PBR WOW!

[Pixels Sideways]

22 hours ago, animats said:

SL users should not have to be aware that the interest list system exists. This stuff is way below the user level.

A brief summary for non-technical people:

Unlike most games, SL viewers start out with no content inside them. Everything has to come in over the network. Each region is managed by a simulator program, and those talk to each other and the viewers. Simulator programs know what's in their region at all times. Viewers start out knowing nothing about that. Simulators send viewers a list of what's currently in draw range. When a region first appears, there's a big list sent, and thereafter, each simulator sends updates as you move around.

If the simulator's world view and a viewer's world view ever get out of sync, they won't get back in sync until the avatar leaves the area and comes back. Mostly they do stay in sync, but there are bugs. Currently, those mostly involve teleports and logins, where a huge interest list update is blasted out to each viewer as the avatar enters. Sometimes, especially in regions with many avatars, not all the info gets delivered. When that happens, some objects will not appear in the viewer at all. In regions with many avatars, you sometimes see some avatars with missing body parts.

Exactly why that happens is not well understood.

Hi animats

This is a bit off topic but why does a mesh that is specifically created with a set number of vertices, edges, faces/triangles at a small size that is 2LI suddenly balloon up to 300L when increased to a much large size?   SL generated prims don't do this so why do imported meshes?

And why does the cost of importing/uploading the same exact object at a larger size increase?

If SL servers and viewers see and process the same exact object constructed with the exact same mesh, why does size matter and LI increases?

And applying materials to SL prims that are huge does likewise?

Can you explain this to me like I'm four years old? 

This always seemed weird to me like it was intentional to have residents have to pay more in terms of upload fees and land with more LI to use scaled up objects. 

 

 

 

 

[Jenna Huntsman]

48 minutes ago, Pixels Sideways said:

I use a 13" 2014 MacBook Air running OS X El Capitan  + 1.7 GHz Intel Core i7 +  Intel HD Graphics 5000 1536 MB   This is only computer I have and can't afford a newer one.

Intel hardware of this age will have issues running SL (and any other modern program) due to hardware and software bugs which were never fixed (generally, Intel products from before 2017 have critical, unpatched hardware and / or software bugs).

That said, you may find running Windows on your machine may have more success due to the more modern version of OpenGL supported (MacOS will limit you to OpenGL 3.x, Windows allows you to run OpenGL 4.3).

[Harper Held]

So, I'm sure that I'm missing something important here?

But it looks like LL is culling the number of users who will be spending time and money on SL by de-facto requiring new hardware ...when the trend for ages has been for people to replace their desktops with tablets and mobile devices...?

Meme related:

[Love Zhaoying]

Just now, Harper Held said:

But it looks like LL is culling the number of users who will be spending time and money on SL by de-facto requiring new hardware .

Not necessarily. I think the claims that SL won't work on some hardware are overblown (the claims, not the hardware).

[Harper Held]

Did I mention that we're having an economic downturn and a large swath of LL's audience will be tightening their belts -not plopping ~$400 for a new computer? No? Sorry.

 

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Harper Held said:

Did I mention that we're having an economic downturn and a large swath of LL's audience will be tightening their belts -not plopping ~$400 for a new computer? No? Sorry.

 

Not necessarily. I think the claims that SL won't work on some hardware are overblown (the claims, not the hardware).

[Harper Held]

3 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Not necessarily. I think the claims that SL won't work on some hardware are overblown (the claims, not the hardware).

I hope so -time will tell, of course.

A lot of the people I know in-game are older, retired and/or on fixed incomes and while I happily bought a new machine last year (my previous one is one of the 2017 models mentioned earlier) I was in a lucky spot financially...I hope that my 4gb-video-card using ass isn't chased out of the game by PBR

[edit]: and I hope that the people who are going to events, tipping venues, and basically giving folks someone to talk to in-game (chatgpt isn't quite there...yet) aren't pushed out by PBR too.

Edited December 19, 2023 by Harper Held

[animats]

49 minutes ago, Pixels Sideways said:

This is a bit off topic but why does a mesh that is specifically created with a set number of vertices, edges, faces/triangles at a small size that is 2LI suddenly balloon up to 300L when increased to a much large size?   SL generated prims don't do this so why do imported meshes?

Land impact policy is complicated. The reason meshes are assigned higher LI when scaled up is that they will go to a higher LOD at a longer range when bigger. They thus use more graphics resources when drawn.

Nobody, including LL, is really happy with the LI formula. But if changed, and the LI of existing objects ever went up, some objects would be deleted because they pushed a parcel over its LI limit. This has been discussed at Creator User Group more than once.

