Firestorm PBR Release Is Out

[BriannaLovey]

28 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Yes.. this also means content authoring from inside SL is well and truly dead and it's about time too.

 

Which means that everybody who wants to be a viable creator in SL has to verify their identity by submitting payment info now, as the minimum requirement for uploading mesh. I wouldn't be surprised if marketplace becomes restricted to approved vendors only at some point. Consequence #1.

50 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

The skeletal animation system has been overhauled to transform and skin on the GPU entirely.

And for those of us on integrated graphics? GPU acceleration is only helpful when your GPU has enough cores to do the job without competing with the rendering itself. If you have ever tried to run something like AI inference at the same time you are playing a game, you will understand what I mean. Is there no CPU fallback?

Edited July 9 by BriannaLovey

[Blush Bravin]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

If I buy a nice looking chair that uses PBR, will it look nicer if it was generated and imported using glTF scenes? How will this make a difference to me?

A quick google of 'advantages and disadvantages of gltf scenes' produced this result:

One of the key advantages of GLTF format is its efficiency. GLTF files are compact and optimized for fast loading, making them ideal for web-based applications and AR/VR experiences. This can significantly improve the user experience by reducing loading times and ensuring smooth interactions with 3D content.

That seems like something SL could use, doesn't it? Better performance. Isn't that a big part of why this thread even exists?

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Thank you @Nagachief Darkstone, @Coffee Pancake and @Blush Bravin -- thank you for these explanations: they represent (at last!) substantive, concrete, and convincing explanations of the advantages of glTF scenes.

Thanks also @Luna Bliss for the video, although @Extrude Ragu's great glTF packer does not (so far as I know, which is admittedly not much!) have anything to do with glTF scenes, and I've even used it myself, a fair bit, to produce PBR materials from Creative Commons stuff I've found online.

It does seem as though LL is playing a very long game here: I don't know what the timeline for glTF scenes is, but it's hard to imagine this having any kind of real impact on SL within the next year or two? Which maybe is a good sign: LL thinks we'll be around that long!

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Yes.. this also means content authoring from inside SL is well and truly dead and it's about time too.

I understand why you feel this, and also understand that in-world creation, or indeed creation by anyone who is a "non-professional" has its costs, measured in unoptimized mesh, lag, bad load times, poor quality items, etc. Yes, SL will undoubtedly look better and probably work better if the creation is left up to those with the specialized skills and tools to do it "properly."

I'm afraid, however, that I myself can't help but mourn what is surely another step in the direction of turning SL into two tiered, highly consumer-oriented "paradise."

The erosion of the ability of ordinary residents to produce content, laggy and crappy as it may be, also means a loss of connection and engagement with the platform for some of us. Had I not found photography as an alternate outlet for creation, I'd probably not be here anymore.

And I worry that this pushes the platform a little further down the road to becoming a giant, if very pretty, shopping mall.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

(Sorry, I'm feeling a little depressed and despondent about SL at the moment.)

[Coffee Pancake]

33 minutes ago, BriannaLovey said:

Which means that everybody who wants to be a viable creator in SL has to verify their identity by submitting payment info now

Good. We're all going to have to do that for adult content anyway.

33 minutes ago, BriannaLovey said:

And for those of us on integrated graphics?

SL is moving towards running more like a game now. Equip yourself accordingly. Business netbooks with integrated graphics were never suitable and never recommended.

This has all been testable in the Linden viewer for the last year. Not a beta, actually released, live for everyone, for a year.

As someone who works on a viewer that is often the last resort, we do aggressively performance test and go the extra mile to keep older machines running, but there will always be a cut off and that will always advance.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Duplicate posting. WTF, forums?

Edited July 9 by Scylla Rhiadra

[BriannaLovey]

2 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Good. We're all going to have to do that for adult content anyway.

SL is moving towards running more like a game now. Equip yourself accordingly. Business netbooks with integrated graphics were never suitable and never recommended.

This has all been testable in the Linden viewer for the last year. Not a beta, actually released, live for everyone, for a year.

As someone who works on a viewer that is often the last resort, we do aggressively performance test and go the extra mile to keep older machines running, but there will always be a cut off and that will always advance.

You are wasting your time by giving me advice you know I won't follow.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

This has all been testable in the Linden viewer for the last year. Not a beta, actually released, live for everyone, for a year.

If only more residents had availed themselves of the opportunity to taste test Pabst Blue Ribbon, eh?

