I have used PBR in landscaping, and hated it

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

10 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

I mean I'll be honest, I have no real feelings about Sansar one way or the other. 

It's an interesting place to explore and build. Land is FREE

Sansar (gyazo.com)

 

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

Just now, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

I think had it been easier for SL creators to get up and running there initially, it could have ben great. I still think it's great but there's about .01% of the content for sale on their marketplace.

HOWEVER there's plans to make to make it more attaractive for people to sell there, they will be taking much less of a cut. That may already be happening now

 

Wait, it's still running?

I honestly thought it had closed down already!  Hopefully it'll keep chugging along a while longer until I get a new PC and I can actually get around to trying it.

I actually have my eye on another "virtual world" start-up that's still in early alpha but looks promising.  It's a different concept to SL but still could be fun to play around with.  As technologies evolve there are going to be more and more little startups that, while they may not be direct competition for SL, will nevertheless start eroding SLs user-base as an increasing number of platforms that are tailored to specific communities and activities are launched.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 minute ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

Wait, it's still running?

I honestly thought it had closed down already!  Hopefully it'll keep chugging along a while longer until I get a new PC and I can actually get around to trying it.

Nope, it's still running, last I looked Steam said it's concurrent users figure was...

15.

 

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

2 minutes ago, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

It's an interesting place to explore and build. Land is FREE

Sansar (gyazo.com)

 

Yeah the lighting alone blows SL away (SL lighting has always been pretty bad and the latest iteration really isn't a great improvement, I was pretty disappointed upon seeing it for the first time).

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

35 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

Yeah the lighting alone blows SL away

It's *****ing fantastic and very fun and easy to play with and add to your worlds. 

Edited June 21 by Ingrid Ingersoll

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

Just now, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Nope, it's still running, last I looked Steam said it's concurrent users figure was...

15.

 

Hmm, well as a person who deals with social phobia that's a few more people than I usually like to deal with, but I guess they probably aren't all gathered in the welcome area waiting to jump me so I should be okay?! 😟

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

5 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

Wait, it's still running?

Yes, all 26 of us are still in there building away. We even have a discord.

[Codex Alpha]

7 minutes ago, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

It's *****ing fantastic and very fun and easy to play with and add to your worlds. 

One wonders why with such free land (and affordable tier promised in the future), that many creators didn't flock over there just for the 'amazing graphics', and 'pbr' that they scream about here.... perhaps they are more motivated by $$$ than anything else as a factor.  So now here they are.. trying to get the same thing, but will have to update and possibly retexture their goods anyway to stay in the game...

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

2 minutes ago, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

Yes, all 26 of us are still in there building away. We even have a discord.

That actually sounds pretty chill!

The size of the user base/population of a platform is rarely my primary motivation for being there. I don't tend to go out and socialize a lot in SL, most of my interactions are via IM while standing around on my own.  Based on my experiences on the occasions I have ventured out to areas where there are other people SL seems to have become a pretty insular place.  I haven't had a store or sold any content in over a decade and am perfectly happy just creating things for my amusement and sharing them with friends so being on the platform with the most "potential customers" is definitely not a contributing factor.

I suspect my main reason for sticking around in SL is a weird and twisted sense of loyalty after being here for nearly 20 years (or maybe it's just Stockholm syndrome? 🤔).

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

7 minutes ago, Codex Alpha said:

One wonders why with such free land (and affordable tier promised in the future), that many creators didn't flock over there just for the 'amazing graphics', and 'pbr' that they scream about here.... perhaps they are more motivated by $$$ than anything else as a factor.  

When LL owned Sansar, they took 60% or some retarded amount from sales from items on the marketplace. Content creators decided it wasn't worth it. I have a few items that Apple Fall sells on their marketplace, and I cherish them haha. New ownership and that % has changed.

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

5 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

I suspect my main reason for sticking around in SL is a weird and twisted sense of loyalty after being here for nearly 20 years (or maybe it's just Stockholm syndrome? 🤔).

I hear you.

[Dorientje Woller]

1 minute ago, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

When LL owned Sansar, they took 60% or some retarded amount from sales from items on the marketplace. Content creators decided it wasn't worth it. I have a few items that Apple Fall sells on their marketplace, and I cherish them haha. New ownership and that % has changed.

