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

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

13 minutes ago, Codex Alpha said:

True, but LL is not big on having statistics, nor anyone having access to statistics, nor reported as to those same statistics..

On ALL their past platforms. So how will we get them? They're so cloak and dagger on all that sort of thing.

Given that more residents use TPVs than LLs own viewer I suspect we'll find out from "other sources".  

[BriannaLovey]

11 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

I barely muster 8fps in the latest Firestorm, while in SL21B.. this is ridiculous!

🙃🦆😉😜

 

Unless your VM has PCIe passthrough in order to access a GPU, that is about what you are going to get.

[DevlinMcDermott]

22 minutes ago, Modulated said:

This is drivel.

Drivel, you say? 

I challenge you (or anyone here reading this) to run a simple poll of people that have tried PBR and are having problems or those that have tried PBR and like it.   A simple poll. Better yet, and to make it fair, break it down into five categories.  From love to hate, it and range between. 

What's drivel is the flood of word diarrhea posts that comes after one expresses dislike for it here in this thread.  You can almost call it deliberate. 

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

6 minutes ago, BriannaLovey said:

Sometimes the moment when a decision can have the most amount of impact is when you have the least amount of data to draw conclusions from. I am not waiting until then to help people (both creators and users) work around the issues these updates cause.

Wait I thought we were talking about whether or not people buy PBR content, now you're helping to save people?

What are you planning to do, build an ark out of default plywood cubes and load all the non-PBR users onto it two by two? 😕

[Dorientje Woller]

45 minutes ago, DevlinMcDermott said:

If you want a profitable business like Linden Labs does,. 

Then you cater to the widest audience and the widest demographic. Not just one demographic.

The thing is, most people don't have 2,000–3,000 top-of-the line gaming computers with the latest graphics card. No, most people have 3-6 year old computers and update when the latest operating system is 1-2 years past its end date. That can't run PBR or whatever. 

If Linden Labs wants t to cater to just a small group of basically computer nerds,. Then Second Life will continue as it has. Down hill. 

Total "you know what". I have a 3 year old mid-range system: AMD Ryzen5 3600X, Gigabyte Eagle RTX 2060 OC 6GB, 16 Gig Corsair Vengeance Pro 3200 mhz on a MSI X570 Thomahawk Wifi and the LL viewer as well the FireStorm Viewer run fine on it. And with fine I mean smooth, despite the couple of fps I may drop. I am now, with the LL Viewer, at a club with 30 people in it at 50 fps, and I garantuee you, if I would be there with the Alchemy Viewer non PBR, i would have a slide show at 70 FPS. That's something nobody is talking about = how smooth is it running despite the loss of fps.

Edited Wednesday at 07:16 PM by Dorientje Woller

[Irina Forwzy]

36 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

Why, because of the exorbitant cost of running a free marketplace store?  It literally costs nothing to be a creator in SL, the only reason that a lack of sales would stop someone from creating is if they aspire to be a successful merchant as well as a creator.

Because if their aim is to make money their time spent on production is time they prefer to spend actually earning Lindens. Now, if the creator is just creating for themselves then that's different. The sales are just an added bonus.

[Modulated]

6 minutes ago, DevlinMcDermott said:

Drivel, you say? 

I challenge you (or anyone here reading this) to run a simple poll of people that have tried PBR and are having problems or those that have tried PBR and like it.   A simple poll. Better yet, and to make it fair, break it down into five categories.  From love to hate, it and range between. 

What's drivel is the flood of word diarrhea posts that comes after one expresses dislike for it here in this thread.  You can almost call it deliberate. 

The major drivel part is the '2k to 3k' dollar system  you claim people need. One does not need anywhere near that to run a PBR viewer. I stand by what I said originally.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

3 minutes ago, Irina Forwzy said:

Because if their aim is to make money their time spent on production is time they prefer to spend actually earning Lindens. Now, if the creator is just creating for themselves then that's different. The sales are just an added bonus.

 

40 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

Yes, and that's the distinction between "creators" and "merchants".  Merchants may serve their customers but creators serve whatever it is that compels them to create.

 

[Love Zhaoying]

How to put this delicately: I doubt the people who are here mostly for "adult activities" are really going to care how it looks.

