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

[Paul Hexem]

1 minute ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

SO far, I'm not seeing a need for me to revert. YET!!!! I'll keep you posted if I find a reason. 😂

I'll bet you a free upgrade part to one of our complainers in these threads (and the walkthrough installation) that you won't need to.

[Paula MacKay]

1 minute ago, Paul Hexem said:

Now you're going way too far down that rabbit hole, although even then most municipalities wave away any liability and it's on us to repair and replace parts.

The point is computers are like anything else we use. Parts get old and need to be cleaned, repaired, and replaced with newer parts.

You can extend the life of it- almost indefinitely- by staying on top of that maintenance, which is actually pretty inexpensive comparitively. If you're in a situation where you can't use SL anymore without buying a whole new computer, it's entirely your own fault.

Yes people can do that I do not disagree.  But not all of us know how to do repairs on their PC.  And at least where I live techs can be expensive.  My PC isn't old.  But buying another is not going to happen for a couple years at least.  Meanwhile friends that just don't have money to get new pc's now will be gone.  I am happy for you all that can stay and run sl.  Maybe with those that have no other choice but to leave will make it even easier for you.  I'm not trying to argue one way or the other,.  I know the direction things are going for me in the loss of good friends I have in SL.  I accept that I may need to leave this virtual world that has been a place I have almost lived in for almost 20 years.  I accept the limits I have to make.  I just empathize with others who also can't purchase or update their equipment. 

 

[Rick Nightingale]

11 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Just to clarify: 40 fps is "just fine" performance-wise for you, correct?

Not the OP you quote, but I cap at 40 and it's absolutely fine for anything in SL. I used to cap at 60 (1/2 my monitor's max rate) before  the PBR beta, but can't tell the difference at 40 visually. The fans don't run hard as much at 40 with PBR.

Edited June 25 by Rick Nightingale

[Ayashe Ninetails]

1 minute ago, Paul Hexem said:

I'll bet you a free upgrade part to one of our complainers in these threads (and the walkthrough installation) that you won't need to.

I'm thinking not, but you never know. Avatars do wild things to performance I'm just sayinnnnnnn'. 

I'll find somewhere busy to go and check it out.

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Cristiano Midnight said:

Comparing what people are experiencing now to not keeping up with car maintenance is a completely flawed argument.

Sometimes, people choose flawed comparisons as a deliberate "Strawman argument";  if you accept the "strawman argument" even if the argument (a comparison, in this case) is not valid or related to the actual argument, then those with a weak position "win the debate point".

Example:

Us: "You will EVENTUALLY need to upgrade your PC."

Them: "But I never need to upgrade my car! What about that? Huh? Huh?"

As you can see, it's also similar to a "whataboutism".

 

 

[Paul Hexem]

1 minute ago, Cristiano Midnight said:

Comparing what people are experiencing now to not keeping up with car maintenance is a completely flawed argument.

No, it's not. They've refused for years to replace the aging parts, and now they finally failed (to work for them) and they're acting all shocked. You don't need a 4090 and an i9 to run PBR, you just needed to not ignore that your hardware wasn't keeping up for the last ten years.

1 minute ago, Qie Niangao said:

Umm…

Right?

1 minute ago, Paula MacKay said:

Yes people can do that I do not disagree.  But not all of us know how to do repairs on their PC.

Just come and ask. Lots of people on these forums know how and are willing to help. I said it once already and I'll say it again- I've been offering for years to help people. Only one has ever taken me up on it, and they're currently enjoying PBR as we speak.

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Rick Nightingale said:

14 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Just to clarify: 40 fps is "just fine" performance-wise for you, correct?

Not the OP you quote, but I cap at 40 and it's absolutely fine for anything in SL. I used to cap at 60 (1/2 my monitor's max rate) before  the PBR beta, but can't tell the difference at 40 visually. The fans don't run hard as much at 40 with PBR.

Yesterday when I checked my FPS at home (and saw it was 100fps) is the FIRST time I remember checking FPS in 10 or 15 years.

