Beq Talks About The Future Of Firestorm And PBR

[Zalificent Corvinus]

4 minutes ago, Anna Salyx said:

A 500gb m.2 nvme drive by the brand I like is 68.20 USD. (14 cents/gb). A 2000gb is just 102 dollars more at 170 USD. (9 cents/gb).

I didn't memorise the prices but that 480gb ssd was about 32 quid, and the 2 tb platter was 55 quid?

So that's 2.5 tb for under 90 quid including VAT. compared to 170 bucks for 2 tb ssd, plus VAT

[Fionalein]

Don't forget about Windows' upcoming AI spyware feature that will store millions of screenshots on your local drive. I bet you will need 2TB minimum in W11 soon. I'd rather go with 5TB just to be future proof.

[Anna Salyx]

I did say in the scheme of things, not an apples to apple comparison.  yeah, the platters are going to be much cheaper as a basic option.  But in the scheme of going from 0.5tb to 2tb in SSDs is not a significant jump in price.  if it was 4x or more the price for 4x the space then yeah, def go with the cheaper options.  No, it's skosh over 2x the price for 4x the space , so it puts into the realm of something to consider.  again when talking future proofing that can be an important consideration: do you expect more of the things you like to do recommending SSDs in the coming year or 2? 

an example of a new release game on my wishlist.  (and 2nd edit to say, i didn't realize it until I just looked but a game I bought late last year has a minimum required: SSD with 90 GB free.  so yeah, we are there).

Edited May 31 by Anna Salyx
added an example

[Katherine Heartsong]

14 hours ago, Jaylinbridges said:

I had a 12 year old graphics card in my 12 yr old MB and 12 yr old CPU, and that's what I saw too.  But it went from 45 fps to 30 fps, so I hardly noticed.  I have now installed a 5 yr old graphics card, and all the PBR viewers runs just fine on my 12 yr old system.  But I didnt start with a Walmart laptop either.  I won't have full mirrors turned on though, since I can rotate my cam and get a much clearer image of myself than any mirror. I can live without mirrors.

Same re: mirrors. I think they'll add some cool atmosphere but I'm not using them to check my lipstick on anything except in a posed photo maybe.

And a follow up question about mirrors ... Will people playing vampires see themselves in them?

Hmm?

[Flea Yatsenko]

I have some really cool ideas for mirrors that don't involve just being a home decor thing to look at yourself. I'll have to play with them first to see if what I want to do is reasonable, but real time reflections aren't going to be used just for making a flat mirror surface so you can look at yourself in a mirror in your home.

If you're going to buy a new PC, make sure it is a standard format in a regular sized case. Once you have a decent desktop you should never have to buy a new computer again as you can upgrade parts and re-use a lot of old stuff. Things like just upgrading the graphics card, then just upgrading cpu/motherboard/ram and keeping HDs, case, power supply, monitor, etc.

For example, I upgraded my CPU/motherboard/RAM to 3950x and 32GB of ram and kept everything else (because I was texture baking back then and fast CPU was super important). I only had a 7970 (the old original AMD HD 7970 not the new 7000 series). Then it died and I spent $200 on an RX 580. Then it got so slow I couldn't handle it and bout a 7800XT. I'm not trying to brag but my point is I upgraded my CPU/Mother board around 5 years ago and because I've made incremental upgrades I have a really great computer only spending $500 to $750 every few years. If I had to buy a new laptop to see those gains in performance I wouldn't get an incrimental upgrade, it'd be an entirely new computer probably for over $1000 each upgrade.

[Beq Janus]

Wading my way through this. There remains a number of misconceptions. In no specific order:

2K texture and on-demand loading. 

All Viewers (those based on LL upstream, which is historically all of them) have always done this. It is know as the discard level, and is a form of mipmapping. Mipmapping is the GPU/renderer choosing to use a downsampled texture because it doesn't need all the detail and can save VRAM, the "discard level" is the same but for RAM/disk cache, we request only the discard level required. The real question is not do the viewers do it, (yes they do), but do that do it well? The answer to that is I think mixed historically and the calculation for which size texture to use has been actively tweaked by LL throughout recent developments.

Open Sim

Honestly, not been top of my agenda, PBR is available on OpenSim and PBR terrain should be supported @Ubit Umarov has asked me to provide a mechanism to allow OpenSim to support fallback textures on terrain for OpenSim, a different direction to that taken by LL, one that is required given that OpenSim does not have the same authority to force changes as LL/SL does.

There have been some recent OpenSim specific fixes, mostly contributed/collaborative with myself and non-FS devs. I am currently working on a replacement for the mindnumbingly awful gridlist. The problem of grid discovery is really not a viewer problem to solve it is something the OpenSim community needs to deal with but in the meantime I am trying out a new "self managed" gridlist. Not sure if it will be ready in time for the release. We shall see. 

