I have used PBR in landscaping, and hated it

[Theresa Tennyson]

15 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

LL really needed to replace at least parts of the EEP library. That's not an entirely trivial task, but it's nothing compared to the work that must have gone into the other half of the equation.

LL didn't make most of the EEP library to begin with.

[Porky Gorky]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

The idea that you should expect to change your EEP when you step inside is just . . . bizarre.

Both bizarre and wrong imo. EEP's should be created for exterior envionments and lighting should be used for interiors.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Just now, Theresa Tennyson said:

LL didn't make most of the EEP library to begin with.

I am aware of that.

It doesn't matter. If they wanted this to look good out of the box, they should have produced at least a half dozen or so new ones. The fact that they DID create a new midday one (which isn't terrible) shows that they recognized the problem.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

Both bizarre and wrong imo. EEP's should be created for exterior envionments and lighting should be used for interiors.

Exactly.

There are a lot of people out there who don't get how this works. Including, apparently, people producing new EEPs for it.

And there's a dearth of info at the moment for those people.

[Flea Yatsenko]

10 hours ago, Modulated said:

On the hardware side..I think if people were kinda limping along with the pre-pbr viewer, it was doable, this one is a whole different beast. It needs better hardware. If your rig has integrated graphics or anywhere near bottom of the barrel -like a 2gb/3gb vram gpu it's not going to be a good time IMO. I think it's just the hardware's shortcomings become painfully apparent now.

Those also stuck on a 32 bit viewer are very end of the road now, as there will be no more 32 bit releases.

It depends how good the graphics card/GPU is. If your CPU was limiting performance and you have a halfway decent graphics card or GPU that wasn't being used all the way, you are going to see an improvement since PBR can use more of your GPU.

If you have a laptop with mediocre or bad iGPU that was already stressed out running ALM PBR is going to be very bad for you.

[Theresa Tennyson]

2 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I think people still need to get their head around how this works, and what it entails.

One set of PBR-calibrated EEPs that I picked up included about 4 that completely washed out the avatar in normal exterior light. I couldn't understand the point until I read the notecard: these were designed for interiors, because these are often now darker than they used to be. (Just like in RL! Imagine!)

That might be meant for things like stores where you're effectively always "inside" at that location.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 hour ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Ahuh yeah you're right it's the industry that is wrong

That's the kind of glib ressponse I'd normally expect from somebody with all the technical understanding of a housebrick..

 

!. PBR faces inherent problems in a platform Like SL, simply due to the chaotic nature of SL.

Your games dev company level designer, make the mesh for the level, they texture it, and light it, and start baking, they create 360 degree probes from the textured and lit scene, they remove most of the digital lights used to bake the textures and the probes, and replace them with image based fake lighting and image based fake reflections, and export a GitElf scene, straight into Useless engine. and it's done and looks perfect. 

And it looks and works exactly how it looked and worked in the industry standard tools used to make it.

REAL PBR, where it belongs and works well, which is why it's the standard for THAT industry.

 

But in SL, you immediately run into problems, the levels are not designed by professionals, nor are they static and pre baked, they change chaotically. ANY passing user can wear a light, that totally ruins the scenes pre made fake lighting, any passing user can use a DIFFERENT wind light, etc., it's complete chaos.

 

Then there is this LIE about "must comply with industry standard", as PBR in SL, simply put, doesn't.

The Tone mapping lash-up means NOTHING renders in SL as it was supposed to look in Adumby Substance Abuse.

 

Add in that they didn't implement an actual whole PBR system, just a half finished abortion of a cut down cripple-ware edition, of the most basic version of HALF the system, and there isn't a snowballs chance in Hell, that this will "work as intended" for the majority of the player base.

 

2. Then LL did their usual trick, take a 6 month project, understaff it with under qualified people, working part time, so it takes 6 YEARS, then give up half way through because bored with waiting, roll the mess out anyway, and say "working as intended".

 

That's your PBR flavoured Industry Standard Futurreness, dead in the water right there.

 

3. Bloatstorm TRIES getting it all fixed, a process hampered by time and staffing levels and budget, but most of all, hampered by LL constantly mucking about with their version trying and often failing to fix it themselves before Bloatstorm has a go.

