Is Lindenlab choosing a doomed path for SL ? Tell us if the EEP and PBR introduction changed the way you play SL

[Istelathis]

12 minutes ago, BriannaLovey said:

 

Antiviruses, while providing some (possibly false) sense of security towards their users, act as a protection racket against developers. It is explained here a little: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393698

The firestorm team doesn't pay the protection fee, so no nobody can run their viewer correctly without clicking arcane (to them) settings in their computer.

If you are a Firestorm (or other viewer like this) user and you never want to deal with this ever again, your only options are to switch to a viewer with signed executables, disable your antivirus completely, or install Linux.

They all have got to get their pound of flesh somehow or another 🤣😢 

 

Edited June 25 by Istelathis

[Jase Devin]

White Listing works, cause they don't register Firestorm with the proper MS Channels.

So you are downloading texture after texture because thats what sl is, a bunch of textures, then your antivirus has pull double duty and scan everything. Its bad enough to download and thrash the harddrive and store all these textures in cache but then they all have to be scanned.

Anyway it works very well to whitelist and can be found here how to: https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/antivirus_whitelisting

[Aethelwine]

I am not going to quote anyone but I have seen argument come up on here that it is the responsibility of users to fix problems they are encountering with the way things look. I strongly disagree, responsibility for setting EEPS rests with the landowner. Photographers will want to play with them too but the rest of us deserve at least a half decent experience without applying overrides. In particular Linden Lab has been running this for 6 months and mainland EEPs especially with regard to water are ugly and from what I understand from one of Henri's comments - broken.

With regard to performance it is hard for me to compare, but I don't think the settings Firestorm recommended through their automated process help, if the first thing people have to do is dial the settings back.

[JUSTUS Palianta]

https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/antivirus_whitelisting

That seems like a ridiculous amount of work just to make SL go!

[Cristiano Midnight]

Just now, JUSTUS Palianta said:

https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/antivirus_whitelisting

That seems like a ridiculous amount of work just to make SL go!

It is adding 4 or 5 things to exclusions. Firestorm works without it, but your AV may cause a performance hit.

[Coffee Pancake]

2 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

This should not be catching people by surprise. And there should be well-publicized, intelligently written guidance for people, providing exactly the kind of advice many of us have been giving here, written in simple layperson's language.

And the onus for THAT lies with LL. At this point, watching this unfold here and in-world, I am increasingly pissed off at LL that they have made absolutely minimal efforts to communicate or inform or guide people. In essence, 90% of what we're seeing here is about information, not about computer specs, and the provision of that information would have avoided what has essentially become a kind of PR disaster. LL should have seen this coming, and either didn't, or decided that we, the users, could bear the brunt.

Either way, I'm beyond annoyed at them. They should have foreseen this, could have prevented much of it, and apparently just couldn't be arsed.

There was.

It was published a year ago when PBR launched and everyone refused point blank to even try and look at it.

We have been shouting from the roof tops - Try PBR in the Linden viewer !! .. "no".

Everyone has sat on their hands, refused to even look, refused to give feedback, refused to even see if their hardware was up to snuff.

"Lets all wait for Firestorm to fix it." .. NO PRESSURE .. and Linden get annoyed because it's taken months, and everyone else is annoyed because somehow Firestorm didn't in fact "fix it". People are still sat on their hands refusing because maybe Firestorm will fix it next release.

This was predictable. I was shouting about how this was going to go months ago and .. getting hate for it.

 

The best part, the absolute best part .. those users who have been running SL with ALM disabled because their potato PC couldn't run that, and just kept plugging away are also upset. They have had a decade, a straight decade to figure something out.

 

 

 

Edited June 25 by Coffee Pancake

[SarahKB7 Koskinen]

I will be ditching Firestorm viewer forever if PBR and ALM is not made optional.  This isn't a threat, but a promise.

I already ditched LL viewer long ago. There's plenty of other viewers out there...

Edited June 25 by SarahKB7 Koskinen

[Cristiano Midnight]

2 minutes ago, SarahKB7 Koskinen said:

I will be ditching Firestorm viewer forever if PBR and ALM is not made optional.  This isn't a threat, but a promise. I already ditched LL viewer long ago. There's plenty of other viewers out there...