Defaults and detection (and more ranting about ALM)

The defaults are specified by the "feature table" which is a file you can actually find and read in the viewer distributions.

There is a lot of "educated guesswork" goes into it, but in the end that's all you can ever really expect; we're not in console land here, everyone has a different setup and so the viewer tries to estimate where it thinks your machine sits on the performance spectrum. 

We do not typically change this. In the past FS did have a different table, and I think that was part of the problem that ALM became. ALM was being disabled at far too high level by default. If you managed to wade through my blog post you'll have read my views on the misuse of "ALM-off" and the impact that may well have had on the evolution of SL content. Big coarse-grained feature switches like ALM-off should never have been employed. If I was getting let's say 15 FPS with settings on High, and turned off ALM and got 30FPS, I might assume that this was the only way to get that result. In most cases, I'd have probably got 25+ FPS possibly even the full 30FPS just by disabling shadows. I could have kept the normal maps and other goodies. But we got used to the coarse-grained control, regularly throwing out not just the bathwater and the baby but the entire bath tub, followed by a whining complaint that "your stuff looks crap when I turn off all the rendering features, make it look better" to all the creators. 

What I would say is, don't be in the mindset of "I used to run on High-Ultra, so I should run on High-Utlra now". The table has been cleared and set out anew. Your old settings and levels are not comparable to the new ones. You will want to play around with the settings to find a "new normal" to establish what the correct balance of performance vs shinies is for you and tying yourself to old settings and assumptions is going to hold you back.

Editing PBR/BP (and its shortcomings)

Zi and I added the ability to edit both BP and PBR textures in-situ a few months back. The new editing tools provide a more concise workflow but one that is rather cramped (you can revert to the LL defaults in preferences) and also allow you to tab between the two and see what they look like. There are a few bugs in this, the tint on BP is not respected (as noted in this thread) but it also can garble the UVs. Both of these are on the todo list but are hard to get to the bottom of, I've burned more hours than it deserved already - if there are coders out there who want a challenge, feel free to have a go and send me a pull request to consider, you'll see from the change history how I injected some of the changes...). I will make it clear, though, that FS has no plans to allow a PBR viewer to disable PBR outside of edit mode. It would be a betrayal of the platform in the long-term to ease short-term pain. 

We (Firestorm) will need to keep the editing experience in mind even after SL has moved entirely on. OpenSim does not block older viewers (which is a different problem for a different day) so grid owners and opensim creators will probably spend more time on providing fallback textures (who knows in reality? time will tell)

The big thing that people are missing in all of this is that it doesn't matter one bit if the viewer does or does not support editing of (or even displaying of) fallback textures. If creators are not providing them (because producing such textures is a pain and often leaves a very unsatisfying substandard result) then the ability to show them makes no difference, all you will see is grey/white or at best base colour. For terrain, that is guaranteed, as no possible fallback option exists.

Longer term

I don't think the blog suggested I would give long-term views; if it did, then that was a mistake, as I have no particularly long-term views to share at present. That said, the pipeline of features from LL is always evolving, and we will be part of those plans. After WebRTC, you have scene uploads, changing the way that some creators will import, but moreover (as Joe mentioned), requiring a fundamental rethink of what linksets look like in SL. A proper object hierarchy opens up news challenges and opportunities for creators and scripters. There are early-stage thoughts about a complete revamp of the UI. This will be a big and scary undertaking, too, but if it goes hand in hand with the proposed client-side scripting extensions, it will undoubtedly add new layers of capability to products and change how we interact in SL. 

There were other points, but I've forgotten them by now, and as usual I've written a lot more than I intended.

 

 

 

[Jackson Redstar]

as it is now, even good hardware cannot overcome the 40+ avatars at an event - and it looks like we are being told it will only get worse from here........

[Rowan Amore]

40 minutes ago, Jackson Redstar said:

as it is now, even good hardware cannot overcome the 40+ avatars at an event - and it looks like we are being told it will only get worse from here........

I have no problem with 40+ avatars using the Firestorm PBR viewer.  However, I do have shadows turned off unless I'm doing a photo.  That's the only thing that will push my fps down and even then, it's consistently around 40fps with shadows and 80-90 without.  

[Jackson Redstar]

5 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

I have no problem with 40+ avatars using the Firestorm PBR viewer.  However, I do have shadows turned off unless I'm doing a photo.  That's the only thing that will push my fps down and even then, it's consistently around 40fps with shadows and 80-90 without.  

what hardware is that? I have a i7-10700k, a 3070, 32gig ram and all m2 SSD and with 'everything on' in a crowded event maybe 10-16fps - empty sims or a few people no problem but it is always the large amount of avi's that drop the FPS like a rock! just reading about the new PBR it seems like that rock is gonna get even bigger

[Love Zhaoying]

Thanks for the check-in and additional details, @Beq Janus!

