The End Of An Era and what was a wonderful, enlightened virtual world....

[Ziggy Starsmith]

I been very very good at biting my tongue over this PBR fiasco and been an old timer on SL since 2007. What I see is a total lack of learning from ones mistakes.  This PBR is horrific and all just for mirrors and shiney things. In my day and back in the day we detested anything glowing or shining and blingy and here we are today glorifing it and making our graphics worse, not better. Did Linden Labs NOT learn from the Sansar disgrace? I have experimented on various computers some old and some fast and new and all I see is terrible lag, graphics washed out and worse than ever. I am currently using the older Firestorm viewer for now and when it is blocked I am giving up on Second Life after 16/17 years of daily use. This has proven year after year to have to face a ton of useless bells and whistles and no wonder SL is a ghost town. I am downgrading to basic when my PP account runs out in September, giving up owning land or linden homes and unless a great fix comes along where I can once again sail, motorcycle ride or even go to an event with more than 3 people than SL holds nothing for me unless I want to spend my time in a skybox with a draw distance of 30. I have tried many of the viewers and each one had a different rendering issue. The vast majority of new users will give up after an hour if this is what they encounter and learning curves are way too steep for an average user to even try to care about. Time to move on and sad to think my SL ends this way. I believe the troubles started with mesh,  taking most peoples creativity away from the time everyone could build with prims. Yes it is moving to the future but again, Sansar failed and the Lindens never learn and will end up killing SL the same way as Sansar. So many bells and whistles causing unneeded issues. As I leave this forum and post I just expect this post to be locked or deleted as usual but I don't care because it is true. Any smart mouthed replies (like "Bye") will be sneered at  so save your witty insults and attempts at ganging up on me as usual on these forums. SL used to be "My world, my imagination" but now it is a huge vanity influenced mess where we can no longer play, create, build or even function on. SL used to be adventurous and fun and I was a major funster helped and owned many popular clubs and also a major SL blogger (under my old name). I was also known as the Bellisseria Cat which I stopped doing because of all this nonsense. Yes SL is old code but it was allowing us to properly socialize and have fun right out of the box without having to learn about graphics, setting, new computers or whatever. Just a mess and sad to think this is what will make most common users desert SL until it is dead.

SAD SAD SAD but it was a mostly fun 21 years but I bet SL is gone within 2 more years unless it fixes stuff. 😞

Edited July 15 by Dune Ravenwood

[discussionbot]

Sorry to hear, I feel your pain. I’m a similar boat, being locked out of non-PBR Firestorm in 2 more releases will likely eventually stop my addiction to SL builds. I keep hearing PBR water is really bad too which makes it worse for me as I’m always around water.
 

Hope you can make it work OP, there are some scattered tips and tricks in different topics here by some helpful people if you have the time to mess around with settings, but nothing from Linden Lab themselves. 
 

You can also post here regarding PBR performance issues which LL will actually read (not sure they read forums much):

https://feedback.secondlife.com/bug-reports/p/pbr-performance-hit

[Stephanie Misfit]

I have a decent computer and am struggling with lag now that Firestorm has been updated to PBR. I get 4 frames per second in my house on the ground on mainland. It's taking a lot of enjoyment out of SL for me so I can relate to your post a lot.

[Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia]

13 minutes ago, Dune Ravenwood said:

no wonder SL is a ghost town.

All due respect... if you think SL is a ghost town, you need to get out more.  SL is the bustling downtown of virtual worlds.  OK, maybe not the core of downtown.  Roblox is Manhattan, but SL is Brooklyn.  SL could be bigger, but it's not small, either.  To contrast, I'd say that Open Sim is Amish farms, Active Worlds is a remote state park, and Open Cobalt is Antarctica.

Aside from that, though:  I respect your position.  I had the same position as you, until recently.

If you want to tinker with your drivers and firmware to get things running more smoothly:  I wasn't going to upgrade to PBR at all, until I learned how to set up Resizable BAR on my system.  This article to showed me how to do it.  Everything runs a lot smoother on my system now, not just SL (except Civilization 6, which has intermittent crashes now).  Your mileage my vary, depending on your hardware.  I have an MSI RTX 3060 Ventus 2x with the 12 Gb VRAM, on an ASUS ROG STRIX B450-F motherboard.

