Conifer Dada

Since I came to SL in 2006 there have been many improvements intended to make the visual experience more realistic. These include: Windlight environments with shadows - a definite improvement over the previous basic flat lighting. Mesh - more realistic objects. Whether it's made avatars more realistic depends on the skill of the creator, how the owner adjusts the shape and what skin they use. Projector lights - more realistic artificial lighting. PBR - looks promising if there's no downside - e.g. lag.

I'd be happy with 'fully realistic' if it worked properly without any lag but I guess we're still quite a long way away from that being possible. And even then, if you have a fully realistic human avatar, you could find yourself dancing next to a Snoopy or Spongebob Squarepants avatar. So the next question that needs to be answered is: what would a fully realistic Spongebob look like? Would it look like the original cartoon or would it look like what a real anthropomorphic sponge wearing shorts would look like in real life?

Best to be a bit wary of this robot when it's dancing, it being over 9ft tall and with a spike-ball for its right hand. This robot is not aggressive but it is quite clumsy. I have to say the polished aluminium looks good with PBR.

Happy birthday! I've also passed the 17 year mark in SL recently. If you'd discovered that Wiki page 17 years ago, your whole SL experience might have been completely different🤣

As I mentioned in another thread, I downloaded the Cool VL viewer, and after lowering the maximum frame rate as suggested, it works well in busy places.

The lighting effects with PBR are really good, with realistic reflections on existing shiny objects. It does mess up existing daylight settings though, so you have to make new ones. Also I found that adjusting daylight settings appears to affect the brightness of artificial lights. The downside of PBR, at least with the current release, is that rezzing times are much slower, both for avatars and for the built surroundings. This is even the case when graphics set to minimum. I generally use the LL standard viewer and it had been fine up until this PBR release.

I set the frame rate to 30 and the fan has calmed down a bit. Movement is smooth and things rez reasonably fast. Thanks.

An interesting dancefloor - Nikopol Club.

I tried the updated Senra Jamie body and head on a test alt. It's an improvement over the first version - especially the mouth and nose. Sadly, it's still too far from my current shape (which I more-or-less want to keep) however much I play around with the sliders.

Since the the PBR viewer is almost unusable unless you're on your own in a quiet place, due to slow very rezzing, I thought I'd try the Cool viewer. I downloaded it and it worked fine, even in busy places with high graphics. I did have to stop using it though as the fan on my computer was humming louder than I've ever heard it before!

Big boots and a polished wooden floor.

As mentioned elsewhere, for me rez times of avatars and objects is slower with the PBR viewer - much, much slower in busier places. In fact as far as I can tell, in some busy places some of the textures never download. The performance monitor showed 3 green lights - for server, internet and client while I was at a busy place waiting ages for things to rez. I did a broadband speed test which showed a download speed of 578 Mb/s, upload speed of 53 Mb/s ad a ping time of 21 ms. I reckon that's pretty fast! Assuming the new PBR viewer is the one that new residents now download, their first impressions of Second Life aren't going to be very positive.

The thing that makes me think it's a Firestorm viewer problem is that I've lost inventory on OSGrid and also on my Open Sim standalone. Back on the subject of LL's new PBR viewer, I've been playing around a bit more with settings and it has great potential, it's just a pity that rezzing times have slowed down so much.

The joys and sorrows of PBR . . . Our garden looks as good as it ever has, despite some dubious planting choices. 10 minutes after arriving at Peak Club and still not much has rezzed.

I agree, the PBR viewer is unusable unless you're alone on a sky platform. I want to stay with LL viewer which has worked reasonably well up until this latest version. If this is the viewer that new residents are faced with, most will give up. I use Firestorm for OpenSim and it has its own problems, not least of which losing items from inventory.

Same graphics settings as I had before. I even have a special low-graphics setting that I use while I'm waiting for everything to rez. I've been at a less busy club since then, with about 10 people. Same problem. It seems that the environment textures stopped rezzing when they were about half way through, the same with avatar textures. Rezzing just stopped half-way and stayed like that.

I've had a bit more experience of PBR in the few hours since I posted above. My main points are: You can make really good environments but you need to readjust the settings a lot to get them. The brightness of artificial lights is affected by daylight settings, which shouldn't be the case. Rez times are much slower. I was at a busy club where it usually takes 5 minutes for everything and everyone to rez. With the PBR viewer, after over 10 minutes most of the club building's textures hadn't rezzed and only one of about 30 avatars had rezzed. This was with a low graphics setting. If this problem isn't fixed soon, it risks killing off the SL club scene.

As I mentioned in another thread, I played around with the sliders on one of my environment settings (my own 'sunny mid morning') and eventually got something that looked better than the old version. Artificial light sources seem to be brighter in PBR. It would be simple to adjust them, but 'highlight transparent' seems to have disappeared from the 'highlighting and visibility' menu.😬 UPDATE: "Highlight Transparent" has moved - it's now under Build > Options.

I found the same. But all is not not lost . . . I played around with my 'sunny mid morning' setting (which I made myself) and eventually I got something that looked better than my old version. I had to adjust the mist density sliders and the sun and ambient light. It took a while but if applying the same changes to my afternoon and evening settings will be much easier. Night-time looks about the same with the new PBR viewer, though artificial light sources seem to be a bit brighter.

On an average height female system avatar, hand size 10 is not small, but on some mesh avatars it it.

I did a bit more testing. I still use a system avatar and my hands slider is set to 10, giving me slightly larger than average hands for a female of my height (5ft 4in.) I tested three mesh bodies to see how the hands appeared to myself and also to a test robot alt which was also logged in. I didn't alter any sliders for the test. The Ruth 2 V4 and RuthToo RC3 both had hands about the same size as my normal system ones. The Senra Jamie also had hands about the same size. I acquired a Maitreya Lara X demo and with that the hands appeared significantly smaller. Perhaps someone who already has lots of mesh bodies (demos will do) might be interested to test them all to see how the hand size varies.

I use the LL standard viewer and it generally works well for me. It's always been the case that a lot of females in SL have tiny hands and a lot of males have oversized hands. Anyway, I took myself to a busy club and waited for everyone to rez. Sure enough, a lot of the women had tiny hands, but I'm not sure if they were any more tiny than in the past. I then toggled to a lower complexity setting, so that most avatars appeared as greyed-out versions of the underlying 'system' avatar shape. I noticed the women now had normal sized or even big hands, despite their mesh bodies having tiny hands.

Something different . . . Mainstream clubs which throughout most the year have a nice ambience but think it's "fun" to decorate the place during Halloween with realistic mutilated corpses. If the clubs are not adult rated, then its' presumably against TOS to do this.

I checked and on the Linden Lab standard viewer I can see the whole of other people's profiles, even if they're long.

Until recently it was easy to reach the character limit for text in the 'about' section. Then the limit was raised and now you can write as much as anyone would want.