When glTF meshes finally arrive, it will be time to look at this again.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

46 minutes ago, Pixels Sideways said:

This is a bit off topic but why does a mesh that is specifically created with a set number of vertices, edges, faces/triangles at a small size that is 2LI suddenly balloon up to 300L when increased to a much large size?

It's the physics hitbox, and the "cost" of checking that.

Take  0.64 x 0.64 x 0.64 cube, it's physics surface is small, you can stand on it, like standing on a prim cube, simple physics. Scale it to 6.4 x 6.x x6.4, now that surface is the size of a small room, and you can have a bunch of friends standing on there. a lot more physics to calculate. Scale to 64 x 64 x 64, you can host a damn night club on the top of the thing.

This is just a rough analogy. But basically thats whats happening, bigger scale means more surface area to check for collisions.

 

51 minutes ago, Pixels Sideways said:

why does the cost of importing/uploading the same exact object at a larger size increase?

Same reason, you import it at a larger size, bigger physics load, higher cost.

 

52 minutes ago, Pixels Sideways said:

And applying materials to SL prims that are huge does likewise

Applying ALM-Materials to any prim can cause LI increases, "tortured" prims suffer more, torii suffer a ton, tortured torii, never put materials on them.

Example, a friend made a structure from tapered and sliced hollow prims, LI 19 at a size of 4m x4m x 1.6m, replace the default plywood with Materials, with spec and normal maps, and it changes from Prim accounting to Mesh accounting, LI now over 140.

Convert the 4m x 4m x 1.6m version to mesh, apply materials, scale up to 40m, LI 42.

LL did this, they decided that any prim with Materials on would count as mesh not prims.

 

56 minutes ago, Pixels Sideways said:

This always seemed weird to me like it was intentional to have residents have to pay more in terms of upload fees and land with more LI to use scaled up objects

That's LL for you, welcome to SecondLife.

 

[Qie Niangao]

44 minutes ago, animats said:

The reason meshes are assigned higher LI when scaled up is that they will go to a higher LOD at a longer range when bigger. They thus use more graphics resources when drawn.

40 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

It's the physics hitbox, and the "cost" of checking that.

Either of these can happen (or both, I suppose). Watch the weights under "More info" to see which explodes when a specific object is scaled-up.

When it's physics (common for prims, less common for mesh) the magic wand of setting "Physics Type : None" drives that weight to zero and all sins are forgiven.

It is a pain that an otherwise innocent prim can get mesh Land Impact accounting just by setting a face to "Alpha Mode: Masked" (which ironically makes it easier to render) but there are plenty of other ways prims can get away with LI murder.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

So, playing with PBR a bit today. I had some issues with uploading some PBR materials files, which I'll get to later, after a bit more investigation, but most of my time I spent experimenting with a reflection probe.

So, I set a pretty basic rectangular skybox down on my platform. It took me a bit to figure out how to resize and edit it -- and how to reselect it when I had left off editing it for a bit. Fundamentally, this isn't too complicated, although actually doing it is a pain. I don't fully understand what an ambience setting of over "4" does, nor am I sure what the ambient environment colour is being replaced with if the value is over 1, but . . . mostly this seemed pretty logical, as did the "clip" setting (which I didn't need to use).

I also didn't worry about reflections. I'll get to it!

It looked good. And I really like the ability to set the interior lighting independently of the environment.

BUT . . .

In both the LL viewer and the newest BD one, I was getting weird flickering environmental light in the corners of my skybox, which would come or go as I moved my camera.

Now, I was able to fix this by stretching the bounds of my reflection probe a good 2 or 3 meters beyond the walls of the skybox, but that's not a very good solution for houses and other structures that are set in an environment, and meant to be viewed from the outside as well as the inside. (Ambience here was set at just below 1.0, I think.)

Anyone have any ideas what might have cause the flickering, and how to correct it?

(Also, what a freaking pain it is to "select" the probe when you've sized it tightly to the structure!)

Edited December 19, 2023 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Love Zhaoying]

Now THAT would cause some angst, if PBR changed LI calculations..

[Istelathis]

32 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Anyone have any ideas what might have cause the flickering, and how to correct it?

I'm not sure, but I have noticed it too.  It reminds me of how two prims will flicker when you place them close together but they don't line up just right.  I too, have extended the probe into the walls to minimize the impact, when I notice the flicker if I change the ambience.  

It took me a while to figure out why it was such a pain to select the reflection probe 🤣 I had to select everything around it at first, then deselect everything.  These two options above help, if you haven't found them already.  Resetting the viewer resets the selection for "Select Reflection Probes" in LL's viewer so it has to be checked again.

