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Flea Yatsenko

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Posts posted by Flea Yatsenko

  1. 8 hours ago, Nika Talaj said:

    My biggest takeaway is that evidently LL has decided to flatten their organization.  Their VPS of engineering and marketing departed in January, there is no sign that they intend to replace them.  The engineering news at this lab gab was given by the director of engineering, and the product news by a product manager. My personal read on this is that LLs employee base is dwindling in size, although of course, it's possible that there are other reasons. I'd be surprised to see LL  begin any  large engineering endeavors in the near future, or perhaps ever again  YMMV.

    My other takeaway is that there may be new policies for LL employees as well as for residents.  Perhaps this new user group meeting is actually a way of making direct LL contact with users more formalized, and one-on-one contact between LL employees and residents will be less common than it has been since Belli's inception.  Of course, it's unlikely that we would ever KNOW if LL changes its internal policies for resident contact.

    A LOT of tech companies are downsizing right now. They say it's because of AI but I think it's got a lot to do with the fact that a lot of positions at tech companies weren't really actually very productive jobs. And a lot of jobs were very basic "respond to emails 4 hours a day" types of things. I think they are just consolidating jobs and adding more responsibilities to specific roles.

  2. 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

    • Like 1
  3. 3 hours ago, Jackson Redstar said:

    OK I should clarify. I am looking at this from the perspective of creating video in world. Lowering draw distance is not always an option, Turning off Dynamic Draw helps keeps things rezzed but it can really degrade performance. And MSAA - Im not even sure that is.

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

  4. 6 minutes ago, Jackson Redstar said:

    all these devs in the comments here melting my brain with technical explanations. :) Are there any good debug setting we can set to increase visual performance? I remember back in the old days there was settings like MeshTriangles or something and Triangle-something, damn i can't remember them now, but is there anything someone with a 'powerful enough' computer can do to, when it comes to tweaking debug settings, to improve visual performance?

    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.

  5. 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.

    • Like 4
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  6. 4 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

    Way longer than a year. But it's not that there haven't been attempts to fix it. Apparently what happens is that textured surfaces are actually set to the wrong alpha mode by viewers visiting the region attached to avatars with permission to change the affected objects (usually their owners). As it was explained to me it's not exactly a bug so much as an unfortunate design of the messaging protocol that makes it possible for a network error to actually flip the bits controlling alpha mode on those objects. I imagine that locking them would reduce the likelihood of that happening, although that's just a guess based on that explanation.

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

  7. 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.

    • Like 1
  8. 1 hour ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

    I'm very confused how someone would go through high school and college/university without ever needing to work with files/folders. Between writing papers, making presentations, creating and working with image files, retouching photos, creating ads/catalogs/book covers/brochures, digging through databases/spreadsheets, editing video files, doing field recording and foley, recording/mixing/mastering audio and music projects, writing and editing resumes and cover letters, navigating through emailed docs and PDFs when classes were missed, prepping files for professional printing, creating an entire professional portfolio, etc., I had my face in folders hunting for files damn near 24/7. Granted, I was a design and media major, but the business majors were always buried in their laptops, as well. 

    Are we just not writing and working with media and docs in school anymore orrrr...? 👀

    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.

    • Like 2
  9. On 3/19/2024 at 11:55 AM, Persephone Emerald said:

    Actually, with an increased use of free inventory management pictures for items, it might be possible to show multiple pictures within a system subfolder like in the picture above. 

    I sure wish creators would include pictures with their products, btw. Why don't they do this if they already have an ad picture for the product?

    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.

    • Like 3
  10. 17 hours ago, JUSTUS Palianta said:

    I'm scared.  You could say they can't possibly break it even more then it is now, but ... I really hope linden has been listening to merchant and customer feedback about how they broke it.

    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.

  11. 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.

  12. 7 hours ago, Fergie Finesmith said:

    Every month I'm reaching new lows... this is getting ridiculous. 

    What about you guys? When I thought that January and February were bad months, March is being the worst ever in my Second life history, poor sales EVER!

    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.

    • Like 1
  13. 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.

    • Like 2
  14. 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.

    • Like 1
  15. 22 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

    This right here. ^^^

    Just because someone will know HOW to make a texture using PBR doesn't mean they'll know how to use it correctly.  We've seen this already with clothing before PBR.  Things look like crap because everyone and their brother makes content for SL which of course is the beauty of SL.  User-generated content.  Users are NOT game content creators and using a system meant for qualified game content creators in this environment is folly.

    It's the same thing we're still dealing with with mesh content.  Some know how to do it efficiently while a vast majority do not.  This affects everyone when it's done badly.  Same thing will happen with PBR, IMHO.  

    One creator can make nice hair with low triangle count while another uses 500K triangles for basically the same dang hair.  Which would you prefer?

    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.

  16. 1 hour ago, Jaylinbridges said:

    A smart club owner won't hire anyone to rebuild the club with PBR materials.  They will avoid PBR, use the same point lighting the club has always used, and maybe, if they even know how, set the EEP to a Shared Environment that looks like it always has.  The "cool" clubs that want a shiny PBR disco ball and greasy floors will lose patrons using their Mac laptops.  Although the clientele in some of these light show clubs are too stoned to notice anything different.

    Old wood in classic club builds does not shine or reflect anything but  dust.

    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.

  17. 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.

    • Like 1
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  18. 58 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

    Weirdly I find the PBR viewer to perform significantly better... I was having some weird performance issues with current release Firestorm that I could not resolve but using the PBR Alpha brought performance up to where it should be.

    Can't explain it at all, I even use the same graphic preference (as much as possible, PBR features enabled in the alpha of course).

     

    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.

  19. 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.

  20. On 2/16/2024 at 8:40 AM, OptimoMaximo said:

    Still not explaining what's the point of comparing two softwares, painter and zbrush, which fields of use are completely unrelated to each other's.

    Anyway, good luck with Blender trying to cope with the polygon numbers that zbrush can handle without breaking a sweat.

    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.

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