Scylla Rhiadra

That's good. I've not had the same experience, but YMMV. And, after all, the two PBR shots that Marianne posted are not "bad." They are just not as good as the pre-PBR shot. And they are certainly not the "better looking" SL that we were promised. That will come, with time: PBR, I'm sure, will make things look better, eventually. And the very fact that everyone on a PBR viewer now has materials enabled by default is one reason, although that's at a cost in performance.

I have no idea what "most" means. 51%? Do you have numbers to back that up? I don't, and I don't need them, because empirical evidence has made it clear that a LOT of people are struggling with this. Are you in any of the FS support groups? Have you LISTENED to the chat there, especially the first week after the new viewer was introduced? Are you on SL Twitter or Bluesky? On Discord groups? Because I am, and they are FULL of people complaining, or admitting that they are uninstalling the new FS and going back to an older version. Again, I don't have numbers, but I'd estimate that about one third to one half of my friends to whom I've spoken about this are doing that, or looking for a new viewer entirely. Why do you suppose Henri hurried out a newly cobbled version of his viewer that allows one to turn off PBR? On a whim? He was bored? We all live, to some degree, in bubbles, and it's possible that my "bubble" (although it encompasses, for example, everyone on the FS support group) is one in which people are more likely to have trouble than yours. And it's also true that you'll hear more complaints than "it works fine." But to suggest that this is merely about complainers on the forums is demonstrably, provably, incorrect.

It's a cult.

Yes, although Firestorm gets it right sometimes, finding a good balance. An example is the Phototools box, that gathers together a great many tools that would otherwise be accessible only through the Debug menu, and puts them in one neat, well-organized place. It's not obtrusive -- many residents I suspect are unaware of its existence -- but it's powerful, accessible, and easy to use.

Yes. I think that making a viewer usable on an older or weaker computer is, in most cases, not terribly complicated. More complicated than it probably needs to be, but manageable. Making SL look good, however, is going to be a challenge even to those on good computers -- unless they are inclined to learn how to do things like make (and configure!) reflection probes, adjust EEPs, etc. I've posted this elsewhere, but here are the instructions on LL's wiki about configuring a probe: That's just going to make your average person's eyes glaze over. Even the PBR enthusiasts are reaching the point where they're sort of shrugging, and conceding that an average user on a mid-level computer is going to just have to sort of muddle their way through this. SL was never going to be simply "out of the box" -- and in a sense, that's one of it's strengths, that it offers so much scope for customization and creativity. But it's never been as unintuitive and user unfriendly as these new changes have made it. And again, it didn't need to be that way.

The quality of graphics obviously matters more to some people than to others. Anyone who has been wandering around for the last half dozen years without ever enabling ALM, for instance, probably doesn't care. And that's totally cool -- and a point that so many of the PBR enthusiasts miss, that for some people other things are more important. I think too that if you're a photographer, you'll just tend to be more used to picking up subtle differences -- and you're right, the differences in Marianne's three pics are, objectively, fairly subtle. But for me, the pre-PBR shot is much the better of the three: the colours are richer, the contrasts more pronounced, and the shadows sharper and more distinct. Now, in fairness -- -- there are not, I think, any PBR objects or textures in this pic, so the newer viewers can't strut their stuff by showing how those look. Instead, they're rendering legacy materials using a new lighting system that is not designed for that. -- Marianne is using a custom EEP, but possibly not one designed with PBR in mind. Older EEPs look great in pre-PBR viewers, and either too dark or (as is the case above, I suspect) too washed out in PBR viewers. So, an EEP that has been "tuned" for PBR viewers would probably make those two shots look better -- contrast, saturation, and especially the quality of shadows, are things that can be adjusted in-viewer, using EEP settings, but also other graphical settings (such as shadow clarity, depth, and sharpness). So it would be possible, tweaking some of these things, to bring the three pics more in line There is so little PBR out there in-world right now, that you have to try hard to find a scene that would show it to advantage.

Well, keep cobbling. It's fantastic for photographers!

That's great news! This is totally going to become my PBR viewer of choice. Performance is comparable or better than the official viewer, and it has some really great options. It might even become my photo viewer. I need to do a comparison of the pic quality alongside BD, but . . . with tonemapping options, a sharpness/clarity slider, etc. . . . as I say, I'm impressed.

Fair point. And the screen is generally less cluttered by default. Also, I HATE HATE HATE the LL chat and camera floaters. HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE. Etc.