 

[Love Zhaoying]

11 minutes ago, DevlinMcDermott said:

What's drivel is the flood of word diarrhea posts that comes after one expresses dislike for it here in this thread.  

It's like everyone ate at Taco Bell!

[Coffee Pancake]

12 minutes ago, BriannaLovey said:

Unless your VM has PCIe passthrough in order to access a GPU, that is about what you are going to get.

I have had this working with a multi GPU setup and it's pretty fragile and prone to breaking. A lot depends on your motherboard and some cut a few too many corners.

The VFIO sub is very helpful, .. I have it working on Gentoo, but would recommend Arch due to the better documentation

https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/

[Flea Yatsenko]

26 minutes ago, BriannaLovey said:

Yep. Vast majority of things I have ever bought don't even have normal and spec maps. From a creator's standpoint, there is no point in making them if not everyone sees them. Literally the same exact thing is going to happen with PBR.

  Spec/norm never got used for a lot of things because

1. lack of reflection probes, any interior space with sepc/norm was lighted incorrectly. People wanted full bright and baked instead of spec/norm from my experience. And it was the only way to get accurate lighting in an interior space.

2. Weird workflow with a lot of places for creators to screw up, like not using alpha channels on the spec and norm maps, which is an SL exclusive thing. Using DirectX instead of OpenGL normalmaps.

3. People weren't using ALM so they couldn't see it anyways (hence why LL is forcing it).

4. Just making up random glossiness and using tools that turn textures into spec and norm maps instead of basing the materials they're creating on anything close to how they'd perform in the real world.

LL is forcing PBR because last time they let people decide between spec/norm and diffuse only, people chose diffuse only. I understand completely, because spec/norm looks even worse than the PBR stuff we're seeing. Mainly because with PBR using substance painter or something, the "glossiness" (roughness in PBR terms) is defined because it's supposed to be based on real values for real materials. Spec/norm is just "play with glossiness until I think it looks good!" Which is why so many spec/norm builds in PBR look like play dough or someone polished them.

PBR is great for content creation. I think LL's implementation definitely has some major problems. But:

1. No more baking. I would leave my 3950x 16 core Ryzen baking for 8+ hours on a huge build. Something goes wrong, crashes, turns out wrong, start again! No baking of that significance in PBR

2. Every baked color variant needed to be baked. PBR can change lighting colors and brightness in world. If someone wants to buy an interior space from me, they are in control of what color it is, how bright it is, etc. Instead of trying to find something I baked to their specifications

3. Spec/norm never looked like it did in third party tools like it did in SL. I've spent hours making stuff look good in substance painter, only to bring it in world with spec/norm for it to look like someone dumped shine all over it.

4. There never was any real "select a preset and export from a third party tool to SL spec/norm." It was alwaysjust fudging things to get them to look as good as possible in SL. Which is why so much spec/norm stuff looks absolutely horrible in PBR. Because there were no standards. No basis for how shiny your material should be, only subjective artistic interpretation which has given us a bunch of creators who want to go "SHINY GOOD LOOK!"

PBR and the improvements LL made for content creators, and people who want to adjust lighting, colors, etc in world have been awesome. I can make stuff a lot quicker too, and it looks and sells better.

That said their implementation has a lot of problems, but I'm not here to beat a dead horse. But from a creator's standpoint PBR is awesome. So is not having to split big surfaces into 4 different texture slots, and instead using one 2048x2048. The last update has been awesome for content creators. Whether it stays that way or LL does something crazy that messed with everything is yet to be seen. But creating with PBR is awesome. And to add to that, it's trivial to use the base color map as the legacy fallback so any creators telling you to go away because you won't use PBR are kinda rude honestly.

32 minutes ago, Toothless Draegonne said:

Amusingly, there was much experimenting with tonemapping since early on in the pre-beta days. I was there in certain discords watching it happen. The result was different, but not bad. Life was good. Things actually kind of "popped" a little more than before, if anything.

And then the screaming started. Oh how it started and wouldn't stop. And so we ended up with the current oddball tonemapping that is a kind of compromise that allows for HDR tonemapping without it looking "too different".

Personally I'm hoping that LUT changing becomes a thing available on either a viewer level or integrated into EEP.  Then maybe at least that part of the screaming can stop.

Can't they just make tonemaps use definable? Lots of other games let you choose from different types of tonemapping. SL has always been about users fixing what LL throws at them and the fact they tried to make perfect tonemapping seems really out of place for them.

