NiranV Dean
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Posts posted by NiranV Dean
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On 4/5/2024 at 8:52 AM, Bagnu said:
I am totally lost on this. I've never heard of SteamVR or Visual Studio. What are you creating with these programs?
SteamVR is Steam's own VR API required to start and run VR games on PC via Steam.
I use it to play games in VR (duh), i also record my update videos in VR.
Visual Studio is THE Windows development IDE used to manage all sorts of coding projects primarily written in C/C#/C++ such as most applications and the Second Life Viewers. Think of a Super Coding Text Editor on steroids for coders and developers.I use it for Viewer development as well as everything advanced coding related. I have the "basic version" of it called Visual Code as primary coding/text editing tool (for everything that isn't C/C#/C++ but can be used for that just as well).
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4 hours ago, Bagnu said:
LOL, I used to be a ho, but not so much anymore. Restarting? I restarted my new PC about 10 times in the last half hour just to get "effing" Windows 11 to recognize that the TV I'm using as a monitor really IS 10 bit HDR!!!! Faece me!!! I'm pissed that I should have to do that!!! A reg mod really IS much easier.
Writing in SteamVR is hard when half your keypresses are skipped.
Also restarting is not an option when you want to keep 6 months of "undo" history in Visual Studio.
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On 4/3/2024 at 5:55 PM, Bagnu said:
LOL!!! There IS a reg mod NVIDIA provides that removes the cursor. I looked it up, and just installed it. Works fine. I just have to add the other reg mod if I want the cursor to show. But I'm not making instructional videos, so I don't need it.
i know, it requires restarting tho, i dont do that
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1 hour ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:
Any good recording software has an option to not record the mouse cursor.
Except NVidia Share/Shadowplay.
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Since no one has properly answered this yet: No, you cant.
Cinematic Headtracking and Bone Cam are BD exclusive features.
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local texture preview shows you an uncompressed full resolution version, in other words not indicative of the final quality at all
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Sounds a lot like an extra input device being plugged in and automatically enabled in SL. A controller for instance, Xbox360/One, Playstation etc, they are notorious for having minimal stick drift at all times and if applications (such as SL) don't ignore these tiny drifts they will trigger movements. Most games have deadzones for that to prevent these tiny drifts from constantly triggering any sort of unwanted movement.
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Explanation:
The way most (if not all) shaders are set up is that their math does include the screen resolution (they have to) but they do not alter the input parameters according to your input resolution.If you input depth of field settings that will get you a nice 100 pixel wide circle blur, it will stay exactly 100 pixel at all times irregardless of your resolution, think of it this way, you set ABSOLUTE values that are not affected by anything else, what you input is what the Viewer will output. This means your settings are always specifically tailored to the Viewer's window resolution (because that is what you use to "preview" your settings under normal circumstances right?). If you change the snapshot resolution you will have to scale up specific settings (size based ones) to roughly match the time your desired resolution is bigger than your current preview method's resolution (screen resolution).
To give an example:
Shadow blur on 1.0 will look fitting for 1920x1080, but because shadow blur does not scale with resolution it will blur the same amount on a resolution higher or lower than that, lets say 3840x2160 (4K), this will result in the shadow blur being roughly only "half" as wide on the final high resolution image compared to what you see on your actual window resolution you used to finetune your settings with, the "solution" is quite simple and as others said you will simply have to scale shadow blur up, for the sake of simplicity we'd set it to 2.0 (because we want a blur that is twice as big now), personally i'd recommend adding 20-40% on top, 2.2 to 2.4 might actually look better and closer to what you want. Again as others said you will need to use the snapshot preview to tune your settings (BD has a big preview button to scale the preview across the entire screen) and has an automated scaling option on top of that which should roughly scale up most important values depending on the desired snapshot resolution compared to your original window resolution. It's not perfect but its helpful, i prefer doing it manually.