Ok, just took Alchemy for a quick test spin. I haven't tried it yet in a busy parcel or region, which is one acid test, but I have to say I am very impressed by the performance and, most especially, by the "Lightbox" feature. The latter is the chef's kiss -- so many cool options! And a poser! I was able to run it at Ultra, with Depth of Field on, and take 6k pics while my FPS never dropped below about 12. For my computer, that's stellar. There's stuff I wish it had -- notably area search and a "preview" button for snapshots (I forgot to check if there was a teleport history option), and I wish it didn't mimic the LL viewer interface so closely (esp. the camera floater) -- but this is a really good option, certainly, for photos.

I think there's a lot of truth to this. LL provides diddle squat in the way of guidelines or support. But it's also true that Firestorm can be confusing to new users precisely because it has so many features.

Fixed it for you! And yes, Bill, I think you have those qualities. But we can't help feeling viscerally about some things. What is important is that we are aware of, and acknowledge that way of thinking about ourselves, and work to overcome it. That's not "advice" as to whether or not you should continue to pursue a closer relationship with that person: that's going to depend on a lot of things, and in terms of intimacy, we all have "preferences" that it can be disastrous to ignore. But maybe give it some time and see if perhaps your response isn't just the result of the initial shock of the unexpected?

Agreed, this was my experience. Basically my plan for now is: Firestorm 6 -- Most day-to-day stuff LL Viewer -- For when I want PBR for whatever reason Black Dragon -- For photos Firestorm 7 -- If you hold a gun to my head I also want to try out Alchemy, to compare it performance wise, but also in terms of quality, with Black Dragon.

Meow!

I think this is being a little unfair to Paul, especially the first bit. And I don't think he thinks they are "dirty poor old people." I think he thinks they are lazy. But yeah. It's a cult.

So much this. Except you forgot that new sign-ups should also IM Paul to get help on building a new computer from the ground up.

What this seems to suggest is that FS has been rebuilt to take advantage of the more powerful GPUs loaded into most mid to high end computers, which makes it more efficient on such machines, but with the result that those with older machines that likely have less powerful GPUs (or integrated graphics) are going to get hit commensurately harder. In other words, the new viewer is deliberately focused upon new machines, at the cost of older ones? Does this sound right? It's a bit like something someone here once said about the LL viewer too: that in order to take advantage of new tech, it was consciously (and unfortunately) going to hit low end machines harder than it otherwise might have. That would explain why some people report performance increases with the new viewers, while lots of others are being hit hard.

I used all the viewers with the same settings, so as to get a good comparison. I probably could have increased it a bit by lowering my settings more -- but not by a lot. I'm not sure if my computer is odd or not. I can take 6k shots in Black Dragon, usually with a fairly high depth of field, without too many problems. What causes lag for me is people: anything much more than a dozen or so, and my FPS begins to drop precipitously. Warehouse 21, for instance, is usually a nightmare.

This is an odd thing to hear from someone who sometimes represents as a frog. 🙂

Gosh, only 13 people having problems with the new viewers? Whew. I was worried it might be more. ETA: I think I know these 13 personally!

Honestly, this is the word that has occurred to me more than once, listening to the happy campers in the FS Beta Test group chatting away about how wonderful PBR looks on their gaming computers. I've resisted using it, but for some it really applies. They just don't want to hear about people having issues -- or refuse to acknowledge that this is in any way a substantial problem.

I'm reminded of Paul's suggestion, some time ago, that people having problems with old computers "build their own" from selected components. All you need is a screwdriver!! No, really!

This reminds me of a conversation I was involved in months ago, in the FS Beta Testing group chat, which went something like this. -- There are lots of people having problems with the PBR viewers -- Oh? Do you have statistics to back that up? -- No one is collecting stats, so no -- If you don't have stats, it's not a thing So, this is some sort of weird application of Schrodinger's Cat: if I don't have numbers, it obviously isn't really happening.

Firestorm has always had a lower FPS than the official viewer, though. I presume that's because it has so many add-on features. On Friday, as an experiment, while I was at a club (fairly heavily landscaped and meshed up, and also very new) with somewhere between 15 and 20 other people, I did a quick test of four different viewers. I have a newish laptop (8 months or so old); it's pretty fast and generally handled SL pre-PBR pretty well: I could get 80 FPS on my platform, and probably 40 to 50 at ground level. Using the last FS release pre-PBR, I was getting about 24 FPS in the club. Using the LL PBR viewer, it dropped to about 15. Not great, but actually manageable. Using the new FS PBR release . . . I was getting 4 FPS.

This.