[Kathlen Onyx]

Totally agree! I had to revert back to the old FS viewer because it just would not run on my computer.  Once FS is blocked I will no longer be in SL either.  I am currently weaning myself off of it now.  

The mobile app sucks too.  LL might be moving forward to stay with the times but they will lose a lot of their long term customers who aren't willing to jump through hoops just to log in and have a good experience.  There will surely never be enough new customers to replace the ones they lose and it will be a ghost town.  Most regions are beautiful empty places.  

[Luna Bliss]

20 minutes ago, Dune Ravenwood said:

SAD SAD SAD but it was a mostly fun 21 years but I bet SL is gone within 2 more years unless it fixes stuff. 😞

You are the Belli cat?!  How cute, and thank you for bringing such fun to SL.

Don't give up yet!  I have a feeling a couple updates are going to improve the situation for those whose PC's aren't working well with all this. According to Nagachief, who seems to me to be the most knowledgeable techie person on the forum, they rolled out something in addition to PBR with the recent release that's actually the cause of the diminished performance, so let's hope they focus on this aspect right away.

Until then, just go back to the previous version of Firestorm and your life will be just like it was. Or try the Alchemy viewer. There's no need for you to be in the front line of these changes when your PC isn't up to it...a guinea pig of sorts. Let others do that.

[Stephanie Misfit]

11 minutes ago, Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia said:

All due respect... if you think SL is a ghost town, you need to get out more.  SL is the bustling downtown of virtual worlds.  OK, maybe not the core of downtown.  Roblox is Manhattan, but SL is Brooklyn.  SL could be bigger, but it's not small, either.  To contrast, I'd say that Open Sim is Amish farms, Active Worlds is a remote state park, and Open Cobalt is Antarctica.

Aside from that, though:  I respect your position.  I had the same position as you, until recently.

If you want to tinker with your drivers and firmware to get things running more smoothly:  I wasn't going to upgrade to PBR at all, until I learned how to set up Resizable BAR on my system.  This article to showed me how to do it.  Everything runs a lot smoother on my system now, not just SL (except Civilization 6, which has intermittent crashes now).  Your mileage my vary, depending on your hardware.  I have an MSI RTX 3060 Ventus 2x with the 12 Gb VRAM, on an ASUS ROG STRIX B450-F motherboard.

Resizable BAR sounds nice and all, but I don't think it will help the OP. You need a pretty high-end graphics card to take advantage of it. 

I really feel for users with older PCs who might have been able to run SL ok at lower settings but now find it completely unusable. Not everyone can afford a new PC or even an upgrade. I think many people will end up leaving over this, and I have friends with really low-end systems who will probably go as their experience deteriorates.

[Dorientje Woller]

@Dune Ravenwood Tried to fiddle with the graphical settings. Mind you, graphical settings below are from the Alchemy PBR Viewer. I tried these settings also on the FireStorm & Official LL Viewer, where they gave a moderated boost, while on the Alchemy Viewer I got a big boost in FPS.

 

Edited July 15 by Dorientje Woller

[Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia]

1 minute ago, Stephanie Misfit said:

Resizable BAR sounds nice and all, but I don't think it will help the OP. You need a pretty high-end graphics card to take advantage of it. 

I really feel for users with older PCs who might have been able to run SL ok at lower settings but now find it completely unusable. Not everyone can afford a new PC or even an upgrade. I think many people will end up leaving over this, and I have friends with really low-end systems who will probably go as their experience deteriorates.

Years ago, in college, my game dev professor predicted that one day, SL viewers could develop kind of like how web browsers developed.  At first, web browsers were supposed to edit HTML, as well as read it.  After a few runs at reviving that original vision, with things like the, "read-write web", we kind of have that functionality again, with the inspect tools, but I don't think it's like how Tim Berners-Lee envisioned.  We have separate programs for making different web content.  VS Code for scripting, Affinity Photo for graphics, Premiere for video... at least that's what I use for these things.  This seems like the most efficient way to do things.

So maybe we will have viewers for high end and viewers for low end systems?  We kind of have different viewers for different use cases now, but it's not as wide spread as it could be.  Photographers seem to like Black Dragon.  Kinksters used to like RLV, before RLV became a standard feature in all the viewers.  Land barons and merchants love their text bot clients.  Building is becoming such an uncommon skill set in SL, that maybe some day we will have a viewer for builders, and one for the rabble who don't know how to rez a prim?