Because, I always realize that "FPS is what it is", and if I ever really don't like it, then I can always try changing my settings.  Complaining about it is the equivalent of shaking my fist at clouds.  (I don't have whitelisting or internet or CPU or GPU issues, in general. So, any performance issues I have are "pure SL" - which I can't do anything about except change my settings.)

 

[stlshayne]

9 minutes ago, JeromFranzic said:

I'd like to see this. Also, not all of use use Windows or Mac OS. Some of us use Linux as I do, or even one of the free, open source BSD's to a smaller extent.

(The Megapahit project has a viewer that runs on FreeBSD.)

 

Granted! I'm just a Windows baby so went with what I know. 

[Love Zhaoying]

Just now, Paul Hexem said:

10 minutes ago, Cristiano Midnight said:

Comparing what people are experiencing now to not keeping up with car maintenance is a completely flawed argument.

No, it's not. They've refused for years to replace the aging parts, and now they finally failed (to work for them) and they're acting all shocked. You don't need a 4090 and an i9 to run PBR, you just needed to not ignore that your hardware wasn't keeping up for the last ten years.

Well from THAT point of view, yes. Not from the "but I never have to fix / upgrade my car" is a bad argument. The car will eventually die.

[Vivienne Schell]

18 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Posted my specs yesterday and here is today at a busy club...40 fps

 

What´s your GPU? Also, your settings are not "Ultra", you pushed some sliders down to at best "Medium" settings. Also, watch your power supply. The workload on your GPU should be at about 50/60 percent, which is hilariously high. With exactly the same settings on FS 6 you´d get not only 40 fps, but about 80 or more, with a GPU workload of 15 percent. Now do the same on a midrange, lower end machine and then come back and cheerlead again.

[Love Zhaoying]

Just now, stlshayne said:

10 minutes ago, JeromFranzic said:

I'd like to see this. Also, not all of use use Windows or Mac OS. Some of us use Linux as I do, or even one of the free, open source BSD's to a smaller extent.

(The Megapahit project has a viewer that runs on FreeBSD.)

 

Granted! I'm just a Windows baby so went with what I know. 

There were some changes a couple years ago, where now the official SL viewer won't really run on older versions of Windows. I believe it had to do with the scripts used for the install process. (Those scripts weren't supported on older Windows. I don't think it was Python, but don't recall.)

And before that, I believe (could be wrong) that SL became 64-bit "only"?

Anyway, LL said at the time very few users were still on the older Windows which would not support whatever the change was (whether installation scripts or something else).

 

[Irina Forwzy]

29 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

It still applies though- because (at least in this case) if you'd stayed on top of the service and maintenance, the new road surface wouldn't be a big deal at all.

The best analogy isn't a car as much as a tire. You have tires that need to be rotated periodically and/or may need to be patched up when crap hits them.

But if a road completely changes or the weather completely changes the tires you use may no longer be adequate enough. For instance, my car's tires wont work in an ice storm. 

What LL did without much preparation to the end users, is change the road and the whole environment.  Top to bottom, without creating an alternative route for those that have older PCs. They used to have that alternative route. The base minimum has completely changed.

[stlshayne]

7 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Well from THAT point of view, yes. Not from the "but I never have to fix / upgrade my car" is a bad argument. The car will eventually die.

Your car may still run on the roads laid out 20 years ago, but if you havent fixed your alternator, changed your oil, your Ac...

 

Are we stretching out this comparison too far?

Edited June 25 by stlshayne

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Vivienne Schell said:

Also, your settings are not "Ultra", you pushed some sliders down to at best "Medium" settings.

...so...? Do we need to use Ultra for some specific mystical requirement? Or, are you saying that Rowan's settings were at Ultra in a previous post?

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 hour ago, Paul Hexem said:

I don't know if you're aware of/remember the old Crysis game memes back in the day. When that game came out, there wasn't a consumer PC invented that could run it at any kind of high settings. The jokes became "Can my PC run Crysis? Sure, while toasting food."

Almost 20 years ago, a German company released a new space themed game, with "super advanced graphics".

At the time less than 5% of PC's in use could run it at anything other than LOW settings..

 

Within 3 months, it had gone from £40 a copy to the "Thee for £5" bin in the local PC gamer shops.

