How text-only viewers might be able to save us some of us from PBR

[WeFlossDaily]

Since the disastrous release of the PBR Firestorm viewer which has effectively forced PBR into the spotlight, I've been thrashing PBR every chance I get, which is probably not the best way to make friends, but somebody has to do it. And while it is great fun, it's not the most effective way to fight back against the march of progress, and at the end of the day, it's not especially helpful. On a more constructive note, I've been experimenting with a bunch of viewers and I think I have found a way for those of us on the low end to survive no matter how bad things get. First let me explain something, PBR is only the first of what I consider to be a trifecta of evil. The 2k+-textured world comes next. glTF completes it. Basically, what appears to be a beautiful PBR Magical Future for many ppl on nice PCs is like entering into a new Dark Age for some of us. I firmly believe it will get worse, a lot worse, and I want to take action. The PBR Magical Future / Dark Age could be detrimental for the continual survival of SL, otherwise. I consider myself a PBR Separatist, and what this means exactly, I am about to make abundantly clear.

Out of all the viewers I've experimented with since the sky turned alien white and the acceptable temperature of GPUs has been declared to be much higher then some of us are comfortable with, I've found that I really like Radegast. It's mostly a text-based viewer with some rendering elements tossed in that don't work very well. It's original creator appears to have passed on, and it's current upkeep appears to be struggling from what I can gather and observe. This means that the viewer is vulnerable. As a PBR separatist, I firmly believe Radegast must be maintained, protected, and explored at all costs. I believe it offers those of us on the low-end a way to survive. So, my first order of business is to explore ways to make Radegast fun and easier to use with LSL scripts. I've already figured out a way to walk around in it like I'm playing a text-based adventure game and I want to continue working on scripts that continue with this idea. Follower scripts, sitting scripts, and scanning scripts all suddenly take on a whole new dimension. Currently, I can pretty much avoid using the render (it doesn't really render mesh but it presents a decent impression of the world around you), but I have yet to completely detach myself from using the map to navigate. Creating text-based ways to see the world and move confidently throughout it is a great new challenge and is a ton of fun. I also really like the idea of trying to play SL like a text-based adventure.

There are many challenges, though. For example, the version I'm currently using doesn't tell me when there's about to an earthquake and I occasionally am informed by others that I'm standing in awkward locations in a sim, like between a sign and a tree. Plus, there is the whole accidentally walking into other ppl thing that definitely needs to be handled in a way to attempt to avoid as much as possible. It's still much easier--and more preferable--to play Barbie in pretty much any other viewer and then load up whatever outfit along you want others to see in Radegast. But I think static NPCs used as avatars could also be used as a sort of okejish downgrade from mesh if one was forced to build their avatar in Radegast. A script to correctly rotate and position them might be required, but that's a bit of a way down the road.

Once I've found ways to make Radegast highly enjoyable, I plan to attempt to fork it and implement some of my ideas into the interface. The major overhaul I would want to do is strip it of all rendering elements, which I believe are a threat to it's overall stability and counter-productive to living through text. Just imagine: 0 FPS, powered by the graphics of the imagination. No textures. No mesh. No visuals. No advanced and expensive hardware required. A graphical pipeline as seek and powerful as the taste of diet-water. A few other ideas I have for it is overhauling the local chat box into a powerful almost-Linux-style terminal, in which many owner given commands directly control navigation and scanning to aid with in world navigation. Dual channel entry fields could also allow beginners to use command driven listeners in scripted attachment in an interesting and effective way that I can visualize much better than I can explain. It'd be fun to import the whole 'what song is playing?' feature also. And hilariously, I think text-driven EEPs and personalized weather systems would be a ton of fun and add lots of immersion. It does sound funny to me, though: a text-only viewer with a highly advanced weather control system, lol.