I'm not suggesting that Firestorm start supporting multiple viewers, any more than they already are, with OS and SL viewers.  I'm just saying that maybe LL should try putting out and supporting a viewer with lower end systems in mind, that doesn't use things like PBR, and support it along side the full feature PBR viewer.  LL are the ones getting paid for this.  It's their job to deploy good software.

[Tayln Osbourne]

I'd try out the LL viewer first, there's some odd hardware-specific issues that seem to be happening to Firestorm PBR.

I'd also make sure that in graphics settings that Screen Space Reflections and Mirrors are disabled and that your probes aren't set to real-time. The higher quality settings tend to enable mirrors (and just having a dedicated GPU can cause auto-adjust to quality setting where it sets mirrors on in some cases when it really shouldn't) and occasionally some strange bug causes probes to be set to real-time.

Additionally, LL is already working on fixes for lower end machines and those PRs are already closed and merged, so you might not even have to wait that long for performance and stability improvements.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

33 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

I'd try out the LL viewer first, there's some odd hardware-specific issues that seem to be happening to Firestorm PBR.

I'd also make sure that in graphics settings that Screen Space Reflections and Mirrors are disabled and that your probes aren't set to real-time. The higher quality settings tend to enable mirrors (and just having a dedicated GPU can cause auto-adjust to quality setting where it sets mirrors on in some cases when it really shouldn't) and occasionally some strange bug causes probes to be set to real-time.

Additionally, LL is already working on fixes for lower end machines and those PRs are already closed and merged, so you might not even have to wait that long for performance and stability improvements.

I wonder, though, how long before FS would incorporate any such fixes?

I'm wondering if we might not be seeing, somewhat as Bubble suggests above, almost a paradigm shift in viewer use as a result of this, with residents spreading out somewhat more evenly across a diverse range of viewers, depending upon their needs and systems. Firestorm has been, for a variety of reasons, the Leviathan, but that might well be changing. I think it's certainly going to see its use drop measurably, unless they are able to incorporate performance fixes relatively quickly.

And I need to check out Alchemy -- for photography, not performance issues.

[Conifer Dada]

36 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

I'd try out the LL viewer first, there's some odd hardware-specific issues that seem to be happening to Firestorm PBR.

I'd also make sure that in graphics settings that Screen Space Reflections and Mirrors are disabled and that your probes aren't set to real-time. The higher quality settings tend to enable mirrors (and just having a dedicated GPU can cause auto-adjust to quality setting where it sets mirrors on in some cases when it really shouldn't) and occasionally some strange bug causes probes to be set to real-time.

Additionally, LL is already working on fixes for lower end machines and those PRs are already closed and merged, so you might not even have to wait that long for performance and stability improvements.

I gave up using the LL standard viewer precisely because of the huge deterioration in performance that came with the introduction of the PBR viewer. I switched to Alchemy, which worked fine until its latest update, which brought a noticeable decline in performance, but not as bad as with the LL viewer. So I'm not surprised that Firestorm users are having the same problems.

Even with graphics set to minimum, rez times are considerably longer with the PBR viewers.

[Henri Beauchamp]

6 minutes ago, Conifer Dada said:

Even with graphics set to minimum, rez times are considerably longer with the PBR viewers.

This is due to the new texture fetcher (which has nothing to do in itself with PBR). LL's new implementation is naive, to say the least (FIFO queue instead of a priority queue).

See this message of mine about it.

[Henri Beauchamp]

1 hour ago, Dune Ravenwood said:

I have tried many of the viewers and each one had a different rendering issue.

Did you try the Cool VL Viewer ?...

A dual renderer (PBR and EE ALM/forward) to help with the PBR transition period (i.e. until LL properly fixes their own mess), a super-fast rezzing experience, high frame rates, and no compromise for usability on ”old” or ”weak” PCs.

 

[Ziggy Starsmith]

Yes and yours as well as the SL Official viewer were the best of all of them but graphics were grey on some land, my hairbase rezzed only on one side. No viewers fault but this LL PBR junk. Most viewers could be tweaked to run fine but with frame rates cut in half and draw distances lowered to 60 or less makes sailing impossible. LL has no idea what they do most times. One buggy project to the next.

