Flea Yatsenko

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_atlas

Is there any ETA? It's going to be so much easier and quicker to use a texture atlas on a 2k than 4 separate 1k textures.

It still costs money to make an AI model, or you need an expensive AI card. There are AI marketplaces and oddly enough the prices for those assets are pretty in line with SLMP, maybe even more expensive. I don't think it'll crater content creator's income by itself. The real threat isn't just to content creators in SL. It's to SL itself. LL managed to fight off companies like Facebook/Meta in the metaverse craze because SL had content and none of the other platforms did. With AI, a large company can spend millions of dollars on AI generated content for their virtual worlds, far cheaper than paying a human to make stuff, and have just as much (modern) stuff as SL has. Everyone laughed at Meta and Horizon Worlds because the content was terrible. They couldn't find quality artists for their budget. Now imagine if Meta launched a new virtual world and they could throw millions of dollars at AI model generation. A company like FB could make thousands of models with their money and they could make SL's content amount and quality look not very impressive. Payscale as the average salary of a 3d modeller in the USA is a little under $50k. Kaedim is $50 for 10 credits. 1 credit for a "low poly" which doesn't look game ready, 4 credits for a high poly. If a company like FB wanted a virtual world they could probably do it for much cheaper. $5 per asset is very good, a big company like FB/Meta could make a lot of assets for their virtual world with that price. https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=3D_Modeler/Salary

I know it's always not an option, but you could definitely design your scenes around shorter view distances.

Lower draw distance, increase LOD (usually Object in graphics settings). Best way for higher image quality with better performance. And disable MSAA. It kills my performance when there's alpha masked textures, like plants. Draw distance is huge, look at this area of a circle calculator https://www.mathsisfun.com/geometry/circle-area.html Notice how area goes from 804 at 32m view distance to 3216 at 64m view distance. That area is all filled with stuff your computer needs to render, download, etc. The less area your computer has to render stuff, the less it has to render (most of the time, there are exceptions) so the better it's going to run.

Sales correlates with how much maintenance is going on. Even if it doesn't directly affect SLMP, billing maintenance can affect people's ability to buy L$ to spend. General inventory issues and stuff can make people just log and not bother with SL. If you are going to spend thousands of L$ on stuff, you don't want to be fighting SL or thinking something is going to go wrong. I think this is a lot more common than people realize. It seems the last few times I've created new listings, I've had lots of problems with image uploads giving me a 404 error, listing not saving when pressing save, etc. That kind of stuff just makes people log out and do other things. I think it affects people far more than they realize. SL is supposed to be fun. There's nothing fun about rezzing stuff and having it take 10 seconds to rez, so you re-rez and end up with 3 copies. Things not attaching then suddenly attaching 5 minutes later. Making an order on SLMP and not having it be delivered for 5 minutes. This whole week is filled with inventory maintenance and restarts.

Can this happen with changing physics of objects (none/convex hull/prim)?

The last week or so, I've been selling higher end, newer products. Actually a lot of PBR stuff. My old stuff wasn't selling well when it usually was. Considering all the SLMP and billing maintenance my sales have been pretty good. The week before though, they were heavily in world sales. SLMP constantly goes between prioritizing cheaper products then more expensive ones. If you don't have both in your store you are going to see large slumps and big booms. That said if search is promoting older products and that changes and your sales go down, you might need to adjust your strategy. Just my two cents, not trying to be rude.

Imagine if you will a Documents folder filled with hundreds of documents with obscure names only the creator understand and can only be found via searching. They understand files, but they don't organize them into folders. Instead of browsing to /2024/final paper/science they just search "final paper 2024 science" and it's all thrown into a huge folder with zero sub folders. It's not surprising since search has gotten so much faster (don't want to show my age lol) on a computer. But it's a direct lack of any sort of organizational skills. If they need an attachment they either don't even bother downloading it and just view it from the inbox each time, or it gets thrown into a giant unorganized folder called downloads.

LL has the marketplace. They have direct delivery. Surely they could include the primary image in the marketplace listing as an image when the product is delivered in world? Directories aren't going to work with the generation that grew up with iphones and androids and only searching for stuff. Making product images the responsibility of the vendor is never going to work. There are too many vendors who don't update old listings or aren't even in SL anymore. They could easily just include the primary product image in inventory when the product is delivered in world. It's too late for stuff that has already been delivered but this is something new users need, not existing ones.

I hope they are realizing that the biggest issue isn't even search quality being poor, but SLMP failing to work sometimes. Random 404 and 5xx errors all the time is not good for an ecommerce marketplace.

Getting 404 errors when uploading images to new listings and saving a new listing sometimes doesn't actually work. Every time I make new listings I get reminded how borked this thing is and how much lost income it's costing me because it doesn't work properly. Wouldn't be surprised if check outs and other parts of SLMP behaved the same way.

You are comparing year over year, right? Like February 2024 to February 2023, 2022, etc?

In world sales are making up for the poor marketplace sales performance for me. But yeah, my SLMP income is some of the lowest I think I've ever seen for the last month. My sales have been kind of below normal for several months, but when SLMP really dives the in world sales fill in the gap. If you are selling avatar stuff, the sale events are probably the driving factor. I went as far as to make my own search engine website for my store and it's picking up the slack. But I think there is some fatigue with how difficult it is to find stuff to buy in SL and people aren't bother with SLMP like they used to and instead look for alternate search or events/blogs. I think the last update they did to search greatly increased relevancy of returned results at the cost of the quality and age of listings. The end result was a bunch of very relevant stuff that is horribly outdated. One of the keywords I target has only the first 4 results having ratings, and one is 1 star, the other is 1.5 stars. And further down in results are some 4 and 5 star rated products, some not from my store. In fact some of my lower rated stuff appears higher than my higher rated stuff when searching with two very generic keywords that target both. The new algorithm is also extremely easy to game. I think you have serious merchants not diving into manipulating search in hopes that it'll be fixed, and more scam-tier merchants diving right into gaming the system as hard as they can. I honestly think the days of just depending on SLMP for sales is over.