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You want the global light strength slider for local lights
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34 minutes ago, WarmAnimations Lisa said:
But why not? Or if you don't want to do competition to Avastar why not have a sync feature? because well even tough its similar even using the same shape etc... the truth its never be the same do the raw pose in world vc do on blender... And this BD feature its so near the perfection... why not this extra mile to allow creators to turn static poses into truth lifealike animations?
You won't be getting life-alike animations by exporting them to Blender.
You would have gotten life-alike animations however with the Puppeteering project (that i would have used to have Poser syncing and coupled with a planned VR implementation a recording feature that would allow recording your VR movements thus "motion capture" inside SL). You can already do that in Blender.
BVH export is pretty complicated, the only reason the Viewer has an .ANIM export is because the Viewer already had this feature from the very beginning (all these years), i just used it. BVH requires quite some complicated translations from the internal stuff to what BVH does. As it stands right now the ANIM export is still quite... unfinished and needs work and i'd like to get that actually fully working and fleshed out first before i try anything else.
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11 hours ago, Aiyumei said:
Maybe @NiranV Dean has something planned in the pipeline?
Nope, no plans to add BVH export.
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Yea thats the summary of OP's post. My actual answer is below.
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2 hours ago, Nalates Urriah said:
I think you mean the setting to enable/disable ALM is gone. ALM is permanently ON.
That's what i said.
On 2/17/2024 at 6:33 AM, NiranV Dean said:Guys guys guys, you are completely missing the point of this post and no one seems to have answered the actual question/problem.
Advanced Lighting Model is gone.
Answer:
Yes. That is intended. ALM is no longer an option, it is now the defacto default and always on, there is no more forward or windlight renderer. ALM has finally become the standard after 15 years as "unstable". -
5 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:
Thanks for confirmation. I didn't have a chance today to check this out, but was pretty sure it worked that way in Firestorm - for as long as I remember.
That is of course unless they break it, generally speaking they do touch inventory functions more so there is a chance they could break it, although unlikely as its quite seccluded from everything else.
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18 hours ago, Dorientje Woller said:
I wish that Firestorm, the LL viewer, Black Dragon would fixed the most annoying bug of their inventory: when you have searched in your inventory by name, selected the folder or part that is in the folder that you need, clear the search term, that the inventory scrolls back to the top of it. In the Alchemy viewer, the inventory expands but you remain in the folder that you have selected.
In Black Dragon selecting any inventory item or folder and then clearing the search will keep the item/folder selected and automatically scroll to it. (Just tested in 5.1.0) This has always been the case as far as i can think back, i've used this for years. I personally never fixed this, meaning this is a thing coming from LL, which means they too have this. Which means Firestorm does have it too.
Searching.
after clearing:
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Guys guys guys, you are completely missing the point of this post and no one seems to have answered the actual question/problem.
Advanced Lighting Model is gone.
Answer:
Yes. That is intended. ALM is no longer an option, it is now the defacto default and always on, there is no more forward or windlight renderer. ALM has finally become the standard after 15 years as "unstable".-
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On 1/25/2024 at 3:38 AM, animats said:
I just put this into the Canny-based new Second Life issue system.
Not sure if that does anything. There don't even seem to be BUG numbers in there.
You are on my list.
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Save as File is the old original "local" XML file save which can be found in your presets folder in your APPDATA/Roaming/Black Dragon folders.
Save as Item is the new "save as Inventory item" EEP method for sharing them easily.
Both should be listed in the Environment Editor which can be found in the Dragon - World - Environment Settings menu.
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On 1/2/2024 at 9:15 AM, Henri Beauchamp said:
Come on ! 🤪
You said 60fps in ALM with shadows, and in the very simple scene I benchmarked, I hardly pull 20fps with shadows and without SSAO from the GTX 460.
Short of testing in a skybox or an empty sim, there is no way you'd get 60 fps with shadows on. Period !
With a faster CPU you do, like i said i had an FX 6200, thats a six core, SL back before performance and pbr werent even using the gpu much, with performance gpu usage spiked because they optimized the code allowing the gpu to get its turn more often.