Edited December 19, 2023 by Istelathis

[Scylla Rhiadra]

46 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

I'm not sure, but I have noticed it too.  It reminds me of how two prims will flicker when you place them close together but they don't line up just right.  I too, have extended the probe into the walls to minimize the impact, when I notice the flicker if I change the ambience.  

It took me a while to figure out why it was such a pain to select the reflection probe 🤣 I had to select everything around it at first, then deselect everything.  These two options above help, if you haven't found them already.  Resetting the viewer resets the selection for "Select Reflection Probes" in LL's viewer so it has to be checked again.

In my case, I think I sort of know what is happening . . . but I'm not sure why it is happening.

The probe is essentially reading itself as a spherical shape, rather than a rectangular one -- which is why the corners are flickering, because they are extending outside of the notional sphere. But it's not doing so consistently -- i.e.., it's not actually changing shape, which is why it is flickering.

Just to be clear, the shape I've chosen for the probe is definitely rectangular. That's particularly evident when you extend the bounds of the probe beyond the walls of the skybox, because you can see the (straight,  not curved) lines demarcating the boundaries between the environmental light and the probe's ambient settings traced out on the ground around the skybox. It's just that the probe occasionally "forgets" that it's rectangular.

In any case, it's a problem they need to fix.

[elleevelyn]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

In my case, I think I sort of know what is happening . . . but I'm not sure why it is happening.

The probe is essentially reading itself as a spherical shape, rather than a rectangular one -- which is why the corners are flickering, because they are extending outside of the notional sphere. But it's not doing so consistently -- i.e.., it's not actually changing shape, which is why it is flickering.

Just to be clear, the shape I've chosen for the probe is definitely rectangular. That's particularly evident when you extend the bounds of the probe beyond the walls of the skybox, because you can see the (straight,  not curved) lines demarcating the boundaries between the environmental light and the probe's ambient settings traced out on the ground around the skybox. It's just that the probe occasionally "forgets" that it's rectangular.

In any case, it's a problem they need to fix.

i see this as well. I also see it on the Linden ocean when I turn my avatar or pan the viewer camera. The surface of the water  flickers really badly within a circle centered on my avatar

the double perimeter lines of the ?reflection? circle visible on the water. These lines are visible without rotating my avatar

 

is not my computer being under-powered, is something wonky with the rendering

my dets

Second Life Release 7.1.1.7039128750 (64bit)
Release Notes

Second Life Server 2023-11-07.6790647783
Release Notes

CPU: 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-12900 (2419.2 MHz)
Memory: 64862 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10/11 64-bit (Build 22621.2861)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti/PCIe/SSE2

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 31.0.15.3699
OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 536.99

Window size: 3840x2054
Font Size Adjustment: 96pt
UI Scaling: 1
Draw distance: 512m
Bandwidth: 5000kbit/s
LOD factor: 4
Render quality: 6
Advanced Lighting Model: Enabled
Texture memory: 11242MB
Disk cache: Max size 3993.6 MB (100.0% used)

 

my settings on full bore. Note my FPS is approx. 120. If the flicker was because under-powered hardware then my FPS would be in the tank I would think

ps add here: I tried to smash it, by sit on a really fast spinning object, and was able to smash my FPS down to 37. 37 or 120 it didn't matter - the flicker stayed consistent. Is not recommended to spin yourself round with Draw Distance = 512. But yanno, science 😹

also too tho, am pretty sure that there is a JIRA already for this and Linden are already onto it

 

 

Edited December 20, 2023 by elleevelyn
perimeter image

[Pixels Sideways]

4 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Not necessarily. I think the claims that SL won't work on some hardware are overblown (the claims, not the hardware).

SL can run on old hardware with everything set to lowest graphics settings which means you will never see the world as intended which vastly diminishes the SL experience.

[arton Rotaru]

2 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

In my case, I think I sort of know what is happening . . . but I'm not sure why it is happening.

The probe is essentially reading itself as a spherical shape, rather than a rectangular one -- which is why the corners are flickering, because they are extending outside of the notional sphere. But it's not doing so consistently -- i.e.., it's not actually changing shape, which is why it is flickering.

Just to be clear, the shape I've chosen for the probe is definitely rectangular. That's particularly evident when you extend the bounds of the probe beyond the walls of the skybox, because you can see the (straight,  not curved) lines demarcating the boundaries between the environmental light and the probe's ambient settings traced out on the ground around the skybox. It's just that the probe occasionally "forgets" that it's rectangular.

In any case, it's a problem they need to fix.