I genuinely pity ANY TPV dev who still has to accept merge code from LL. AS IS without being able to kick it to the kerb and just do their own version, like Henri does.

 

4. Hardware. It's all well and good screaming that "oh the drop in frame rate isn't so bad, I was getting 170, now I only get 100, but that's ok.", well year ok for YOU, but stop and think on all the people who were managing to get by on 17 FPS, who now get 10 or less. And you wonder why many complain how bad that is, and how this threatens a platform made up mostly of people with older hardware.

 

5. Yay SLB21, woo hoo, yeah let's rush out the release build to co-inside with that.

That's such an LL thing to do, and I'm gob-struck that Bloatstorm would COPY that stupidity, just to score brownie points.

 

Apparently YOUR preferred approach would be screaming

"But... But... More armies use Soviet AK tech, therefore American troops with 5.56 mm assault rifles should only be given Soviet 5.45 mm ammo BECAUSE IT'S AN INDUSTRY STANDARD!" before wondering why, when WWIV starts, all your soldiers DIE for lack of being able to shoot BACK.

 

"Industry Standards" don't MATTER, what matters is what WORKS for the case in hand.

 

Is PBR ok in CyberPuke 77 running on a 4090? Hell yeah, will it be ok in SL running on a 1030? Not a chance in hell.

Some idiots claim the "average steam user" uses a 3060. But I saw the steam survey for GPU usage just last month, the second most popular GPU on Steam is, a 1650 at about 4 %, and 3060's make up less than 8 % of all GPU's.

 

SL needs to STOP listening to Futurreness junkies who assume their "4090 based leet gamerz" rigs are "industry standard".

 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

49 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

That might be meant for things like stores where you're effectively always "inside" at that location.

I suppose it's possible that that is their thinking, but that's not specified in the accompanying notecard "instructions," which merely say that they are "designed for use in a completely enclosed environment" and that they'll blow out your avatar if used when not within a reflection probe.

I think that stores and events should probably start using either interior lighting or reflection probes set to increase light in the future.

One thing the notecard adds that sent chills of horror down my spine:

"You may need to break out the old face lights as non PBR skin and hair fails against PBR items at the moment."

Ack!

[Modulated]

1 hour ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

That's the kind of glib ressponse I'd normally expect from somebody with all the technical understanding of a housebrick..

 

!. PBR faces inherent problems in a platform Like SL, simply due to the chaotic nature of SL.

Your games dev company level designer, make the mesh for the level, they texture it, and light it, and start baking, they create 360 degree probes from the textured and lit scene, they remove most of the digital lights used to bake the textures and the probes, and replace them with image based fake lighting and image based fake reflections, and export a GitElf scene, straight into Useless engine. and it's done and looks perfect. 

And it looks and works exactly how it looked and worked in the industry standard tools used to make it.

REAL PBR, where it belongs and works well, which is why it's the standard for THAT industry.

 

But in SL, you immediately run into problems, the levels are not designed by professionals, nor are they static and pre baked, they change chaotically. ANY passing user can wear a light, that totally ruins the scenes pre made fake lighting, any passing user can use a DIFFERENT wind light, etc., it's complete chaos.

 

Then there is this LIE about "must comply with industry standard", as PBR in SL, simply put, doesn't.

The Tone mapping lash-up means NOTHING renders in SL as it was supposed to look in Adumby Substance Abuse.

 

Add in that they didn't implement an actual whole PBR system, just a half finished abortion of a cut down cripple-ware edition, of the most basic version of HALF the system, and there isn't a snowballs chance in Hell, that this will "work as intended" for the majority of the player base.

 

2. Then LL did their usual trick, take a 6 month project, understaff it with under qualified people, working part time, so it takes 6 YEARS, then give up half way through because bored with waiting, roll the mess out anyway, and say "working as intended".

 

That's your PBR flavoured Industry Standard Futurreness, dead in the water right there.

