LL Reaches Out on PBR

[Sid Nagy]

7 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

This PBR fiasco is turning into a nightmare, I release loads of PBR materials every month for sale and people just keep buying them and then come back and demand more! “Make this” they cry, “make that” they beg. Then I have to go to the effort of replying with things like “OK, I will”. Then there is all the hassle of cashing out all the money and bloody spending it. I am just about sick of it all.

Good for you.
But mileages vary. I'm not in the texture selling business and have no intention to start something in that field.
I'm totally not in the mood to learn things about the new texturing merits for SL, that (hopefully) not even halfway in their final stages. So I wait.  Meanwhile sales slowly go down.

Edited August 23 by Sid Nagy

[Luna Bliss]

8 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

17 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

I think you're missing out on major factors not included in your assessments.

You're right.

I paid no mind at all to the pronouncements of s $200 an hour Californian Fake Guru at a Yogi-the-Bear Pay-2-Win Ashram, for example, how remiss of me.

 

Meanwhile, in a discussion of the merits of a so-called "technical improvement" it helps if one understands the technology, and what "improvements" it's supposed to provide, rather than the BS claims of technically ignorant people, and can therefore point out when it's broken.

I don't think Ashrams or my participation in self-growth venues in and outside of SL have anything to do with my evaluation of PBR, and also shouldn't be brought into the discussion in some misguided attempt to trash me.

To make an evaluation of whether LL did a poor job in implementing PBR we'd need to know:

How much money do they really have to develop this feature? Did they have enough money to hire the absolute best developers in the field, or have the funds to hire enough people?  Is it necessary to have the residents do part of the work, be guinea pigs, in order to cut costs?  You can't really compare LL to other games that have more money, more developers, more volunteers.  You seem to think LL has a bottomless pit of money.

How is SL different from these other games?  It could be it's MUCH more difficult to get PBR to work here. As I said earlier, for all we know what they're doing could be absolutely amazing due to the constraints of SL (more real-time rendering, an outdated engine, and more features specific to SL).

I'm sure there's more factors I haven't thought of, important variables needed to make a competent evaluation as to whether LL is doing a good job.

 

 

[ValKalAstra]

8 minutes ago, Robin Kiyori said:

There's a big difference between  constructive criticism of things you find lacking and overly dramatic drivel devoted to dragging down every perceived flaw. Just as here is a difference between people disagreeing with your points and actively being shouted down.

It's good that LL is updating and bug-zapping any issues. Things are defiantly not buttery smooth but they are getting better.

Aye. I knew to stay away from the PBR discussion when people started reaching for terms like "fascist boot lickers", "cultists" or "commissars" fighting against "evil communist greedy capitalist creators" while styling themselves like some digital age Sophie Scholl.

It's a buggy *****e software patch that failed on several levels, not virtual genocide. Bloody hyperbolic hell, people.

So hopefully LLs statement can normalise affairs a bit because the rethoric is beyond insane.

[Ceka Cianci]

I can't help but think that there has to be a good PBR and beer goggles meme out there somewhere just waiting for some beer drinking SLer to create..

🥸    

Something like, Damn girl, with PBR  you look HAWT!

hehehe

[Porky Gorky]

2 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Principles, so important to have some, yes?

 

[Porky Gorky]

2 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

Good for you.
But mileages vary. I'm not in the texture selling business and have no intention to start something in that field.
I'm totally not in the mood to learn things about the new texturing merits for SL, that (hopefully) not even halfway in their final stages. So I wait.  Meanwhile sales slowly go down.

I just put myself in the right place at the right time to capitalize on a gap in the market. It won’t last.

[Arielle Popstar]

32 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

The problem, Zalificent, is that you think EVERYthing LL does is "broken drek".

I see a SL I enjoy, despite some flaws.  I accept the fact that SL, like life, has flaws and aspects I wish were different BUT I don't feel the need to constantly berate it all the time due to its imperfections.

You accuse others of this strange 'cult of positivity' without seeing you are in a 'cult of negativity'.

She's not nearly negative enough for some areas of SL and actually in the "positivity cult" for other things where the Lab is antique in comparison to other platforms.

You're just negative about her negativity because you don't have a defence from a technical perspective and therefore have to make it about the poster.

[BilliJo Aldrin]

2 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

BilliJo's computer is literally broken. The fan on her old GPU broke so she keeps the case open and blows fans on it, but it still overheats and crashes fairly frequently. All a matter of public record.

Actually, since i started using a bigger fan months ago, it hasn’t overheated and shut down even once. So I can put off buying a new computer until being forced to use a PBR viewer causes it to start shutting down again. 😂

[BilliJo Aldrin]

1 hour ago, MissSweetViolet said:

I agree, the mirrors which I was actually looking forward to, are a major issue right now. For the most part my laptop handles PBR well, but the mirrors not so much, I have to disable them.

