Janet Voxel

Well, I mean besides most people not knowing about it the next thing people got out of it was “YAY! Mirrors!” When in reality all it is, is an improved rendering system. The truth is, the mirror thing is a novelty, that most people will play around with for about 10 minutes. I played with it for about 10 mins on the test grid and was over it. It’s not like you need it to dress your avatar, maybe for pictures? Clothing can be PBR right now! There’s going to be some wait time for creators to make real attempts at it. The skin and body thing I agree with. It would’ve been nice to have with this roll out. However, what I do know is subsurface scattering (the element that makes a rendered skin look more realistic) is more expensive to render. That could be why they left it out. The good thing about all of this is, the door is open for it to be added later! This opens the door for a lot of good things. It might not be a sexy improvement right now, but it has the potential to lead to some!

I think it’s coming from a couple of us complained about the previous couple of builds “running like crap” and mentioning how a PC’s graphics card fans are a lot more active now. The current build is running much smoother and my gpu isn’t spinning as hard. Or it could be typical Doomerism. Who knows?

Keep in mind I’m not telling you how to live your life or anything like that. There’s only so many hours in a day, my life is so busy (yet I have time to post on a message board, watch YouTube videos, tik tok, etc, etc), all excuses. when we become adults, learning is no longer mandatory…that’s all. Maybe you become more selective in what you attempt to learn, but that’s not the case for everyone. Also, that doesn’t change from when you’re a child. Children are also selective in what they learn. For a thing that is a hobby, a past time, a game it means you have some kind of interest in it. It is also not mandatory. It’s also a platform that does very little in the way of holding your hand and you pretty much have to figure it out yourself. It’s pretty telling that you based your opinion on what someone else said, when you can literally download the viewer and see for yourself. You could have downloaded the gltf viewer months ago. You could’ve played with it then. LL encouraged people to do this. When this topic came up months ago and the sky was falling then, that’s exactly what I did. I built a little bathroom scene and attempted to make gltf materials and thought ‘hmmm…this isn’t bad, I’d like to see what the gltf viewer looks like on the main grid.” So I did. I even discovered the Alchemy viewer, which I didn’t even know existed. I learned something. What you’re doing isn’t being selective about what you learn. It’s actively trying not to learn about a topic, yet….trying to be active in a conversation about it. They used to call that something.

From what I hear from my teacher friends they don’t even do that anymore. Remember when we thought the internet would usher in a new age of knowledge? Information would be right at your finger tips, all you have to do is go get it. Yet somehow….we’re in this strange place.

It’s interesting to me that we lament the decline of education, yet we don’t lament the decline of adult learning and reading comprehension.

I think it has to do more with the advertising trend towards minimalism. Clean lines, no clutter, basic geometric shapes, etc. Remember a few years ago a lot of shops had a Shabby Chic aesthetic? Or before that….grungy?

Yeah, not a fan. It’s not a dealbreaker to make me not shop in those stores, but it definitely makes me want to leave as soon as I get what I came for.

I think he’s right though. The thing is I think you both have valid points. I think a computer purchased from your local big box electronics store or Amazon can run Second Life no problem. I think we’re getting caught up in the idea that it can't, when no it probably won’t run it on ultra with shadows on, but it should be able to handle it at medium settings. I think we get caught up with people bragging about getting 200 fps on a 4k monitor so much we think it’s the norm. When the truth is the norm is more like my best friend tp’ing me to her house and 5 mins into a conversation she says “You’re still rezzing.” When I ask her about the new shoes I’m wearing. That would drive me nuts that it takes things that long to Rez, but her? She’s ok with it. So it might not be necessary for a 91 year old hottie to upgrade to a rtx 4080, she might be fine with a $699 special from Best Buy.

Right, the reason I was suggesting the beta grid is for the free uploads and the meetup time because you would be designating a time and place to do all of that. It’s a little different than just logging in to the beta grid and starting a conversation with someone there already. It was just a suggestion. I’m thinking you might have to start up something like this yourself though. I really think it’s a good idea to have something like this going on.