LL did such a wonderful job of communicating this to . . . the few hundred people on this forum and the few hundred more who read the official blog posts. Oh, and the 30 or so regular attendees of UG meetings.

[BriannaLovey]

Just now, Scylla Rhiadra said:

If only more residents had availed themselves of the opportunity to taste test Pabst Blue Ribbon, eh?

LL did such a wonderful job of communicating this to . . . the few hundred people on this forum and the few hundred more who read the official blog posts. Oh, and the 30 or so regular attendees of UG meetings.

Contact me inworld, if possible. I remembered it is more productive to plan amongst ourselves than it is to try to argue with bootlickers.

[Luna Bliss]

26 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Thanks also @Luna Bliss for the video, although @Extrude Ragu's great glTF packer does not (so far as I know, which is admittedly not much!) have anything to do with glTF scenes, and I've even used it myself, a fair bit, to produce PBR materials from Creative Commons stuff I've found online.

I'm not an expert in this by any means, but I think they call it 'scenes' because:

"A glTF asset may deliver one or more scenes, including meshes, materials, textures, skins, skeletons, morph targets, animations, lights, and/or cameras".

I did read somewhere that soon we'll be able to upload an entire scene at once from Blender (like the bed, night table, lamps, rugs, chest of drawers, and chair...in one fell swoop). We're limited at the moment to a few linked objects (not sure of the limit).  But I can see how textures for such a scene could be greatly reduced by using one or two glTF files for all the items in that scene.

Edited July 9 by Luna Bliss

[Luna Bliss]

2 minutes ago, BriannaLovey said:

Contact me inworld, if possible. I remembered it is more productive to plan amongst ourselves than it is to try to argue with bootlickers.

and the name-calling begins...

[Coffee Pancake]

 

1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

If only more residents had availed themselves of the opportunity to taste test Pabst Blue Ribbon, eh?

LL did such a wonderful job of communicating this to . . . the few hundred people on this forum and the few hundred more who read the official blog posts. Oh, and the 30 or so regular attendees of UG meetings.

Realistically everyone should have the linden viewer installed as a fall back.

It's been my experience doing support that people will lie long before they do anything to help themselves.

11 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I understand why you feel this, and also understand that in-world creation, or indeed creation by anyone who is a "non-professional" has its costs, measured in unoptimized mesh, lag, bad load times, poor quality items, etc. Yes, SL will undoubtedly look better and probably work better if the creation is left up to those with the specialized skills and tools to do it "properly."

This is all about the right tool for the job.

There is a huge amount of resistance to picking up blender, but that's the level of tooling SL content requires. We're so far away from the days when anyone could rub a few prims together and call it good.

2 minutes ago, BriannaLovey said:

You are wasting your time by giving me advice you know I won't follow.

Which is why I have zero sympathy.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 minutes ago, BriannaLovey said:

Contact me inworld, if possible. I remembered it is more productive to plan amongst ourselves than it is to try to argue with bootlickers.

I would emphatically NOT call Coffee a "bootlicker." She's very happy to criticize LL, and has done so, vehemently, here many times.

What she is, is an enthusiast who comes from a particular kind of tech culture, and who has a particular vision for SL that is not, at least in many of its particulars, shared by myself -- in large measure because I come at this from a different culture.

I have every respect for Coffee's views on this, although I think her approach is exclusionary and dismissive of a really large part of SL's demographic. But I'm certainly not going to denigrate her.

[Luna Bliss]

18 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

The erosion of the ability of ordinary residents to produce content, laggy and crappy as it may be, also means a loss of connection and engagement with the platform for some of us. Had I not found photography as an alternate outlet for creation, I'd probably not be here anymore.

I think this happened with mesh, honestly. Even a few years ago many residents didn't even know what a prim was, and didn't know you could create anything on your own -- they simply bought things and assembled them.

I think there will always be important ways for engagement outside of building inworld with prims-- your photography, for example, and all the many groups doing all sorts of things.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

4 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Realistically everyone should have the linden viewer installed as a fall back.

Realistically, most people hate the LL viewer - myself among them. Earlier today, I was modifying something using it, and needed to change one part of a linked mesh set. So, I ticked "Edit Linked Parts" or whatever it's called. Does the LL build tool have arrow buttons to scroll through each of the parts in turn? No, it does not. Because . . . honestly, I don't know why it's such a crappy viewer.

Which is a shame, because in terms of performance, it is much better than FS.

None of this in any case would replace an actual communication, couched in laymen's terms, of what LL was doing, why, and how to adapt to it.

