Candide LeMay

None of these look like they would run SL acceptably. For SL you want more of a gaming laptop, something with a dedicated graphics chip/GPU (Nvidia or AMD). All these 3 have integrated Intel graphics chips which run SL very poorly.

LL has a small development team (presumably), but even so there's specialization among them. Is the graphics engineer going to be productive/helpful working on the chat system or vice versa? No. They all do their own thing at their own (admittedly glacial) pace. The question is - why doesn't LL hire more developers?

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/PBR_Materials#Fine-Tuning_Reflection_Sample_Volumes

My motivation for using the animesh formula is that 1) it's somewhat "fair" because it allows you to have LODs without additional LI penalty provided the LODs are kept simple enough 2) it's server side, unlike client side metrics like rendering/frame time 3) it's a formula that LL already has implemented and we all know the less work LL has to do, the higher the chance of them actually doing something

That setting currently doesn't persist, which is annoying.

Well yes and no. A PBR material is its own complete inventory asset that you can hand out, sell etc. There are some in the inventory library already. I can imagine a market for ready to be used PBR materials (just like in the prim days there was a market for textures). You don't have to create the materials yourself to use them and you can also use them on prims of course, so in a way PBR materials might be a bonus to prim builders.

I like this idea. A script call that would answer the question "If avatar ABC with all its attachments was an animesh object, how much LI would it have?" I'm guessing we'd see many avatars with LI going to thousands.

I generally accept all land based experiences when requested. They can't really do anything substantial like change my inventory or take my money AND their effect is limited to the parcel I'm on, so I don't worry about it. And the grant is very easy to remove if I never needed to do that (that has yet to happen).

There was a thread a while ago here in the forums about how many people use ALM regularly/always on. Plenty of people said they never use ALM or only when taking pictures. I got the same response when asking this question inworld. The big change the PBR viewers will usher will not so much be PBR materials, but everyone* finally seeing materials - either classic ones or PBR. *exception for Old Man Henri and his viewer 😉

How are the pre-rendered imposters going work if every parcel and every avatar potentially have a different EEP applied to it? If I'm on a parcel with a misty dark EEP and see a bright sunshine impostor in the distance that's worse than seeing nothing.

Group notices for events that don't include the SLURL for the event and instead force you to fetch the notice attachment/HUD (which fails to be delivered half of the time), wear the HUD and click the HUD to get a notecard with the SLURL and/or landmark.

Mainland sims have 22500 LI capacity, not 20000.

Does this mean we can now set the collision sound with a script and then delete the script and it will still use the custom collision sound? If so that's great news.

The real ping you need to measure is to a server in Oregon US, not your closest local speed test server. That's where you are connecting to when you're in SL. 600ms is excessive but pings around 200-250ms are common for european locations.

Requiring premium account would be a good way to keep the minors out too (at least in theory).

Tell that to people who make and/or demand clothes and avatar accessories where every tiny detail is modeled and textured so that you can zoom in and see the dust particles. No professionally produced game has assets that are as heavy/wasteful as SL does. SL creators throw more geometry on shoe laces than commercial games do on whole characters. Yes it's a failure of LL to set reasonable limits on attachments (something a like geometry and texture "budget" for your avatar) but that ship has sailed. Maybe LL can do some sort of background reprocessing of assets for mobile users to reduce the load, we'll see.

Companies without "Love Machine": several new features per year LL with "Love Machine": several years per new feature I know which one I prefer as a customer/user.

It would help if the SL caching system would actually work. The CDN that's delivering assets is typically very fast, as is my internet connection. Sometimes I can get a sim to load faster if I nuke the cache and let everything re-download over the network, even with the cache located on a ram disk. That does not make sense.

This must be a fairly recent change, I was able to ping the simhosts before. Shame LL didn't use the east coast AWS location for the cloud migration. It would not make much difference to people in americas but it would shave off some latency for us euros.

Some people would argue this has already happened. And to be at least somewhat on topic - as someone who makes stuff to amuse myself, I find PBR a welcome addition to SL. The 3D tools outside of SL are so nice these days that even an amateur like myself can use them easily. The less friction in getting stuff into SL the better.

Does the upcoming mobile viewer from LL based on unity really not support PBR materials? That would be very weird if they released it like that.

Related to the topic, maybe we could petition LL to relax the terraforming limits in the down direction (you can set the up and down limit separately). I can see why you don't want to allow +10m or +20m so that people don't construct giant hills, but going down has a much smaller potential for grief and allows people to build basements and whatnot on mainland. +4m/-10m seems pretty reasonable to me.

Teleport to the sim, hit Alt-R for region details and look in the Terrain tab. It lists the terraforming limits.

Check out The Wastelands estate. We got sand up to our eyeballs...

It's easy to cut back yes, but that's also true for the people who create and sell stuff. Some of your favorite creators might/will decide they are not getting enough butter for their efforts and stop. The total amount of butter in SL is not growing, only LL's share of it.