Rick Nightingale

Despite my problems with reflection probes, PBR compliant environments and odd-shaped rooms, I do like PBR and the associated changes overall. With some reservations - for instance, I miss coloured specular maps for iridescence (although nothing to stop still doing that and just ignoring PBR), and invisiprims for my watery builds. The metallics really are so much better than baked-on materials. Shiny, polished rubber - yes! And reflective surfaces that really do reflect the surroundings; at least once that pesky reflection probe is set up (or, rather, eight probes and still some corners missing). If we could have arbitrarily shaped reflection probes that would be so much better (like uploaded as mesh, or just an edited prim). I'm guessing there are technical reasons that's not going to happen though, or they would already exist.

I've been playing around with PBR environments, which I've not really got around to until now (been too busy making knickers and nipple covers). First, it's just the same in LL's viewer as in Firestorm (I checked every case). So any complaining that it's Firestorm's fault... it's not, and defecting to the other team in protest over PBR or how your PC handles it is pointless. Rant at LL, not the Firestorm devs. 1. Many of the free PBR environments I've tried are just as unusable as most of the old windlight and EEP environments are. 2. Placing reflection probes in a building is an utter nightmare, with terrible results, unless you only have cuboidal rooms or live in a spherical bubble (then it's child's play - are we allowed to use that phrase given recent ToS issues?). Curves? Non-right-angle corners? Vaulted ceilings? Then get used to silly shadowing that completely ruins your beautiful decorating! I can see a lot of very boring buildings being sold. "Little boxes made of ticky-tacky. Little boxes all the same". 3. Make sure those reflection probes don't coincide with the edge or face of a mesh, because you'll get the weirdest texture flicking issues (nothing to do with VRAM / texture thrashing). 4. It's easy to set up a PBR environment and materials to look good in an isolated setting (which is sort of what I've been doing up to now, without realising that). It's not so easy in the 'real' world. Maybe I need much more practice, but I feel sorry for the many users who don't even know how to open the edit tool.

I have specific experience, because I was directly involved in it, of them working to do exactly that with a data-loss bug introduced into the viewer by LL, and thus manifesting in FS (and others) too

@Ingrid Ingersoll I use HWInfo; it's free and will tell you the temperatures of everything in your system that reports it, and a lot more too. https://www.hwinfo.com/ Just click the green Free Download button from there. When you run it, look at the Sensors Status windows and scroll down; it's all in there. Edit: Annie's link mentiones HWInfo about half way down that page too.

Yep, that's one I've been watching with the betas. It's better in the release than it was in the beta (in fact it was better in the last couple of betas too). Still, my 16GB can get eaten away quite quickly, especially if I try to run two logins at once for testing. That had my PC stuttering within a minute as Windows started thrashing the swapfile because the RAM was all used up. With the release, I can do it again as long as I stay away from busy places. With one instance and the release, I'm seeing no problems with 16GB. I do have an extra 16GB on the way though

See my post just above yours (you might have missed it while writing yours). With those system specs I see no reason why it can't run OK.

I'm running a ten year old i7 3770K CPU, 16GB RAM and a GTX 1080 GPU... it runs the latest Firestorm easily, with graphics settings pretty much max'd out and framerate capped at 40fps on a 2560x1440 monitor. It occasionally dips below 40fps, down to 20's, when TP'ing into a busy place. Then the fans get loud too, until it settles down. Obviously, just-opened shopping events are still the lag-fests they always have been. Basically it's perfectly fine here, given the age of my hardware. Blame LL for any PBR issues etc... the Firestorm team have been doing everything they can to make Firestorm cope the best it can with what they were handed by LL.

I'm not aware of any way to do that. You can't copy/paste the Inventory/Outfits folders, otherwise pasting as a link into the #RLV would be an option... but no. And I can't think of any other way to 'sync' them other than the obvious, completely manual way. That said, there are viewers that supposedly allow creation of subfolders in the Outfits folders. I can't recall which I read can do that, but perhaps it can do other things. I would be surprised though, and even if it could, it's probably not portable then to other viewers.

Rick Nightingale gets a service business idea...