So why not use them?

[SarahKB7 Koskinen]

I already do.  Firestorm has some stuff in it that "other viewers" don't/can't do the same, or better.  Firestorm is just one of several viewers I use and would be sad and annoyed to lose it because of the PBR/ALM issues I have with it.

Edited June 25 by SarahKB7 Koskinen

[Dorientje Woller]

Scratches my head, same settings in the official SL viewer and FireStorm, in the exact same place with camera pointed at the back as you log in, even same windlight: in the SL viewer around 130 fps and in the FireStorm around 70 fps.

Edited June 25 by Dorientje Woller

[BilliJo Aldrin]

4 hours ago, Irina Forwzy said:

Here's the facts:  last time SL decided to update to expand LL''s enterprise and push people to a more modernized platform without any consideration to inventory and specs it resulted in a massive failure that had to be sold off: Sansar.

The introduction of mesh was a success, yes but partially because it took a longer time to evolve and it wasn't a complete change in the viewer.  Therefore in order for LL to make this a success they have to slow down the older viewer login blocks.  Instead of 2 years for a viewer to be phased out make it 3 years.

Do incremental changes to PBR to improve performance and visual stability.  They also need to have more training toward the end users. This isn't something where you can just choose to buy an old item or one made out of mesh with advanced lightning model. This is you having to adapt to a complete change to the texturing process and how everything looks.

If you want the game to survive, you don't want to push out everyone that has older pcs. Many of those are contributing FINANCIALLY to the game on a monthly basis.  While the newer one that may have splurged 5K in a gaming computer may not be able to afford or even want to put that much money into the game.   You want to be able to retain and add, not add to then throw out the old retainment.

When LL tried to do that with Sansar and indicated that we couldn't pull our older inventory over what happened?  The only ones that were for it were the vendors because that meant they were going to get revenue from the extra purchases. The regular people did not jump into the idea and it was a failure. The new customers weren't enough.

This isn't just about morality, ethics, etc. This is about knowing your financial model and understanding that you can't go and overall it completely and risk a user base that's already paying into the platform from altogether leaving.  Mesh by the way was a success, but it's debatable as well considering there were more people in SL pre-mesh and more vendors.

Sansar failed because of what it was designed to be: a place for YOU to create your own virtual world.

LL never planed to host another place like Second Life.

Once people realized that, they stayed away in droves.

Second Life users are not here for the pretty, they are here for the social aspects.

That's why you will never get the gamers in here, because SL isn't a game you can play to rack up points and "win".

[Scylla Rhiadra]

43 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

There was.

What, this?

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/PBR_Materials#Removal_of_Advanced_Lighting_Model_.28_ALM_.29_Graphics_Option

You're not serious, surely. That entire page devotes exactly this to ameliorating the effects of the new viewer on performance:

Quote

For those users on lower-end hardware who depended heavily upon those options to navigate Second Life with an acceptable framerate, we recommend the following settings:

• Transparent Water: Disabled
• Screen Space Ambient Occlusion: Disabled
• Shadows: None
• Screen Space Reflections: Disabled
• Reflection Detail: Static Only
• Reflection Coverage: Manual only

And that wasn't there at first.

This is a page full of mostly technobabble written almost exclusively for creators. A "layperson's guide" to PBR and how it will impact on users it emphatically is not.

And where's the info on EEP and how to fix those now that PBR has effectively broken about half of them?

43 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

We have been shouting from the roof tops - Try PBR in the Linden viewer !! .. "no".

Who is "we"? People on this forum? What rooftops have you been shouting from?

No one here, or even in the TPV groups, has anything like the reach that LL has. This is a HUGELY important change to the viewers, and LL has made more effort publicizing Shop N Hop than they have what that change means, and how its impact can be reduced.

 

43 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

users who have been running SL with ALM disabled because their potato PC couldn't run that, and just kept plugging away are also upset. They have had a decade, a straight decade to figure something out.

The users who have been running all this time without ALM -- and I'm actually one of them, unless I was taking a pic or had some special reason to turn it on -- were doing so because performance mattered more to them than pretty graphics.