[BriannaLovey]

3 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I would emphatically NOT call Coffee a "bootlicker." She's very happy to criticize LL, and has done so, vehemently, here many times.

What she is, is an enthusiast who comes from a particular kind of tech culture, and who has a particular vision for SL that is not, at least in many of its particulars, shared by myself -- in large measure because I come at this from a different culture.

I have every respect for Coffee's views on this, although I think her approach is exclusionary and dismissive of a really large part of SL's demographic. But I'm certainly not going to denigrate her.

Maybe that is the wrong word then. I am not sure what to call someone who adores the separation of production and consumption into different castes like this.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

4 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

I think this happened with mesh, honestly. Even a few years ago many residents didn't even know what a prim was, and didn't know you could create anything on your own -- they simply bought things and assembled them.

I think there will always be important ways for engagement outside of building inworld with prims-- your photography, for example, and all the many groups doing all sorts of things.

Oh, this is without question true. The introduction of mesh has obviously been an enormous boon in many ways to SL, but there has been a price. The introduction, first of PBR, and now of glTF scenes, is just nudging us further down that road.

And yes, those who need a creative outlet will find a new one. Within SL, or elsewhere.

[Luna Bliss]

1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

And yes, those who need a creative outlet will find a new one. Within SL, or elsewhere.

Create to your hearts content with sculpts and prims -- it just won't sell as well. The creative outlet is still there if you like to build.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

7 minutes ago, BriannaLovey said:

Maybe that is the wrong word then. I am not sure what to call someone who adores the separation of production and consumption into different castes like this.

I think most people feel this way about their own particular niches. Great cooks denigrate those who use frozen veggies. Professional writers harp on about the use of stock phrases and cliches. And people with a techie background don't get why everyone doesn't understand what they understand, and tend to denigrate the work of the amateur. It's not exclusive to Coffee, or to techies. You should see the look on the faces of some of my colleagues when a non-academic uses the word "Deconstruction" to mean "taking something apart."

Edited July 9 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Create to your hearts content with sculpts and prims -- it just won't sell as well. The creative outlet is still there if you like to build.

The point isn't so much that there aren't other outlets for creativity.

It's that creativity is no longer, as it once truly was, embedded within the culture of SL. Now, we go shopping instead.

[Luna Bliss]

7 minutes ago, BriannaLovey said:

Maybe that is the wrong word then. I am not sure what to call someone who adores the separation of production and consumption into different castes like this.

I like the idea of everyone having the chance to participate in the economy should they choose to do so. However an economy requires a willing consumer, and the consumers have chosen what they want -- high quality content.

[BriannaLovey]

6 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Create to your hearts content with sculpts and prims -- it just won't sell as well. The creative outlet is still there if you like to build.

And if it doesn't sell well, it will not appear inworld nearly as frequently. The stuff that sells will be the stuff occupying all the sims we visit. It isn't just about our own creativity.

At least with mesh we could delink it, recolor it, and do many other things with it. It sounds as if glTF scenes will be completely prefabricated, with no option of modifying them inworld. Sansar didn't go very well, and neither will Sansar 2.0 here.

Edited July 9 by BriannaLovey

[Luna Bliss]

2 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

6 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Create to your hearts content with sculpts and prims -- it just won't sell as well. The creative outlet is still there if you like to build.

The point isn't so much that there aren't other outlets for creativity.

It's that creativity is no longer, as it once truly was, embedded within the culture of SL. Now, we go shopping instead.

You have a point...that mindset seems to have lessened. In the early days it was exciting just to rez a prim and see it manifest with a cool sound (I remember being shocked at this in a building class).

However, personally, I found ways to be creative in ways I never believed possible in addition to building. I think others can find 'their way' too.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Just now, Luna Bliss said:

You have a point...that mindset seems to have lessened. In the early days it was exciting just to rez a prim and see it manifest with a cool sound (I remember being shocked at this in a building class).

However, personally, I found ways to be creative in ways I never believed possible in addition to building. I think others can find 'their way' too.

Oh, I'll NEVER forget, sometime in my second or third week, watching someone build a waterfall from scratch.

It felt like magic.

[Luna Bliss]

7 minutes ago, BriannaLovey said:

And if it doesn't sell well, it will not appear inworld nearly as frequently. The stuff that sells will be the stuff occupying all the sims we visit. It isn't just about our own creativity.

I think you're defining "our own" too narrowly. Sure there's some big companies shoveling stuff into SL who aren't truly part of the community. But many mesh creators are part of the community.