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

[Rick Nightingale]

24 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

On the other hand, there has been a huge upsurge in people buying PBR materials since the weekend.

I put just one on the MP that I made for myself, a few months back. Didn't even except it to sell but it's been flying out the door since 30 minutes after I listed it!

[Extrude Ragu]

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

This rings similarly to your quote from 2011 that Mesh would not succeed.

Ah, that explains a lot!

[Vivienne Schell]

2 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I'm not telling you that.  I'm not a part of your argument. I'm just pointing out the illogic in your statement.

However, there are users here in the Forum, who created free tools for creating PBR materials by combining individual files.  So, if such tools were made available to those who "create textures", then they COULD create PBR textures.

This rings similarly to your quote from 2011 that Mesh would not succeed.

 

2011: 50000 sims

2024: 24000 sims

Big success!

[Codex Alpha]

6 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I just wondered as it seemed mostly creator and developers who are trying to convince everyone that they should be ok with the forced update.

I really don't know why any particular speaker is for or against something here, as they don't usually back it up with any reasoning. So far I just see elitism, instead of understanding, and trying to find solutions.

For me, as a creator(if I bother continuing), I care about my stuff looking as intended, and not having to change my workflow specifically for SL - so far I didn't have to, after figuring out how I'd convert from PBR to SPC, but like I said, it's an end-user issue.
FFS, I never heard of EEP nor had any reason to use it, as I don't run sims. So most of us are at their mercy. no probes, no EEP,  set up correctly - why would I put up PBR stuff when it could just garner complaints and low ratings?

[Qie Niangao]

50 minutes ago, Cristiano Midnight said:

People can continue to use the previous version of Firestorm, and other viewers. Why would you leave now?

Yeah, the "why now" question makes me wonder why the sky must be falling this very moment. There are these other options right now, and at least one (CoolVL Viewer) that seems will be around until every last user relents to ALM.

Meanwhile, you never know. Maybe a properly configured PC will fall from the sky. Or the Mobile viewer will hit General Availability* and then who needs a computer? Maybe we'll eventually do the Lab's job for them again and write up the user guide for getting the most from PBR with the least hardware impact.

Maybe they'll even further optimize the code, although… for all the talk about how this viewer must not be optimized because it uses more resources than some other game: how many of those games handle texture animation on megaprim sculpties and all the rest of the wacky legacy content every SL viewer must? There's no existence proof that a substantially more optimized glTF-capable SL viewer can exist.

(One caveat: folks who still use voice with a desktop client will have an extra constraint once WebRTC fully replaces Vivox. I don't know that there's a schedule yet for shutting down Vivox but it's one thing we all should want as soon as feasible, so depending on timing some users may want to adopt CoolVL Viewer in order to have both the updated voice and the pre-PBR rendering ability.)

___________________
*I just started playing with it in the past couple days. It's not going to replace desktop except in "content consumer" mode, but I must say, even in it's current state, it runs way better than Lumiya ever did for me. Not rendering much PBR yet, though.

[Extrude Ragu]

9 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I just wondered as it seemed mostly creator and developers who are trying to convince everyone that they should be ok with the forced update.

Because we have lives.  Having to support two different rendering engines, one from the dinosaur era and one from the present is a major pain in the ass. Would you want to double your work load to support people who wouldn't clean their computer or buy a $200 GPU after twenty years?

Our lives are precious, we want to spend our time creating content with the best tools of our time. Most creators constantly run up against the limits of our tools. We don't want to live on a platform that exists in the past, because we exist in the present and want to be a part of it. We want to have useful skills that are relevent to the present.

[Vivienne Schell]

2 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Because we have lives.  Having to support two different rendering engines, one from the dinosaur era and one from the present is a major pain in the ass. Would you want to double your work load to support people who wouldn't clean their computer or buy a $200 GPU after twenty years?

Our lives are precious, we want to spend our time creating content with the best tools of our time. Most creators constantly run up against the limits of our tools. We don't want to live on a platform that exists in the past, because we exist in the present and want to be a part of it. We want to have useful skills that are relevent to the present.

