Candide LeMay

The way I read it it's no VAT on the membership payments (plus, premium, premium plus, plus premium plus...), but still VAT on the land/tier fees.

I've recently looked at the land usage fees page and noticed the fees are slightly lower than before. Is everybody else seeing the same? https://secondlife.com/my/account/landfees.php?lang=en-US

It's up to LL to make an informed decision and changes, not me. If they decide to drop the non-ALM renderer in future viewers I will cheer for that change. YMMV etc

As someone who goes through the effort of creating normal maps/baking textures/using lights in SL/etc even with the current materials system, it annoys me greatly that so many people have ALM off. It's like producing color tv shows when a large percentage of viewers have black and white tv sets (remember those?). It will annoy me even more if PBR materials are available and the viewer still offers non-ALM rendering. Broadening SL's user base with people whose hardware is unable to run ALM is not a benefit or desirable to me*. Others have a different perspective, but I'd argue Henri's desire to fly around with a 1024m draw distance is pretty niche and he can keep the forward renderer in his own viewer for that user case. *I'm in SL to make stuff, that's my jam. If people can't see what I make it's no fun.

I knew it, Patch is a giant crustacean from the paleolithic era.

Folks who follow the PBR project - are there plans to support decals in the new renderer? That would be a big win.

I am a man in RL, but in SL I am a fabulous chick!

You get dozens of materials with the steam version, enough to get you started. And there are many many substance material packs available online either for free or for few bucks. It's not different to buying texture packs in SL in ye olden days.

Substance Painter (and Designer etc) can be purchased on Steam for around 130 bucks (there's typically a sale around December/January). This is a permanent license that doesn't require monthly subscription. 3D Coat has a painting-only version without all the voxel stuff for about 100 bucks. Again, a permanent license with no subscription. Not free, but reasonably affordable.

Modern PBR workflow is the opposite of painting by hand. If you use a program like Substance Painter/ 3D Coat / etc you have vast libraries of materials and presets ready to be used. You don't go "oh wood looks like this and its specular highlights are like this, let me paint them by hand" no, you select a wood type material from your library, tweak it a little and apply it to a 3d model using brushes/fills/other tools (all nicely realtime). Same for stone, concrete, metals etc. Use layers to add damage/rust/irregularities. This allows even an anti-artist like myself to texture objects rather efficiently.

You can have your 60fps with 256m draw distance, just not on old potato computers. I don't see a problem with that. You are not setting the rules for how SL "should be enjoyed" (and neither am I, but if I was I'd say materials/lights are more important than draw distance and fps over 30).

I've tested on a laptop with nvidia MX330, which based on benchmarks is somewhere around GTX 650 Ti (a 10 years old GPU) performance, so pretty modest. Latest official LL viewer. Detected settings around High, draw distance 128m. Went to Natoma/Ivory tower, which has a good mix of geometry and about 10 avatars. ALM off: frame rate in the high 50s ALM on (no shadows, AO or DOF): frame rate in the low 50s Walked around some other sims with similar results: ALM on is a few % performance hit, if at all. And you actually see materials and lights if people have put effort into it.

The sim has to manage interest list and object updates for each of the connected clients. Again, I don't see why the time spent on these tasks should be different between prim and mesh objects. Maybe if you could get 100+ agents into a sim and compare the server times with different set of objects that fill the sim you'd see some differences, but that seems like a difficult (and probably pointless) test to execute

I don't understand what performance you're trying to measure. Why are you showing us server stats? Unless there's a bunch of avatars jumping around the builds and engaging the physics engine, why would the server stats be different between a prim and a mesh build?

I don't see LL lowering the land fees (mainland or private regions) but I also don't see LL raising them either. So with the current high inflation that's going on worldwide the fees are getting "cheaper" (in real money terms) each month.

A single vertex can hold multiple kinds of information. Coordinates in XYZ space, coordinates in UV space, vertex color etc. SL counts all of them. It's the difference between "how many bags are there" (Blender) and "how many things are in all bags" (SL).

Isn't the main difference in crispness the antialiasing setting (which only applies to ALM as far as I can tell)? In Firestorm with ALM on and antialiasing set to 'disabled' things seem just as sharp as with ALM off. If I set antialiasing to 2x 4x etc then things get more blurry.

The ability to cash out using a direct bank deposit (for EU residents) instead of Paypal would make the premium plus attractive to me, although I think that option should be available to everyone in general.

@Monty Linden now that we can rent servers in the same datacenter as LL, would it be possible to increase the throttle thresholds for http requests that stay in the same AWS region?

Andrew was the one who broke Starax' magic wand all those years ago. On the other hand, having to work on SL's spaghetti code again might just be the right punishment for that 😛

Given the pace of development in the past isn't this more like a 2022-2032 roadmap?

I got abandoned land via a support ticked while having no other plot in that region.

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You mean Mojo Linden?

I have seen animesh characters simply disappear from my view standing right in front of it, repeatedly. There are definitely problems in that area.