BriannaLovey

This is the demographic that makes the most financial sense for LL to attract, if extrapolation based on current trends is correct: https://www.emarketer.com/content/millennials-gen-z-gen-alpha-video-games If future creators will be hyper-optimized for production (using industry-standard 3d-modelling techniques being the minimum here,) then future generations are hyper-optimized for consumption.

It is currently closed-source, as far as I know. If this remains the case, third-party viewer development would become incredibly difficult.

I wasn't so sure of this before, but I would bet money now that eventually LL is going to port the (currently mobile-only) Unity-based viewer to desktop based on the incentives alone.

That is why the JPEG2000 texture format is still used. Even if you don't have enough memory for all the textures, they can still be decoded at a lower resolution for display. Some viewers even allow you to reduce the maximum image size that is displayed.

Second the Cool VL Viewer. It runs much faster than other viewers. I am using it on Intel integrated graphics right now, normally getting about 60 FPS, compared to 20-30 on Firestorm (this is with PBR off of course, I don't bother turning it on ever.)

The thing about the mobile application is that it is based on Unity, a cross-platform game engine. This means that if necessary, the mobile viewer can be ported to desktop and have the GUI altered to be similar to that of a desktop viewer. My (totally speculative but somewhat reasonable guess) is that this is going to be a fallback in case the planned replacement of OpenGL with Vulkan in the main viewer doesn't go as planned.

You aren't going to get your wish. I confirmed today, yet again, with the Firestorm support that there would be no option to disable it. Their paraphrased words were "We aren't going to implement the switch. It would be [toaster bath] for the entire Firestorm project." Therefore, the only options are to use Cool VL Viewer, or to fork your own viewer.

I am always too lazy to change them

They want to discourage the mass use of 2048x2048 textures, and encourage the use of them only when absolutely necessary. If everyone used 2048x2048 textures, the required VRAM for SL would quadruple overnight.

The max texture resolution increased to 2048. If you shrink your texture to 1024x1024 or lower, the upload price will be L$10 again.

This happened with one of mine once, but I just bought a server-grade case fan, connected it to the motherboard, then zip-tied it onto the GPU heatsink. No cooling problems so far.

All viewers that copy LL's latest texture fetching code untouched will have this same problem unless they fix it themselves. Henri explained that LL changed something about the texture fetcher to make it perform worse, and I can't find the link to his post :c

No worries. If you could leave the fallback texture as the default prim texture, that would be nice though. This allows some viewers like Cool VL Viewer to use the base_color channel as a replacement for a texture. I have heard that some creators are placing fallback textures on their stuff with a message in the texture telling people to upgrade their viewers, which is a lot worse than just leaving the texture as default.

Would have been a different situation of everybody was forced to use it all at once. Lots more complaints, bug reports, and other issues would have been filed. If it were a big enough problem to reduce the amount of online users, LL could force a rollback to the previous release until performance and other issues were resolved. With Firestorm taking up close to half the userbase, the impact of PBR is effectively being delayed until version 6.6.17 is blocked, so LL isn't even on the receiving end of a lot of the user feedback about bugs specific to PBR and other new changes.

Ironically, FS has proven with this very release how much of a liability TPVs are.

Correct. Firestorm and Cool VL Viewer are the only ones left. Singularity also works for OpenSim, but appears to no longer be maintained.

I will take problems like this into account if possible, but hopefully anything is better than nothing. It would be far easier to implement this viewer-side, or to use Cool VL Viewer's Lua scripting API to check something like this, but that limits the viewers that people would be able to use this utility in. Edit: Looks like there are no functions to get the texture/material properties of objects that aren't linked to the script's object :c Guess it won't happen for now.

At some point I am going to develop LSL-based tools that will allow people to determine whether or not a creator is using self-made PBR objects, and to separate creators into 3 separate lists: 1) Those who create PBR-only items. 2) Those who create items with PBR materials, but with fallback textures and normal + spec maps 3) Those who still create with only regular textures and normal + spec maps. Assuming that doing so is within the limitations of LSL; I am a little rusty as far as that goes hehe

I have tried bugging them about it since the PBR beta, and my suggestion was met with a firm "No" every time. They aren't interested in our suggestions. Cool VL Viewer on the other hand will allow you to turn off PBR.

It isn't just memory. Newer GPUs have a lot more cores the integrated GPUs found on most Intel CPUs. Because of this, they can perform better at parallelizable workloads, like rendering.

I have said this before, but the real determining factor will be whether or not they have a more stable release after 6.6.17 gets blocked.

If you are shocked by something like this, then you have a lot to learn...

May be better to contact creators personally via notecard or IM. Many of them have busy lives, and probably don't spend a lot of time on this forum.

Linux makes a huge difference, especially on an efficient desktop environment like LXDE, LXQt, or XFCE. For comparison, Windows 11 has taken up at least 4GB RAM on idle every time I have used it. Plus, it runs a lot of background processes that take up CPU and disk bandwidth. So if you use a Windows computer and have low RAM and/or your OS is installed on a hard disk instead of a SSD, it will be a much more laggy experience. I would suggest anyone comfortable with the process of installing an operating system to use Linux for SL, as you will get a lot more out of your hardware than otherwise. Just don't bother responding to her, her mind is already made up about all of this. There is simply no use in talking to her anymore.

This is why I don't see LL supporting (or even allowing) TPVs much longer. Firestorm in particular has become a liability to LL, especially since a surprising amount of people have no idea how to whitelist a program in an antivirus. If you agree with this logic, prepare accordingly.