Are they both logging into the same region?

It's all a mess. I stopped selling full perm for the most part. Even if someone violates the ToS you have a really hard time finding out if they are violating it. Let alone enforcing it. I think it's really just trust, merchants trust customers to follow the ToS and customers respect it so full perm doesn't go away. But it always seems like whenever I release a FP version eventually the product just stops selling and most of my products don't. I would be surprised if most people followed user ToS, let alone read them.

Best way to get high FPS is to lower draw distance, and in crowded places, do things to render fewer avatars, like decrease the complexity limit, increase number of imposters, etc.

When they tried to solve the problem of PBR looking the same in SL and GLTF tools, they managed to really throw a wrench into how users change their environment settings. Sounded good in theory when they were trying to make GLTF tools like Blender and SP have consistency with SL. But it's clear in doing so they completely messed up EEP and how things look for users. I feel like LL expected users to come up with good EEP settings to fill in the void, like SL users usually do. But all the old EEP settings should be moved to "legacy" to make it clear they aren't going to be plug and play with PBR. Which was a really big mistake because nothing angers people like an update that they don't think they need that manages to make them jump through hoops to get things working the way they were. Am I wrong to think that these dark room issues are because of the auto-generated reflection probes at ground level? I haven't played too much but it feels like if you make an enclosed space in the sky you don't end up with dark rooms. Wouldn't it have been better to skip the ground level reflection probes and make it an upgrade, i.e. you buy a house or whatever with probes and lighting set up? With the auto generated probes it feels more like people are getting reflection probes without any lights and it's completely breaking everything, when you need both to get proper results.

Please re-read. It's a lot more difficult to mess up PBR textures than it is spec norm. The problem isn't the PBR textures, it's the environment and scene, i.e. lighting and environment settings. PBR is supposed to emulate real life as much as possible. Please tell me where you can step outside in RL and see a massive blue glow and haze on everything on a sunny day.

There are only a few projector lights rendered at a time. They are only meant to be used sparingly. That said the biggest problem with PBR isn't the PBR content, it's the scene they are in (EEP, reflection probes, etc). It also seems like people don't like the general idea of PBR. PBR is supposed to mimick the real world. A PBR club with proper reflection probes and lighting would be one of the best use cases for PBR. One of the worst use cases is making avatar clothing that is viewed in all sorts of scenes and environments, some which won't be set up for PBR, some will be set up for PBR incorrectly (like the blue glow problem), and some will be set up properly. Which is why people are (understandably) upset about PBR. And about lower end hardware, the default PBR recommended settings are way too high and it's causing a lot of negative feedback. The default, new user PBR experience is horrible between the poor environment settings and the recommended settings being way too high.

2k/4k would be really good if used properly. If people packed things properly and added multiple materials into a single texture, besides the local improvements, that's also less network requests. Network requests are stuck behind your ping, that's one of the biggest drivers of slow rezzing. A 2k is four times as large as a 1k. Blender's new UV packer works amazingly well and if you are using it, you have to really screw up to make poor use of your space. That said it would completely get abused by people. I imagine clothes with 2k textures on everything just because it looks slightly better than 1k. LL should start a program where they test you on your content creating abilities and it unlocks more advanced features like 2k/4k textures.

I think it entirely depends on if you are limited by your CPU or your GPU with performance. PBR is going to use your GPU more effectively, so if the GPU is starving for data and not being used entirely then PBR is going to be an improvement. If your GPU is already struggling with old viewers, PBR is going to be worse since it's doing so much more stuff. Just my theory at the moment.

I noticed default PBR settings are too aggressive. I.E. what's recommended is usually too high and runs poorly. I was able to get PBR running on a very old netbook. It wouldn't even run at default above 1fps at recommended settings, but lowering draw distance and some settings made it usable if I really had no other choice. What is happening is people are not changing their settings, running PBR, seeing it's slower, then comparing it to their old settings (which probably have been tweaked, like lower draw distance) and thinking PBR is slower. I think Linden Lab is still adjusting their graphical defaults based on their minimum requirements, which seem completely too low https://secondlife.com/system-requirements Do you know anyone running SL with 4GB of ram on an 800mhz Pentium 3? The netbook I used is close to a 1.5ghz Core 2 Quad in performance per clock and it struggled massively.

I'm just assuming you only want one piece of software. If I had to choose I'd take SP over Zbrush but if you can do both you probably should. I'm comparing them based on your workflow, even though each piece of software accomplishes different goals. I think from delivering a quality product, high quality painted materials are more valuable than baking normals to low poly. But obviously the best choice is to do both, I think it just depends how much time you have and what market segment you're targeting. It also depends what you're making. SL used to compress normal maps heavily before PBR, so odds are baking from high to low wouldn't look that great. EllieAnne doesn't have a lot of time and is just getting into things, so I'm basing my opinion on that.

I would take SP over ZBrush because SP makes it a lot easier to handle PBR and GLTF and ZBrush, while superior to Blender in sculpting, only kind of repeats Blender's functionality. Better to ditch ZBrush, learn to sculpt in blender, and use substance painter. AFAIK Blender's GLTF support isn't nearly as good as SP's.