I've also noticed that my fan goes up with shadows on where it didn't before [ in theory not an issue for the fan to run, but I've had past issues with on my first laptop, so I'm admittedly a bit paranoid], so unless I'm taking pics, I've been keeping those off as well till fixes come in.

With those two things off, things run well for me so far, and I've liked the PBR content I've seen so far. 

What is this obsession with mirrors? oooo I can see myself in a mirror, i love second life 10,000 times more now 😂

[Luna Bliss]

8 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

49 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

The problem, Zalificent, is that you think EVERYthing LL does is "broken drek".

I see a SL I enjoy, despite some flaws.  I accept the fact that SL, like life, has flaws and aspects I wish were different BUT I don't feel the need to constantly berate it all the time due to its imperfections.

You accuse others of this strange 'cult of positivity' without seeing you are in a 'cult of negativity'.

She's not nearly negative enough for some areas of SL and actually in the "positivity cult" for other things where the Lab is antique in comparison to other platforms.

You're just negative about her negativity because you don't have a defence from a technical perspective and therefore have to make it about the poster.

I do have a valid defense, and I've presented it.  An evaluation of whether LL is doing a good job requires more than knowledge of the nuts and bolts. As I said:

To make an evaluation of whether LL did a poor job in implementing PBR we'd need to know:

How much money do they really have to develop this feature? Did they have enough money to hire the absolute best developers in the field, or have the funds to hire enough people?  Is it necessary to have the residents do part of the work, be guinea pigs, in order to cut costs?  You can't really compare LL to other games that have more money, more developers, more volunteers.  You seem to think LL has a bottomless pit of money.

How is SL different from these other games?  It could be it's MUCH more difficult to get PBR to work here. As I said earlier, for all we know what they're doing could be absolutely amazing due to the constraints of SL (more real-time rendering, an outdated engine, and more features specific to SL).

I'm sure there's more factors I haven't thought of, important variables needed to make a competent evaluation as to whether LL is doing a good job.

[BilliJo Aldrin]

21 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

So, it's worth noting even in the best games, you only actually see real time mirrors in single player. Rendering lots of players is always going to require a ton of horsepower, even before you consider that SL makes it so much worse. Add mirrors that double them up (or more) and you're just asking for trouble.

Mirrors are absolutely best only used when you're by yourself in a quiet area or in a skybox or something, otherwise they really probably should be kept off.

Thank goodness one has the option to disable mirrors, thats one option I’ll never use

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 minute ago, Luna Bliss said:

You seem to think LL has a bottomless pit of money.

I think they have publicly admitted they have a turnover of over 500 million a year, and are "a reliable cash making machine".

 

3 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

It could be it's MUCH more difficult to get PBR to work here

From a technical standpoint, SL is unsuitable for a PBR implementation of any kind.

Too many on-the-fly-variables for it to work efficiently. Hence the over abundance of those auto-probes, constan'y spamming your viewer with render requests for Environment HDR probe reflection maps. to provide the fake reflections on all the over-shiny surfaces, for example, that in a PBR friendly platform, would have been baked ONCE, by the level builders, when that game was made.

 

7 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Is it necessary to have the residents do part of the work, be guinea pigs, in order to cut costs?

Paying customers have a right to expect the people they are paying to do their jobs properly, not fob that off on the paying customers.

You don't take your car to the repair shop, agree to pay the massive estimated repair bill, then put on overalls and pick up a wrench your self.

 

10 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

I don't think Ashrams or my participation in...

You brought in your keen interest in amateur hobbyist shopping mall psychology...

12 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

...brought into the discussion in some misguided attempt to trash...

...People who don't agree that LL are doing a "great job" and that "PBR is great".

 

14 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

You can't really compare LL to other games that have more money, more developers

And yet the Futureness Cultists do that constantly...

"AAA Game [ insert name here ] has PBR, so SL urgently NEEDS to have it too, at any price, even if it damages the platform's finances and long term viability!"

Remember one of the Futureness Cultists, who used to start a new thread every couple of months telling us about some not-so-cool feature, they had totally misunderstood, and saying that SL should have this immediately, and that "LL needs to up their game or they will be left behind".

THAT's the SAME Futureness Cultist who talked LL into wasting a crapton of money on "Web Cam based Auto-Gurning", despite most people in SL hating the idea, because HIS avatar looks like a week old corpse in Freebie-Warehouse one-size-fits-nobody clothing.

 

[Ceka Cianci]

Just now, BilliJo Aldrin said:

Actually, since i started using a bigger fan months ago, it hasn’t overheated and shut down even once. So I can put off buying a new computer until being forced to use a PBR viewer causes it to start shutting down again. 😂

I had an old boyfriend that had a heat devil heater fan that he cut a hole in the side of his case door right over his cpu.