Ahh, I spoke above without considering simply preventing 'average' users just being tempted. I suppose looking at that isolated aspect, all the disinformation about it all could dissuade the average user from thinking to try, because it's 'too hard' because the sellers protect their work too well. I don't like that thought though; to me it's yet another manipulation of things by those with a vested interest, to the detriment of most people. Oh well, such is (second) life 🤣

Perhaps, but once again I have to say it's a completely useless attempt. As easy it is when you know, there's no way an 'average' user can steal an asset without some research to give them the knowledge how to (except perhaps taking a screenshot of a rendered texture, which is a very poor way). If they do that simple research and go ahead, then all these attempts to protect it really offer absolutely zero protection. Again, the only exception is the marking of the textures on the demo (which spoils the demo unless done carefully), but even that would only slow down a determined adversary.

My bugbear with reflection probes is that they are only available as cuboids or spheres. You can't manipulate them much either; it's their bounding box that matters, not the 'visible' shape. My house has a lot of curved walls, non-90-degree corners, vaulted ceilings and so on. Trying to fit reflection probes into it is a nightmare.

Yep - and gives a bit of a problem with clothing and wearables. (You cannot wear a reflection probe). The only non-wearable I sell comes with a reflection probe as a coalesced object with it, so it's easily (re)moveable/modifiable.

Don't think I've come across that one before. Looks good at a quick glance, and is open source too. I'll take a look, thank you

The one you listed even includes the photoshop files.

Add a demo of CrazyBump to the above and you're all set! AiAi's gltf packer sees a lot of use here too.

Yes, one of the things on my 'wish list' for a complete SL do-over is an integrated, simple mesh creation tool that people can use without taking a degree in 3D design. While I'm comfortable with Blender now, that's taken a lot of time and I still probably don't even know a tenth of what it can do (I found a new function that saved a few hours only yesterday!). I Use Avastar to make rigged mesh in it. I wouldn't like to even try without that.

It amazed me some years back to discover just how many makers did not seem to know you could use the alpha channels in the normal and specular maps. It's all in the wiki, after all, and yet they are still rarely utilised where they could be to good effect. Some makers on the other hand clearly do understand them. I have this, somewhat forlorn, hope that because PBR is a new system, more makers will actually learn how to use it effectively. Even though it has been implemented in SL in LL's typical way. Realistically, I imagine an awful lot (both interpretations intended) of 'PBR' materials being simply cobbled together from existing Blinn-Phong maps and called 'PBR'.

Timed demos are an absolutely useless way to try to prevent copying; it's completely ineffective at that. Wouldn't surprise me if it happened like that though, given the paranoia and erroneous beliefs around copying that seem to endure in SL regardless of the facts. Spoiling textures on demos can prevent those being stolen, at least until the thief hangs around the store for a while and spots someone wearing the full product after demoing it. So again, even that isn't effective if someone wants to steal it and is prepared to put in a little time. There is nothing that can be realistically done to prevent assets being stolen. If it can be rendered by a viewer, it can be stolen with almost trivial ease. Restrictive permissions* and timed demos do not in any way prevent content theft; all they do is inconvenience the consumer. The only thing that cannot be stolen is a script with restrictive permissions, because scripts are not downloaded by a viewer. They stay on the server, where they run. *Edit for clarity and the pedantic: Obviously, no-transfer permissions are needed on things to prevent them being 'shared'. No-mod is needed on demos but is completely ineffective as a security measure, and only inconveniences the purchaser on the full product.

The excess shiny can be mitigated somewhat using the edit window if the object/material have mod perms by turning down the metallic and increasing the roughness sliders (saying this for those who aren't familiar with it). Those controls modulate the materials in the maps.

Yep - it's literally "The new shiny!"

I'm leaving mine to the SL cat's home.

Thank you for that; what a wonderful story. Apart from you getting scratched up I guess, but still a good memory. You had me grinning the whole while I read it. Our cat, who died a year ago next month (old age; we had her for 19 years) used to jump onto and climb all the way up the curtains with her claws, to then sit on the rail at the top and look down on us. The very first thing she did when we brought her home as a kitten was to try to escape by running up the chimney. I only just caught her in time. There's a bend and a ledge half way up our chimney flue and only taking the wall out would likely have got her out if she'd made it that far. Here's a picture of her, about to disembowel a tinsel ball (she loved those):

Perfect!

Last time I did that, to a random kitten which was lying just like that, which had turned up on our doorstep when I got home... It was a trap! As soon as I started to tickle the cute, innocent looking kitten, it closed the trap like a Venus fly trap, all four cute little paws hooking their claws into my wrist as the kitten gnawed on my thumb! I lifted it up, like the guy in the movie "the blob" when it got on his hand, with the kitten still gnawing on me and hooked in for keeps. I pleaded with my wife for help, she just laughed out loud. Never again... kittens are evil! (until I see another one looking irresistibly cute...)