BriannaLovey

That could work if PBR content was already ubiquitous

There is nothing for me to hack, silly. Firestorm is open-source. Speaking of which, there are Linux binaries available right now: https://codeberg.org/arkstormdev/arkstorm-viewer/releases Windows is a pain to get the build toolchain set up on though, so people will have to wait for that. Mac users, sadly, will have to build from source. I don't have a Mac, and never plan on getting one, so I can't build it for you.

It won't be a mass exodus as much as a demographic shift, if LL's plans works as they intend. That is the best case scenario, at least.

SL is inching towards simply becoming Consoomer Simulator at this point

True, but you would still have the rendering engine's performance penalty, regardless of what your viewer is rendering. Mine (and others) complaints about PBR are really only applicable to the SL viewer implementation of it.

Do not underestimate how siloed communities on SL are from one another.

Minecraft has third-party mods that allow you to use shaders, but the default look is literally just flat textures.

Like the message shaking the screen when the sim you are in is about to restart?

I mean they are free to do that, I am not stopping them. I was more commenting on the secondary and tertiary platform-wide effects that this will have.

You scored some whales, thats why. The same people who can afford hardware to run the latest Firestorm in its laggy state are the same people who can afford to buy stuff in SL. On the surface, it may not seem like there is a problem with effectively hardware-banning (via hardware obsolescence) those in SL who can't keep up. LL doesn't lose any money, and may actually gain money in the short term by not having to cover the cost associated with keeping those users able to connect. Only when it starts becoming even harder to find people to talk to and interact with do they have a problem, though. Not everyone remaining is going to want to play Consumer Simulator forever if there are too few people to interact with.

A TPV viewer with mesh trying to even create mesh assets on a grid that doesn't support mesh would not be able to upload the mesh at all, unless it did one of 2 things: 1) Host the mesh assets on a server entirely separate from LL's. 2) Use existing asset formats (sound would be the most likely candidate, since a sound file is essentially just a sequential list of numbers,) as a carrier for the mesh assets. The mesh would be encoded into a sound file (or series of sound files if the triangle count is too large for a single one,) then uploaded as sound by the viewer. The sound asset IDs could be written somewhere on the prim's metadata (sculpt texture slot is best, as this is what the current mesh implementation actually uses) with some indication that they are actually mesh. The viewer could then download the sound, decode it to mesh objects, and render them in place of the prim. Any viewer without this capability would try to parse the sound UUID as a sculpt texture and fail.

Keep your eye on Grid Survey once Firestorm 6.6.17 is close to being blocked from logging in. There are a great number of people who procrastinate about updating their viewer until it is absolutely necessary. All bets are off until we see whether or not metrics start changing faster as a result. edit: link to concurrency stats for your convenience: https://gridsurvey.com/economy.php

But can you kill that which is not living? 😄

I guess my idea of a typical "protest" is people loudly complaining about things and expecting their voices alone to have any sort of leverage. If it actually involves any disruptive measures, then it is powerful. It is just a matter of finding people of the "chaotic good" archetype who know how to mitigate risk properly.

Protesting doesn't do anything. Never has, never will. The only thing you can do is to not comply, and to teach others how to do the same. All the way to the bitter end.

Behold, the shared experience!

It is likely that the new renderer is treating alpha blending faces differently than the old one. Definitely worth looking into.

Is this due to a rendering bug, or is it intentional?

If you use Linux, you can use nvidia-smi or rocm-smi for this, depending on which GPU vendor you use. I don't believe the GPU drivers built into the linux kernel have any standard way of controlling the fans, but I could be wrong.

The only way of doing it would be to make a viewer without PBR rendering that has the ability to tell if an object has the data pointing to a PBR material. This is absolutely possible.

They likely get derendered too if they are mesh and don't have a fallback texture. Depends on the implementation.

What is tw0 plus tw0 m1nus eighth? You don't seem human.

Are you sure about that? There is also [redacted]

It just doesn't make any sense that they would do this with their current OpenGL backend. They have already stated that they want to move to Vulkan at some point, which is much more efficient and would not be as much of a problem for older hardware. Why not work on that first before forcing everyone to use this? Sure, doing now gets them to see the shinies faster, but once they move to Vulkan it will mean re-doing a whole lot of work anyways.

6.6.17 is the last version that doesn't have PBR.