[Conifer Dada]

21 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

This is due to the new texture fetcher (which has nothing to do in itself with PBR). LL's new implementation is naive, to say the least (FIFO queue instead of a priority queue).

See this message of mine about it.

That maybe, but the problem occurred at the same time as PBR was introduced, and it seems the same with Firestorm and now Alchemy. Since the first PBR viewer was introduced, LL have released a few updated versions but those haven't brought any improvement in performance.

Edited July 15 by Conifer Dada

[Henri Beauchamp]

7 minutes ago, Dune Ravenwood said:

Yes and yours as well as the SL Official viewer were the best of all of them but graphics were grey on some land, my hairbase rezzed only on one side.

The ”grey on some land” might be a ”stuck” ground texture (it happened before PBR too), and while my viewer will automatically retry these after a minute or so, you can ”convince” such texture to load immediately by popping up the mini-map, right clicking on it an choosing ”Refresh terrain” in the context menu.

As for failures to rez some objects in PBR rendering mode, this got fixed in last release (v1.32.2.5) and was due to an occlusion culling bug specific to my PBR backport (oops !): see this message for technical details.

[Henri Beauchamp]

14 minutes ago, Conifer Dada said:

That maybe, but the problem occurred at the same time as PBR was introduced, and it seems the same with Firestorm and now Alchemy.

Yes, because they adopted LL's new texture fetcher, which I did not do in my viewer, instead improving a lot the old fetcher to make it better at anticipating VRAM overshoots and keeping things in line.

[Ziggy Starsmith]

2 hours ago, Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia said:

All due respect... if you think SL is a ghost town, you need to get out more.  SL is the bustling downtown of virtual worlds.  OK, maybe not the core of downtown.  Roblox is Manhattan, but SL is Brooklyn.  SL could be bigger, but it's not small, either.  To contrast, I'd say that Open Sim is Amish farms, Active Worlds is a remote state park, and Open Cobalt is Antarctica.

Aside from that, though:  I respect your position.  I had the same position as you, until recently.

If you want to tinker with your drivers and firmware to get things running more smoothly:  I wasn't going to upgrade to PBR at all, until I learned how to set up Resizable BAR on my system.  This article to showed me how to do it.  Everything runs a lot smoother on my system now, not just SL (except Civilization 6, which has intermittent crashes now).  Your mileage my vary, depending on your hardware.  I have an MSI RTX 3060 Ventus 2x with the 12 Gb VRAM, on an ASUS ROG STRIX B450-F motherboard.

Get out more? I am a wanderer and explorer of mainland and private sims. 24 hours a day all dead ghost towns unless your an addicted shopper at events or huge clubs. Bet I been more places than anyone in 16 years. All this advice and tweaking helps but the thrill is gone and I can't continue to support a company that is so blatant at destroying their own product just as things improve. 1 step forward 5 steps back with LL. They gave us a dream and then stomped on it.

Edited July 15 by Dune Ravenwood

[Midnoot]

2 hours ago, Dune Ravenwood said:

I been very very good at biting my tongue over this PBR fiasco and been an old timer on SL since 2007. What I see is a total lack of learning from ones mistakes.  This PBR is horrific and all just for mirrors and shiney things. In my day and back in the day we detested anything glowing or shining and blingy and here we are today glorifing it and making our graphics worse, not better. Did Linden Labs NOT learn from the Sansar disgrace? I have experimented on various computers some old and some fast and new and all I see is terrible lag, graphics washed out and worse than ever. I am currently using the older Firestorm viewer for now and when it is blocked I am giving up on Second Life after 16/17 years of daily use. This has proven year after year to have to face a ton of useless bells and whistles and no wonder SL is a ghost town. I am downgrading to basic when my PP account runs out in September, giving up owning land or linden homes and unless a great fix comes along where I can once again sail, motorcycle ride or even go to an event with more than 3 people than SL holds nothing for me unless I want to spend my time in a skybox with a draw distance of 30. I have tried many of the viewers and each one had a different rendering issue. The vast majority of new users will give up after an hour if this is what they encounter and learning curves are way too steep for an average user to even try to care about. Time to move on and sad to think my SL ends this way. I believe the troubles started with mesh,  taking most peoples creativity away from the time everyone could build with prims. Yes it is moving to the future but again, Sansar failed and the Lindens never learn and will end up killing SL the same way as Sansar. So many bells and whistles causing unneeded issues. As I leave this forum and post I just expect this post to be locked or deleted as usual but I don't care because it is true. Any smart mouthed replies (like "Bye") will be sneered at  so save your witty insults and attempts at ganging up on me as usual on these forums. SL used to be "My world, my imagination" but now it is a huge vanity influenced mess where we can no longer play, create, build or even function on. SL used to be adventurous and fun and I was a major funster helped and owned many popular clubs and also a major SL blogger (under my old name). I was also known as the Bellisseria Cat which I stopped doing because of all this nonsense. Yes SL is old code but it was allowing us to properly socialize and have fun right out of the box without having to learn about graphics, setting, new computers or whatever. Just a mess and sad to think this is what will make most common users desert SL until it is dead.