Apply at EA.

[Arielle Popstar]

1 minute ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Because we have lives.  Having to support two different rendering engines, one from the dinosaur era and one from the present is a major pain in the ass. Would you want to double your work load to support people who wouldn't clean their computer or buy a $200 GPU after twenty years?

Our lives are precious, we want to spend our time creating content with the best tools of our time. Most creators constantly run up against the limits of our tools. We don't want to live on a platform that exists in the past, because we exist in the present and want to be a part of it. We want to have useful skills that are relevent to the present.

Well I do see and increasing amount of Mesh Bodies that creators need to rig for so that seems par for the course and I'd have to wonder if an object that can look good in either engine wouldn't the most sought after items.

[Extrude Ragu]

1 minute ago, Vivienne Schell said:

Apply at EA.

If we're playing that game - Go sign up for OpenSim

[Porky Gorky]

29 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

"Huge Upsurge" and "best selling" are not the same thing. 

You've got an interesting way of thinking! (Unless you just like to argue.)

Yep, just my own personal experience of sales in a new, small MP store, Im not claiming "best selling" of anything but apparently @Vivienne Schell likes grasping at straws.

Edited Tuesday at 05:50 PM by Porky Gorky

[Vivienne Schell]

11 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

One caveat: folks who still use voice with a desktop client will have an extra constraint once WebRTC fully replaces Vivox.

There always will be Discord.

[Qie Niangao]

3 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Having to support two different rendering engines, one from the dinosaur era and one from the present is a major pain in the ass.

Although Henri promises to do that. And to be fair, the Lab is stuck doing a bit of that, too: they can get rid of forward rendering (finally, thank god) but they've got Blinn-Phong materials to render, alongside glTF, and that's not going to change.

Thing is, longer term, it's not going to be a fun experience to be in-world without PBR rendering enabled in the viewer. Even ignoring materials, come glTF scenes, it's going to be like the introduction of Mesh: can't see it means can't navigate the world anymore.

(I have mixed reactions to glTF scenes, by the way. It's a big change. On the plus side, maybe object scripting will finally get hierarchies, for which we've pleaded for two decades now. On the less plus side: a whole lot of finished AI-created content just around the corner, starting with "backdrops".)

[Irina Forwzy]

2 hours ago, Paul Hexem said:

Well. That's the part that's not entirely true.

I keep saying "people have had a decade" because technically this all started with ALM. When ALM was introduced, we had the option to disable it while we took the time to upgrade our computers to run it.

If you'd done that, PBR now wouldn't even be a speedbump (not to start the comparison again). If we simply turned it off and ignored it for over a decade, we kind of brought this on ourselves.

Except people that had ALM turned on are having issues with PBR.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

On the less plus side: a whole lot of finished AI-created content just around the corner, starting with "backdrops".)

Ugh.

[Love Zhaoying]

18 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Yeah, the "why now" question makes me wonder why the sky must be falling this very moment.

EVERY new contentious change is usually a "SKY FALLING NAO".

Some in this thread are just "new to us" (although apparently some are oldbies and just new to "me").

 

[Paul Hexem]

Just now, Irina Forwzy said:

Except people that had ALM turned on are having issues with PBR.

The complaints about that, I suspect (as do others) is hyperbole. Exaggerated, or a lack of willingness to change any options, at the very least.

[Love Zhaoying]

2 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

6 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

On the less plus side: a whole lot of finished AI-created content just around the corner, starting with "backdrops".)

Ugh.

I hope if they come with "cardboard cutout" avatars for photos, they are at least ugly so we all look beautiful by comparison.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 minute ago, Paul Hexem said:

The complaints about that, I suspect (as do others) is hyperbole. Exaggerated, or a lack of willingness to change any options, at the very least.

I can only speak from personal experience, but in my case, yes, there is an additional performance loss, over and above what I used to get by having ALM enabled, when using the PBR viewer with no other visual bells and whistles. It's not a killer, but it's measurable and not negligible.