I'd also like to solve the language problem which I believe plagues other viewers, where they all basically just use the same handful of languages in a way that I find is discriminatory and dismissive of others (ya, language politics. Sorry). This makes creating text-driven EEPs extremely challenging across the board but could create a small niche--and possibly very profitable--market for native speakers who choose to contribute content to such EEPs or sell them for profit while honing their descriptive prowess. Also this could be a powerful tool to assist with language learning in SL. Not only would you be learning to use the interface in your target language if you wanted, but you could experience the weather in whatever language you could find a EEP for, even if it wasn't the language of the viewer UI. Including conlangs could also be fun. I'm a huge proponent of using toki pona as a global lingua-franca for causal conversation between ppl of various languages due to how simple and easy to learn it is.

I also wonder what a sim designed to be interacted with and explored primarily with a text-only viewer in mind look might look like. It wouldn't require any texturing, and could likely be made out of prims and scripts. This would be very accessible in terms of in-world creation, although I can't imagine how anybody would be able to build such a thing in a text-only viewer. Ya, that sounds like a complex problem (one that it's totally fair to ask: why would anybody even want to solve it).

I'm sure some of you are going to thrash this thread and my ideas and I don't care. If you think a text-only viewer is the dumbest thing ever, that's okej. I completely understand. But it's my hope that I inspire others, spark a conversation, and can find a way to do something to fight back against the March of Progress and help ppl trapped on low-end machines stay in SL until LL comes to their sense and abandons PBR for a better rendering system that works for everybody. I'm also excited about exploring this whole new way of experiencing SL though a giant wall of text. =]

So what do you think?

Have you ever tried a text-only viewer?

What kind of problems and challenges do you foresee?

Would you consider trying a text-only viewer because of this post/thread? Did you? And what did you think of it?

[Stephanie Misfit]

No, while I am not happy with the performance of Firestorm since PBR, I would have no use for a text viewer. I build and I like to decorate.

[Midnoot]

Text viewer isn't even second life🤨

 

Something people only use because they aren't at their pcmasterrace

.. besides , we have glorious semi 3d mobile viewer now .  But let me guess , your phone can't handle that just like your PC can't handle pbr cause no matter what , you're gonna cheap out .

Edited August 12 by Midnoot

[belindacarson]

3 minutes ago, Midnoot said:

ext viewer isn't even second life🤨

Rubbish.

 

Lumiya in text mode is how a lot of people interact on second life.

 

Firestorm has a text only mode too.

 

The new ll viewer doesn't have one (will it ever? Idk) but it's still in beta.

[Midnoot]

2 minutes ago, belindacarson said:

Rubbish.

 

Lumiya in text mode is how a lot of people interact on second life.

 

Firestorm has a text only mode too.

 

The new ll viewer doesn't have one (will it ever? Idk) but it's still in beta.

Because they have to . Not because they want to .

[belindacarson]

6 minutes ago, Midnoot said:

Because they have to . Not because they want to .

Rubbish.

 

I use lumiya because I want to.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

16 minutes ago, Midnoot said:

besides , we have glorious semi 3d mobile viewer now .

A piece of fustercluck coded trash almost as worthless as the idea that SL can "survive" with text only".

SL is a niche market platform, with a limited demographic, you can't draw in a new demographic, because the platform doesn't appeal to them, and you can't afford to lose any significant percentage of the niche market, because you pass the tipping point between profitability, and closure.

 

Mobile is worthless, text only is worthless. Fail-PBR elitism is worthless.

THREE failed solutions to one "problem", how to drive off as many paying customers as possible, and bankrupt the platform, and kill it DEAD.

 

[WeFlossDaily]

24 minutes ago, Midnoot said:

your phone can't handle that

It can't. I don't use a smart phone.

24 minutes ago, Midnoot said:

your PC

I play on a laptop.

25 minutes ago, Midnoot said:

you're gonna cheap out

I am. I want a discount on the discount. Fun high-tech stuff is cool and highly desirable but food is really expensive right now.

[WeFlossDaily]

34 minutes ago, Stephanie Misfit said:

No, while I am not happy with the performance of Firestorm since PBR, I would have no use for a text viewer. I build and I like to decorate.

I completely understand. =]

[WeFlossDaily]

18 minutes ago, belindacarson said:

I use lumiya because I want to.