Today, I doubt if even 1% of gamers have ever heard of it.

 

Futureness Cultist Hardware Snob Elitism comes with a price.

 

Top three Reasons why AAA games companies are currently neck deep in the brown and smelly and sinking fast.

1. Covid isn't keeping people indoors with nothing to do but play computer games.

2. Ripping out decent gameplay and fun and replacing it with preachy DEI Fake virtue signalling on "important issues" like Distant planets having too many attractive women, ( translation: ANY ).

3. Thinking "kewl grafiix" is a substitute for decent gameplay and FUN.

 

Multiple games companies have gone BUST over this 3 step program for losing customers.

AND YOU ARE ENCOURAGING LL TO FOLLOW THEM.

 

[stlshayne]

3 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

There were some changes a couple years ago, where now the official SL viewer won't really run on older versions of Windows. I believe it had to do with the scripts used for the install process. (Those scripts weren't supported on older Windows. I don't think it was Python, but don't recall.)

And before that, I believe (could be wrong) that SL became 64-bit "only"?

Anyway, LL said at the time very few users were still on the older Windows which would not support whatever the change was (whether installation scripts or something else).

 

I'd still pay to take a 2018 Windows XP SL user out for beers, just to see whats going on there (besides monitary stuff)

[Rick Nightingale]

4 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I always realize that "FPS is what it is"

Yes, largely the same here. If it's low enough to notice when I think I shouldn't, I'll try to fix it. Otherwise I cap it just because it's pointless letting the CPU/GPU render more frames than SL can even deliver.

Not that running uncapped ever strained my system noticeably until PBR came along and woke up the GPU's fans.

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Irina Forwzy said:

What LL did without much preparation to the end users, is change the road and the whole environment.  Top to bottom, without creating an alternative route for those that have older PCs. They used to have that alternative route. The base minimum has completely changed.

We are now "off-roading" all the time. You need a 4WD vehicle. 

Your 20 year-old "beater" won't make it without destroying the suspension, blowing all the tires, etc.

[Ayashe Ninetails]

High 30s-45ish FPS standing around at the Uber shopping event (with 39 avatars present). That's about what I expected. 

Oh, I should also mention I didn't do any of the Firestorm AV whitelisting tricks. I should probably do that, too.

 

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, stlshayne said:

I'd still pay to take a 2018 Windows XP SL user out for beers, just to see whats going on there (besides monitary stuff)

Good luck, they are probably locked in their bunker and won't come out.

[Paul Hexem]

9 minutes ago, Irina Forwzy said:

What LL did without much preparation to the end users

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.

Edited June 25 by Paul Hexem

[stlshayne]

Also must throw out: anyone seriously making the comparison between new PCs and like-new cars (if they mean it as a price sink).. surely has such a top of the line PC that they have no reason to complain, or last bought said car in the late 90s - early 2000s.

Edited June 25 by stlshayne

[Rowan Amore]

1 minute ago, Vivienne Schell said:

What´s your GPU? Also, your settings are not "Ultra", you pushed some sliders down to at best "Medium" settings. Also, watch your power supply. The workload on your GPU should be at about 50/60 percent, which is hilariously high. With exactly the same settings on FS 6 you´d get not only 40 fps, but about 80 or more, with a GPU workload of 15 percent. Now do the same on a midrange, lower end machine and then come back and cheerlead again.

I have my fps set to 60 so I don't run full bore.  No need to do that.  I hit Ultra then dialed back to the way I always run.  Draw distance, LOD, etc.  Turning them down increases my fps without any difference to the visual.  My GPU was running between 40% and 60%.    

I already posted my specs but it's a laptop with an RTX 3060.

 

[stlshayne]

Also, I feel this is SL related- the best PBR comment of the day has already been made:

 

[Vivienne Schell]

6 minutes ago, stlshayne said:

Also must throw out: anyone seriously making the comparison between new PCs and like-new cars.. surely has such a top of the line PC that they have no reason to complain, or last bought said car in the late 90s - early 2000s.

Gaslighters. As if cars would need to be replaced by a new car any other two years. Only cause some car garage at San Fransisco demands it.