Extrude Ragu

He's talking about the guts of the system and some of the tweaks LL could make. It's techno talk. Most residents also don't know what a vertex buffer is, a draw call or texel density means, but it hasn't stopped them enjoying mesh.

Your very first screenshot, the one you were complaining about shows that you set the environment to the new PBR Midday. You then go on to state:- Which means you have a reflection probe in the building, something that won't be found in existing content. Are you saying the previous statement and screenshot are a lie? What

Lets put the doom and gloom to bed. Here's what lighting actually looks like under the defaults in PBR viewer as a new user would experience in a region that hasn't been updated for PBR. It doesn't go dark inside interiors. OP had to mess about with probes and ambience settings and change the windlight to the new PBR midday to make that happen.

That's not what happens though is it. You've gobbled up OP's statement and accepted it as the truth, despite the screenshot is non default settings

It is in the loaded language You intentionally write like this, to force me to agree with you that it's an abomination as though that is the accepted consensus. In using this language, you declare you are not here to have a discussion, you're here to declare something to be broken. And you want to force me to agree with you, by forcing me to answer a question in which a new consensus is defined, despite I do not agree with it.

I would put forward that none of these necessarily entail realism. It's perfectly possible to make a cartoony windlight, a cartoony mesh, cartoon style lighting, and stylized PBR textures. All these do is allow for more creative control than anything else.

Why declare something an abomination, before we have even figured out how it works? People have been developing and testing PBR for SecondLife for years, why then, the instant it comes out, declare it broken after barely having had it for a week to try yourself? Give it time. Mess about with it. The forum is an exciting place to create drama I know but it's rather quite unfortunate given the work that went into it to give it so little chance.

Again, consumers aren't being asked to do anything. Legacy is the default on old regions. Things won't break unless people ask them to break.

The point is, they're not being asked to do that. The region won't look like that unless they ask for it to look like that, at which point it's because they're trying to make something nicer than what they can make under the old legacy sky.

I could be completely wrong. I'm still figuring it out myself. I think it's one of those things where if you just want to play SL without fiddling with probes and lighting the legacy setting is for you. Legacy is the default because the newer one takes a little work to set up a region for full PBR/ambient effects. But if you wanna create something really cool then some time is going to be needed figuring out/transitioning to fully committing to full ambient lighting and the pay off will be your region will look newer/shinier in the end with a little bit of love and care. We should be careful not to muddy the water by claiming the first screenshot is what most people see. There are people lurking the forum who will take any opportunity to jump up and down on the neck of any new SL features, claim it's ruining SL until it dies because that's what they do and then we can't have nice things. Most people will see Midday legacy on old regions, which looks fine.

My understanding is that Ambience controls the mix between environment ambient color (eg. The sky) and the overall contribution from lights within the probe volume (indirect lighting). Ambience 0 uses fully the sky color and nothing else, and 1 and above uses fully the lights and nothing else. The room might be getting darker because it is no longer picking up the sky at ambience 1. Also, don't forget PBR introduces the concept of exposure. Your pupils dilate in a dark environment to let more light in and vice versa, so this can play a role in what you see I think.

Midday without legacy is the PBR version, do you have an environment probe set up for the room?

Eh, using paying customers as guinea pigs is sadly nothing new, just look at all the 'Early access' games. Unfortunately people do buy them, and so that's the situation we have.

If SecondLife had a content review system I would not have ever created in SecondLife or own my region today. As a creator this is a big no-no, and is actually the reason I rejected a more technically advanced virtual world in the past (Sinespace) The things that generally cause lag are known and measurable. Triangle counts, Texture Memory (VRAM) and Draw calls. Might all sound like jibberish to average joe, but all creators worth their salt know what these are. Most creators simply do not optimize not out of ignorance of optimisation, but because it takes them more time. It adds extra steps to their workflows, and sad to say it but a lot of creators are just here to get as much money as they can out of the platform, and cutting corners gives them a competitive advantage over other store owners because they can provide more content which grows their brand and attracts more customers who don't know better. The simple solution to this, and the one that will also be deeply unpopular is to start imposing lag limits on avatars. Avatars are the worst offenders because unlike rezzed items which have the land impact limits, attached items have no lag limits at all. We need VRAM limits, triangle limits, draw call limits. There is no financial incentive for LL to do this directly and will be deeply unpopular the moment they realize they can't put on their laggy mess of an avatar. LL will probably never be brave enough to impose these limits on SecondLife. HOWEVER there *is* financial incentive for region owners to impose lag limits. A few laggy guests can spook off other visitors because they will perceive the region to lag. So give region owners the tools to impose these limits and many will. Let the region owners take the blame. Once such limits are imposed on avatars, customers will inevitably start demanding less laggy things from creators so that they can wear all the stuff they want to wear - This will be how we finally start reigning in some of the stuff that really takes the cake.

Because SecondLife residents are not game developers, and have no financial incentive to optimize the items they create in-world. The truth is, SecondLife is actually a lot faster than a lot of game engines, because SecondLife's engine has to cope with all of the user generated content. But users don't tend to care about performance or even know how to spot an unoptimised object so they will just rez and rez and rez unoptimised junk until it's barely tolerable. In my own region, I create all my own content and use optimization techniques. SecondLife in a well developed region runs at 120+fps on mid-tier hardware. Users are keen to blame the viewers, but the truth is the viewers are doing a herculean effort rendering the junk users tend to upload, it's actually the users habits that need to change, and the only way that's going to happen is when creators who sell to the wider SecondLife audience have a strong financial incentive to optimize their content. Good luck making that happen, because guess what making people put more effort into making money is never going to be popular.