Sometimes the book is better than the movie. =]

 

[HeathcliffMontague]

SL will soon become the next "but can it run Crysis?" meme

[WeFlossDaily]

5 minutes ago, HeathcliffMontague said:

but can it run Crysis

[sirhc DeSantis]

@WeFlossDaily

mi wile toki e ni: ijo palisa li wawa. "radegast" li wan la mi li kama jo e ni. tenpo suno ni la mi li tawa tan toki pi palisa. mi wile e toki palisa li kama pona la mi wile e ni: toki palisa li wawa. mi wile e toki palisa tan ijo palisa. "RGB" li kama tan palisa luka. tan ijo palisa, mi toki e ijo "DiscWorld Trollish". toki kepeken "OPenL".

(sorry I couldn't resist)

[Conifer Dada]

We all buy new computers only to discover that the LL and Firestorm PBR viewers don't work any better on them. So we migrate en mass to other third party viewers which work better, until we all experience massive inventory loss issues. It's then that we turn to text only viewers to reminisce about the old days while exchanging sound gestures. 😁

 

[BilliJo Aldrin]

2 hours ago, WeFlossDaily said:

Since the disastrous release of the PBR Firestorm viewer which has effectively forced PBR into the spotlight, I've been thrashing PBR every chance I get, which is probably not the best way to make friends, but somebody has to do it. And while it is great fun, it's not the most effective way to fight back against the march of progress, and at the end of the day, it's not especially helpful. On a more constructive note, I've been experimenting with a bunch of viewers and I think I have found a way for those of us on the low end to survive no matter how bad things get. First let me explain something, PBR is only the first of what I consider to be a trifecta of evil. The 2k+-textured world comes next. glTF completes it. Basically, what appears to be a beautiful PBR Magical Future for many ppl on nice PCs is like entering into a new Dark Age for some of us. I firmly believe it will get worse, a lot worse, and I want to take action. The PBR Magical Future / Dark Age could be detrimental for the continual survival of SL, otherwise. I consider myself a PBR Separatist, and what this means exactly, I am about to make abundantly clear.

Out of all the viewers I've experimented with since the sky turned alien white and the acceptable temperature of GPUs has been declared to be much higher then some of us are comfortable with, I've found that I really like Radegast. It's mostly a text-based viewer with some rendering elements tossed in that don't work very well. It's original creator appears to have passed on, and it's current upkeep appears to be struggling from what I can gather and observe. This means that the viewer is vulnerable. As a PBR separatist, I firmly believe Radegast must be maintained, protected, and explored at all costs. I believe it offers those of us on the low-end a way to survive. So, my first order of business is to explore ways to make Radegast fun and easier to use with LSL scripts. I've already figured out a way to walk around in it like I'm playing a text-based adventure game and I want to continue working on scripts that continue with this idea. Follower scripts, sitting scripts, and scanning scripts all suddenly take on a whole new dimension. Currently, I can pretty much avoid using the render (it doesn't really render mesh but it presents a decent impression of the world around you), but I have yet to completely detach myself from using the map to navigate. Creating text-based ways to see the world and move confidently throughout it is a great new challenge and is a ton of fun. I also really like the idea of trying to play SL like a text-based adventure.

There are many challenges, though. For example, the version I'm currently using doesn't tell me when there's about to an earthquake and I occasionally am informed by others that I'm standing in awkward locations in a sim, like between a sign and a tree. Plus, there is the whole accidentally walking into other ppl thing that definitely needs to be handled in a way to attempt to avoid as much as possible. It's still much easier--and more preferable--to play Barbie in pretty much any other viewer and then load up whatever outfit along you want others to see in Radegast. But I think static NPCs used as avatars could also be used as a sort of okejish downgrade from mesh if one was forced to build their avatar in Radegast. A script to correctly rotate and position them might be required, but that's a bit of a way down the road.

Once I've found ways to make Radegast highly enjoyable, I plan to attempt to fork it and implement some of my ideas into the interface. The major overhaul I would want to do is strip it of all rendering elements, which I believe are a threat to it's overall stability and counter-productive to living through text. Just imagine: 0 FPS, powered by the graphics of the imagination. No textures. No mesh. No visuals. No advanced and expensive hardware required. A graphical pipeline as seek and powerful as the taste of diet-water. A few other ideas I have for it is overhauling the local chat box into a powerful almost-Linux-style terminal, in which many owner given commands directly control navigation and scanning to aid with in world navigation. Dual channel entry fields could also allow beginners to use command driven listeners in scripted attachment in an interesting and effective way that I can visualize much better than I can explain. It'd be fun to import the whole 'what song is playing?' feature also. And hilariously, I think text-driven EEPs and personalized weather systems would be a ton of fun and add lots of immersion. It does sound funny to me, though: a text-only viewer with a highly advanced weather control system, lol.

