Extrude Ragu

Another case of path to hell paved with good intentions - This is a good enough statement from a TPV dev to motivate some creators to upload a new, unique unsupported product texture with each new product to evade such measures, thus creating even more VRAM waste. As a creator - This is not an issue of 'laziness' - This is an issue of 'customer experience'. What you are asking creators to do here is intentionally give a customer a bad product experience that is neither designed for that customers rendering engine or in-fact PBR, just so that your viewer can render 'something'. You think you are doing everyone a favor, but you are not. If a creator is going to support a customer on old hardware, they'll take the time to bake them a proper diffuse texture so the product can be enjoyed to its best on old hardware. Giving customers on old hardware albedo maps in their diffuse is not something any creator who cares about customer experience wants to do, because it makes the product look like utter crap for the customer making their purchase un-enjoyable. No creator wants to give a customer a product the customer won't enjoy. On the contrary, deluding everyone that they can avoid upgrading their PC's forever is simply transferring the expense to creators who care about customer experience. Creators like me will make it clear at a certain point that their content is PBR only so that customers on old hardware can avoid purchasing what they can't render. I will never intentionally give a customer a product that looks like sh#t for that customer. Creators that care about customer experience will not let customers see albedo maps in diffuse. Get this into your head. Small time hobbyist creators often cannot afford to bake textures for two different rendering engines. Wanna know how long I spent rendering textures for my last outfit? 7 days. Sure, there were a lot of parts to bake, tennis racquets, wristbands, shirt, skirt, shoes, accessories, and yeah I made 30 different texture variations but I just like giving my customers customization choices. By the time I'd packed all the textures a whole week had gone past. I took holiday time out of my job to do that. I can't afford to do that twice, and do you really think that's a reasonable ask? You're asking creators to either give their customers a terrible experience, or take on a financial burden that many creators simply cannot. No, just no. You talk about potato hardware, but then forget just how much time and electricity it takes to render proper diffuse maps for old computers, and how much complexity it adds to a creators workflow, having to support two different rendering engines. You're not being some hero that's making SL more affordable for everyone, you're actually making SL a more expensive world to create for (and in turn, more expensive to shop in). You're also raising the barrier to entry shutting people out of making money on SecondLife, whilst simultaneously perpetuating the idea to the outside world that Secondlife remains an ugly game that is stuck in the past, ensuring that we never get that new wave of users who spend money in SL and give it life for years to come. Most budget gaming computers on the market do not cost much at all. The idea that having a >10y old computer is a reserve of the rich is simply not true. I'd encourage people to take a look on eBay - You'd be surprised at just how cheap some of these things go for.

I think it's important for some situations, like for example meetings. But to be honest I don't mean to be horrible but some people just talk and talk and talk - Like they talk instead of thinking - To the point that I can't hear myself think. I don't know if the antenna on the side of my head are just more sensitive to it or what but it actually drains me, like dementors to my life force. So I just turn voice off most of the time and leave it permanently off in my sim to avoid attracting those kinds of people in my own sim. Then again, there are also people that can't stop typing, but I think voice makes it too easy.

Me (Ai)

Me and my alt Hana~ Hana~

Stupid question but since it hasn't been mentioned have you tried hiding it with the build tools?

Glad I could help even the linux community, if just through providing the source. I like the layout switcher

Watching this thread with interest. I feel like part of the issue is that simulators seem to be authoritative about login sessions. ie. When you log in to SecondLife using the viewer, you're actually logging into a simulator. I wonder if that is really ideal, after all, should a simulator disconnect really lead to having no valid login session? One thing I've always wanted for SecondLife personally is the ability to roam. That means being able to swap between a mobile viewer and a computer or laptop seamlessly, walk around town (which causes your IP to change) without being logged out. If login sessions were untied from simulators and viewers, and instead centralised, it would probably be easier to correct simulators and viewers that have suffered from desync, whilst also providing residents with the possible benefit of being able to roam between devices in the future.

Hmm yes.. Butt plug penetration testing...