SAD SAD SAD but it was a mostly fun 21 years but I bet SL is gone within 2 more years unless it fixes stuff. 😞

Sorry brah , but second life was rapidly deteriorating into a ghost town compared to what it used to be , far before pbr was released. I admit it's far worse than it used to be , but it looks beautiful . The graphics improved . You just can't see it cause potato pc. If anything , we will be able to retain the new generations who admittedly aren't piling into second life ,for a little longer, since they come in with genuine gaming pcs and not netbooks like the veterans do lol. They can enjoy pbrs beautiful textures and a more realistic environment 

 

I blame the population drop more on the way the popular sims are moderated . No fun allowed, everywhere you go. They're only popular because they're affiliated with shops , sex sales , and big names .

 

Don't let the door hit ya on the way out . XD

[Henri Beauchamp]

4 minutes ago, Midnoot said:

Don't let the door hit ya on the way out . XD

Are you serious ?... Do you really think encouraging old time SLers to leave and rejoicing they do will do anything to improve SL ?!? 🤪

Don't you understand that SL cannot afford loosing users ?

If anything, you should be more considerate and polite ! 😠

[discussionbot]

58 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Firestorm has been, for a variety of reasons, the Leviathan, but that might well be changing. I think it's certainly going to see its use drop measurably

100%, this will be inevitable. If anyone has been following the in-world Firestorm helper’s group which is massive, it’ll be obvious how bad the new update has landed with the average SL user with almost daily complaints/comments from surprised users trying their best to make it work. 
 

Of course it’s not an absolute measure but still serves as a good temperature check (along with forum & feedback website comments) about where things stand generally with the shoddy new update. 

[Porky Gorky]

4 minutes ago, Midnoot said:

Don't let the door hit ya on the way out . XD

But they have predicted the end of SL within 2 years! Surely we should take such a statement more seriously? I have penciled in an hour for SERIOUS PANICKING this afternoon. I suggest you all do the same.

[Robberinthemuseum]

I feel op's pain. Went out dancing earlier and only got 9fps. My average fps with graphics set to high these days is 20fps. I don't know what to think about it. For me it's still playable, but 20fps is brutal. 

[Ziggy Starsmith]

46 minutes ago, Midnoot said:

Sorry brah , but second life was rapidly deteriorating into a ghost town compared to what it used to be , far before pbr was released. I admit it's far worse than it used to be , but it looks beautiful . The graphics improved . You just can't see it cause potato pc. If anything , we will be able to retain the new generations who admittedly aren't piling into second life ,for a little longer, since they come in with genuine gaming pcs and not netbooks like the veterans do lol. They can enjoy pbrs beautiful textures and a more realistic environment 

 

I blame the population drop more on the way the popular sims are moderated . No fun allowed, everywhere you go. They're only popular because they're affiliated with shops , sex sales , and big names .

 

Don't let the door hit ya on the way out . XD

Your right, Mesh and Pathfinding destroyed the good old sailing and motorcycle racing days. As I said, time and time again they drop the ball and personally I had enough, spent way too much on pixel/mesh crap for nothing and for you last comment about the door? Hope your computer burns up immediately chump. If your the type of customer LL wants than you deserve what happens in the future. People here used to have fun, know how to play and create and not waste hours and days on tweaking settings, avatars, lighting, mirrors and all kinds on vanity insanity.....ye old SL glory days were legendary!

Edited July 15 by Dune Ravenwood