 

3. Bloatstorm TRIES getting it all fixed, a process hampered by time and staffing levels and budget, but most of all, hampered by LL constantly mucking about with their version trying and often failing to fix it themselves before Bloatstorm has a go.

I genuinely pity ANY TPV dev who still has to accept merge code from LL. AS IS without being able to kick it to the kerb and just do their own version, like Henri does.

 

4. Hardware. It's all well and good screaming that "oh the drop in frame rate isn't so bad, I was getting 170, now I only get 100, but that's ok.", well year ok for YOU, but stop and think on all the people who were managing to get by on 17 FPS, who now get 10 or less. And you wonder why many complain how bad that is, and how this threatens a platform made up mostly of people with older hardware.

 

5. Yay SLB21, woo hoo, yeah let's rush out the release build to co-inside with that.

That's such an LL thing to do, and I'm gob-struck that Bloatstorm would COPY that stupidity, just to score brownie points.

 

Apparently YOUR preferred approach would be screaming

"But... But... More armies use Soviet AK tech, therefore American troops with 5.56 mm assault rifles should only be given Soviet 5.45 mm ammo BECAUSE IT'S AN INDUSTRY STANDARD!" before wondering why, when WWIV starts, all your soldiers DIE for lack of being able to shoot BACK.

 

"Industry Standards" don't MATTER, what matters is what WORKS for the case in hand.

 

Is PBR ok in CyberPuke 77 running on a 4090? Hell yeah, will it be ok in SL running on a 1030? Not a chance in hell.

Some idiots claim the "average steam user" uses a 3060. But I saw the steam survey for GPU usage just last month, the second most popular GPU on Steam is, a 1650 at about 4 %, and 3060's make up less than 8 % of all GPU's.

 

SL needs to STOP listening to Futurreness junkies who assume their "4090 based leet gamerz" rigs are "industry standard".

 

There is a word for this...bloviate. Yes, perfect.  You type a lot but say little .

[Zalificent Corvinus]

9 minutes ago, Modulated said:

There is a word for this...bloviate. Yes, perfect.  You type a lot but say little .

I'm sorry that you're wrong, but it's not my problem.

Blame LL for releasing their PBR two to three years too damn early.

 

[Beq Janus]

4 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Definitely, although in fairness, I'll repeat what I've said before: if the immediate point of this exercise is to make SL look "better" than it did before, for most people that's not going to be the case. And that's because LL has only done half the job: they changed the materials and lighting system, but left us with a library full of EEPs designed for an older, different one.

Yes, EEPs can be created by individual users, and yes there are people making them for PBR (although I've not been very impressed by those in that category I've seen), but we all know that most users don't really know their way around the EEP settings, and aren't going to do this -- or, as witness comments we've seen here, recognize that they should do it. Most residents are simply going to decide that the new viewers suck without understanding that it's the EEPs that now suck.

LL really needed to replace at least parts of the EEP library. That's not an entirely trivial task, but it's nothing compared to the work that must have gone into the other half of the equation.

This I think hits the nail on the head. A set of re-calibrated EEPs in the library would have been a great addition to this whole process. It might also have allowed the estate owners to get their heads around the issue too. The wider problem is exemplified by mainland where the lighting is needs updating.  @animats has been complaining about the overly dark mainland EEP since...well EEP. Nothing has happened because, to be fair, there's an awful lot of mainland but now with PBR those really do need an urgent overhaul.

I was impressed by a free day cycle by @Jenna Huntsman

[JeromFranzic]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

"You may need to break out the old face lights as non PBR skin and hair fails against PBR items at the moment."

Ack!

(Cries bc Open Sim doesn't have as many options for face lighting as SL does... 😔😪)

[Love Zhaoying]

2 minutes ago, Beq Janus said:

This I think hits the nail on the head. A set of re-calibrated EEPs in the library would have been a great addition to this whole process. It might also have allowed the estate owners to get their heads around the issue too. The wider problem is exemplified by mainland where the lighting is needs updating.  @animats has been complaining about the overly dark mainland EEP since...well EEP. Nothing has happened because, to be fair, there's an awful lot of mainland but now with PBR those really do need an urgent overhaul.

