once again the populous will have to "upgrade", redo EEPS ,  buy new items or  ---- I just had a thought. There could be regions that prohibit the use of PBR. We DO still have a choice about what we put on our own land.  If it isn't THERE folks won't need to deal with it.  

 

I do think that things will improve down the road. Fingers crossed. 

 

HMMMMMMM.   

Again, that TESTING thing comes into the picture. Sometimes "simpler" is much less painful.   I did get that survival kit just mentioned and that will be interesting but I have no plans to switch viewers until necessary. 

 

 

[Love Zhaoying]

13 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

Here is a really good (or bad depending on how you look at it).  

Note this is a gorgeous clock, not knocking the clock at all. Happily it comes in both PBR and regular versions.

Clock in FS non-PBR.

Clock SAME EEP in Linden viewer (it just updated again it seems)

PBR viewer with EEPs adjust to look better. Note there is no longer a GAMMA setting in EEP it has been replaced by something to do with EEP. 

 

Honestly the "better" part of the equation isn't working for me. 

 

Please help me understand your example.

Which clock is which (you didn't spell it out)? I assumed that the clock on the right in the second picture was PBR because of the reflection. Why is the left-side clock in the first picture white / not rezzed (if non-PBR and that is not the PBR clock, why wouldn't it be rezzed)?

Thanks!

 

[Love Zhaoying]

6 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

redo EEPS

In my case, I never bothered with EEPS. (Only recently, pre-PBR, did I get my first mesh body that was in not viewable in full daylight non-EEP!) So, this may cause some other laggard oldbies like me to catch up.