I don't think the issue is the presence of AFK avatars. Nobody complains of afk users on discord, but it's not like we have discord open 24/7. The issue stems from the application design. Weaknesses in SecondLife's handling of AFK avatars need exploring IMO. We should be asking ourselves why we have so many successful interactions on discord rather than SL and learn from that to improve SL.

It all seems a bit overkill for me. Why make a whole viewer for a single feature? What we really need is the ability to extend viewers, but I suppose that's probably no small task, given that people will want to extend and change all sorts of aspects of their viewers, even things a viewer developer wouldn't expect to be changed.

A short quote. I'm going to make my grievances clear:- Nobody in this thread has claimed that the performance loss that was experienced by the bug reporter wasn't real. You have misrepresented people in this thread who have simply stated their own personal experiences as liars, when there is no reasonable expectation that all users use or experience SecondLife the same way. I find this very contemptible especially considering these are testers are people who put aside a lot of their time trying to find and fix bugs before the viewer reaches people like you, so that you can get a better experience. You also misrepresented testers by saying that they have told others their experiences with performance are not valid. I certainly haven't said such a thing and I haven't seen anyone else say such a thing either. What gives you the right to mislead others about how I or others think? You also misrepresented the views of LL by presenting a user of SecondLife's bug report to users of this forum as though it is a statement LL themselves made. You also presented the issue as though it affected all users, and happened in all circumstance, by omitting information on the contrary until I pointed it out myself - This action might not have been intentional, I give you benefit of the doubt by assuming you don't know how to interpret the release notes, but it's still shows a level of ignorance on the matter even if you didn't know better.

At this point you are just spewing false accusations about PBR viewers and nonsense in general. The user stated their viewer achieved a higher framerate than a pre-pbr viewer until the bug condition occurred. There is no reasonable expectation that people who test drove the PBR viewer were teleporting around a lot. On the contrary, only a few regions were PBR enabled and thus there was little reason to teleport. I personally think you should retract your statement that PBR testers sought to mislead others, because it is simply not true and a very upsetting accusation against those who were involved in testing efforts. I think that your entire attitude towards the people that make an effort to help LL improve the viewer to be completely unacceptable.

For the sake of accuracy - These statements are not accurate. LL has not stated their viewer "causes massive performance loss" - A user did. The release notes link to individual bug reports written by users, and show the title the user has written, and said user had made a bug report about it with that title. The kicker is, in said bug report, the user states that their viewer had actually achieved a higher FPS than previous release viewers, but encountered a performance issue after teleporting around. So in other words, saying LL is calling people who had no performance issues liars is simply false, and the issue is not likely to occur to people depending on how they tested the PBR viewer. Better yet, because the user filed a bug report, something got done about it

It's interesting that you say this. Currently, according to the official SecondLife system requirements (https://secondlife.com/system-requirements) - 4gb is the minimum and 8gb is the 'recommended' - Perhaps this is misleading residents and giving them false expectations? I don't know when this was last updated, but I wonder if it's even possible to play SecondLife on 4gb of RAM.

She's saying that some creators would be tempted to put a diffuse map in their PBR material instead of albedo, because their customers can turn PBR off in certain viewers and will just see whatever populates the albedo slot. So in other words it's actually only the people using a PBR viewer, who would see the pollution.

To be honest I think the whole out of band viewers using Albedo as a fall back is really paving the path to hell with good intentions. What I mean is, for a TPV dev, sure, you get to tell everyone you're being all virtuous and supporting people on old hardware. But this is not just old hardware we're talking we're talking about here, this is ancient hardware. And actually this whole exercise is ultimately costing everyone money. For example, LL is spending a lot of money on modernising SL and telling creators they can expect that viewers will render their content with a modern pipeline, and their content will always look at least a certain quality. By developing a viewer that intentionally breaks this promise, you undermine that promise and creators are less likely to invest in the platform. This costs money. For people who don't know, Albedo is not diffuse, and it will look incorrect. Metals for example will generally show up as just the color black in an albedo map. There is no lighting data in an albedo map and so your textures will look flat and ugly if it is rendered as though it is diffuse. No creator worth their salt is going to want the average customer experience to be a product to look like that, so they would have to bake extra fallback textures, to support these legacy viewers that make PBR optional - This costs creators time and money, and ultimately makes the platform less appealing to create for. LL also has a public image problem of being an ugly failed social experiment from the 2000's that is full of old people, and this sort of reinforces that idea because it's sending the message that we haven't moved on from that. People will see modern SL screenshots from these viewers, and assume SL never moved on and is now a retirement community. Even better, the screenshots will be uglier than the 2000's because at least in the 2000's the textures were designed for the rendering engine. This is terrible marketing that costs us new players Supporting ancient hardware is expensive for SecondLife in general. Lets be clear here we're not asking people to install 4090's but simply have a computer made in the last ten years that was designed to do some basic gaming. At some point, other peoples thrift comes at SecondLife's expense. We should support old hardware yes, but also recognize the cost involved in supporting ancient hardware.