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9 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:
I re-did the tests I had done a few weeks and months ago, using my ”potato” computer (which was considered quite decent a gaming computer back when I built it): Core2 Quad Q6600 CPU OCed @ 3.4GHz with 8GB DDR3, GTX 460 (Gigabyte GV-N460OC-1GI) with 1024MB VRAM, 1920x1200 24” monitor.
Sadly, this PC is ”too weak” to record a video while doing the viewer benchmarking (it would too badly impact the frame rates), so I could only take screen shots as proofs, but you are of course welcome to redo the tests by yourself if you still do not trust me !
I used Second Life maintenance viewer v6.6.17 (pre-PBR), Second Life release viewer v7.1.2 (PBR), Black Dragon v5.0.3 (PBR; I did not find a pre-PBR version of BD), and the Cool VL Viewer v1.32.0.4 (dual renderer). All viewers were tested under Windows 11, and the Cool VL Viewer (the only one with native Linux builds among them), was also tested under Linux (but I forgot to test shadow modes... Drat !).
The benchmarking conditions and protocol are as follow:- CPU and GPU locked to their maximum (OCed) frequencies, all energy saving features turned off.
- Viewers in windowed mode and their window maximized (same size for all viewers).
- GL/GPU settings set to core GL profile, anisotropic filtering on, FSAA in 4x mode. The NVIDIA OpenGL driver is configured to use threading, V-sync off, triple buffering on.
- Texture memory setting (GL bound texture memory for Cool VL Viewer) set to 512MB so that the viewer won't spill vertex buffers and GL textures over to the RAM (which would tremendously slow it down), while using as much VRAM as possible.
- All benchmarks made in a single place, in front of my shop in Hunburgh, with just one avatar on screen (my alt avatar, a potato legacy avatar too !... You won't tell the conditions are too stringent, this way... 😜).
- Draw distance set to 256m (the same draw distance I always used, including in the old days when this PC was my brand new one). Environment setting set to midday (legacy version, i.e. without PBR auto-adjust).
- Camera settings set so that all viewers got the same FOV (and the same objects to render).
- All rendering settings common to all viewers set at an equal value (and the ones that are specific to a given viewer are disabled). In particular the LOD factors were set as follow in all viewers: Objects (volumes) LOD to 3.0, Linden trees LOD to 3.0, Terrain LOD to 2.0, Avatars LOD to 1.0, Avatar physics LOD to 0 (off), jelly dolls off (no complexity limit), max non-impostors set to 10 (16 for the Cool VL Viewer: I just remarked this discrepancy, but it is not really a problem with just one avatar on screen).
- Each time, the viewer in benchmark was started and left alone until it settles to a stable frame rate, with all textures loaded (verified via the texture console).
Here are the results (note that the quoted fps rate is averaged and varies in real time with spikes and dropouts by about +/-5%, for all viewers):
In forward rendering mode:In ALM mode, without shadows (and SSAO off too):
In ALM mode, with shadows and SSAO off:
In ALM mode, with shadows and SSAO on:
In PBR mode, without shadows (and SSAO off too):
- Second Life Viewer 7.1: 27fps
- Black Dragon: 34fps
- Cool VL Viewer under Windows: 36fps
- Cool VL Viewer under Linux: 43fps
In PBR mode, with shadows and SSAO off:
In PBR mode, with shadows and SSAO on:
(*) In this test, SMAA and CAS shaders were also activated in the Cool VL Viewer, to replace FXAA and provide a sharper render.
As you can see, at no time any viewer has been capable, in this rather simple 3D scene, to render at 60fps with shadows on !
You can also notice how badly deferred rendering (ALM and PBR shaders alike) does impact the frame rates with this kind of old GPU (the same impact, or even worse, is seen with iGPUs, even newer ones). With the Cool VL Viewer (which C++ highly optimized code shines brighter when less time is spent rendering with the GPU), the forward rendering mode is about 60-70% faster, when compared to the shadow-less deferred mode (ALM and PBR alike, here as well). But even LL's poorly optimized pre-PBR viewer can gain 30% in fps rate by simply switching to the forward rendering mode... Here again, this is specific to old GPUs and (pretty much all) iGPUs, since for modern GPUs, ALM/PBR is almost always as fast or faster than the forward mode.