I was impressed by a free day cycle by @Jenna Huntsman

@Beq Janus, I've seen a few comments more recently, that for PBR to look "right", people will have to use reflection probes.  (Prior to seeing those comments, I thought probes were really only needed for things like mirrors.)  Do you have any comment on whether it is true, and eventually word will spread that people need to rez reflection probes just for their PBR to "look correct" (or look better)?

 

[Beq Janus]

9 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

@Beq Janus, I've seen a few comments more recently, that for PBR to look "right", people will have to use reflection probes.  (Prior to seeing those comments, I thought probes were really only needed for things like mirrors.)  Do you have any comment on whether it is true, and eventually word will spread that people need to rez reflection probes just for their PBR to "look correct" (or look better)?

 

I'm not expert enough with PBR to say that, or at least there are those that know far more about it. The viewer creates "some" reflection probes automatically, it places them where it thinks makes sense. You can see this if you open the develop menu and go to render metadata -> reflection probes. As you can see these are present but relatively sparse and if you ar on a build platform my experience has been that they are practically non-existent. A localised reflection probe covering for example, the interior of your room, would certainly be more reliable than an automatic one.

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Beq Janus said:

5 minutes ago, Beq Janus said:

I'm not expert enough with PBR to say that, or at least there are those that know far more about it.

The viewer creates "some" reflection probes automatically, it places them where it thinks makes sense. You can see this if you open the develop menu and go to render metadata -> reflection probes. As you can see these are present but relatively sparse and if you ar on a build platform my experience has been that they are practically non-existent. A localised reflection probe covering for example, the interior of your room, would certainly be more reliable than an automatic one.

Thank you! I was unaware of this "automatic" placement, and in general the advice (which again I read in only a few posts, recently) on "always rez reflection probes" sounded like an outlier. 

Thanks also for the info that we can see the (automatic and otherwise) reflection probes in displayed metadata!

5 minutes ago, Beq Janus said:

I'm not expert enough with PBR to say that, or at least there are those that know far more about it.

Your response was extremely helpful, nonetheless! Now I can use this information if it comes up again. 

[Nagachief Darkstone]

31 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

@Beq Janus, I've seen a few comments more recently, that for PBR to look "right", people will have to use reflection probes.  (Prior to seeing those comments, I thought probes were really only needed for things like mirrors.)  Do you have any comment on whether it is true, and eventually word will spread that people need to rez reflection probes just for their PBR to "look correct" (or look better)?

 

From experience, yes. The good thing is I've made some probe-centric tutorial videos that will hopefully help with that. 

I've been working with PBR when it was still in project phase, while there's a few things I'm still learning, pretty sure LL's engineering department is one of the few groups that have more knowledge and experience than me.

Edited June 21 by Nagachief Darkstone

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

32 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

@Beq Janus, I've seen a few comments more recently, that for PBR to look "right", people will have to use reflection probes.  (Prior to seeing those comments, I thought probes were really only needed for things like mirrors.)  Do you have any comment on whether it is true, and eventually word will spread that people need to rez reflection probes just for their PBR to "look correct" (or look better)?

 

From experience, yes. The good thing is I've made some probe-centric tutorial videos that will hopefully help with that. 

Yes, I believe you are the one who said reflection probes are needed.  So, I asked Beq because of what you posted.  However, I did not see you comment anything about the "automatic" reflection probes.  Please see Beq's reply above.  Do you have any comments on Beq's reply? I specifically had asked for feedback from others (Beq in this case) because of what you previously posted.

And yes, I saw you posted the above video before.

 

[Nagachief Darkstone]

Just now, Love Zhaoying said:

Yes, I believe you are the one who said reflection probes are needed.  So, I asked Beq because of what you posted.  However, I did not see you comment anything about the "automatic" reflection probes.  Please see Beq's reply above.  Do you have any comments on Beq's reply? I specifically had asked for feedback from others (Beq in this case) because of what you previously posted.

And yes, I saw you posted the above video before.

 

Automatic probes work okayish when you're on the ground, but floating builds sometimes will fail to generate automatic probes, which means all you get is the (kind of awful) skyprobe.

