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

[Henri Beauchamp]

2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

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

I have been ”shouting” too, so I do sympathize !

I told them that PBR won't cut it for many SLer's ”weak” computers and that getting rid of the forward rendering mode was a bad idea. And I since demonstrated it with my dual renderer in my viewer.

Then I told them, countless times (at pretty much every meeting I attended), that PBR was not yet ready for release...

Finally I tried to contribute some fix to their mess (rejected, because gLTF 2 specs rule)...

This had the same effect as ”pisser dans un violon”, as we say in French (something akin to ”spit in the wind”, in English).

And now, we (are just starting to) see the result... 😵‍💫

Had they listened to people like us, they would have been more careful and thorough, and PBR would have been released (later, yes) in a good state that would have pleased 95% of the SLers, instead of pissing off 30% of them...

I'm so sad... 😢

Edited June 25 by Henri Beauchamp

[Nagachief Darkstone]

29 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

Finally I tried to contribute some fix to their mess (rejected, because gLTF 2 specs rule)...

To be fair, if they deviate too much from glTF 2.0 specifications, they can't use glTF 2.0 branding or wording, which is what they want to do, I believe.

Also we really shouldn't be trying to fudge the viewer and instead change the content, which is easier and less prone to unexpected problems further down the line.

Edited June 25 by Nagachief Darkstone

[Henri Beauchamp]

6 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

To be fair, if they deviate too much from glTF 2.0 specifications, they can't use glTF 2.0 branding or wording

And who cares about wording and branding ?????? !!!!!!! 🤪

Certainly not me, and certainly not 99.999% of the SLers !... All we want is that PBR viewers do not break our years-old stuff and yet makes things go forward, with more shiny and gorgeous stuff.

In this respect, Windlight, which had the same kind of impact on ”potato” computers than PBR is having now, did not break anything, and was making everything look even better.

I wish LL would change their stance about the strict (and stubborn) adherence to gLTF specs and admit that yes, definitely, for the good or the bad, SL is NOT Blender, so yes the PBR renderer needs to be adapted to existing SL contents, even if it means more work for the creators using Blender & Co !

Edited June 25 by Henri Beauchamp

[Nagachief Darkstone]

3 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

And who cares about wording and branding ?????? !!!!!!! 🤪

Certainly not me, and certainly not 99.999% of the SLers !... All we want is that PBR viewers do not break our years-old stuff and yet makes things go forward, with more shiny and gorgeous stuff.

In this respect, Windlight, which had the same kind of impact on ”potato” computers than PBR is having now, did not break anything, and was making everything look even better.

I wish LL would change their stance about the strict (and stubborn) adherence to gLTF specs and admit that yes, definitely, for the good or the bad, SL is NOT Blender, so yes the PBR renderer needs to be adapted to existing SL contents, even if it means more work for the creators using Blender & Co !

The only time I've encountered broken content is from the lack of probes or an environment that was already bad to begin with.

Yes. I said it. Some environment settings are just bad.

None of the old stuff I had was inherently broken by PBR, beyond looking a bit bland in a PBR scene. The only problem with PBR I see is that Linden Labs did a very poor job of communicating the differences and what can be done to solve some common issues. For example, probes. They didn't explain probes beyond a short minute blurb in a SLU vid. It's also why I think it was a bad idea for LL to allow disabling probes, because then all of those issues can't be fixed, and none of this was explained to users!

[Love Zhaoying]

6 hours ago, DevlinMcDermott said:

four-month-old custom-built Dell

I am surprised a new Dell doesn't do the job! Are the specs a little low on it, or..?

[Paul Hexem]

9 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

You just sound like a bit of a jerk here.

Yes. Intentionally. Because...

6 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

there are solutions.

5 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

the usual suspects (and some new ones) see this and most issues and changes as an opportunity to cry murder most fowl, complain bitterly, play the blame game, sow discord, express distrust in LL and TPV's, threaten to leave..

4 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

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.

Combining all the posts, there's probably 50 pages of the same thing being rehashed, including lies and misinformation, about something we've been dealing with since ALM was introduced.

People have had over a decade to save up for a GTX 1050, something you can now get for less than 150 USD brand new. Much less if you put any effort into it at all. People, including myself, have been offering for years to help people get their hands on an ALM capable computer for super cheap. Only one person in all that time has taken me up on the offer, and they're currently enjoying the update.

So, when the users that couldn't be bothered come on to the forums to complain, yes. I'm going to be a jerk to them.

[Omegaslayer]

Update on the situation, i won't share the persons name but yesterday i was talking to a friend in second life, she has a really good computer like the best money can buy and it nearly murdered her computer with a seriously bad crash caused by the pbr viewers. I know it sends my fan crazy but to hear someone with one of the best computers struggling makes me wonder how dangerous is it if it can potentially kill a high end windows pc.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Paul Hexem said:

People have had over a decade to save up for a GTX 1050, something you can now get for less than 150 USD brand new. Much less if you put any effort into it at all.