Other problem of Sansar was that we couldn't use our lindens overthere.

[Codex Alpha]

6 minutes ago, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

When LL owned Sansar, they took 60% or some retarded amount from sales from items on the marketplace. Content creators decided it wasn't worth it. I have a few items that Apple Fall sells on their marketplace, and I cherish them haha. New ownership and that % has changed.

My argument was "66% of 0 is 0". For the creative type, those who want to build worlds, Sansar was a good start. They could easily upload items using PBR workflow, and make a few bucks. That was just their excuse (mostly by SL users) why they wouldn't adopt it - 'my $$$$$!'..  The fact is many here saw it as competition anyway to their business in SL, and SL itself, so they worked to destroying it any chance they got.

So now they will do the same thing here, it's funny. Now they have to retool anyway - again.. on an old engine not suited for purpose. If the PBR takes off here, those same creators will have to upgrade anyway.. poetic justice

Edited June 21 by Codex Alpha

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

3 minutes ago, Codex Alpha said:

The fact is many here saw it as competition anyway to their business in SL, and SL itself, so they worked to destroying it any chance they got.

Yeah I never understood that. I made a Sansar account as soon as I could. And still login fairly regularly to build words with items I've scoured from their marketplace and socialize with the tiny community there. It has kind of a sl beta feel.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

1 minute ago, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

6 minutes ago, Codex Alpha said:

The fact is many here saw it as competition anyway to their business in SL, and SL itself, so they worked to destroying it any chance they got.

Yeah I never understood that. I made a Sansar account as soon as I could. And still login fairly regularly to build words with items I've scoured from their marketplace and socialize with the tiny community there. It has kind of a sl beta feel.

The obvious objections of LL splitting their time and resources between two platforms instead of concentrating on SL was a big factor, but I've always suspected that another element to it (and why SL residents seem hostile to almost any other platform that springs up) is because a lot of people feel that SL was "the first" virtual world (apparently they all forgot about IMVU, etc), and that any other worlds that follow must automatically be competitors.

Of course that's completely silly and there's nothing stopping any of us from joining as many different platforms as we like, but then people are just weirdly tribal sometimes and since SL has been continually shunned by the wider gaming community over the years it almost feels like some SL residents have developed this "us vs every other game/platform/etc" mentality and consider those who talk about jumping ship to other platforms as traitors.  Like I said, it's all very weird and tribal.

[RicDelMoro]

What I feel : LindenLab is often trying to satisfy the SL photographers, mainly because those users are an important part of SL's livelihood. Those users are literally "poseurs", they mostly gave up to interact ( and they have their good reasons  ), they just want now likes in Flickr and others platforms. First we had  the EEP ( which has already caused great annoyance ), now  the PBR .It looks like Lindenlab is giving up on gameplay and admitting his failure to make SL a truly interactive game : "Look guys, the SL is bad for parties, but it's great for photos". 
Who defends these complications like EEP and PBR saying that they are more modern is mistaken,because any simulator exists to fool the brain using visual tricks, but without ruining the gameplay.
Firestorm is just trying to adapt to the system, and I bet most of the TPVs people are hating Lindelab for it.
So despite 21 years of life, we'll see if SL can withstand the impact of dubious decisions once again ( Maybe yes, because whoever has stayed in SL to this day is a loyal and stubborn type of user ).  My hope is  the developers of TPVs can overcome Lindelab's mischiefs .

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

6 minutes ago, RicDelMoro said:

What I feel : ...

I feel that you should probably avoid copying and pasting the same rant in multiple threads on this forum because some folks may find that annoying...

(feel free to see my response to you posting the exact same thing in a different thread a few moments ago if you'd like to know my thoughts on taking your frustrations out on people by calling them names).

[Codex Alpha]

31 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

The obvious objections of LL splitting their time and resources between two platforms instead of concentrating on SL was a big factor, but I've always suspected that another element to it (and why SL residents seem hostile to almost any other platform that springs up) is because a lot of people feel that SL was "the first" virtual world (apparently they all forgot about IMVU, etc), and that any other worlds that follow must automatically be competitors.