Finally, there is the problem of the VRAM usage: have a look at the textures blurriness in the screen shots, and in the Linux directory, to the CVLV-*Params.png screen shots, showing the texture console (look at the Bias value): the ALM mode eats up a lot of VRAM, and PBR is even worse in this respect, sometimes causing texture trashing (even in such a simple scene) on old those GPUs with less than 3GB of VRAM or so...
My conclusion is simple: for PBR (or ALM in pre-PBR viewers), you must have a modern enough PC and a discrete GPU with as much VRAM as possible.
The minimum requirements for SL PBR viewers should be changed to:- 4-core CPU, preferably with SMT.
- 16GB of RAM.
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GTX 960 or equivalent.
Well i'm not saying you should be running around with a GTX 460 (let alone a dual core) but your tests also showed that you could run SL with that hardware, of course a more complex scene (such as a club) with several avatars would quickly put an end to your still usable framerate (especially with shadows) but very generous use of impostors can help here to keep at least ~10-15 FPS, which should be more than usable for the average SL user.
On 12/31/2023 at 8:14 PM, NiranV Dean said:Before my GTX 670 died i had to jump down to my old GTX 460 for a bit until i got my GTX 1060 and (apart from the 2GB VRAM being far too little for SL) the 460 was churning out stable 60 FPS with Deferred and shadows enabled. This was back in 2022...
As i adressed earlier already VRAM is a big issue and there is absolutely no getting around this not to mention that hitting the VRAM cap can and will impact your performance drastically as the GPU starts shoveling around textures in and out of memory which should be avoided at all cost. If it wasn't for the low VRAM i'd say your tests have clearly shown that a GTX 460 is capable enough as "minimum" requirement for SL. Though i agree it should probably be a GTX 6xx at least for GPU power, VRAM on the other hand anything that has at least 4GB is absolute minimum for SL (at least now with PBR).
To your tests, considering that you are showing several many plants, 2 houses at least and a tree? sky? platform and probably more stuff behind those bushes i'd say this is a somewhat average complexity scene, the scene i got 60 FPS was a little less complex (the Hippo Hollow and Theater regions) which was probably what pushed me to 60 FPS (note those weren't stable 60 FPS) and neither were they exact we're talking about ~60 FPS so jumping anywhere between 50 and 70 wildly (with the occasional drop into the low frames due to something happening). Your tests do leave the option that 60 FPS are capable (not in your scene) but absolutely possible. On top of that you used a "theoretically" far weaker CPU than i did (although the FX series was notoriously slow and even an Intel Dual Core should blow the FX out of the water by miles at least on single core performance) so depending on how that Intel actually performs you might have lost quite some frames there too compared to my tests, nonetheless i'm quite impressed at the average FPS you pulled with that hardware (even in my Viewer) and even more surprising (heck even shocking almost) is the fact that you pulled consistently more FPS (even close to your own Viewer) out of my Viewer than the LL Viewer. I was very much under the impression that my Viewer is consistently slower than the LL in its stock settings, though we have to keep in mind this is PBR only since you didn't get to test 4.X.X, i'm pretty sure with pre-PBR which still contains all my rendering changes you would have seen lower framerates. (I can make an exception and toss you a link to the latest pre-PBR to test, 4.3.2. I'd be really interested to see what kind of framerate you'd get with that)
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1 hour ago, Henri Beauchamp said:
Well, I do have a PC (the ”fourth” one, in term power, among my still running PCs), with a Core 2 Quad Q6600 OCed @ 3.4GHz, and a GTX 460, and I can assure you that it won't run at 60 fps in ALM in any of today's SL scenes (clubs, scenic sims, or even just outside of my shop in Hunburgh, facing my little forest of trees) !
