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

[Persephone Emerald]

15 hours ago, discussionbot said:

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

Unrelated to PBR because I'm not using a PBR viewer yet, my Firestorm viewer keeps setting my water to reflections of Everything, when I want it to be set to Transparent. I finally worked around this problem by derendering the water, which you can do in the Advanced settings on the Firestorm viewer. You might try that too.

Edited July 15 by Persephone Emerald

[Scylla Rhiadra]

5 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

Yeah, but unless the TPV devs get around to sharing the data, third party is the only remotely reliable source we have. Everything else is literally just feelings.

This reminds me of a conversation I was involved in months ago, in the FS Beta Testing group chat, which went something like this.

-- There are lots of people having problems with the PBR viewers
-- Oh? Do you have statistics to back that up?
-- No one is collecting stats, so no
-- If you don't have stats, it's not a thing

So, this is some sort of weird application of Schrodinger's Cat: if I don't have numbers, it obviously isn't really happening.

[Aethelwine]

2 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Well, gosh. That's certainly going to assist in keeping the platform viable.

Concurrency will drop by a few thousand (and, no, new people aren't going to flock to SL because we have a half-assed implementation of PBR) -- but at least we have working mirrors!

And don't forget the coloured Emojis!

That is the best thing about PBR

[WeFlossDaily]

15 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. 😞

 

I will be sad if you leave OP. You're opinion is valid and important to the community.

[Arielle Popstar]

48 minutes ago, Nalates Urriah said:

You ( @Janet Voxel ) and many others think so too. BUT... since my 2016 (i5 GTX1060) hardware runs FS v7 well while it sucks on other computers, even newer, the problem is most likely in the user's settings or their hardware.

For those that want to see if Windows tweaks can improve performance see my blog: http://blog.nalates.net/2024/07/06/firestorm-viewer-7-1-9-problems/

once or twice a month I see my Windows 10 slow down. It has a massive effect on Firestorm. I take care of updates and damaged files and all returns to normal.

Undoubtedly good information....for technical types who understand it to some degree and can follow the suggestions. Problem is that aside from machine specs and helpful hints on how to improve FPS, the reality is that there is a good percentage of residents in SL who do not have a technical aptitude and who's eyes roll back in their heads even reading anything related to it. They have an aptitude for stuff that makes my eyes water but it doesn't extend to the technical bits of the viewers or the OS in general. 

Some of us techie types need to understand that there is a good portion of residents who simply cannot follow all the stated suggestions. If a viewer is not ready to run without a pile of tweaking needed, those non techie types are just going to throw up their hands and go elsewhere.

[BriannaLovey]

3 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Undoubtedly good information....for technical types who understand it to some degree and can follow the suggestions. Problem is that aside from machine specs and helpful hints on how to improve FPS, the reality is that there is a good percentage of residents in SL who do not have a technical aptitude and who's eyes roll back in their heads even reading anything related to it. They have an aptitude for stuff that makes my eyes water but it doesn't extend to the technical bits of the viewers or the OS in general. 

Some of us techie types need to understand that there is a good portion of residents who simply cannot follow all the stated suggestions. If a viewer is not ready to run without a pile of tweaking needed, those non techie types are just going to throw up their hands and go elsewhere.

It will be wise to tell them to treat all future releases of Firestorm as alpha/beta-stage software, and to only upgrade when bugs are fixed. For other viewers, this may or may not be applicable.

[Codex Alpha]

6 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

 If a viewer is not ready to run without a pile of tweaking needed, those non techie types are just going to throw up their hands and go elsewhere.

And that's the long and short of it. People want stuff working out of the box, and that's all that matters in the end to them. People just want to play a game, not join a cult.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

7 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Some of us techie types need to understand that there is a good portion of residents who simply cannot follow all the stated suggestions. If a viewer is not ready to run without a pile of tweaking needed, those non techie types are just going to throw up their hands and go elsewhere.

I'm reminded of Paul's suggestion, some time ago, that people having problems with old computers "build their own" from selected components.

All you need is a screwdriver!!

No, really!

[Arielle Popstar]

1 minute ago, BriannaLovey said:

It will be wise to tell them to treat all future releases of Firestorm as alpha/beta-stage software, and to only upgrade when bugs are fixed. For other viewers, this may or may not be applicable.

