Flea Yatsenko

Well. Unity decided to make people who use their engine pay PER INSTALL. There was massive backlash, and it was changed, but they only added revenue limits which makes me think LL would still have to pay for EVERY INSTALL on any mobile device. So there was a ton of drama with the engine LL is using for the mobile viewer. I wouldn't be surprised if someone crunched numbers and decided it could end up costing them money to release a mobile client. Unity backtracked a bit and SL is in a really unique situation given Unity's pricing scheme. So maybe they've worked something out. But considering what happened with Unity and how furious the internet was with them, I would expect that drama to at least delay the mobile viewer by a bit. Second the last mobile client was cancelled because it was basically Speedlight except less good and residents started to wonder why LL was even bothering. Third I'm pretty sure everyone on LL's level realizes high end desktop is more or less a dying platform compared to phones, laptops, etc and no matter what cool stuff they do with SL, if their only market is people with gaming PCs, they are never going to be huge. Fourth the mobile client is one of the most important things to happen to SL. Mainly because if they can get SL to run on a mid range phone, that means it'll run great even on low end laptops. Which means a huge hurdle of SL running terribly on people's computers could be coming to an end.

Full bright is only for when you bake lighting, shadows, and everything in something like Blender. No way it will work with in world builds. But yes, PBR is going to make every product take a lot more time to finish, cost a lot more to upload too. Price are probably gonna go up for me for a PBR version. At least if you ship two versions, you can get away with a customer using the old version until they can figure out EEP and PBR.

PBR is affected way more by the environment than materials or baked. PBR can look significantly better but you have to get the environment and reflection probes right. Otherwise it can look way worse, like "why is the blue from the sky coming into my underground tunnels?!" There is going to be a learning curve. I think once people get the hang of it, it'll be amazing. That said, you can't turn PBR off in your viewer. But at least for the world, you can set a lot of stuff to full bright if it's baked and it'll look fine. Even if you can't change EEP settings for the sim, you can change them in your own viewer. In Firestorm, it's just World -> Environment -> My Environments... So really, there's two ways to go about fixing the way the scene looks. There is also an exposure setting in the graphics that you can play with and it'll make it look more like what you're used to. You should always release a PBR and non PBR version of your products, unless you think the mobile viewer is going to completely fail. Mobile viewer won't support PBR last I heard. But no matter what a baked build in full bright, as long as it's not for an AV, is going to look fine like it always has. LL is going to eventually block non-PBR viewers besides the mobile one. And of course that won't look the same either. LL built in regular diffuse textures as a backup to PBR specifically for that reason. There's always a rough transition period when LL gives us a major new feature like this. It was the same with sculpties, materials, etc. But Materials were massively outdated compared to other games (sorry to use that term) and PBR is an industry standard.

502 gateway error

Just saying LL's defaults for the PBR viewer are not good, but it's something easily fixed.

Happens in Linux too, running the open source driver. Either it's a problem affecting both drivers or the viewer. I tried editing the debug setting to change VRAM and it didn't help. It seems to get worse if you TP around to other places. It's so bad in Firestorm Alpha that I can't even get stuff to stay loaded long enough to get product images.

I think you are gonna find that 99% of marketplace images are already photoshopped and edited. I think almost all major merchants edit their photos before listing. I don't, but it's obvious they do because everyone has bought something without trying a demo that didn't look anything as nice as the picture. The lighting is a lot different with GLTF/PBR but I found playing with the exposure settings can make it a lot better. I just think the default exposure is too high, I turn it down in my viewer. Even just lowering exposure to .9 stops it from crushing bright colors.

I think there is a bug or something with viewer detecting how much VRAM you have. I have a 6800 with 16GB of VRAM and with the Firestorm PBR viewer I get insane trashing. I saw them talking about it in the preview group as well. Seems like a new thing, just suddenly started happening, then I started using the PBR viewer and it got extremely bad. Even if you had 32GB of VRAM, if the viewer is only detecting 512MB it's going to cause problems. Really hope there is a solution soon. This is so SL, the graphics get upgraded with PBR and everything looks way better but then there's a new texture loading problem and everything looks blurry and terrible. I even deleted my firestorm_x64 folder to reset everything and it didn't help at all. I don't think this problem has to do with any settings unless there are new defaults and they are bad, or a new setting has a bad default that's breaking stuff.

I think SL has a very innovative userbase who can usually fix problems better than LL can. And realistically no one knows something like SL more than the users who can understand the problems. It's actually a really good thing SL users can fix SL's problems and it's something extremely rare that a lot of other companies could only dream of. I think LL kind of knows they are not entirely steering the ship. They are more like the people who keep the ship running and not sinking. And I think that's what makes SL so cool and filled with really awesome user generated content. It's a good relationship and it makes SL extremely unique, even amongst all these metaverse fad things popping up. I think LL knows to kind of keep their hands off the wheel and just let the users take control of most things. In world shopping was a pain, so we got xstreetsl. LL provided bodies were aging very poorly so we got mesh bodies. SL's users almost always fix LL's shortcomings and I think the current LL is kind of realizing that their role is to give its users the tools it needs to make SL better instead of trying to make SL better. And yes, I consider mobile client a tool to make SL better because it should in theory make for a lot more customers which would drive a big content creation push because there's more money and the market is larger. The shopping experience is gonna get fixed soon, trust me And yeah I had a rough day in RL so sorry in advanced if some of this post doesn't make sense.