And for a great many of those complaining about PBR, that's still their priority. They don't care that we can now see our faces reflected in the kitchen kettle. They want to go places where lots of people are without seeing their screens reduced to a slide show.

(The irony is, of course, that SL doesn't look better now for most people. And those who have to dial back their settings because of PBR are going to get one that looks worse than ever.)

 

Edited June 25 by Scylla Rhiadra
Fixed a word the censor didn't like. And forgot link.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

6 minutes ago, Dorientje Woller said:

Scratches my head, same settings in the official SL viewer and FireStorm, in the exact same place with camera pointed at the back as you log in, even same windlight: in the SL viewer around 130 fps and in the FireStorm around 70 fps.

Yes, my experience also. Firestorm has always been laggier than the LL viewer, but it's even more pronounced now.

[Randy Pole]

Adult regions, windlight, mesh, voice etc. etc. etc. - all things that people said would be the end of Second Life. Yet it is still here.

We adapt and change.

Trust me looking back at how things used to be is looking through some very thick rose tinted glasses - we were UGLY!!!!

The viewer and server code gets updated to keep things relevant - not to keep things how they were 10 or 20 years ago.

[Cristiano Midnight]

15 minutes ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

 

That's why you will never get the gamers in here, because SL isn't a game you can play to rack up points and "win".

There has always been an overlap between SL and gaming. A lot of people in SL also play games… MMOs, Fortnite, etc. Also, gamers always try to find a way to fornicate in games. SL has limitless adult content, which is a draw. 

[Rick Nightingale]

3 hours ago, BriannaLovey said:

Antiviruses, while providing some (possibly false) sense of security towards their users, act as a protection racket against developers.

Agreed! They are like those website protection rackets that list your website, public IP address or even email server as 'potentially malicious' and block you, until you join their scheme or jump though countless hoops. Been there, done that, too many times. Even one of the hardware firewall vendors (stuff costing thousands) used to do it, blatantly. And Cloudflare is a pain with its faulty and largely worthless geolocation blocking that they won't even discuss with people they have wrongly blocked from the Internet.

I haven't trusted or  used any installed AV product in over twelve years, on any of my many PCs (I currently have six PCs plus three Raspberry Pis, all of which can be turned on and accessed remotely from my living room chair, plus three laptops for travel). That includes completely disabling it in Windows 10, and my Windows 11 test system. In all that time I've not had an infection (and yes, I do know that) and it's not like I don't get around the Internet to some shady places!

I was sick of AV hogging system resources, causing no end of problems (Norton was practically sabotage-level malware in itself!), and just getting in the way. And being expensive for things I didn't really trust anyway.

The final straw was when I got a trojan-infected file (a RAT (Remote Access Trojan) from a legitimate source that had been hacked). The download, subsequent installation, and even running it didn't trip the AV (Symantec Professional version that my employers used; supposedly the best). So much for real-time protection and download scanning.

Even pointing the AV at the file I manually found the RAT in didn't work. Out of curiosity, I tried it in a sandboxed VM with Microsoft's AV and that didn't pick it up either.

The only thing that saved me was my personal firewall; something I've often been told by people is pointless and all I need is AV. The firewall kicked off and alerted me the instant the trojan tried to get out onto the Internet.

The solution to the malware infection just in case it was also a virus... a system restore from a backup, which are taken regularly because that's the only real protection there is from malware, system failures, random corruption, etc.

I wouldn't be without a personal firewall. It's the first thing to go on after a fresh OS install. Other than that I simply practice good 'Internet Hygiene'. Nothing unknown gets installed without first checking it out in a sandbox and/or VirusTotal. My systems are periodically offline-scanned for malware - i.e. when I can be bothered or if something seems not right; nothing has ever been found.

Edit: that was a bit of a rant essay, wasn't it? I guess I'm a bit bored, sitting here right now watching two CCTV feeds from our garden because I'm hunting a furrier variety of RAT right now... cocked and locked...

