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Linden Lab your PBR is giving me a headache


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1 minute ago, Luna Bliss said:

Why do you think that PBR should be in its final state right now?  This is a process. I already see differences, and I only imagine it getting better.

It shouldn't be in this state at all, it's been fubared from the get go.

Standard LL Feature Development Procedure.

Take something real devs would do in 6 months, full time, with a team, give it to one guy working part time one day a week, ETA six years, cancel it after 3 years, and roll it out as half finished broken crap, do sod all for 6 months, then start trying to fix it, part time over another 18 months, end up with something inferior to paying real devs to spend 6 months doing it right.

 

 

Best solution right now?

 

Roll back to the last NON PBR LL Fail-viewer, and fire everyone who worked on PBR or authorised its rollout 2-3 years too early, then hire some real devs and let them do it properly over the course of a year..

 

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19 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:
24 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Why do you think that PBR should be in its final state right now?  This is a process. I already see differences, and I only imagine it getting better.

It shouldn't be in this state at all, it's been fubared from the get go.

Standard LL Feature Development Procedure.

Take something real devs would do in 6 months, full time, with a team, give it to one guy working part time one day a week, ETA six years, cancel it after 3 years, and roll it out as half finished broken crap, do sod all for 6 months, then start trying to fix it, part time over another 18 months, end up with something inferior to paying real devs to spend 6 months doing it right.

 

 

Best solution right now?

 

Roll back to the last NON PBR LL Fail-viewer, and fire everyone who worked on PBR or authorised its rollout 2-3 years too early, then hire some real devs and let them do it properly over the course of a year..

Everything, for you, is crappy and inferior because they didn't do it how you think it should be done. That's why I don't trust your assessments.

Your type is an all-too-familiar presence on the forum. It's a wonder someone higher up doesn't see your expertise and hire you on the spot, isn't it.

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Threatening to not buy my stuff isn't the flex you think it is when PBR plant sales = several thousands -v- 0 sales to you in all the years I've been here.

Can you see how absurd threatening to not shop with me is? Oh and the 'smart creators' flex, come on, please try harder.

The percentage of people not seeing PBR this time next year will be like 0.005% , who don't even shop with me in the first place.

It wouldn't be very smart of me to cater to those people. Besides if they can't afford a PC when their hobby is playing a video game, they're not likely to be on a spending spree for plants that they  don't want to buy anyway, because they're unable to detect the difference from their 'smart creator skybox with legacy ALB' way over my head in the trollousphere.

So exactly why am I supposed to care about any of this? What outcome are you expecting from telling me or implying:

  • My content I've worked very hard on is no different from legacy content 
  • I'm not a smart creator
  • I should make 'legacy skybox gardens' to 'be smart'

Maybe I can take you on in an advisary role, because after 100s of thousands of sales of plants and landscaping over the years perhaps you're the person to take my brand to the next level of being a smart creator making legacy sky boxes for forum trolls.

 

 

 

 

 

2 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Smart creators should be looking into making ALM BP textured skybox gardens about now, because a lot of people will want those.

 

Smart creators will avoid GitElf scenes like the plague, for home and garden work. Nobody wants to buy a house/apartment with some failed artiste wannabe's choice of ugly furniture perma-welded into the no mod house interior, because Giitelf scenes allows clueless egowh*res to impose their taste in wall colours and furnishings on anyone MAD enough to buy a home from them.

 

try applying it to, oh for the sake of example, somebody using PBR to make plants, that don't look much if any better than non PBR alm-bp plants.

I certainly wouldn't buy PBR plants for MY garden, they won't be visible to many of the visitors, and don't look better enough to justify that handicap, and the hiked prices people are likely to charge for putting "Ruined with PBR" on the advert.

 

 

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10 minutes ago, Cube Republic said:

The percentage of people not seeing PBR this time next year will be like 0.005% , who don't even shop with me in the first place.

Not that I am a plant person but how difficult would it be anyway to have a pbr and non pbr version available if you have the amount of experience you are saying you have?

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16 minutes ago, Cube Republic said:

if they can't afford a PC when their hobby is playing a video game

Some people can't afford it. There is no need to talk down to them like this.

Edited by xDancingStarx
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14 minutes ago, Cube Republic said:

Threatening to not buy my stuff isn't the flex you think it is when PBR plant sales = several thousands -v- 0 sales to you in all the years I've been here.

Can you see how absurd threatening to not shop with me is? Oh and the 'smart creators' flex, come on, please try harder.

The percentage of people not seeing PBR this time next year will be like 0.005% , who don't even shop with me in the first place.

It wouldn't be very smart of me to cater to those people. Besides if they can't afford a PC when their hobby is playing a video game, they're not likely to be on a spending spree for plants that they  don't want to buy anyway, because they're unable to detect the difference from their 'smart creator skybox with legacy ALB' way over my head in the trollousphere.

