BriannaLovey

lmao your pessimism is hilarious sometimes

Time will tell the size of "everyone else" relative to "older residents". The outcome of this entire debacle will ultimately depend on which is larger, and which is more responsible for keeping LL afloat financially.

One demographic optimized for production, another demographic optimized for consumption...I swear I have heard this somewhere. Wherever that is from, I suspect it is going to drive those who don't neatly fit into one or the other to break away from SL altogether. What you say reminds me of a story of someone I found on a sim once. I will not name names, but this guy just had a silly little snowman avatar that he created himself using prims. His creation was on MP, so I got a copy and ran around with him and had fun! I am relatively new to SL compared to most, but if this is what SL used to be like...oh my. Something has definitely been lost. This is the example of someone who is not going to fit well with SL in the future, where nothing but raw production and consumption feed into each other endlessly.

They already spend $400/month on intern developers to write the code that powers the PBR engine, they need some time to recover financially. Joking aside, @Henri Beauchamp already wrote a dual-renderer that allows for PBR to be turned off. If a single unpaid hobby developer can do it, then LL has no excuse.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger!

The viewers I am imagining won't have an old codebase, but will derive from the new codebase and replace only the rendering parts. See the source code of Cool VL Viewer and its dual rendering engine for what I mean. Your assumption that non-PBR viewers will be unable to decode glTF assets is incredibly faulty.

Meaning the viewer and asset server will use it glTF internally as their cache/long-term storage format instead of the existing SLM/.asset format? Or will they be converted to the currently used format on upload? This is an important distinction. Also side note: storing a directly importable file in the cache is going to make IP theft incredibly easy... Edit again: In case there is any ambiguity to what I said, my question is: Will this asset cache model change in the future? https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Mesh_Asset_Format

That is bound to cease in the future as supply chains become less global and moore's law breathes its final breath.

Well yeah, but it is better than plywood, is it not?

You own a large land rental company, yes? You are in a position to collect data from all the people that rent from you about their experience with PBR, and how it has impacted their decisions. This will not only be important to safeguard the longevity of your business, but would also be good for the entire userbase to have a representative sample of what people are doing.

I expect that future non-PBR viewers will take the base color of each material and use it as a texture anyways, or combine the maps in some way or another to generate an approximation of the material. One already does, mine will as well. You will have nothing to worry about regardless of what kind of viewer people choose 😄

Have been the whole time. I have been directing people to use Cool VL Viewer since the start, and then later Genesis viewer as well once I found out it wasn't going to have PBR for a while. Then I am also going to make a fork of the last non-PBR Firestorm version that disables their version checking mechanism and removes all their telemetry except the bare minimum required by LL. From there, I will add more features to it, like partial visibility for PBR materials. I was going to call it PotatoStorm, but now that you are using the ark analogy, I think I will call it ArkStorm. Thanks for the idea!

Unless your VM has PCIe passthrough in order to access a GPU, that is about what you are going to get.

Sometimes the moment when a decision can have the most amount of impact is when you have the least amount of data to draw conclusions from. I am not waiting until then to help people (both creators and users) work around the issues these updates cause.

I have talked to someone who works for a land rental company inworld about the ramifications of this update. I was told that the vast majority of the customers aren't the sort who can afford or know how to upgrade their PC properly for this.

Yep. Vast majority of things I have ever bought don't even have normal and spec maps. From a creator's standpoint, there is no point in making them if not everyone sees them. Literally the same exact thing is going to happen with PBR.

It costs time. Time is infinitely more valuable than money. If you spend time creating stuff that nobody buys, then there is an opportunity cost, since you could be doing other more valuable things with that time. The story is different if you create things for yourself I suppose.

A lot of creators hoped that PBR would simplify their workflow. In reality, all it does is add another step on top of it, since there will still be a large portion of SL that will be using pre-PBR viewers or Henri's viewer in order to continue using SL with their hardware.

My point is that if a creator creates PBR-only items and most people don't buy them, then the creator has nobody but themselves to blame.

majority of end users don't care. Creators must not forget who they serve.

I would give you money for all your work if I had it. The fact that LL hasn't offered you a job says a lot about them.

I mean there is a difference between most mesh ever made and the average mesh uploaded to SL

That computer likely doesn't have a dedicated graphics card, as most prebuilt Dell computers don't have one, unless it is a workstation, since Dell has a subsidiary (Alienware) that is focused on gaming computers. There is no way it costed $2000 either (unless Dell or whatever retailer it was bought from is really good at scamming people.)

Ooh nice! I will add it to the list of recommended non-PBR/optional-PBR list of viewers in my PBR Luddites group, since it says on the Genesis page that the viewer won't have PBR implemented until it is performant enough.

It is likely also the antivirus, since Firestorm's binaries are not signed with a certificate, and therefore will be constantly scanned for malicious activity by whatever antivirus he has. If he gets a much higher speed than FS on the LL official viewer, then this is probably the reason. See what I said above.