Of course that's completely silly and there's nothing stopping any of us from joining as many different platforms as we like, but then people are just weirdly tribal sometimes and since SL has been continually shunned by the wider gaming community over the years it almost feels like some SL residents have developed this "us vs every other game/platform/etc" mentality and consider those who talk about jumping ship to other platforms as traitors.  Like I said, it's all very weird and tribal.

Pretty much that is at the core. For me, I can enjoy multiple platforms each for what they are - which ALL have pros and cons, but for me Sansar was finally a place where there was NO constraints on creativity, no LI limits, no land costs, and an engine that was specifically engineered for the PBR workflow everyone here (claimed) to want. So this is very interesting to me to see how it plays out here.

My viewers have seemed to calm down with the thrashing now, maybe earlier when I installed it need to reload everything so was super slow.. but now I can walk around. The PBR looks like poop and has added a blue haze to everything - but I can allow for that to be worked out - but bad FPS and lag cannot be abided. So maybe I put my suitcase back in the closet for now and see.

[Cackle Amore]

On 6/19/2024 at 6:44 AM, Sid Nagy said:

Give kids a new toy and they play all the time with it.
Same with PBR I guess.

But in the end it is just an effect for in the toolbox, to reach a specific goal. It should not be the star of a build or a selling point.
Just like, glow, bling, lightning, normal.... use it sparsely and carefully and we will be all good in the end IMHO.

Do I use normal in my builds? Yes. For every texture? No.
Same goes with glow and lightning and I will use PBR the same way. But first I wait until all the mainstream viewers have it and then I'll start carefully to experiment with it. When I do it the right way, customers will never know that I use it.
When they notice, the effect is used most likely way to strong than.

You don't even need to completely fill out a PBR material for what it's worth.

Can still have a single texture in it. That's what I did with some grass I made recently. It's just the base texture with the metal set to 0 and double sided turned on.

[Holluschickie]

PBR is great: I look like a cartoon character with full brightness, and the new lighting model, that I can't switch off gives me extreme contrasts! Also, the new PBR "grass" looks like a wonderful ocean. (Just will have to paint new materials for all the other stuff I own).

[animats]

10 hours ago, Beq Janus said:

  @animats has been complaining about the overly dark mainland EEP since...well EEP.

True.

With PBR, which stands for Physically Based Rendering, the idea is that you are supposed to use real-world values for illumination. Then, if you want camera effects, they are applied at the camera, as "tone mapping". Each user can have different camera effects, but everyone is supposed to see the same lighting and materials.

SL is about halfway there on this. Lights in PBR still don't have actual illumination levels, as defined in the glTF spec.

Light intensity is specified in glTF as

• point and spot lights use luminous intensity in candela (lumens/square radian)
• directional lights use illuminance in lux (lumens/m²)

These seem obscure, but the general idea is that, for a point light, 1.0 candela is the light from a standard candle. A sphere is 4π square radians. A classic 100 watt incandescent bulb puts out about 1600 lumens, or about 128 candela. So that gives a sense of real-world numbers.

SL doesn't do this yet. There are all those legacy lights. It would probably work out OK if old SL light intensities of 0..1 were mapped to 0 to 100 candela. So the default old SL lamp would be equivalent to a 75 watt light bulb. That's easy to understand.

Allow users to set higher light intensity values, maybe up to 10x that. You might want spotlights on a stage.  Super-bright lights can be a griefing problem, just as in RL. I've seen this in another virtual world. Someone had a sun-brightness point light at ground level, and if it was in your field of view, the screen went white. So an upper limit is reasonable.

The only directional lights in SL are the sun and moon. The intensity of bright sunlight is around 100,000 lux. This is huge compared to light bulbs. But the PBR renderer can handle that. Intensity within the renderer has a wider range that 0..1, which is what "high dynamic range" rendering means. The sun should wipe out almost all other lights. Then the "tone mapping" just before display maps everything into what the display can handle.

If PBR/glTF is done that way, as should happen as glTF loading gets going, then lighting is less of a matter of opinion and more about matching real life. That's a key point of glTF. The test scenes look much the same in everybody's renderer.