The glitching probes at high altitudes should be fixed already in the GLTF Maint viewer. Give that a shot maybe.
https://releasenotes.secondlife.com/viewer/7.1.2.7215179142.html

[arton Rotaru]

1 hour ago, elleevelyn said:

also too tho, am pretty sure that there is a JIRA already for this and Linden are already onto it

The striping artifacts on the Ocean are coming from the Screen Space Reflections. I keep those turned off.
And yes, it's a known issue since February actually. Unfortunately it hasn't been fixed yet.

[FelicityPage]

On 12/18/2023 at 6:19 AM, Jenna Huntsman said:

If you're having issues with the viewer freezing up and stalling, submit a JIRA - https://jira.secondlife.com/

The engineers who can fix this don't read these forum threads - but submitting a JIRA will bring these kinds of issues to their attention, so they can be fixed.

Oh, I didn't do that in means to get help, I was just explaining what happens to me using PBR Viewer. The lag was from my end.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Ok, so wait.

I just purchased two PBR texture packs from the MP.

One is insane, includes the constituent textures but not the combined "Materials," and includes instructions that make no sense with reference to the actual "edit" dialog, OR the names given the textures in the kit itself. I tried making a new Material using the instructions in the SL PBR wiki, and it didn't work, possibly because the file names are different. (i.e., "ao," "diffuse," "displacement," "normal" and "specular"). Ok, so "diffuse" presumably is the "Albedo" or "Base Colour"? And "Normal" is "Normal." Beyond that . . . I have no idea what, if anything, goes in the "Emmisive" or "Metalic Roughness" slots. I tried "Specular" in the latter, but that looked awful.

The other commercial material is better and easier to use because it has an actual "Materials" . . . texture? What are we calling it? It seems to work ok, although the EEPs I've been running it through produce some pretty bizarre results.

But the kicker . . . ?

Apparently you can't tile PBR materials? They can only be STRETCHED???? (I tried this both in BD and the LL Viewer. Unticking "Stretch Textures" does nothing: it still just stretches.)

Either that's insane, or I'm doing something seriously wrong. HELP!!!

ETA: I've just worked out that you can manually adjust the scaling. That is STILL insane, however.

Edited December 20, 2023 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Love Zhaoying]

23 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Apparently you can't tile PBR materials? They can only be STRETCHED???? (I tried this both in BD and the LL Viewer. Unticking "Stretch Textures" does nothing: it still just stretches.)

Either that's insane, or I'm doing something seriously wrong. HELP!!!

ETA: I've just worked out that you can manually adjust the scaling. That is STILL insane, however.

Can you please clarify? Tiling (repeats) and scaling (size) are not the same AFAIK. Which work / don't work? Certainly there should be JIRA's for either..?

3 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

The glitching probes at high altitudes should be fixed already in the GLTF Maint viewer

@Scylla Rhiadra, when I saw the above quoting you, I couldn't find anywhere you said the "flickering" issue was at high altitude; can you confirm if you were at ground or high altitude?

[Istelathis]

34 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Apparently you can't tile PBR materials? They can only be STRETCHED???? (I tried this both in BD and the LL Viewer. Unticking "Stretch Textures" does nothing: it still just stretches.)

Either that's insane, or I'm doing something seriously wrong. HELP!!!

ETA: I've just worked out that you can manually adjust the scaling. That is STILL insane, however.

It doesn't seem to work with default for me, but planar works on my side.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Just now, Love Zhaoying said:

Can you please clarify? Tiling (repeats) and scaling (size) are not the same AFAIK. Which work / don't work? Certainly there should be JIRA's for either..?

"Scale" is the term that the edit dialog uses. In effect, when you increase the scale along either vertical or horizontal axis to > 1, you are repeating the image or part of it . . . i.e., essentially tiling it. But you'd need to use a calculator to make sure that you weren't distorting the aspect ratio if the surface you are placing the materials on is anything other than 1:1.

It's nuts that you can do that, but can't simply tile it using the "Stretch" tool.

5 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

@Scylla Rhiadra, when I saw the above quoting you, I couldn't find anywhere you said the "flickering" issue was at high altitude; can you confirm if you were at ground or high altitude?

I was on my sky platform, which is 1800m up. So, not ground level, but not insanely high either. I haven't tried this at ground level.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

12 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

It doesn't seem to work with default for me, but planar works on my side.

I tried planar too, but it still didn't seem to tile when I stretched. At least, not in BD. But I just tried that in the LL viewer, and you're right, it does seem to work.

STILL . . .

It's like they are trying to make this hard!

Edited December 20, 2023 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Istelathis]

8 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

It's like they are trying to make this hard!

On the plus side, I just saw that we don't need to change all of our prims to convex physics to enjoy the bennies of having our Li brought down, having 28 prims linked together only show 14 Li while using prim physics 😁 

 

Edited December 20, 2023 by Istelathis