I don't think it's a sane expectation that things should look 100% the same between third party tools. Just having people not making up random spec/norm values in their builds is going to be a huge step forward. Just having different EEP values and how varied everyone's tastes are, they should absolutely let you chose which type of tonemapping you want to use. Just my two cents. There was so much that could go wrong uploading materials before and PBR makes it a lot more difficult for creators to screw it up (but they will!)

[Extrude Ragu]

48 minutes ago, DevlinMcDermott said:

group of basically computer nerds

This derogatory statement to me reveals your real reason for disliking PBR.

[Psyche Starling]

25 minutes ago, Irina Forwzy said:

But if no one buys your product, why are you going to continue to make?  Majority of creators aren't creating just for the sake of creating. They are making for those that shop their products.

If they were creating for just themselves, you'd see more long-skirts and knee-length skirts for instance, than what we see...

I mean, it's a "por que no los dos" thing. I make stuff because I feel like making stuff, and I might as well toss it out there for sale because someone else might like it too, and maybe it'll offset the cost of my "materials" a little. But I don't expect it to make me a RL level of income that I can really live on. Maybe the big creators do. I'll probably never make a lot because it is pretty influenced by my own tastes.

And I do love a long skirt, but sometimes I get a fun idea involving a short one, and into the store it goes.

[Love Zhaoying]

43 minutes ago, Toothless Draegonne said:

Do I need to remind everyone again that you need far less than "the latest gaming PC" to run SL in full ultra? I'm doing just that on last gen's mid-tier laptop, and if you are budget-concious, you do not buy laptops expecting bang for buck.

I have a similar situation: mid-tier last-gen notebook (last year's model).  I CHOOSE not to use "Ultra", merely because it is noticeably slower and I don't really need Ultra or want it that badly. I CAN use "Ultra". I'm not complaining, because that's how it was pre-PBR! No change.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

8 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Now that you mention it, that would be the smart business move.

How exactly would forcing pc users onto mobile, where they have no inventory access, and so basically no use for most of their inventory, and thus will STOP buying stuff, a "good business move"?

Nobody buying things means all inworld stores close, LL lose massive amounts of land revenue, nobody being able to rez/build means nobody wants of needs a home, kiss the residential parcel tier income goodbye, say Bye-bye to Bellicosia too.

 

Nothing smart about it. 

[Rowan Amore]

56 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

That's still anecdotal evidence.  As I said until we start seeing statistics of the number of people using PBR viewers and how much time they're spending in world there's no telling what percentage of residents are going to be using PBR.

It might also be that people don't actually NEED new hardware but need to learn to adjust the hardware they do have to the task.  Seems some don't want to hear that, though.  

[Aglaia]

PBR is a big improvement, but like any innovation, it requires to get used to it and change our habits a little bit. Right now there is almost no content at all made with PBR, so the SL users might not see any improvement. But wait a few months and years, when all SL will be populated of PBR stuff, everything will look more realistic.

I've read in this thread that PBR is all about reflectiveness and metal ? Not at all. All kinds of materials reach an upper level of realism with PBR: leather, plastic, wood, glass, stone, paper, ceramic, fiber, really everything. They look better because they look more realistic, and they look more realistic because because they get affected by the lighting in a much more natural way than they were with the legacy Blinn-Phong textures.

Another improvement that comes with this update is the use of Reflecion Probes. With them, you can make some much more realistic areas like caves and caverns, or even just some simple bedroom. See this photo for example, bright outside (kind of end of afternoon) and dark inside: 

 

PBR materials are also actually EASIER to make for creators. In the legacy Blinn-Phong method, you had to bake your diffuse texture. Depending on the lighting you used to bake your texture, it could produce very different results, and you got some objects that can look very good or very bad in SL, depending on the lighting that is used in the place where this object is rezzed. With PBR, there is no problem anymore. You produce your materials and the result is not affected by the lighting that you used in your 3D software.

All that said, i think that Linden should really give more documentation about how to use PBR. They made some videos and a wiki page, but it is for builders, not really for the end-users. However there are some important things to know to get a real profit of PBR stuff. Especially : it is very important to understand what is a reflection probe and how to use it if you buy some PBR stuff and rez it in your home.