Was it as easy to get a used graphics card during the recent "shortage"? (I believe that ended this year, maybe a little earlier.)  From what I remember reading, it was hard to get your hands on one due to demand. Even if that was the "middle-to-higher end" cards (due to their use in mining, etc.), that should have impacted the availability of used lower-end cards, since fewer people would trade them in. (Can't trade in the card if there is nothing to "trade up" to.)

[Modulated]

Just now, Omegaslayer said:

Update on the situation, i won't share the persons name but yesterday i was talking to a friend in second life, she has a really good computer like the best money can buy and it nearly murdered her computer with a seriously bad crash caused by the pbr viewers.

I have doubts about the validity of this story, but continue....

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Omegaslayer said:

Update on the situation, i won't share the persons name but yesterday i was talking to a friend in second life, she has a really good computer like the best money can buy and it nearly murdered her computer with a seriously bad crash caused by the pbr viewers. I know it sends my fan crazy but to hear someone with one of the best computers struggling makes me wonder how dangerous is it if it can potentially kill a high end windows pc.

I'm going to say it: This sounds like starting a rumor.

[Omegaslayer]

Just now, Love Zhaoying said:

I'm going to say it: This sounds like starting a rumor.

3 minutes ago, Modulated said:

I have doubts about the validity of this story, but continue....

oh for god sakes it's the truth, this isn't the first person i've heard with excellent computers struggling to run it or it causing repeated crashes, just because it's not happening to you doesn't mean it didn't happen. I am sick and tired of people saying well you had enough time to get a new graphics card or saying well that can't happen because such and such, it literally is bloody happening. An unstable viewer has been released in various forms and if high end computers can't crack it then something must be wrong in the base of the software, if a piece of software is causing crashing and other issues it is a coding problem. Software that is not safe can cause damage to a computer, and none of us want our bloody computers to die.

 

 

[Paul Hexem]

3 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Was it as easy to get a used graphics card during the recent "shortage"? (I believe that ended this year, maybe a little earlier.)  From what I remember reading, it was hard to get your hands on one due to demand. Even if that was the "middle-to-higher end" cards (due to their use in mining, etc.), that should have impacted the availability of used lower-end cards, since fewer people would trade them in. (Can't trade in the card if there is nothing to "trade up" to.)

There's been several shortages in the last ten years. During one of the more recent ones I was several generations behind on a GTX 970 card. It struggled, but I was able to get by until I caught an RTX 2070 on sale. That I'm still using happily, as a matter of fact.

The important part was that I was able to just buy it and install it, because I was already prepared.

[Omegaslayer]

Just now, Paul Hexem said:

There's been several shortages in the last ten years. During one of the more recent ones I was several generations behind on a GTX 970 card. It struggled, but I was able to get by until I caught an RTX 2070 on sale. That I'm still using happily, as a matter of fact.

The important part was that I was able to just buy it and install it, because I was already prepared.

Do you like rage baiting people?

[Henri Beauchamp]

13 hours ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

None of the old stuff I had was inherently broken by PBR

Semi-transparent faces are broken:

ALM 80% transparency cube, opaque textures (black letters on white background):

Same cube, PBR (also used LL's latest release viewer, so that no one comes and pretends it's my viewer's fault):

 

But this is just one example of many other issues, the worst such issues being with shiny faces, that look blue, even with the few HACKED (black ambient light, white blue horizon !) ”PBR-aware” environments settings.

And no, saying ”but you just need a reflection probe !” is NOT acceptable !

99.9% of SL is without any reflection probes (e.g. mainland builds), and therefore renders badly with PBR !

Automatic probes shall solve such issues, but are currently a total joke.

 

Other unacceptable issues:

• Bogus object occlusions (entire parts of builds do not render until you run into them or walk on them, and no the latest ”fix” that disables code working perfectly in forward and ALM modes, does not fix the issue). EDIT: I just found a workaround for this bug !
• Ugly water (unrealistic color), without any reflection in it beside sky, and SSR broken beyond repair, not showing any reflection as it should, but instead causing moires on water surface.

Edited June 26 by Henri Beauchamp

[Paul Hexem]

1 minute ago, Omegaslayer said:

Do you like rage baiting people?

Yes.

[Omegaslayer]

Just now, Paul Hexem said:

Yes.

thought so 

[Qie Niangao]

5 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I am surprised a new Dell doesn't do the job! Are the specs a little low on it, or..?

Yeah, something strange is going on here. Of course it's possible to buy very low-end Dells, but supposedly the (non-PBR) Catznip is running fine on it, so it's at least SL-capable. The thing is, for all the pages of complaints, it really doesn't take a high end gaming machine to have no problem with PBR—my old i5 an existence proof of that. So if we can somehow cut through all the hysteria here, there's just bound to be some guidelines possible for reaching satisfactory performance with minimal upgrades and plausible settings adjustments.

One thing that would pose a problem, though, is if this Dell has only integrated graphics, no GPU. That configuration was never great, but I'm sure it could run pre-PBR Catznip at low settings, or CoolVL Viewer at slightly higher settings. But long term, doing without ALM is just no way to see SL anymore. That content was fine for its time and still of historical interest, but it's just not going to be what anybody will create for anymore.

