BriannaLovey

That makes sense. I saw @Count Burks made a thread complaining about PBR a while ago. When someone like that and his clients are having problems with a new feature, it is not to be taken lightly.

If you are correct and the people who can't run the viewer are such a small minority that it is fine to de-facto hardware ban them from the platform, then why did the Firestorm team decide to keep 6.6.17 alive forever?

....its a 2D pixel game with retro aesthetics. Any performance improvement is going to be totally negligible, since it doesn't use 3D acceleration to the same degree that live service AAA garbage does. I still disable ALM regularly since viewers run faster without it. I don't mind the lack of graphics quality, since the other games I play aren't hyper-realistic like the AAA slop nowadays is. I suspect a lot of others do too (anywhere from 0-43% of Firestorm users, as I said before.) Fact is, there are still a lot of people that don't care about things being shiny and realistic, and just want to have fun.

lmao I have no idea where to even start with this. Do I need to buy a 4090 in time for the next Stardew Valley update? No? How about Minecraft with shaders? It still runs fine on my crap-tier HP laptop from 10 years ago? Who would've thought! I don't think they intend to do any more development work on it. The viewer just won't be subjected to the same block (completely client-side by the way) that past obsolete Firestorm versions have been subjected to. This sadly does mean that it will take extra work to compile it from source since dependencies will be out of date, so switching away from Firestorm will still be a good idea in the long run for those who can't handle the latest version.

My point flew over your head, it seems. SL may be a game, but does it have to be a AAA game requiring dedicated graphics? Most people didn't think so, and those people are a sizeable part of the userbase. Abandoning them is a completely braindead move, which is why Firestorm is not blocking 6.6.17 going forward.

There have been several attempts to give a technical explanation of why this happens to some people and not others. If you need one, try using the search history using terms like "iGPU" or "integrated graphics" and "PBR".

Until now, it also ran on non-gaming PCs. Anywhere from 0-43% of Firestorm users are not using a gaming PC, and I know it definitely isn't 0% of them.

All viewers derive their rendering code from LL's viewer, aside from some independently developed viewers like the ones @animats is working on. Firestorm support has said themselves that they have nobody on the team proficient enough to fix LL's rendering code as of now; all fixes come from upstream. The product may be the world, but who wants to buy into a world that they are unable to access?

Time will tell. But if this was just people being lazy, the Firestorm team would not have sought approval to keep 6.6.17 unblocked forever. Because of this, I suspect that there is more data they have that indicates this time it is different. Comparing SL to Blizzard reminds me of why I blocked Coffee in the first place. AAA gaming is a complete joke now; a shadow of its former self. I would block all posts mentioning her too, but that would mean I miss other peoples messages :c

If you are talking about the fact that Firestorm isn't paid software, it is still LL's rendering code, and LL are the ones who will be losing money by not fixing it or at least borrowing code from TPVs like Alchemy and Cool VL Viewer that have managed to clean up the mess at least somewhat. If you mean that the 43% who don't run the latest viewer are dead weight because they don't spend money on SL, I have explained elsewhere why this isn't the case.

I know it isn't most users. But if you tell any other software company that 43% of their users aren't upgrading because of unresolved issues, then there would be enormous pressure to solve said issues.

"You don't need to see the source code, just trust be bro!"

Every single time. No exceptions.

That is what people did on IMVU who didn't want to buy the Access Pass (subscription to be able to view adult content.)

Regarding this, it would be useful to see more data from FS in order to see the rate of adoption for 7.1.9 compared to other releases they have made in the past. We only know that 7.1.9 was released 2 months ago, and nearly 43% of users aren't using it. This must be abnormal for the FS peoples to see, otherwise they would not have made this decision.

Well this is a very good decision on their part! I can imagine how hard the support team begged for this lmao. And it saves me the trouble of having to maintain a forked version! I just hope they keep the prebuilt dependencies up for a bit longer so they can be properly archived, or simple instructions are made for building the dependencies from source as well. Edit: No wonder they made this decision, just look at their viewer usage statistics!

Would you rather: 1) Learn how to operate a new viewer? 2) Spend the same amount of time trying to fix Firestorm's inevitable bugs?

If you have tested it, is it also a problem on OpenSim?

I know :c They just want pastures for their cyber-cattle to graze in without having to worry about how any of it works.

bool is_object_appropriate(LLViewerObject* objectp) { if(!objectp) return false; gKarenList.updateGlobalKarenCount(); for(karen_iter_t iter = gKarenList.begin(); iter != gKarenList.end(); iter++) { if(iter && iter->thinkOfTheChildren() && objectp->isSLRedContent() && !gAgent.isSLRedSubscriber() ) { return false; } } return true; } This is just a sample of what the code for the viewer-side SL Red implementation will look like.

I saw this coming ever since the modesty layers came into play. The underground .pdf enthusiast community (though I can't say I miss them) were the canary in the coal mine for this; the demographic most likely to leave first as a result of efforts to sanitize the platform. When you consider these facts, the incentive for LL to go in this direction makes sense from a business standpoint: 1) For various geopolitical reasons I won't go into, several countries or their member states are enacting laws that will require age verification for adult content. 2) The most user-friendly way for age verification is via payment info. 3) Tying payment info to age verification makes it easy to turn adult content on SL into a subscription service, which is what I suspect would be the real goal of this change in the first place.

The technological illiteracy epidemic caused by Apple, Google, and now even Microsoft dumbing down their systems to cater to the lowest common denominator is a major problem with consequences we have yet to truly experience.

If this isn't an argument for use of memory-safe programming languages like Rust, I don't know what is (yes, not all vulnerabilities arise from memory safety issues, but many of them do.)

Text-based communication often does this to people, regardless of the topic. Just look at the last 20 years. You either learn to keep your cool or at least block people you know will upset you, or you remain a perpetual emotional wreck as a result.

I can count the amount of people who are both aware of the problems and who have the skills to fix them on one hand. Only about 2 (if I am generous) or 1 (if I am stringent) are working towards fixing it. As for the rest of the users here? When people are affected by a problem with a nature totally beyond their comprehension, they lash out in anger.