 

Edited June 25 by Rick Nightingale

[Modulated]

FS support a bit ago, a mod hinted at an update coming soonish to address some things. They are starting to fast walk the releases I think to get the non pbr versions out of support. Honestly I am wondering at this point if a cleaving of non pbr viewers altogether would have been the better thing to do in the first place instead of this gentle push into obsolescence -just do it and get it over with. Everyone on the same page, better or worse.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 minute ago, Modulated said:

Honestly I am wondering at this point if a cleaving of non pbr viewers altogether would have been the better thing to do in the first place instead of this gentle push into obsolescence -just do it and get it over with. Everyone on the same page, better or worse.

I think that this is very much LL's attitude: rip off the band aid right away.

Pretty much every part of this rollout has been intended to force PBR on the grid -- they want this to happen, and the sooner the better, possibly because their future developments rely upon a universal use of forward rendering?

[Nagachief Darkstone]

Something I want to point out is that, conservatively, the average polycount your PC has to render in a club is around 10-15 million per frame. In more popular or detailed clubs, you're likely going to push ~50% more than that. That is an insane scene budget for even a modern AAA game to shoot for. LL is basically having to work miracles in making user content be performant.

PBR is still in its early stages, there's likely some improvements still being worked on that would help some users. For example, this pull request from the public SL Github: #1831 Fix for redundantly rebuilding bounding boxes forever by RunitaiLinden · Pull Request #1832 · secondlife/viewer (github.com) This one in particular in some cases can double FPS in testing.

[Sid Nagy]

On 6/24/2024 at 7:08 PM, Love Zhaoying said:

I think we should refer to all those threatening to leave / flounce, as the "Suicide Squad"!

 

It should not be seen as threatening to leave IMHO.
People express their feelings. Announcing is a far better word.
When someone says things like: "LL will have to take PBR back or I and a bunch of friends will storm the Trump Tower in New York",  that is threatening.

The new situation is for many people an evaluation point. Where do I stand at the moment?  Are new investments in time and or money still worth it for me? Do I like SL enough to go trough the hassle of learning new things?
All valid questions that can be discussed, without calling it threatening, if the outcome for some is, that they likely will leave.

If I did not have a premium account until next April, I would most likely call it a day. I'm so not into learning to jump trough new hoops at the moment. That is not threatening, it is just how I feel at this moment.
It is a good thing that the Lab invests in improvements. But it is a good thing for everyone to overthink what these improvements mean for one personally. Without being linked to a video like this.

Edited June 25 by Sid Nagy

[Modulated]

1 hour ago, SarahKB7 Koskinen said:

I will be ditching Firestorm viewer forever if PBR and ALM is not made optional.  This isn't a threat, but a promise. I already ditched LL viewer long ago. There's plenty of other viewers out there...

Better find a replacement now, because it's not going to happen pretty much-and LL seems all in with pbr now.

[BilliJo Aldrin]

New sign for my place

[BilliJo Aldrin]

54 minutes ago, Cristiano Midnight said:

There has always been an overlap between SL and gaming. A lot of people in SL also play games… MMOs, Fortnite, etc. Also, gamers always try to find a way to fornicate in games. SL has limitless adult content, which is a draw. 

yea, but are there sex pose balls in those other games? It's all text based when it happens

[Marianne Little]

8 hours ago, Irina Forwzy said:

For you it's too bright, for me everything looks super dark. What i have that's PBR looks immensely dark and it doesn't matter what windlight I change to, it's like the PBR pieces are living in the film Dark City or I'm in Gotham.

Use World- Enviroment- and set it to "Midday". Not "Midday Legacy".

It looks surprisingly fine. Better than Midday before PBR.

If you have bought Battlescars enviroment packs, they have included PBR from February 2024, and also updated some packs from 2023.

They are named "PBR for Black Dragon and Alchemy" since they were made before Firestorm released a PBR viewer, but they look fine in the Default SL viewer and Firestorm. "- BATTLESCARS WL - CLOUDS - COMMERCIAL NATURE 4.0 ( EEP ) (PBR)" has some good, light ones.

[BilliJo Aldrin]

Just had a thought, will pbr textures be used for skins? Will I soon see plywood avatars everywhere?

That will be even funnier that the box head and donut hole avatars I used to see before I finally installed a mesh capable viewer 😂

And they say SL doesn't keep getting better and better 😆