I usually have a good time whilst playing SecondLife . The best thing to do is just engage with the people you have a good time with, and disengage with the people you don't. The forum is another can of worms though...

I've seen people do this a lot of times, and it has never ended well.

People you choose not to engage with stalking your profile and then trying to use your partner as a proxy to talk to you.

Someone complained that PBR won't affect their body. I assume they meant lack of BOM support or perhaps they're using the default LL body. Just wanted to point this out - The jira is filed by a linden and contains plans for bom support for PBR, so obviously they are thinking about it already but it would be its own project. So who knows, maybe it will come down the road.

Search engines aren't even good at finding stuff anymore. I've noticed that Google, DuckDuckGo etc if you ask them an even slightly niche query, will instead give you results for something more commonly searched for, and absolutely refuse to give you any results that aren't A. a major news publisher (aka. a content farm) or B. an app posing as a website. It used to be the case that you'd find results of people having discussions about niche topics on forums or some persons personal website, but now unless it's a big site it's not in the results. It's like unless it's big and corporate you're not allowed to see it. Sometimes I resort to using Yandex, this russian search engine, just to get oldschool interesting results.

Easy solution is just to make it opt in. In the end, being a merchant is all about picking and choosing compromise. Increased security necessarily compromises convenience for customer in nearly all forms. In the end, life is risk/reward.

I'm hearing the newer PBR build from firestorm has performance improvements and I don't doubt it will continue to receive them as PBR matures. Alchemy runs just as fast with PBR than it did without it for me. I would encourage anyone shy to look inside their computer to give looking inside a second thought. Learning skills, being curious and stepping outside the daily routine is good for your brains neuroplasticity and sense of confidence if nothing else. Unplug it, take the screws off one day and have a look inside. You don't have to touch anything, just be curious about how your little box works. Just be warned, chances are, if you've never opened it before and it's an old machine, the insides will be coated in dust. Would be a good idea to clean it, the heat is likely slowing your computer down.

Oh oh, in case it saves anyone 50bux Substance Painter 2024 steam version is set to go up 50usd 1st Jan, so if you were thinking of getting it nows the time

Handpainting in an image editor I mean at its core, if you are handpainting, the easiest thing to do would be to trace over your base color image on a couple of new layers. The first layer would be your roughness. You can think of this like how rough a material would feel in your hand. You'd paint towards white (1) when the surface is very rough feeling, and towards (0) when the surface is very smooth like polished marble, or of course somewhere in between for fabrics and whatnot. You could use local textures and experiment to get the feel of it. Metalness is equally a black and white image, in general things are either metal or they aren't, so it's pretty easy to know where to paint black and where to paint white. Once you'd done your handpaintings you'd just export those black and white layers as their own images to use. If you already know how to make a normal map - You're pretty much there. You'd chuck your color image, and your painted roughness/metalness, normal map into my packer and that's it For dedicated tools I thiiiink Quixel Mixer works standalone without 3d modelling https://quixel.com/mixer If it needs a 3d model honestly I can literally just give you a mesh square to paint on lol https://www.materialmaker.org/ Material Maker is another one https://armorlab.org/ There are also AI tools knocking about that attempt to create PBR materials from images https://textures.digimans.ai/ Bed time for me. Happy new year