Camera filtering and tone mapping is a user preference. There are users bothered by the changing intensity of tone mapping as you go from a dark place to a bright place. That's trying to match the auto-iris feature of the human eye. So a flatter tone-mapping setting is useful as an "accessibility" feature.

Here are some night scenes, rendered with Firestorm 7.1.9, but not prepped with PBR materials.

Port Babbage at midnight. It does have the feel of a Victorian city at night.

Animats HQ in Vallone. This has many lights. More of them are on with the PBR renderer.

Existing night scenes are translating well.

 

 

Edited June 22 by animats

[Zalificent Corvinus]

2 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

The obvious objections of LL splitting their time and resources between two platforms instead of concentrating on SL was a big factor, but I've always suspected that another element to it (and why SL residents seem hostile to almost any other platform that springs up) is because a lot of people feel that SL was "the first" virtual world (apparently they all forgot about IMVU, etc), and that any other worlds that follow must automatically be competitors.

Sansar's lack of appeal to SecondLifers was far simpler than that.

 

"Dear Customers,

We've decided to leave SL to rot in maintenance mode for the foreseeable future, while using it as a cash cow to finance Sansar, a platform with no clear idea of who it's for or what they are supposed to do there, except not be smutty.

Nothing you have in SL will carry over, not your inventory, your avatar, your account name, your L$ balance, or any of your content creation skills, including LSL scripting.

We intend this VR ONLY platform to be entirely GEEK FREE, despite VR being GEEK ONLY, unlike SL which is full of Geeks, so most of you are not welcome there anyway.

Sansar will use c# as its scripting language, rather than LSL, because some clueless numpty told us it was fashionable amongst people under 30, even though it has NONE of the bespoke functions needed to connect it to a virtual world, unlike LSL.

But fear not! We won't be closing SL down as long as there are cash cows to be milked to pay for Sansar!

PS. Also, Sansar lets me give a job as overpaid VP For Nothing Of Any Importance, to my son!

 

Flub Linden Chief Execufail"

 

That is what killed Sansar's almost non existing appeal for most SecondLifers.

 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

The obvious objections of LL splitting their time and resources between two platforms instead of concentrating on SL was a big factor, but I've always suspected that another element to it (and why SL residents seem hostile to almost any other platform that springs up) is because a lot of people feel that SL was "the first" virtual world (apparently they all forgot about IMVU, etc), and that any other worlds that follow must automatically be competitors.

Of course that's completely silly and there's nothing stopping any of us from joining as many different platforms as we like, but then people are just weirdly tribal sometimes and since SL has been continually shunned by the wider gaming community over the years it almost feels like some SL residents have developed this "us vs every other game/platform/etc" mentality and consider those who talk about jumping ship to other platforms as traitors.  Like I said, it's all very weird and tribal.

I'm by no means trashing Sansar, but the reason it didn't appeal to me is that it felt more like a series of very nice looking stage sets or backdrops than a world.

Edited June 22 by Scylla Rhiadra
Typo

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

Just now, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I'm by no means trashing Sansar, but they reason it didn't appeal to me is that it felt more like a series of very nice looking stage sets or backdrops than a world.

I think that's likely to be true of most newer virtual worlds that try to utilize the latest game engine features, simply because the gigantic contiguous world we have in SL just isn't as easily optimized and will always run into the same performance issues (until such time as more powerful hardware becomes commonplace or someone comes up with a really clever solution for how to create a sprawling landscape full of random content).

There are some novel approaches that have been tried, including one that was mentioned earlier, instancing.  I'm not sure it's something that would ever be possible to implement in SL at this late stage, but if one were developing a new virtual world platform it's definitely one way to allow users to haphazardly scatter unoptimized content around their personal spaces without it having a negative impact on performance for other users.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

6 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

one that was mentioned earlier, instancing

Instancing might be useful for busy events, as thats the main use for it in MMO's

multiple copies of the "traders market" map, 30 users per instance.

 

But in SL, while it might be handy for shopping events, or those tedious townhall meetings of listening to Lindens giving speeches, the use suggested in this thread was as is always the case from that poster "delete the homes of anyone who won't let me trespass in them, and exile the home owners off the grid! so i can trespass where their home used to be", and as long as that's the proposed use, the answer is "Oh HELL NO"