I'm thinking in some ways with their 3 version rule it already is. People do not have to use the current release and can hold off for a couple more. At the least though all the angst surrounding the latest gives both the FS and LL dev's some ideas what needs fixing.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 minutes ago, Codex Alpha said:

People just want to play a game, not join a cult.

Honestly, this is the word that has occurred to me more than once, listening to the happy campers in the FS Beta Test group chatting away about how wonderful PBR looks on their gaming computers. I've resisted using it, but for some it really applies. They just don't want to hear about people having issues -- or refuse to acknowledge that this is in any way a substantial problem.

[Coffee Pancake]

1 minute ago, Codex Alpha said:

And that's the long and short of it. People want stuff working out of the box, and that's all that matters in the end to them. People just want to play a game, not join a cult.

There are 39,595 people playing the game right now.

There are a bakers dozen on the forums having a moan.

Little perspective goes a long way.

[BriannaLovey]

1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I'm reminded of Paul's suggestion, some time ago, that people having problems with old computers "build their own" from selected components.

All you need is a screwdriver!!

No, really!

heh. If I had the money, I would start building computers for people affected by this, preinstall a stable user-friendly OS like OpenSUSE on them along with all the current TPVs, then give them away. But until then I will have to help them in other ways.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

6 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

There are a bakers dozen on the forums having a moan.

Gosh, only 13 people having problems with the new viewers?

Whew. I was worried it might be more.

ETA: I think I know these 13 personally!

Edited July 15 by Scylla Rhiadra

[BriannaLovey]

Just now, Codex Alpha said:

And that's the long and short of it. People want stuff working out of the box, and that's all that matters in the end to them. People just want to play a game, not join a cult.

This is why I don't see LL supporting (or even allowing) TPVs much longer. Firestorm in particular has become a liability to LL, especially since a surprising amount of people have no idea how to whitelist a program in an antivirus. If you agree with this logic, prepare accordingly.

[Arielle Popstar]

1 minute ago, Coffee Pancake said:

There are 39,595 people playing the game right now.

There are a bakers dozen on the forums having a moan.

Little perspective goes a long way.

How many are bots, on mobile or AFK's playing some other game in the background? I highly doubt there are 39k actually playing the game. That doesn't include all those holding on for dear life hoping they don't crash.

[Coffee Pancake]

1 minute ago, BriannaLovey said:

This is why I don't see LL supporting (or even allowing) TPVs much longer. Firestorm in particular has become a liability to LL, especially since a surprising amount of people have no idea how to whitelist a program in an antivirus. If you agree with this logic, prepare accordingly.

If LL ban TPVs a copybot with viewer spoofing wont help you side step the official client.

[animats]

Somewhere here, there's a performance problem.

Firestorm 7 on a desktop machine with a rather low-end GPU. 19 FPS.

I just tried riding around my rather cluttered store/workshop that tended to get around 14FPS with Firestorm 6.x, running the viewer on an older Linux 8GB desktop. 2 CPUs with hyper-threading for four execution streams. Firestorm is keeping them all about 60% busy, which is good. The somewhat puny NVidia 640 (2GB, product launched in 2012) is over 80% full and 100% busy. Firestorm's graphics auto-setting has set draw distance to 96m and turned off shadows and mirrors.

This is mediocre, but tolerable SL performance. I tried New Babbage, one of the high-detail areas of SL, and again, got 15-19 FPS.  It's about the same as Firestorm 6, although the GPU is doing much more of the work.

Is the troubled user's system below that level of hardware?

This is on Linux, by the way. That may make a difference.

 

 

Edited July 15 by animats

[Ayashe Ninetails]

1 hour ago, Paul Hexem said:

Shadows and regular reflections on, SSR and mirrors off, 128 DD, two other avatars, mainland, I can hit 100 easy based on direction.

Yep, that sounds pretty good then. I'd be curious what would happen if you took your current settings to a packed shopping event sim. That's where I saw a massive drop from three-digit fps (low 200s) into the 40s. Oof.

Not that it matters - I fully expect 35+ avatars to wreak havoc even with the best of hardware.

[Coffee Pancake]

1 minute ago, Arielle Popstar said:

How many are bots, on mobile or AFK's playing some other game in the background? I highly doubt there are 39k actually playing the game. That doesn't include all those holding on for dear life hoping they don't crash.

This is one of the most pervasive myths about SL .. that all the other people we aren't in direct constant contact with aren't actually real, somehow.