I specifically avoided buying a parcel that was a few meters over 512 because of the tier system. Get rid of this and people will stop abandoning those tiny pieces of land

Death by snu snu

Hey if you're going through and updating the houses, could you be a darling and set the click action to 'none' for everything that isn't a door, window or control panel? Right now, every part of the linden homes is demanding to be clicked with that grabby cursor and hover tips for clickable items, there's nowhere for our poor cursors to rest

Sim crossings. Yes I know it's not practical to simulate the entirety of SL on one computer. But we could make simulators like 10x bigger so we didn't have to cross them so much. Computer processing power has moved on since SL's inception 20 years ago

I do attend meetings from time to time on an alt. The impression I have is that on the whole LL wants to improve itself, but LL's work on SL is very departmentalized and often even given to third party contractors like Product Engine etc. The result is that whilst yes SL gets improvements, SecondLife as an experience is not cohesive. Attend meetings and depending on which meeting one team will ask you questions such as "How can we improve the marketplace?" "How can we improve Caspervend?". Another team will ask you "How can we improve the simulator and scripting?" and another team will ask you "How can we improve the viewer?". The truth is the most meaningful changes you can make to SecondLife are ones that treat SecondLife as one big experience, rather than a set of different components. Lets imagine we are designing a new social game, and want to design a shopping experience. If we were doing it from scratch, we would probably imagine that there is some UI on the screen in the game next to our character, where we can scroll through a list of pictures of shoes or whatever we're shopping for. We click one and it just appears on our avatar. We click another, click click click, oooh I like that one.. BUY. This takes about 20 seconds for the user to demo ten products and find one they like. This is a 'designed' shopping experience. Now compare that to the SL marketplace. You simply can't have that experience. Even demoing one pair of shoes is an experience that can be measured in minutes. You've probably logged into the game a second time just to visit the marketplace, not all products have demo's, and the ones that do each have a different unpacking system. You've probably realized you can't rez where you're standing and had to teleport away from your social group. All but the most determined customers are going to be willing to demo ten products in SecondLife. This is a 'not designed' experience, it's a combination of properties LL has brought over the year and maintained (Caspervend, XStreet) - It is not the result of big picture thinking but rather users trying to make something - Anything - work in the games existing limitations, and then LL buying it out for a lack of better solution themselves. Delivering such a 'designed' cohesive shopping experience that is so fast and easy for the user would require modifications to the viewer, simulator, and marketplace all at once and really needs one team of people acting as jack of all trades to get this done. I personally think SL's biggest weakness is that SL simply can't deliver a designed cohesive SecondLife experience. Trying to get 4 different teams who are free to work on whatever they want to collaborate on a single 'big picture' project like this and deliver it in a cohesive for customer and timely manner is simply not possible. Feel free to prove me wrong. I'm not saying that LL aren't talented, they deliver plenty of quality improvements to each of their products, but they are just that, separate products, and not a cohesive experience.

To be honest sniping land intended for someone else I see being best described as a form of theft. People tend to hide behind the argument that since the system allows them to do something, they can do it. But this does not hold water to me. The system allows you to grief people and say all kinds of nasty things in voice chat, nothing stops you, but does that make it OK? No. If I was lending my bicycle to a friend and left it unlocked for a minute for my friend to take, and a thief came along and took the bike, that would not be OK. I did not consent to that transaction. It is theft. Sure, I could have protected my bike better, but it is still theft and it is not OK. In much the same way, using a bot to instantly find out vulnerable land faster than any human could, and take it from a non consenting user who intended to give it to someone else is theft. Plain and simple. It was not intended for you. It was not yours to take. You simply took advantage of a vulnerable situation and the users lack of technical knowledge.

Because one of the primary reasons people come to SL is to do things they'd never feel comfortable doing in RL. I'm more surprised by the people that come to SL and try to be as normal as possible, makes me wonder just how freaky they must be in real life that normality is their fantasy

The patterns as you call them are not 'patterns' at all. Bark - The darkness 'pattern' you see is the crevaces between the individual flakes of bark. This would be where your normal map and ambient occlusion would come in. Same for linen and nylon, you're looking at individual threads of fabric interwoven which have tiny creases and crevaces, this would all be shaded with your normal map and ambient occlusion. Most PBR materials you can download from websites already come with such maps, it's not work you'd have to do yourself typically unless you were designing a material from scratch.

I agree with the sentiment that it's better to teleport the user back to the inviter rather than out of the region. There is a problem with llEjectFromLand however in that they will be ejected to the same altitude as they were in the main region. Meaning that unless your region is flat and doesn't use skyboxes, your guest has a high chance to end up being sent on a long fall or getting trapped somewhere unintentionally, which is why I personally went with llTeleportAgentHome. I did in the past request llSendToTelehub, to improve this situation as I don't like having guests that just entered the region be immediately teleported back out, but alas it never happened.

Interestingly on my exploration I have come across places where bots are marked as scripted correctly, I even found a place where there's a whole group of like 12 of them all marked correctly. Although I suppose it's possible that LL themselves might have manually marked them