I encourage everybody to have a look at this this video. I'm not the author of it but i will give this link to my customers to help them. It is beginer-friendly and it explains how to setup a probe in your home.

 

I don't think that Firestorm or SL viewer should give the option to switch to PBR / Not PBR. This kind of thing slows down the adoption. Technologies are improving all the time, we have to accept it and stay in the train. Staying in our comfort zone may be cool and relaxing, but that's now how a platform like SL can keep improving.

Edited Wednesday at 07:54 PM by Aglaia
typo

[SylviElle Zaftig]

14 minutes ago, Psyche Starling said:

I mean, it's a "por que no los dos" thing. I make stuff because I feel like making stuff, and I might as well toss it out there for sale because someone else might like it too, and maybe it'll offset the cost of my "materials" a little. But I don't expect it to make me a RL level of income that I can really live on. Maybe the big creators do. I'll probably never make a lot because it is pretty influenced by my own tastes.

And I do love a long skirt, but sometimes I get a fun idea involving a short one, and into the store it goes.

That's also how I view the way I create my stuff. I do it because I want something different/unique just for me, even if the model I use is full perm. If someone else wants to buy it and thinks it's pretty enough, then awesome, that's great.I've been lucky enough to have made enough money in SL to have lived off of it's income. Not anymore, but back in the day I and my ex partner made enough. Unlikely to happen again as I don't know how to mesh let alone rig...but it's all good.

PBR textures are probably my death knell in SL. Have no clue how to use Substance Painter, and if it's something I'll need a monthly sub for, forget about it lol.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

4 minutes ago, SylviElle Zaftig said:

PBR textures are probably my death knell in SL. Have no clue how to use Substance Painter, and if it's something I'll need a monthly sub for, forget about it lol.

There are some cheap/free alternatives to Substance Painter, etc. and also several resources online with plenty of free PBR materials to download (the quality of which can vary so it's worth picking up one of those aforementioned free alternative apps so you can preview materials before uploading them).

[Irina Forwzy]

38 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

How to put this delicately: I doubt the people who are here mostly for "adult activities" are really going to care how it looks.

 

Those are sometimes still wearing nonmesh. I went to one the other day and I thought the whole of space and time was going to implode!

[Zalificent Corvinus]

2 hours ago, Toothless Draegonne said:

But hey let's just pin everything on some obscure 3D chat room from 20 years ago that when it even gets a mention, is usually in the context of "huh, Sadville still exists."

Bye! We won't miss you when you depart for TurboSquid and Useless Engine based First Person Shooters.

 

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour ago, DevlinMcDermott said:

If you want a profitable business like Linden Labs does,. 

Then you cater to the widest audience and the widest demographic. Not just one demographic.

The thing is, most people don't have 2,000–3,000 top-of-the line gaming computers with the latest graphics card. No, most people have 3-6 year old computers and update when the latest operating system is 1-2 years past its end date. That can't run PBR or whatever. 

If Linden Labs wants t to cater to just a small group of basically computer nerds,. Then Second Life will continue as it has. Down hill. 

You don't need top of the line anything. The people with the 6 (10) year old GPU is exactly who is targeted with this.

[Extrude Ragu]

4 minutes ago, SylviElle Zaftig said:

PBR textures are probably my death knell in SL. Have no clue how to use Substance Painter, and if it's something I'll need a monthly sub for, forget about it lol.

You don't need substance to create PBR materials. If you are interested in learning to mesh, learning how to make materials inside Blender is sufficient. Many creators prefer substance because it offers a lot of unique features but it is not really necessary to create something nice. Lots of other tools are available to make these materials as well.

A perpetual license version of Substance is on Steam. You don't need to get the monthly sub.

 

 

[SylviElle Zaftig]

1 minute ago, Extrude Ragu said:

You don't need substance to create PBR materials. If you are interested in learning to mesh, learning how to make materials inside Blender is sufficient. Many creators prefer substance because it offers a lot of unique features but it is not really necessary to create something nice. Lots of other tools are available to make these materials as well.

A perpetual license version of Substance is on Steam. You don't need to get the monthly sub.

 

 

Oh cool, ok thanks! I dabble in Blender, but that's about it. Still working on some Blender videos I bought off of Humble Bundle. I'll check the license on Steam. thanks much!