[Irina Forwzy]

2 hours ago, Cristiano Midnight said:

Every time the sky falls, there is supposedly a mass exodus from SL. Hell, it is not just an SL thing. Many people have claimed to be leaving X now that Elmo turned it into a Nazi hellscape, but yet those same people are still posting there. Will some people stop using SL over the issues they are having? Maybe. If they are motivated enough, they may try to find alternatives to keep using it. Still, the legions of people leaving is likely over-exaggerated in the heat of all of this.

Haha not all of us are it. I quit that show the moment Elmo-with-a-balloon for a head felt entitled to buy that platform and turn it into a complete and utter caca-pool.

Edited Tuesday at 06:48 PM by Irina Forwzy
Gah! Multitasking!

[Qie Niangao]

1 minute ago, Paul Hexem said:

4 minutes ago, Irina Forwzy said:

Except people that had ALM turned on are having issues with PBR.

The complaints about that, I suspect (as do others) is hyperbole. Exaggerated, or a lack of willingness to change any options, at the very least.

We need a viewer dev to help here, but it's possible the Lab picked this time to shift more workload from CPU to GPU, in order to speed up PBR rendering. If something like that is the case, those folks who had just enough GPU capacity to do ALM would now be hurting (and would be doing ALM now, even without any of the PBR material rendering).

[Coffee Pancake]

Couple of points ...

AMD card owners are struggling, specifically though who bought high end gaming laptops .. The curse of crappy drivers strikes again.

GLTF adoption is not about the branding, sheesh. If Linden deviate from GLTF spec then importing GLTF content wont work. The whole point of GLTF is to make moving work from one platform (like blender) to another (like secondlife) easy. It's a huge win for SL and wil take a lot of the secret knowledge out of making high end content. As a side effect we get a lot of new shiny .. because (and I know this might surprise some) .. what we had before PBR was garbage.

@Scylla Rhiadra A year ago - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ1eRTlWDYk - there is other stuff too.

 

Edited Tuesday at 06:09 PM by Coffee Pancake

[Vivienne Schell]

38 minutes ago, Rick Nightingale said:

I put just one on the MP that I made for myself, a few months back. Didn't even except it to sell but it's been flying out the door since 30 minutes after I listed it!

Wow, you gonna be a rich man! Maybe cause the most don´t know of the free libraries on the web?

[Paul Hexem]

3 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I can only speak from personal experience, but in my case, yes, there is an additional performance loss, over and above what I used to get by having ALM enabled, when using the PBR viewer with no other visual bells and whistles. It's not a killer, but it's measurable and not negligible.

Just now, Qie Niangao said:

We need a viewer dev to help here, but it's possible the Lab picked this time to shift more workload from CPU to GPU, in order to speed up PBR rendering. If something like that is the case, those folks who had just enough GPU capacity to do ALM would now be hurting (and would be doing ALM now, even without any of the PBR material rendering).

Oh yeah. It'd be lying to say there's no change at all. Personally, I'm one of the ones that benefitted- I'm getting extra FPS on near identical settings. Some people will get less based on how much load their GPU is now taking.

The hyperbole is saying "It worked fine on ALM and now it's completely broken and I have to quit SL or buy a totally brand new 2000 USD computer."

[Qie Niangao]

3 minutes ago, Irina Forwzy said:

Haha not all of us are there. I quite that show the moment Elmo-with-a-balloon for a head felt entitled to buy that platform and turn it into a complete and utter caca-pool.

Agreed, it's intolerable now. I still get notifications from a couple journalists who post exclusively there, but the browser is just fine for those rare exceptions; no more app.

Now, by analogy, if PBR drives all the interesting people from SL and leaves only fungal lifeforms, yeah, I'm outta here, too. Haven't really seen much indication of that yet, though.

[Rick Nightingale]

2 minutes ago, Vivienne Schell said:

Maybe cause the most don´t know of the free libraries on the web?

You won't find anything like mine in a free library (I have them all, and then some); that's why I had to make it

Edit: and not that rich; I sell things at SL prices, not RL prices

 

Edited Tuesday at 06:11 PM by Rick Nightingale