I thought that was neat. He had an on off switch for it and a dial for it and could speed it up or lower the fan speed.. He had a filter on it also to catch the dust..

You could feel the air coming out of  his case in every little opening.. It was loud though for sure.. But it was  a lot better than the little dinky fan he took off.. It kept his case and everything cool..

hehehe

[Paul Hexem]

22 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

I can't help but think that there has to be a good PBR and beer goggles meme out there somewhere just waiting for some beer drinking SLer to create..

🥸    

Something like, Damn girl, with PBR  you look HAWT!

hehehe

Do those pants come with PBR mirrors? 'Cause I see myself in them!

[Flea Yatsenko]

8 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

I'm totally not in the mood to learn things about the new texturing merits for SL, that (hopefully) not even halfway in their final stages. So I wait.  Meanwhile sales slowly go down.

It's not bad if you are using existing materials. It's actually a lot easier to use than blinn-phong spec/norm since you just have one material to use instead of three maps.

 

Just now, Arielle Popstar said:

She's not nearly negative enough for some areas of SL and actually in the "positivity cult" for other things where the Lab is antique in comparison to other platforms.

You're just negative about her negativity because you don't have a defence from a technical perspective and therefore have to make it about the poster.

While there are people that defend what LL does, I don't think you'll find a lot that defend how they do it. SL needed things like reflection probes, specially for interior spaces. It's just the way LL did it was not good. Attacking a feature that should be an improvement, because a lot of mistakes were made implementing it, doesn't solve any issues at all.

SL is reaching an age where things it depends on are no longer much supported or are completely deprecated. OpenGL has basically been abandoned for Vulkan and lower level APIs that are similar. Collada is no longer supported or developed.

One of the biggest mistakes LL did was forcing Firestorm to adopt PBR for SL21B when the rest of the viewer code had serious issues. Those are the kind of implementation errors LL made, it doesn't matter how much they spent or whatever.

[Luna Bliss]

3 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

23 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Is it necessary to have the residents do part of the work, be guinea pigs, in order to cut costs?

Paying customers have a right to expect the people they are paying to do their jobs properly, not fob that off on the paying customers.

You don't take your car to the repair shop, agree to pay the massive estimated repair bill, then put on overalls and pick up a wrench your self.

You compare apples to oranges so much in your erroneous comparisons that you need to open up a fruitcake factory.   Cars are just like virtual worlds!  lol

[Zalificent Corvinus]

2 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

You compare apples to oranges so much in your erroneous comparisons that you need to open up a fruitcake factory.   Cars are just like virtual worlds!  lol

When you pay a company to provide a service, being auto repairs or a virtual world,  you have a right to expect them to provide that service, and for the service to work.

When they don't, you complain, and if needed, get together with other complaining customers and demand action, and possibly a class-action litigation to force their hand.

 

What you don't to is try and sort it out for them, your self, while claiming they are a good company that cares about it's customers.

You're PAYING them to sort it out.

 

[Arielle Popstar]

5 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

I'm sure there's more factors I haven't thought of, important variables needed to make a competent evaluation as to whether LL is doing a good job.

You missed the biggest factor of all that has to do with priorities. There are a truckload of other enhancements the Lab could have taken care of that would have meant way more to a greater portion of the residents. PBR is really only of benefit to creators and artists. Those buying PBR content are only doing so because they'll spend their money on any new shiny, whether it looks good or not but as far as that shiny benefitting the platform long term in attracting new residents is not just doubtful but a fantasy.

The single biggest complaint about SL is the learning curve and until that is addressed, any other enhancements are a waste of time. In that regard LL is doing a horrendous job and has been consistent at that for the last decade.

[Luna Bliss]

4 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

10 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

You compare apples to oranges so much in your erroneous comparisons that you need to open up a fruitcake factory.   Cars are just like virtual worlds!  lol

When you pay a company to provide a service, being auto repairs or a virtual world,  you have a right to expect them to provide that service, and for the service to work.

When they don't, you complain, and if needed, get together with other complaining customers and demand action, and possibly a class-action litigation to force their hand.

 

What you don't to is try and sort it out for them, your self, while claiming they are a good company that cares about it's customers.

You're PAYING them to sort it out.

Virtual worlds, though, are an ongoing process. With cars, the radiator is broke, you fix it, done.

We can't expect an upgrade to be released in a pristine state -- much of the problems can't even be known completely until many use the update, and it wouldn't be economically feasible to have an inordinate amount of testers.

In a virtual world the company actually needs us as part of the ongoing process.

[Arielle Popstar]

Just now, Luna Bliss said:

Virtual worlds, though, are an ongoing process. With cars, the radiator is broke, you fix it, done.