[Rowan Amore]

20 minutes ago, Jackson Redstar said:

what hardware is that? I have a i7-10700k, a 3070, 32gig ram and all m2 SSD and with 'everything on' in a crowded event maybe 10-16fps - empty sims or a few people no problem but it is always the large amount of avi's that drop the FPS like a rock! just reading about the new PBR it seems like that rock is gonna get even bigger

Firestorm 7.1.8 (74216) May 26 2024 20:20:29 (64bit / SSE2) (Firestorm-Betax64) with Havok support
Release Notes

You are at 111.1, 93.9, 55.2 in Yangbaechu located at simhost-028524d95340096c1.agni
SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Yangbaechu/111/94/55
(global coordinates 263,791.0, 235,870.0, 55.2)
Second Life RC Magnum 2024-04-13.8669470296
Release Notes

CPU: 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-12800HX (2304 MHz)
Memory: 32436 MB (Used: 2409 MB)
Concurrency: 24
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 11 64-bit (Build 22631.3672)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU/PCIe/SSE2
Graphics Card Memory: 6010 MB

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 31.0.15.4680
OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 546.80

RestrainedLove API: (disabled)
libcurl Version: libcurl/7.54.1 OpenSSL/1.1.1q zlib/1.2.11.zlib-ng nghttp2/1.40.0
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v8.4.1
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Studio 2.02.20
Dullahan: 1.14.0.202310131404
  CEF: 118.4.1+g3dd6078+chromium-118.0.5993.54
  Chromium: 118.0.5993.54
LibVLC Version: 3.0.16
Voice Server Version: Not Connected
Settings mode: Firestorm
Viewer Skin: Firestorm (Grey)
Window size: 2560x1334 px
Font Used: Deja Vu (96 dpi)
Font Size Adjustment: 0 pt
UI Scaling: 1
Draw distance: 128 m
Bandwidth: 1000 kbit/s
LOD factor: 1.75
Render quality: High (5/7)
Advanced Lighting Model: Yes
Disk cache: Max size 2048.0 MB (78.6% used)
Built with MSVC version 1939
Packets Lost: 3/22,854 (0.0%)
May 31 2024 06:29:38 SLT

[Love Zhaoying]

10 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Packets Lost: 3/22,854 (0.0%)

No WONDER your frame rate is so bad, you need to do something about that packet loss!!! 😉

 

Edited May 31 by Love Zhaoying

[Jackson Redstar]

1 hour ago, Rowan Amore said:

 

thanks Rowan - interesting other than the newer CPU everything else is similar except you on a laptop yet getting 2 to 3 times the FPS, Maybe I just need some WD40 to loosen up the joints lol

[Scylla Rhiadra]

4 hours ago, Rick Nightingale said:

For clarity, the existing lights still work the same in the PBR viewer. I use projectors to simulate light though stained glass in my build and they still work the same. At least so far. I still light my house up as before, although I have put in extra lighting too; we do now need to illuminate areas as well as use reflection probes if we don't want the sky reflecting off the interior (through the roof!).

I've not read up on it but I think what is being said is that LL have not given us the different (and probably very useful) lighting available with gltf. Along with other things.

Something else we cannot do with PBR materials is that iridescence that a lot of texture makers use; where an object reflects different colours of light than it is itself. There's no way to do that with LL PBR. I miss it already.

Yeah, I've been using the FS Beta (and Alpha before that), as well as the PBR-enabled Black Dragon, so I know that projectors (and shadows) are working in them. I'm just confused by Animat's comment which, if I read it correctly, applies to the gITF standard and suggests that SL's projectors aren't part of that. What he's calling "cone" lighting sounds like projectors -- directional lighting -- but without shadows?

I'm sure I'm just getting all of this very confused though.

[Love Zhaoying]

5 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

What he's calling "cone" lighting sounds like projectors -- directional lighting -- but without shadows?

I was confused too and glad you pointed it out. 

Possibly off-topic but related thought: It makes sense to me if there is "such a thing" as local lights that don't create shadows. Just because you want "more light" doesn't mean you want each of those lights to create shadows! 

ETA: From the perspective of having to add a set of local lights because "PBR is dark inside", but not wanting to create shadows from those lights.

Edited May 31 by Love Zhaoying

[Scylla Rhiadra]

25 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I was confused too and glad you pointed it out. 

Possibly off-topic but related thought: It makes sense to me if there is "such a thing" as local lights that don't create shadows. Just because you want "more light" doesn't mean you want each of those lights to create shadows! 