[AmeliaJ08]

3 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

That's the kind of glib ressponse I'd normally expect from somebody with all the technical understanding of a housebrick..

 

!. PBR faces inherent problems in a platform Like SL, simply due to the chaotic nature of SL.

Your games dev company level designer, make the mesh for the level, they texture it, and light it, and start baking, they create 360 degree probes from the textured and lit scene, they remove most of the digital lights used to bake the textures and the probes, and replace them with image based fake lighting and image based fake reflections, and export a GitElf scene, straight into Useless engine. and it's done and looks perfect. 

And it looks and works exactly how it looked and worked in the industry standard tools used to make it.

REAL PBR, where it belongs and works well, which is why it's the standard for THAT industry.

 

But in SL, you immediately run into problems, the levels are not designed by professionals, nor are they static and pre baked, they change chaotically. ANY passing user can wear a light, that totally ruins the scenes pre made fake lighting, any passing user can use a DIFFERENT wind light, etc., it's complete chaos.

 

Then there is this LIE about "must comply with industry standard", as PBR in SL, simply put, doesn't.

The Tone mapping lash-up means NOTHING renders in SL as it was supposed to look in Adumby Substance Abuse.

 

Add in that they didn't implement an actual whole PBR system, just a half finished abortion of a cut down cripple-ware edition, of the most basic version of HALF the system, and there isn't a snowballs chance in Hell, that this will "work as intended" for the majority of the player base.

 

2. Then LL did their usual trick, take a 6 month project, understaff it with under qualified people, working part time, so it takes 6 YEARS, then give up half way through because bored with waiting, roll the mess out anyway, and say "working as intended".

 

That's your PBR flavoured Industry Standard Futurreness, dead in the water right there.

 

3. Bloatstorm TRIES getting it all fixed, a process hampered by time and staffing levels and budget, but most of all, hampered by LL constantly mucking about with their version trying and often failing to fix it themselves before Bloatstorm has a go.

I genuinely pity ANY TPV dev who still has to accept merge code from LL. AS IS without being able to kick it to the kerb and just do their own version, like Henri does.

 

4. Hardware. It's all well and good screaming that "oh the drop in frame rate isn't so bad, I was getting 170, now I only get 100, but that's ok.", well year ok for YOU, but stop and think on all the people who were managing to get by on 17 FPS, who now get 10 or less. And you wonder why many complain how bad that is, and how this threatens a platform made up mostly of people with older hardware.

 

5. Yay SLB21, woo hoo, yeah let's rush out the release build to co-inside with that.

That's such an LL thing to do, and I'm gob-struck that Bloatstorm would COPY that stupidity, just to score brownie points.

 

Apparently YOUR preferred approach would be screaming

"But... But... More armies use Soviet AK tech, therefore American troops with 5.56 mm assault rifles should only be given Soviet 5.45 mm ammo BECAUSE IT'S AN INDUSTRY STANDARD!" before wondering why, when WWIV starts, all your soldiers DIE for lack of being able to shoot BACK.

 

"Industry Standards" don't MATTER, what matters is what WORKS for the case in hand.

 

Is PBR ok in CyberPuke 77 running on a 4090? Hell yeah, will it be ok in SL running on a 1030? Not a chance in hell.

Some idiots claim the "average steam user" uses a 3060. But I saw the steam survey for GPU usage just last month, the second most popular GPU on Steam is, a 1650 at about 4 %, and 3060's make up less than 8 % of all GPU's.

 

SL needs to STOP listening to Futurreness junkies who assume their "4090 based leet gamerz" rigs are "industry standard".

 

Totes. Just like you were right about Lara X. Always right! it's everyone else who is wrong.

 

[Love Zhaoying]

34 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

Automatic probes work okayish when you're on the ground, but floating builds sometimes will fail to generate automatic probes, which means all you get is the (kind of awful) skyprobe.

And indoors on the ground, vs. outdoors on the ground? Are automatic probes effective at all indoors at ground level? 

[CaitlinParker]

Bottom line... PBR was meant for a new engine rather than the reverse-engineered, piecemeal engine that's been in place for years.