So exactly why am I supposed to care about any of this? What outcome are you expecting from telling me or implying:

  • My content I've worked very hard on is no different from legacy content 
  • I'm not a smart creator
  • I should make 'legacy skybox gardens' to 'be smart'

Maybe I can take you on in an advisary role, because after 100s of thousands of sales of plants and landscaping over the years perhaps you're the person to take my brand to the next level of being a smart creator making legacy sky boxes for forum trolls.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I expect that future non-PBR viewers will take the base color of each material and use it as a texture anyways, or combine the maps in some way or another to generate an approximation of the material. One already does, mine will as well. You will have nothing to worry about regardless of what kind of viewer people choose 😄

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3 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Not that I am a plant person but how difficult would it be anyway to have a pbr and non pbr version available if you have the amount of experience you are saying you have?

I can't really comment on someone elses workflow but from my own experience it isn't a huge amount of work if you're talking about PBR vs the previous materials system with normal maps and specular colour, etc.

However if you're talking about PBR vs legacy textures without any normal map then, depending on how the content is created, it can be near impossible to make something look good under both renderers (the same was true of legacy textures vs materials, the normal map really does make a massive difference if you're working with organic models like vegetation).

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4 minutes ago, xDancingStarx said:

Some people can't afford it. There is no need to talk down to them like this.

 

20 minutes ago, Cube Republic said:

if they can't afford a PC when their hobby is playing a video game, they're not likely to be on a spending spree for plants that they  don't want to buy anyway

His assessment is correct, though.  If someone can't afford an upgrade, they're not going to spend the money they do have on content they can't see correctly.

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On 6/24/2024 at 11:32 AM, Count Burks said:

Sl21B Nimbus

Somebody just posted this image in another thread. Orange floor, orange skin, look at the arms of the woman they have a plastic shine on them. The hair of the boy, plastic shine on it. The effects of the sunlight on the ship, plastic shine all over.

You own a large land rental company, yes? You are in a position to collect data from all the people that rent from you about their experience with PBR, and how it has impacted their decisions. This will not only be important to safeguard the longevity of your business, but would also be good for the entire userbase to have a representative sample of what people are doing.

Edited by BriannaLovey
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5 minutes ago, BriannaLovey said:

I expect that future non-PBR viewers will take the base color of each material and use it as a texture anyways, or combine the maps in some way or another to generate an approximation of the material. One already does, mine will as well. You will have nothing to worry about regardless of what kind of viewer people choose 😄

What we commonly refer to as 'textures'  contain lighting information and often baked shadows now. While the color channel on PBR is pretty flat.

Edited by Cube Republic
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Just now, Cube Republic said:

What we commonly refer to as 'textures' now contain lighting information and often baked shadows now. While the color channel on PBR is pretty flat.

Well yeah, but it is better than plywood, is it not?

 

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1 minute ago, Cube Republic said:

I'm being realistic, telephones, computers all go out of date, have a shelf life.

That is bound to cease in the future as supply chains become less global and moore's law breathes its final breath.

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1 minute ago, Cube Republic said:

I'm being realistic

I'm talking about your tone. When you say "if they can't afford a PC when their hobby is playing a video game" you are ridiculing people. And there is no need for that here. People have been enjoying SL on their crappy devices. They are part of SL and a community. It's not about "playing a video game". Have some more respect.

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1 minute ago, BriannaLovey said:

I expect that future non-PBR viewers will take the base color of each material and use it as a texture anyways, or combine the maps in some way or another to generate an approximation of the material. One already does, mine will as well. You will have nothing to worry about regardless of what kind of viewer people choose 😄

From a creators perspective, this is wrong, however - Since ALM requires a diffuse map, not Albedo. One has lighting information encoded into it, the other doesn't.

I very much doubt you're going to generate a (good) approximation of the material, Diffuse texture baking is GPU heavy. Even if you only do it once that's going to take a long time per asset on the slow computers you wish to support, making it unpractical.

You might say what's the big deal if its wrong, but from a creators perspective this means that many customers are seeing an ugly version of their product.

As a creator and merchant, I personally would not in good conscience take your money and give you a product that I knew would look ugly on your avatar or in your home.

Even if my customer is in the process of cutting off their own nose to spite their face, I wouldn't want to participate in that, personally. I'm here to provide people with a good product experience.

The notion that it's 'easy' for a creator to provide a fall back is only true if the creator does not care about the quality of the experience. In reality, to provide a fall back a creator needs to author two different sets of materials. Proper ALM materials are actually quite complex to make due to the channel packing required and also the baking setup/time. If a creator is providing lots of texture options, this can easily add up to whole days of time added to the content creation process to make a product.

What's more, PBR is only part of what LL is working on. LL are working on supporting entire glTF scenes, which means your viewer won't be able to render entire skyboxes and assets made in glTF format. Many creators have collectively agreed that we will be considering viewers that don't support glTF as 'out of band' for product support and indeed this is the line LL seem to be agreeing to take too. It will simply be too much of a headache to try to support old viewers forever.