In Black Dragon (but not, I think, Firestorm), you can turn shadows off on individual projector lights. That's potentially useful because one can currently only employ 2 projectors that cast shadows in a given scene. There may be instances where one wants more than 2 directional lights in a scene, but you don't need them all casting shadows. Imagine for instance a long wall with multiple sconces, all casting light in a cone downwards. With BD (and I'm 90% sure this is the case because I think I've done it) you could have, say 3 or 4 projectors in a scene shining directionally downwards -- but set only two of those to cast shadows.

One MAJOR improvement (for me anyway, because I use a LOT of lights typically in a single scene for pics) is that there is now no limit to the number of point lights you can use at once.

Edited May 31 by Scylla Rhiadra
Missing word. Whyyyyy?

[HeathcliffMontague]

Geez. Way to scare folks hardware wise in this thread. I'm doing just fine in SL as it is right now with a recent R5, 16 Gigs, 4 GB of DDR6 VRAM, 100 Mbps down. With some adjustments, of course. And although I come from the "desktop first and keep it plugged in" kind of view, this is on a laptop on Wifi.

I'm all for "future proofing", but keep in it perspective and don't freak people out so much, folks  

Edited May 31 by HeathcliffMontague

[Lillani Lowell]

I've wanted to see PBR in Second Life for nearly a decade.

It is nice it is finally arriving.

All Second Life needs now is GLTF uploads and the ability to upload skinned mesh with truly custom skeletons without any of this Blender plug-in non-sense.

[Katherine Heartsong]

3 hours ago, Jackson Redstar said:

what hardware is that? I have a i7-10700k, a 3070, 32gig ram and all m2 SSD and with 'everything on' in a crowded event maybe 10-16fps - empty sims or a few people no problem but it is always the large amount of avi's that drop the FPS like a rock! just reading about the new PBR it seems like that rock is gonna get even bigger

I think my set up is similar to yours, maybe a weaker 3060 card? (Mac person normally, only have the PC gaming rig for, well, gaming.) I get 30–40 fps when dancing at Hotwife even when it's packed to the brim, and never change my draw distance and nearly ultra-high settings. Running the latest (but not PBR) Firestorm. Same at Muddy's and Fogbound.

Weird it's that different.

[BilliJo Aldrin]

4 hours ago, Jackson Redstar said:

as it is now, even good hardware cannot overcome the 40+ avatars at an event - and it looks like we are being told it will only get worse from here........

Jelly is your friend 😬

[BilliJo Aldrin]

6 hours ago, Fionalein said:

Don't forget about Windows' upcoming AI spyware feature that will store millions of screenshots on your local drive. I bet you will need 2TB minimum in W11 soon. I'd rather go with 5TB just to be future proof.

Its gonna save images of all the porn I look at? 😖

[Coffee Pancake]

6 hours ago, Jackson Redstar said:

what hardware is that? I have a i7-10700k, a 3070, 32gig ram

This is a laptop.

You have a mid range mobile edition GPU and a CPU that's 4 generations old  limited to PCIE 3.0

A desktop 3070 comes with a heat sink the size of a house brick and consumes 220 W. This power consumption is converted to heat at an almost 1:1 ratio (a PC is almost as efficient as a space heater at heating space). A laptop can't even supply a chip with 220W let alone get rid of that much heat.

A 3070 GPU can consume 220W because at full beans, it needs 220W. if you can't give it that much power, it will never run with full beans.

If it can never run at full beans, why should the manufacturer put a desktop binned chip in a laptop .. they use laptop variants, that run slower, even if it is a "3070", it's really really not a 3070.

All of that .. everything I just wrote, applies to the CPU too.

 

Desktop computers don't have bigger circuit boards and massive power stages just for fun, just the combined CPU & GPU VRMs (power delivery) from a desktop take up more PCB space than an entire laptop motherboard.

 

Why do you think we always say buy a deskop PC not a "gamers" laptop.

 

 

Edited May 31 by Coffee Pancake

[Jackson Redstar]

21 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

You have a mid range mobile edition GPU and a CPU that's 4 generations old  limited to PCIE 3.0

 

I have a desktop - 700w 'Gold' power supply too

[Coffee Pancake]

3 hours ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

I think my set up is similar to yours, maybe a weaker 3060 card? (Mac person normally, only have the PC gaming rig for, well, gaming.) I get 30–40 fps when dancing at Hotwife even when it's packed to the brim, and never change my draw distance and nearly ultra-high settings. Running the latest (but not PBR) Firestorm. Same at Muddy's and Fogbound.

Weird it's that different.

Your desktop CPU and 3060 beats up his mobile 3070 and steals it's lunch money.

These things are not the same. Not even a little bit.

[Jackson Redstar]

3 hours ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

Jelly is your friend 😬

well I video weddings the clients may not like all their gests as jelly dolls! LOL