Actual bots account for less than 1-3% of the population count, we know this as fact from when the grid stopped allowing them to log in.

Avatars who don't excitedly respond to random booty calls aren't bots.

 

2 minutes ago, animats said:

Is the troubled user's system below that level of hardware?

Quite a few are .. they were getting away with budget business netbooks, some of which are over a decade old.

[Janet Voxel]

I love how we’re obsessed with fps, yet the average monitor only has a refresh rate of like 60mhz. Then in the same discussion, we’re talking about how people can’t afford a new PC.

if you don’t have a 300-500 dollar monitor, 60 fps is fine and going over your refresh rate is kind of a waste.

[animats]

What will really stall Firestorm out is running out of main memory.

Hanging out in London City on the low-end machine. People are discussing why boomers are bad.

Firestorm stalls out when memory fills and swapping to disk starts. 8GB of main memory is not enough. If this machine had 16GB, it could handle this hangout area.

The official minimum hardware list for SL is way out of date.

A real minimum equipment list for SL:

• 4 CPU cores. (Firestorm can use them now.)
• 16GB of main memory. (Less, and you stall out in crowded areas.)
• An NVidia 640 2GB graphics card. (This is low-end.)
• Enough SSD for the viewer cache. (Cheap to add as an additional drive.)
• At least 100Mb/s networking. (Less, and you wait all day for assets.)

That's minimum, not recommended. And don't try to have anything else open, such as a browser, while running SL on this level of hardware.

I don't know what to say about laptops and integrated graphics. Someone else will have to benchmark those.

[Ayashe Ninetails]

7 minutes ago, Janet Voxel said:

I love how we’re obsessed with fps, yet the average monitor only has a refresh rate of like 60mhz. Then in the same discussion, we’re talking about how people can’t afford a new PC.

if you don’t have a 300-500 dollar monitor, 60 fps is fine and going over your refresh rate is kind of a waste.

Anything over 30 fps doesn't matter in most cases, but there are people reporting getting under 10 fps with very reasonable settings and decent hardware, and that hurts quite a bit. That's the reason why I checked mine in different scenarios as soon as I swapped to the newest viewer.

[BriannaLovey]

1 hour ago, animats said:

Somewhere here, there's a performance problem.

Firestorm 7 on a desktop machine with a rather low-end GPU. 19 FPS.

I just tried riding around my rather cluttered store/workshop that tended to get around 14FPS with Firestorm 6.x, running the viewer on an older Linux 8GB desktop. 2 CPUs with hyper-threading for four execution streams. Firestorm is keeping them all about 60% busy, which is good. The somewhat puny NVidia 640 (2GB, product launched in 2012) is over 80% full and 100% busy. Firestorm's graphics auto-setting has set draw distance to 96m and turned off shadows and mirrors.

This is mediocre, but tolerable SL performance. I tried New Babbage, one of the high-detail areas of SL, and again, got 15-19 FPS.  It's about the same as Firestorm 6, although the GPU is doing much more of the work.

Is the troubled user's system below that level of hardware?

This is on Linux, by the way. That may make a difference.

 

 

Linux makes a huge difference, especially on an efficient desktop environment like LXDE, LXQt, or XFCE. For comparison, Windows 11 has taken up at least 4GB RAM on idle every time I have used it. Plus, it runs a lot of background processes that take up CPU and disk bandwidth. So if you use a Windows computer and have low RAM and/or your OS is installed on a hard disk instead of a SSD, it will be a much more laggy experience. I would suggest anyone comfortable with the process of installing an operating system to use Linux for SL, as you will get a lot more out of your hardware than otherwise.

 

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Gosh, only 13 people having problems with the new viewers?

Whew. I was worried it might be more.

ETA: I think I know these 13 personally!

Just don't bother responding to her, her mind is already made up about all of this. There is simply no use in talking to her anymore.

Edited July 16 by BriannaLovey

[Harper Held]

43 minutes ago, BriannaLovey said:

Just don't bother responding to her, her mind is already made up about all of this. There is simply no use in talking to her anymore.

Aren't you just a peach.

Edited July 16 by Harper Held

[Harper Held]

1 minute ago, Harper Held said:

Aren't you just a peach.

Don't bother telling me to not quote you, not 'at you', leave your name out of my mouth ...or whatever.

If you post in a public forum, expect to get replies from public people.

Edited July 16 by Harper Held