Extrude Ragu

Somehow I suspect if they did they'd never admit to it

Presumably you're talking about creators here, as customers do not need to learn anything. They rez their PBR house and it's already set up for them, it just works. If they use an old EEP, the sky doesn't fall, and the PBR house still looks better than their neighbors legacy one (assuming its an actually good creation). So then what exactly does a creator have to learn? How to make a PBR material? Well if they're using Blender, they were already making PBR materials and had to convert them to work with the legacy renderer. For most creators creating in PBR removes Second Life specific steps of the content creation process. It makes it easier. Speaking as a creator who uses PBR, authoring materials for Second Life has become faster.

I sat down and started going through all the system environments and applying them to myself one by one. None of them look 'wrong' with my own PBR content. Sure they can probably look 'better' if I edit the old environment and give it HDRI scale etc. But are they broken without it? no. I think some of the complaints are a bit overblown to be honest, having put what is being complained about into practice. It feels like people are complaining about theory instead of what happens in practice.

Oh, another observation that I had in roblox, that I think would work well in SecondLife. One thing I struggled with as a newbie I had no idea how to leave the world I was in and eventually went to close the roblox window when I couldn't find how to leave. Like Second Life, Roblox has a do you want to quit confirmation window. However, what they did different, was that they also added an option to that dialog to go to another world. I think we could learn from that. How many newbies at the welcome hub quit SecondLife because they don't know how to go somewhere else? What if we added an option to the quit confirmation dialog to go somewhere else? It could open the destinations floater or something. It could help retain newbies a bit longer until they learn how to find destinations properly.

In terms of 'making the transition' smoother for young people who are growing up and looking for a more mature platform. We do already have something similar to Roblox's worlds - Experiences. Experience profiles in SL already have a picture field, a location field, name & description field. A quick marketing trick would be to simply make an experience guide page from that data, similar to the destination guide. Sure, I don't think they could ever be the main event like roblox, but that's not the point, the point is to provide enough familiarity to make the platform transition smoother. Like a 'hey! we have something kinda like that too!'

I don't think Second Life should try to be Roblox. But I think it's worth observing what makes other platforms popular regardless. I haven't given a great deal of thought yet as to what to draw from my observations. Been too busy with RL work. I might have some thoughts later.

*sigh*

A Train Simulator When I was young the equivalent of this would have been Microsoft Train Simulator. A train drives past me. It's being driven by another player. I drove around in this world. It's also vast. The key takeaway here for me as a creator is that Roblox players aren't just used to building little hangouts together. They build entire games together and hang out and play in them.

So, I sat down and made an account on Roblox, to actually see what Gen A are growing up with, trying to understand their 'creature comforts' etc. I've never played Roblox before until today so all of this is new to me. Disclaimer: I'm not claiming Second Life should behave like any of this. This post is purely observation. Don't shoot me, I'm just the messenger, mmkay? The homescreen The first thing I notice about Roblox is that you don't just log in and appear in a world like Second Life. You have to choose a world. I notice that every world appears to be more like an 'activity' or an 'experience'. There are first person shooter worlds, minigame worlds, roleplay worlds etc. I found it very easy to click something and immediately find myself engaging in an activity of some kind. I joined a world called 'Realistic Car Driving' It was not long before I found myself racing around, doing jumps and doing donuts in a parking lot. From the experience I found that Roblox is a pretty strong game engine. The driving was snappy, like an actual driving simulator, it was clear the simulation was happening client side because there wasn't that classic SL input delay. Another world takes me into a very realistic and highly detailed first person shooter experience I notice that Roblox has no hangups about completely changing my avatar depending on the world I'm in, and the worlds have different UI. Essentially like playing totally different games. Two different driving worlds had two different UI's.

I mean by the time those who are 14 now are mature enough to be playing SL, their interests will change and evolve and I suspect in many ways SL will have its own natural appeal over these platforms targeted at a younger audience. With that said, maybe it would pay its dues for some residents and the SL Marketing team to create roblox accounts and play for a day. Figure out what features from Roblox are really good/popular and should make their way into SL.

Should be live now Was the feb 14 server release https://releasenotes.secondlife.com/simulator/2024-02-06.7806095376.html

Obviously the skirt example here particularly sucks for you as a user especially if the item is no mod. It looks like the creator has set a blanket 'Environment' value under the specular setting, which is what is causing the vasoline slime type effect you describe. Still, it surprises me that you say this doesn't show up as much in the Firestorm viewer, as usually this effect would also show up there with such a setting. I'd be interested to see what the specular settings of the skirt are. It could be that you've actually managed to uncover a bug, because I really would expect them to more or less render close to the same. Speaking as a creator, I know it doesn't fix your existing skirt, but I reckon it would be possible to make an awesome sequin skirt under PBR, because you could use the normal map/combined with AO channel to do individual sequins, combined with metallic you'd be able to make something that naturally sparkles as you move around

A wood material wouldn't normally reflect blue light so strongly, even outdoors. I think the wood material might not be packed correctly, just judging by the way it is reflecting so much light. It looks like either roughness channel is incorrect or somehow it has been set slightly metallic. If you take a screenshot of the edit material dialog, I can probably tell you at a glance if the material is configured correctly and might be able to spot any mistakes that might have occurred. What I find interesting about the skirt being blinn-phong, is that I'd expect the non-pbr viewer to also show a reflection as even blinn phong does environment reflections, just very badly. It looks like reflections might just be plain off in the non-pbr viewer screenshot? Try putting it in the ultra preset?

In your screenshots, The non-PBR one is showing a plywood cube, and the PBR one is showing a wood different material. Is this a PBR Material on the background on the left screenshot? Same question for the skirt - Is this a PBR material?

General problem with adding basically any feature to Second Life

Yeah, that is one thing that I do actually have a gripe with, LL seems to have deluded itself that this is OK and the answer is NO. Then again, I'm not so fond of the current cloud system we have in SL either. It's always been a bit 'meh', feel like SL could use better.

Blender has all the necessary tools to be industry compliant and achieve WYSIWYG with SL. There are instructions on which settings to check match up in the wiki. I haven't had issues authoring materials in Blender.

also FWIW it's possible to purchase substance painter and own it perpetually via Steam.

The properties are all exposed to LSL. See https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/PRIM_REFLECTION_PROBE

skill issue, I made many of my existing pbr trims with blender alone

It'll be interesting to see what makes 'round two'. Me and a friend applied but nada, so either they got a lot of applications and we're out of luck or they stopped for a lack of enough applications. Hm 🤔

ah yes the 'spray and pray' impregnation tactic 🤔

In a world where people are actively damaging their attention span on TikTok and engaging in pointless culture wars on Twitter and YouTube, getting those people unhooked from those platforms and learning to enjoy old fashioned computers, socializing and creating in the virtual world will probably do them some good. If they've gotten as far as registering and logging in, that's a good sign they wanted to at least try it. Maybe they've never played a video game before, or grown up on an iPad. I think as long as they're willing to learn, give them the tools to learn. Otherwise, where else will they learn? Some other game?

An off topic section would be useful for keeping the on-topic sections on topic. People need a space to blabber. Of course the noisiest threads would be culture war/rage bait/politics. Not sure we want those, probably better discussed in-world where fires don't spread too fast when people say stupid things lol

Yes well whilst you work on saving the world by making everyone your 'be smarter' serum, I'm going to trust that the lead firestorm developer and one of the top engineers at LL knew what they were talking about. Actually I've personally experienced the results of their work as I take yearbook photos for my sim yearly and the FPS difference after the work had been completed was night and day.