If you need proofs, I can do a few captures, to demonstrate... But not today and now, obviously (soon Champagne time for me !). 😜
Please, keep in mind that what you were rendering back in 2012 got nothing to do with what you got today to render in SL !
Also, on this PC, you can see the major impact of ALM (or PBR alike, with the latter not being slower, but using more VRAM, which in the end leads to blurry textures), compared with forward rendering, which is twice as fast !
Like i said, i tested this back in 2022 and until a month ago i had a GTX 1060. Sure you aren't getting 60 FPS in a club, then again you will never get 60 FPS in a club with shadows on. I was getting around 20 FPS in a club with the FX (GPU is irrelevant) for the most part, that was with jellydolls however (later i found out that jellydolls are complete ass and simply turning them off and using the old impostors instead actually gives better and more stable performance), after the upgrade to a Ryzen 5 3600 i was able to get ~30 FPS with everyone being impostored and with the performance update after i was able to get ~40 FPS with everyone fully shown (no more impostors), that was still back with a GTX 1060.
Again 20 FPS in a club WITH shadows+ssao+ssr is more than enough for most people (not for me) but considering that most people are even fine with 10 FPS... 20 is more than fine and thats WITH shadows, turning shadows off while keeping everything else on could easily push you to 40-50 FPS. Again i see no excuse. Deferred really doesn't need much hardware to run let alone run at an acceptable framerate, worst case people will have to turn off shadows if they are really desperate but people falsely connected shadows with deferred and thought turning one off means turning both off.
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On 12/29/2023 at 9:25 PM, Henri Beauchamp said:
Because you would not accept to be forced to go to a racetrack with a 1995 Toyota Corolla when you do not want to go to that race track in the first place ?... 😮
Not everyone can afford buying a new computer every 5 years, you know...
A singular new CPU maybe.
I cannot attest to these comments. I was always able to run Deferred and shadows with cheap hardware at more than acceptable framerates.
Before my GTX 670 died i had to jump down to my old GTX 460 for a bit until i got my GTX 1060 and (apart from the 2GB VRAM being far too little for SL) the 460 was churning out stable 60 FPS with Deferred and shadows enabled. This was back in 2022. We are talking about a GPU that came out in 2010 coupled with an AMD FX 6200 which came out 2012. So were are talking 10+ year old hardware. Sorry but there is literally no excuse why after 10 years you shouldn't have something that can run at the very least Deferred enabled (now default) and even shadows if hardware from 10+ years could do it at 60 FPS. I have practically 0 income and even i can somehow manage to stay along, there is no way you cant put 100 bucks aside somehow to buy a new GPU/CPU ONCE. If people just stopped buying entire PC's as a whole or craptops for overpriced 2000+ bucks they would be able to afford something that can run SL for the years to come. Right now i'm getting 200 FPS in the PBR Viewer and Shadows+SSAO enabled, that is easily more than twice i got with the performance Viewer (which was around 80 FPS and i never managed to crack the 100).
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On 12/30/2023 at 3:30 PM, OptimoMaximo said:
Yep I guessed that much. With LL it's always a race towards the minimum
Oh? You were serious?
I thought you were giving them the benefit of the doubt. I would define "minimum" as LL's absolute maximum, pretty sure they are aiming lower than that.
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16 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:
Its implementation certainly is, though. Hte implied functionality is (as always with LL) half way through being actually useful, resetting the skeleton locally only. How hard is it to build a message to the server telling other viewers to trigger a reset on their side as well? Ultimately doing what this thing is for: un deforming an avatar, for good.
I do not have access to the server so i can't tell but i can guarantee you it is super easy to add another message, i've told LL so many times "just add a simple message" for us to use but they always refuse because its "so much work" and "so complicated" and not "easy", i call bs.
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Choice of Skins for Second Life (and other) Viewers
in Second Life Viewer
Posted
The Viewer does have a skins debug setting if i remember correct, you could use that given you add extra skins aside from the default.
Also whoever warns you dark mode is bad in some circumstances sounds like full of bs.