Buying a decent graphics card, if there's power supply to handle it, could well make sense, but whether now is the time to upgrade  the whole machine is less obvious to me, solely because I'm not sure how much NPU will matter, specifically for non-SL applications going forward. I can easily see that even basic spreadsheet and document management may demand onboard AI chips to do what we'll expect in a year or so—and I can see it just fading away and any AI be cloud-based, screw the privacy noise. It's just too soon to tell, and I'd sure hate to throw a bunch of money at a "CoPilot+" PC now.

[Omegaslayer]

1 minute ago, Qie Niangao said:

Yeah, something strange is going on here. Of course it's possible to buy very low-end Dells, but supposedly the (non-PBR) Catznip is running fine on it, so it's at least SL-capable. The thing is, for all the pages of complaints, it really doesn't take a high end gaming machine to have no problem with PBR—my old i5 an existence proof of that. So if we can somehow cut through all the hysteria here, there's just bound to be some guidelines possible for reaching satisfactory performance with minimal upgrades and plausible settings adjustments.

One thing that would pose a problem, though, is if this Dell has only integrated graphics, no GPU. That configuration was never great, but I'm sure it could run pre-PBR Catznip at low settings, or CoolVL Viewer at slightly higher settings. But long term, doing without ALM is just no way to see SL anymore. That content was fine for its time and still of historical interest, but it's just not going to be what anybody will create for anymore.

Buying a decent graphics card, if there's power supply to handle it, could well make sense, but whether now is the time to upgrade  the whole machine is less obvious to me, solely because I'm not sure how much NPU will matter, specifically for non-SL applications going forward. I can easily see that even basic spreadsheet and document management may demand onboard AI chips to do what we'll expect in a year or so—and I can see it just fading away and any AI be cloud-based, screw the privacy noise. It's just too soon to tell, and I'd sure hate to throw a bunch of money at a "CoPilot+" PC now.

I wonder if it's something wrong in the base code, people with good computers shouldn't be having issues and yet they are. 

[Qie Niangao]

15 minutes ago, Omegaslayer said:

Update on the situation, i won't share the persons name but yesterday i was talking to a friend in second life, she has a really good computer like the best money can buy and it nearly murdered her computer with a seriously bad crash caused by the pbr viewers. I know it sends my fan crazy but to hear someone with one of the best computers struggling makes me wonder how dangerous is it if it can potentially kill a high end windows pc.

I believe she said she has the best ever computer, but if any application "nearly murdered" it, it is garbage. It's very possible she made it garbage herself, but any properly configured machine cannot be harmed by any application. It's not a matter subject to opinion.

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Omegaslayer said:

I wonder if it's something wrong in the base code, people with good computers shouldn't be having issues and yet they are. 

Who knows? It will be interesting to find out! 

[Modulated]

14 minutes ago, Omegaslayer said:

oh for god sakes it's the truth, this isn't the first person i've heard with excellent computers struggling to run it or it causing repeated crashes, just because it's not happening to you doesn't mean it didn't happen. I am sick and tired of people saying well you had enough time to get a new graphics card or saying well that can't happen because such and such, it literally is bloody happening. An unstable viewer has been released in various forms and if high end computers can't crack it then something must be wrong in the base of the software, if a piece of software is causing crashing and other issues it is a coding problem. Software that is not safe can cause damage to a computer, and none of us want our bloody computers to die.

 

 

You said 'nearly murdered' it with a crash, that seems questionable.

[brodiac90]

2 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

And who cares about wording and branding ?????? !!!!!!! 🤪

Certainly not me, and certainly not 99.999% of the SLers !... All we want is that PBR viewers do not break our years-old stuff

I remember when the child avatar changes were first announced. Breaking old content was a massive concern and a lot of forum users shot it down with messages like "Just wear undies and you'll be fine." without ever really trying to understand the concerns. 

Now I am not very technically minded but I do have sympathy for your position. Perhaps you could explain what old content has been broken and why? I imagine people will be more interested when it's something that effects them and not just a minority of people. 

 

[Irina Forwzy]

5 hours ago, Aethelwine said:

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.

While true,  how do you apply an environment setting toward a parcel or sim that is liked by both the person that doesn't have PBR and the person with PBR?  I know it can be done, I've tested it in my own area (at least to my specs in PBR), but there's always a risk that someone will find it jarring because within their adaptation they have issues with it.

Assuming you leave the regular windlights and EEPs and opt into the Battlescars and Specter ones.

[Love Zhaoying]

Idea: if someone's "high end PC" threatened to essplode, maaaayyyybe they bypassed the "safety protocols" (CPU and GPU temps) and/or overclocked it, etc. I'm just saying..

 

[Irina Forwzy]

4 hours ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

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".

I agree, but it appears that some people believe that that's the audience we should attract.  SL in theory should be as inclusive to both as it can be.  But that also means being vastly more communicative about certain features that can potentially break PCs and adding options that would disable that "feature" from their devices for the time being as they move to upgrade their device if they want to get the full experience.

And maybe they do develop this, maybe they do introduce a new version of LL and even Firestorm where PBR has a Non-PBR function that has some of the old rendering available. With the caveat, that that will go away in a couple of years as they slowly transition to full PBR.