We can't expect an upgrade to be released in a pristine state -- much of the problems can't even be known completely until many use the update, and it wouldn't be economically feasible to have an inordinate amount of testers.

In a virtual world the company actually needs us as part of the ongoing process.

PBR is giving the car a new paint job when the ignition is still a mess, the wheels are somewhat square, the brakes are were the accelerator should be, shocks are non existent making the car sway about like a drunken sailor and the headlights are in the rear. 

[Ceka Cianci]

3 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

PBR is giving the car a new paint job when the ignition is still a mess, the wheels are somewhat square, the brakes are were the accelerator should be, shocks are non existent making the car sway about like a drunken sailor and the headlights are in the rear. 

This is why I only drive Jeeps! \o/

hehehe

[Luna Bliss]

6 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

22 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

I'm sure there's more factors I haven't thought of, important variables needed to make a competent evaluation as to whether LL is doing a good job.

You missed the biggest factor of all that has to do with priorities. There are a truckload of other enhancements the Lab could have taken care of that would have meant way more to a greater portion of the residents. PBR is really only of benefit to creators and artists. Those buying PBR content are only doing so because they'll spend their money on any new shiny, whether it looks good or not but as far as that shiny benefitting the platform long term in attracting new residents is not just doubtful but a fantasy.

The single biggest complaint about SL is the learning curve and until that is addressed, any other enhancements are a waste of time. In that regard LL is doing a horrendous job and has been consistent at that for the last decade.

The learning curve is also SL's greatest strength though, as it points to the fact that SL is a complex virtual world with many features to partake in. There's no way this can be made easy.

It seems other ideas regarding what you think should have been prioritized were not deemed as necessary by most others (thinking of your desire for an improved inventory).

You have the same problem as Zilli -- you narrowly focus on what YOU want without seeing the big picture.

Regarding what *I* want, sure, it's something I'd like as an artist and creator -- we're all about bringing the elements of our world we love (like light) into the process. But if I thought this would only benefit a select few I wouldn't want it here --  but I think the purchasers of content are going to LOVE the way it looks, just like they love mesh now. And, I think with better presentation of the world it's going to attract these people from other games who always laugh at the inferior way SL looks. Additionally, the way we create content for the world is balked at (it's much more difficult in SL compared to other games, and will be easier with glTF).

[Flea Yatsenko]

6 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

You missed the biggest factor of all that has to do with priorities. There are a truckload of other enhancements the Lab could have taken care of that would have meant way more to a greater portion of the residents. PBR is really only of benefit to creators and artists. Those buying PBR content are only doing so because they'll spend their money on any new shiny, whether it looks good or not but as far as that shiny benefitting the platform long term in attracting new residents is not just doubtful but a fantasy.

The single biggest complaint about SL is the learning curve and until that is addressed, any other enhancements are a waste of time. In that regard LL is doing a horrendous job and has been consistent at that for the last decade.

The shift from baked lighting to PBR completely changed how I build. Instead of making builds not meant to be modified because the baked shadows and lights would break when the in world object changed, I now actively make my PBR builds as meant to be taken apart, modified, parts re-used elsewhere, etc and the lighting is all scripted so you can change colors, strength, etc. All features missing from baked lighting builds.

PBR, for a lot of builders, isn't just adding more shiny and making things easier (which it is). It's a shift away from baked lighting and towards in world lighting because PBR brought tools like reflection probes.

None of my legacy content has any of those advantages in PBR, which is why it seems like it's just a trivial graphics update that brought a lot of problems. PBR won't show its real value until you are building in world with things designed for PBR and in world lighting.

[Henri Beauchamp]

2 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

Very immature, Henri.  Even my little grandson knows to behave better.

Immature ?... No !

just a bit of caustic humor to vent out my utter and desperate, frustration to see that all the warnings people like me raised, long before this fiasco, were totally ignored by LL. We now see the (very sad, since this mess was entirely avoidable) result...

Let's hope LL will listen, next time !

And in the mean time, let's all sing along the new anthem ! 😜

[Luna Bliss]

1 minute ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

The shift from baked lighting to PBR completely changed how I build. Instead of making builds not meant to be modified because the baked shadows and lights would break when the in world object changed, I now actively make my PBR builds as meant to be taken apart, modified, parts re-used elsewhere, etc and the lighting is all scripted so you can change colors, strength, etc. All features missing from baked lighting builds.

I'm so glad you're doing that, and I hope others will as well.

I have a little hobby (kind of like the Game Of Homes with the Bellisseria residents) of buying homes, decorating, and living in them awhile before moving on to another.  I was so upset that I couldn't take this one apart recently without these dark shadows being present on the wood where a rock rested against it.  I've run into similar issues when I wanted to remove a porch or modify some other part of a house -- dark shadows that could not be removed, preventing me from doing what I wanted with the house.