I'd also like to solve the language problem which I believe plagues other viewers, where they all basically just use the same handful of languages in a way that I find is discriminatory and dismissive of others (ya, language politics. Sorry). This makes creating text-driven EEPs extremely challenging across the board but could create a small niche--and possibly very profitable--market for native speakers who choose to contribute content to such EEPs or sell them for profit while honing their descriptive prowess. Also this could be a powerful tool to assist with language learning in SL. Not only would you be learning to use the interface in your target language if you wanted, but you could experience the weather in whatever language you could find a EEP for, even if it wasn't the language of the viewer UI. Including conlangs could also be fun. I'm a huge proponent of using toki pona as a global lingua-franca for causal conversation between ppl of various languages due to how simple and easy to learn it is.

I also wonder what a sim designed to be interacted with and explored primarily with a text-only viewer in mind look might look like. It wouldn't require any texturing, and could likely be made out of prims and scripts. This would be very accessible in terms of in-world creation, although I can't imagine how anybody would be able to build such a thing in a text-only viewer. Ya, that sounds like a complex problem (one that it's totally fair to ask: why would anybody even want to solve it).

I'm sure some of you are going to thrash this thread and my ideas and I don't care. If you think a text-only viewer is the dumbest thing ever, that's okej. I completely understand. But it's my hope that I inspire others, spark a conversation, and can find a way to do something to fight back against the March of Progress and help ppl trapped on low-end machines stay in SL until LL comes to their sense and abandons PBR for a better rendering system that works for everybody. I'm also excited about exploring this whole new way of experiencing SL though a giant wall of text. =]

So what do you think?

Have you ever tried a text-only viewer?

What kind of problems and challenges do you foresee?

Would you consider trying a text-only viewer because of this post/thread? Did you? And what did you think of it?

I've used text-only in the past, Text-only sucks. If I can't see how amazing I look inworld, whats the point of logging in?

Edited August 12 by BilliJo Aldrin
spelling, changed a word

[Midnoot]

As much as I hate the migration to messengers outside of second life , It makes me wonder why people don't just catch up with the world a little bit and get their sl friends to add them on discord ... Oh right , cause  getting second life people to try anything other than second life is like pulling teeth.

 

If you're so desperate to communicate with your second life friends , you should be in each other's discord , or some type of messenger , no exceptions . If they disagree , how much of a friend was that ? Lol . That's a " role play friend " . 

 

If it's not about keeping in touch with existing second life friends  and it's using second life text viewers to find local chat? Almost impossible and we can tell when you're doing it . Sitting there with a borked ao , logging into the same spot every single day , never moving except in small increments , never aware of visuals that happened right in front of you in world, etc. Not that this means much but we know >_  >

 

I call these people non-members of second life since it's like they're unaware to anything that's happening. Poor guys/girls often saying stuff while people are out of range , scurrying around in a corner like a blind opossum. 🥺

Edited August 12 by Midnoot

[Phil Deakins]

5 minutes ago, Midnoot said:

I call these people non-members users of second life

FIFY

[HeathcliffMontague]

41 minutes ago, Midnoot said:

If you're so desperate to communicate with your second life friends

You're totally missing the mark there, my friend. Us "oldies" are perfectly able to use Discord, Skype, Teams . We can even develop Polaroid pics.. It's just that when you purchase a  Ryzen 5, a medium GPU and 16 GB you expect things like SL to kinda work  

[Midnoot]

1 minute ago, HeathcliffMontague said:

You're totally missing the mark there, my friend. Us "oldies" are perfectly able to use Discord, Skype, Teams . We can even develop Polaroid pics.. It's just that when you purchase a  Ryzen 5, a medium GPU and 16 GB you expect things like SL to kinda work  

Mediocre specs , mah boi.