Years ago, maybe 5-6, my grandmother ( who is 91) asked me to help her with her PC. I turned it on and saw the Second Life icon on her desktop. My heart sank and morbid curiosity got the better of me. I logged in, yes I was worried my then 80 something year old grandmother was on second life getting freaky. It loaded right up, the Avi rezzed and so did everything else fairly quickly. It was a noob Avi and it was some social place. I logged out and casually asked her about it later in. It turns out her tenant’s 16 year old daughter would come up and play second life every once in a while. This was on a 15 year old Dell with no graphics card. This was around the time, I had just upgraded from a GT 240 that I was struggling at a fairly crowded shopping event with. The point here is: No my grandmother wasn’t getting freaky on Second life and I was surprised it ran ok on that dinosaur. I’m not sure we should get into the “but will it run on a potato PC? argument just yet or assume it won’t. Especially since there seems to be a good deal of tweaking going on as far as this new viewer goes. It seems very unstable from build to build to me and not even close to being optimized.

I only work from home two days a week now, but I thought I was the only one who did that.

While BB is a good suggestion, and certainly a good way to get started, I don’t think that’s what she means. I think she’s asking more for a group or someplace where she can go to just BS, chat and share mesh she’s working on with likeminded individuals. I'm not aware of any place like that inworld, but it sounds like an awesome idea! The weird shower thought I had about this was to use the test grid like a sandbox and have meetups once a week or something.

It’s funny to think after ditching skin appliers we would somehow end up using them again. The biggest element to making a more realistic skin is subsurface scattering and that is missing currently. But I could see the pbr applier thing happening once some creators figure out how to make a gltf applier. Since quite a few bodies are mod now, all it might take is an unholy union of a scripter and a skin maker, it could be something we end up seeing at some point.

Yes, this! I’m really hoping they did it all at once to sort of rip the band-aid off all at once so to speak. It really did have me thinking along the lines of “Maybe this PBR thing isn’t going to work out.” About a month ago.

Here’s the thing: you’re really not going to notice much of a difference. You might notice a slight improvement, that’s about it. There’s a couple of reasons for this the way I see it. 1) it’s still a work in progress 2) there aren't that many PBR objects out there at the moment. So you’re looking at legacy objects, in a slightly different light. You’re going to be underwhelmed by that for the most part. I’m glad you brought this up in this way, because I said this a many pages back. All the majority of people are going to care about is “Does it look better?” And “Does it run better/Can my computer run it?” This isn’t a poke at you or the people having a technical discussion about PBR. The average SL user doesn’t care whether it’s Blinn-Phong or PBR or will investigate further than buying something labeled “PBR” and seeing how it looks. It’s definitely not going to look worse. However, your favorite windlights might not look the same. It’s very similar to buying a new monitor and things looking off for a while. You’ll adjust eventually. I can’t say any of the legacy content looks bad. How will this affect how your avatar looks? Not very much. Your avatar, body, head, etc is legacy content. It’ll look pretty much the same. The biggest disappointment about this whole thing for me has been how few creators have taken the time to play around with this or even know what this is. The creators that have messed around with it, clothing wise, looks amazing. You will notice the difference between a sequin dress that uses PBR vs legacy. However….you’re going to have to wait for the content and it’ll probably be a couple years before the majority of creators really figure it out. Even then, honestly, there doesn’t seem to be that much incentive or reason to change a workflow from legacy as far as texturing an object right now.

That’s a pretty good explanation and it explains why suddenly the PBR viewers I had been using started “running like crap”. This last build seems to have improved things somewhat, not really sure why, but I hope LL keeps making adjustments.

Interesting observation…I thought the same myself.

Exactly this!

IMO it’s going to come down to: Does it look better, can my computer run it and is it easy to work with? At the end of the day LL has to make sure all of those things are true for most user and creators to adapt to it.

Because most people did go with Catwa mainly, then Lelutka early on.

A couple of creators tried it. One, I forget who, made a complete avatar. Slink made heads and body. Most people opted for Catwa or Lelutka. People opted for buying the head and body separately early on and it became the norm and it’s been that way ever since. People get really tribal about which body they use. Practicality is not the name of the game when it comes to either of those. It’s what looks best. Part of it is, there is a finite number of shapes you can do. It wouldn’t be long before people started looking the same. Mainly though, it just never took off. Come to think of it……there might be space for someone to come out with a complete avatar, but it would have to be really, really good.

Nice! It looks good!

Are you using Stable Diffusion or Midjourney?

I wonder are you using gtlf materials for the stone? That might make it pop more.

There definitely are people like that in Second Life and there are places you can go that are verbal fight clubs where no one is safe. It is not, however the norm. That doesn’t exclude you from running into someone like that or those people temporarily spilling onto your favorite sim briefly. If someone wants to Troll or Grief, there are definitely better places on the internet to go. I think you’re right. Even suggesting SL is toxic is a bit on the hyperbolic side.