 

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1 minute ago, xDancingStarx said:

I'm talking about your tone. When you say "if they can't afford a PC when their hobby is playing a video game" you are ridiculing people. And there is no need for that here. People have been enjoying SL on their crappy devices. They are part of SL and a community. It's not about "playing a video game". Have some more respect.

I agree, they have my sympathies. 

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11 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

From a creators perspective, this is wrong, however - Since ALM requires a diffuse map, not Albedo. One has lighting information encoded into it, the other doesn't.

I very much doubt you're going to generate a (good) approximation of the material, Diffuse texture baking is GPU heavy. Even if you only do it once that's going to take a long time per asset on the slow computers you wish to support, making it unpractical.

You might say what's the big deal if its wrong, but from a creators perspective this means that many customers are seeing an ugly version of their product.

As a creator and merchant, I personally would not in good conscience take your money and give you a product that I knew would look ugly on your avatar or in your home.

Even if my customer is in the process of cutting off their own nose to spite their face, I wouldn't want to participate in that, personally. I'm here to provide people with a good product experience.

The notion that it's 'easy' for a creator to provide a fall back is only true if the creator does not care about the quality of the experience. In reality, to provide a fall back a creator needs to author two different sets of materials. Proper ALM materials are actually quite complex to make due to the channel packing required and also the baking setup/time. If a creator is providing lots of texture options, this can easily add up to whole days of time added to the content creation process to make a product.

What's more, PBR is only part of what LL is working on. LL are working on supporting entire glTF scenes, which means your viewer won't be able to render entire skyboxes and assets made in glTF format. Many creators have collectively agreed that we will be considering viewers that don't support glTF as 'out of band' for product support and indeed this is the line LL seem to be agreeing to take too. It will simply be too much of a headache to try to support old viewers forever.

 

Meaning the viewer and asset server will use it glTF internally as their cache/long-term storage format instead of the existing SLM/.asset format? Or will they be converted to the currently used format on upload? This is an important distinction.

Also side note: storing a directly importable file in the cache is going to make IP theft incredibly easy...

Edit again: In case there is any ambiguity to what I said, my question is:

Will this asset cache model change in the future?

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Mesh_Asset_Format

Edited by BriannaLovey
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5 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Quality content doesn't age overnight. It becomes classic.

I haven't run into any older content that looks especially bad in the viewer.  The viewer will have little impact on whether I buy an older product which isn't PBR.  I have some of @Cube Republic's older products and they still look great.  If I like his new products, I'll probably get some of those as well.  Since I don't plan to use anything other than a PBR viewer from now on, whether older type textures are included with new products is irrelevant to me.   People still have the.option, if they choose to go non-PBR viewer, to purchase older products.

It's a lot like the LaraX.  Some people will refuse to use it and some creators will only rig FOR it.  The choice is yours if you want to buy NEW content from those creators.

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3 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

It's a lot like the LaraX.  Some people will refuse to use it and some creators will only rig FOR it.  The choice is yours if you want to buy NEW content from those creators.

Good point that it limits one's customer base. I have walked away from a number of outfits because a creator no longer rigged for Lara and I am not willing to spend the L$ to outfit LaraX with accessories.

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8 minutes ago, BriannaLovey said:

Also side note: storing a directly importable file in the cache is going to make IP theft incredibly easy...

It already is.

9 minutes ago, BriannaLovey said:

Meaning the viewer and asset server will use it glTF internally as their cache/long-term storage format instead of the existing SLM/.asset format?

I can't tell you how LL devs will choose to store the data. What I can tell you is that glTF assets have a lot more information in them than regular SL mesh assets, containing things like animations, alternate uv's, heirachies, shape keys, armatures, and much more.

In other words, even if they don't store it directly as glTF in the cache, they will need a new way to store it to the existing way. Old viewers simply won't be able to render what they don't understand.

Logging into a pre-PBR viewer in 3 or 4 years will be like logging in with a pre-mesh viewer today.

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Just now, Extrude Ragu said:

It already is.

I can't tell you how LL devs will choose to store the data. What I can tell you is that glTF assets have a lot more information in them than regular SL mesh assets, containing things like animations, alternate uv's, heirachies, shape keys, armatures, and much more.

In other words, even if they don't store it directly as glTF in the cache, they will need a new way to store it to the existing way. Old viewers simply won't be able to render what they don't understand.

Logging into a pre-PBR viewer in 3 or 4 years will be like logging in with a pre-mesh viewer today.

The viewers I am imagining won't have an old codebase, but will derive from the new codebase and replace only the rendering parts. See the source code of Cool VL Viewer and its dual rendering engine for what I mean. Your assumption that non-PBR viewers will be unable to decode glTF assets is incredibly faulty.

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1 minute ago, BriannaLovey said:

The viewers I am imagining won't have an old codebase, but will derive from the new codebase and replace only the rendering parts. See the source code of Cool VL Viewer and its dual rendering engine for what I mean. Your assumption that non-PBR viewers will be unable to decode glTF assets is incredibly faulty.

Well, as someone who works as a software engineer, I don't envy what you're going to put yourselves through, but good luck :)

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