No one wanted this and no one asked for this, yet LL put it in regardless and now they'll have to hear all the negative comments about it.

LL, PBR is standard for most games today because they have engines that can actually handle it.  The engine you reverse-engineered years back for SL cannot handle PBR... period.  There's a reason why old engines can't handle today's advances in graphics and PBR for SL shows that.  It might also be the reason why it was never really implemented because whomever was working on this realized that it was going to cause serious issues, most notably the drop in FPS for every person in SL, the massive lag the mirrors cause which also results in a massive drop in FPS and possible crashing.

I hate to break it to LL, but if PBR is here to stay, then you must build a new engine that actually works with it.  Yes, people will need to upgrade or get new PCs or laptops that can accommodate PBR as it is now, but the bulk of it is engine side and the engine as it is cannot handle it.

Edited June 21 by CaitlinParker

[Nagachief Darkstone]

12 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

And indoors on the ground, vs. outdoors on the ground? Are automatic probes effective at all indoors at ground level? 

Autoprobes I've found are very hit or miss with indoor scenes, you're better off putting down probes for interiors.

1 minute ago, CaitlinParker said:

Bottom line... PBR was meant for a new engine rather than the reverse-engineered, piecemeal engine that's been in place for years.

No one wanted this and no one asked for this, yet LL put it in regardless and now they'll have to hear all the negative comments about it.

LL, PBR is standard for most games today because they have engines that can actually handle it.  The engine you reverse-engineered years back for SL cannot handle PBR... period.  There's a reason why old engines can't handle today's advances in graphics and PBR for SL shows that.  It might also be the reason why it was never really implemented because whomever was working on this realized that it was going to cause serious issues, most notably the drop in FPS for every person in SL, the massive lag the mirrors cause which also results in a massive drop in FPS and possible crashing.

I hate to break it to LL, but if PBR is here to stay, then you must build a new engine that actually works with it.

They are working on implementing the base glTF 2.0 specification, which does include major overhauls in how the renderer is structured. There's already tangible benefits in the glTF mesh project viewers, such as GPU-transformed bones vs the current meshes transformed on the CPU, which has provided a significant performance improvement in skinned gltf mesh. 

[Coffee Pancake]

5 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

They are working on implementing the base glTF 2.0 specification, which does include major overhauls in how the renderer is structured. There's already tangible benefits in the glTF mesh project viewers, such as GPU-transformed bones vs the current meshes transformed on the CPU, which has provided a significant performance improvement in skinned gltf mesh. 

I have no complaints about this part. It's entirely necessary work.

My complaint is that it's being done deliberately blind to 20 years of SL content.

If this was a game being made from scratch, the spec is a starting point that then gets handed over to the art department to make pretty with custom shaders and tweaks, which we don't and wont ever have.

SL does have an evolved art style, and this bombs us back to square one trying to make content that both fits the new normal and existing expectations, and looks good next to content made for the old system.

It's going to be a very tough transition and vast swathes of SL (like mainland) are not going to transition at all and will end up looking junk forever.

[Henri Beauchamp]

1 hour ago, Beq Janus said:

I'm not expert enough with PBR to say that, or at least there are those that know far more about it. The viewer creates ”some” reflection probes automatically, it places them where it thinks makes sense. You can see this if you open the develop menu and go to render metadata -> reflection probes. As you can see these are present but relatively sparse and if you ar on a build platform my experience has been that they are practically non-existent. A localised reflection probe covering for example, the interior of your room, would certainly be more reliable than an automatic one.

Please, see this proposal of mine for automatic probes that would be setup around objects, based on a flag on their root primitive.

[Nagachief Darkstone]

6 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

Please, see this proposal of mine for automatic probes that would be setup around objects, based on a flag on their root primitive.

This might be useful in having reliable influence points for future GI solutions. Godot's SDFGI looks promising and just needs some vague helpers to function, afaik. Signed distance field global illumination (SDFGI) — Godot Engine (stable) documentation in English

One of the big issues with the autoprobes right now is that generating one for a floating build relies on the vague 'complex enough octree' metric.

Edited June 21 by Nagachief Darkstone