[HeathcliffMontague]

1 minute ago, Midnoot said:

Mediocre specs , mah boi.

LOL

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

1 hour ago, Midnoot said:

getting second life people to try anything other than second life is like pulling teeth.

Oh that's simply not true and an unfair characterization of SL residents.

They do sometimes try other platforms!  They usually stick around for an hour or two to complain bitterly about the mediocre selection of hair and shoes on offer then log out and head straight back to Second Life.

[Orwar]

   Would a text-based viewer come with an AI describing the scene around you to let you interact with the 3D space in text?

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

3 minutes ago, Orwar said:

Would a text-based viewer come with an AI describing the scene around you to let you interact with the 3D space in text?

If the AI incorporates the voice of James Earl Jones or Morgan Freeman then I may become a text-only convert!

[Yorkie Bardeen]

1 hour ago, Midnoot said:

As much as I hate the migration to messengers outside of second life , It makes me wonder why people don't just catch up with the world a little bit and get their sl friends to add them on discord ... Oh right , cause  getting second life people to try anything other than second life is like pulling teeth.

Using Discord is the next step towards doxxing yourself outside of SL. I am OK with using Discord for SL stuff, because I don't have anything remotely RL connected on that platform, but a lot of people probably might see it as a problem. I get annoyed when stores put out notices with bit.ly links that go to facebook; one more way to expose people's RL information if they didn't copy/paste the link into a private browser tab first.

So long as Henri is making CoolVLViewer I think there is a valid alternative without going so far as using purely text based viewers. I did use Radegast in the past, though, and I think it's not a bad idea generally to have something like that available. Firestorm text mode is not exactly that, and it really hoses your firestorm settings if you use it and want to go back to normal.

[Simo Vodopan]

4 hours ago, WeFlossDaily said:

Since the disastrous release of the PBR Firestorm viewer which has effectively forced PBR into the spotlight, I've been thrashing PBR every chance I get, which is probably not the best way to make friends, but somebody has to do it. And while it is great fun, it's not the most effective way to fight back against the march of progress, and at the end of the day, it's not especially helpful. On a more constructive note, I've been experimenting with a bunch of viewers and I think I have found a way for those of us on the low end to survive no matter how bad things get. First let me explain something, PBR is only the first of what I consider to be a trifecta of evil. The 2k+-textured world comes next. glTF completes it. Basically, what appears to be a beautiful PBR Magical Future for many ppl on nice PCs is like entering into a new Dark Age for some of us. I firmly believe it will get worse, a lot worse, and I want to take action. The PBR Magical Future / Dark Age could be detrimental for the continual survival of SL, otherwise. I consider myself a PBR Separatist, and what this means exactly, I am about to make abundantly clear.

Out of all the viewers I've experimented with since the sky turned alien white and the acceptable temperature of GPUs has been declared to be much higher then some of us are comfortable with, I've found that I really like Radegast. It's mostly a text-based viewer with some rendering elements tossed in that don't work very well. It's original creator appears to have passed on, and it's current upkeep appears to be struggling from what I can gather and observe. This means that the viewer is vulnerable. As a PBR separatist, I firmly believe Radegast must be maintained, protected, and explored at all costs. I believe it offers those of us on the low-end a way to survive. So, my first order of business is to explore ways to make Radegast fun and easier to use with LSL scripts. I've already figured out a way to walk around in it like I'm playing a text-based adventure game and I want to continue working on scripts that continue with this idea. Follower scripts, sitting scripts, and scanning scripts all suddenly take on a whole new dimension. Currently, I can pretty much avoid using the render (it doesn't really render mesh but it presents a decent impression of the world around you), but I have yet to completely detach myself from using the map to navigate. Creating text-based ways to see the world and move confidently throughout it is a great new challenge and is a ton of fun. I also really like the idea of trying to play SL like a text-based adventure.

There are many challenges, though. For example, the version I'm currently using doesn't tell me when there's about to an earthquake and I occasionally am informed by others that I'm standing in awkward locations in a sim, like between a sign and a tree. Plus, there is the whole accidentally walking into other ppl thing that definitely needs to be handled in a way to attempt to avoid as much as possible. It's still much easier--and more preferable--to play Barbie in pretty much any other viewer and then load up whatever outfit along you want others to see in Radegast. But I think static NPCs used as avatars could also be used as a sort of okejish downgrade from mesh if one was forced to build their avatar in Radegast. A script to correctly rotate and position them might be required, but that's a bit of a way down the road.

Once I've found ways to make Radegast highly enjoyable, I plan to attempt to fork it and implement some of my ideas into the interface. The major overhaul I would want to do is strip it of all rendering elements, which I believe are a threat to it's overall stability and counter-productive to living through text. Just imagine: 0 FPS, powered by the graphics of the imagination. No textures. No mesh. No visuals. No advanced and expensive hardware required. A graphical pipeline as seek and powerful as the taste of diet-water. A few other ideas I have for it is overhauling the local chat box into a powerful almost-Linux-style terminal, in which many owner given commands directly control navigation and scanning to aid with in world navigation. Dual channel entry fields could also allow beginners to use command driven listeners in scripted attachment in an interesting and effective way that I can visualize much better than I can explain. It'd be fun to import the whole 'what song is playing?' feature also. And hilariously, I think text-driven EEPs and personalized weather systems would be a ton of fun and add lots of immersion. It does sound funny to me, though: a text-only viewer with a highly advanced weather control system, lol.

I'd also like to solve the language problem which I believe plagues other viewers, where they all basically just use the same handful of languages in a way that I find is discriminatory and dismissive of others (ya, language politics. Sorry). This makes creating text-driven EEPs extremely challenging across the board but could create a small niche--and possibly very profitable--market for native speakers who choose to contribute content to such EEPs or sell them for profit while honing their descriptive prowess. Also this could be a powerful tool to assist with language learning in SL. Not only would you be learning to use the interface in your target language if you wanted, but you could experience the weather in whatever language you could find a EEP for, even if it wasn't the language of the viewer UI. Including conlangs could also be fun. I'm a huge proponent of using toki pona as a global lingua-franca for causal conversation between ppl of various languages due to how simple and easy to learn it is.

I also wonder what a sim designed to be interacted with and explored primarily with a text-only viewer in mind look might look like. It wouldn't require any texturing, and could likely be made out of prims and scripts. This would be very accessible in terms of in-world creation, although I can't imagine how anybody would be able to build such a thing in a text-only viewer. Ya, that sounds like a complex problem (one that it's totally fair to ask: why would anybody even want to solve it).

I'm sure some of you are going to thrash this thread and my ideas and I don't care. If you think a text-only viewer is the dumbest thing ever, that's okej. I completely understand. But it's my hope that I inspire others, spark a conversation, and can find a way to do something to fight back against the March of Progress and help ppl trapped on low-end machines stay in SL until LL comes to their sense and abandons PBR for a better rendering system that works for everybody. I'm also excited about exploring this whole new way of experiencing SL though a giant wall of text. =]

So what do you think?

Have you ever tried a text-only viewer?

What kind of problems and challenges do you foresee?

Would you consider trying a text-only viewer because of this post/thread? Did you? And what did you think of it?

At that point you might as well play a 'Choose Your Own Adventure' game.

 

3 hours ago, WeFlossDaily said:

 

Wasn't SL always like that? *Snirks*

15 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

If the AI incorporates the voice of James Earl Jones or Morgan Freeman then I may become a text-only convert!

Give me Gilbert Gottfried anyday for SL. His voice would perfectly encapsulate the chaotic and pathetic vibes of some users.

"Holy hell was this erotic at the expense of my own morality. I would sink even deeper into the rabbit-hole again! Just like IGN says its a 10/10"

"Here we have Sherry and her yacht that takes up so many damn scripts rolling by. She always was a snarky, uppity ***** like the rest of them in the sailing community. If you're not one of them, then, well, you may as well be ***** is their thought process. Thats Siren's Isle for ya!".

"Please would somebody give me a blow-job?"

That or George Carlin or any other figure of that 'nature' would be ideal.

Edited August 12 by Simo Vodopan