Yeah but reflection probes can cause a ridiculous amount of lag. Not sure how to deal with it as a vendor, if I add it to each piece in a builder's kit it'll make building easier but the optimal way is to place it after the build is done where it's needed. There are going to be a lot of teething issues for sure. But PBR is going to be amazing and we're going to get a lot of stuff that looks amazing in SL that people aren't expecting.

There is also a big warning on PBR test regions that you shouldn't post PBR stuff on the marketplace yet. I don't think you need to rush into making PBR stuff, it's going to be a while before everyone is on a PBR viewer. But you should be learning how to deal with it. Just a heads up, I was ready to go full PBR before I saw that sign and started thinking about it.

Mobile client is using a game engine not developed by LL. It uses Unity. LL won't be responsible for all the backend and graphics stuff with the mobile viewer, only making SL work with another game engine. The current SL Viewer is basically a game engine LL has created to handle SL. It has to do graphics, networking, graphics API (OpenGL, Vulkan, etc) support by itself and LL has to make it. Mobile viewer will be capable of whatever Unity Engine is capable of, which is a lot. Here are the platforms it supports https://support.unity.com/hc/en-us/articles/206336795-What-platforms-are-supported-by-Unity- Meaning mobile SL viewer could be ran on everything on that list (theoretically). For APIs (directX, OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal), here's what Unity supports https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/GraphicsAPIs.html So yeah, theoretically, it's possible to get all sorts of optimized builds and LL doesn't have to do much work compared to the official viewer. LL has the potential to make SL much bigger than just a mobile client, but we'll see what happens. This is one of the most exciting things to happen in SL in a long time since it has so much potential to reach new users.

502 errors the last week have been incredibly bad. Worse than I've seen that I can remember. Happens on secondlife.com and the marketplace.

How dumb do you have to be to run a scam on a completely controlled, centralized economy like SL? LL controls every part of the L$, every transaction, etc. It's not like getting grandma to buy a gift card to "pay the IRS." How are you supposed to even get rid of your scammed L$? Even if you sell it in some shady way like not on the exchange, LL can still pretty much know where it's going, where it came from, etc.

SL has gotten a lot better with performance too. I have my old AMD FX 8350 I use sometimes and it is actually quite usable with an old HD 6900 and FX 8350 in Linux. Much better than I remember. Still not great on my AMD A4-5000 but that's a 2013 netbook APU so I can understand. I think LL doesn't get enough props for what they've done with viewer performance, and PBR is going to shift massively from CPU limited performance to GPU limited. Between CPUs getting better and viewer getting better, the bar for running SL is lowering. Which is great because that can be a huge hurdle for new users, specially those who don't have proper gaming PCs.

Happens with me too but I'm not gonna waste Linden time with a Linux+WINE setup. I thought it was just my Linux setup.

Get lots of mesh and material upload errors in Firestorm alpha. FS will give me MISSING_NAV_BLOCK yet official client uploads fine. FS Alpha won't bulk upload materials either, always gives an error. Sometimes I have to use it, though I haven't tried yours in WINE yet. Plus FS doesn't have HAVOK. Linux software should work in all (distributions) versions of Linux. Publishers just list specific versions because they don't want to get stuck troubleshooting someone's Gentoo installation where they have obscure setups. Some distros are a lot easier to use than others, and some a lot easier to fix or troubleshoot. Anything based off Debian or Red Hat is always a good choice, though I vastly prefer Debian (or Devuan since systemd is awful)

Firestorm works perfectly fine for me in Gentoo Linux. I just download the tar, extract it, and it's fine. The official client in WINE loves to crash on me though. It's a pain.

I have a similar problem under different circumstances. I resolved it by removing the SL updater exes from where SL is installed. I forget exactly which exes to delete, but if you search for Linux WINE crash on start you should find something. My problem wasn't SL client, it was the SL updater and it caused the whole show to not run. I think that's something LL needs to fix, because if anything goes wrong with the updater the client fails to load and they have a user who is upset they can't run SL. SL starting shouldn't depend on the SL update services succeeding when they can just log in, get the client blocked message, then download the new version. Anyways, try deleting the update exes and stuff in the install directory (MAKE A BACKUP!!!) and see what happens.

Deleting in world stuff owned by people who haven't logged in in a long time makes no sense. Someone is paying for that land and they are keeping it there for a reason. Unless I'm mistaken there's no way to have free land in SL that could be abandoned for years. You have to constantly be paying for it. If someone is paying for a sim and it's filled with stuff from someone who did leave SL, they have the ability to return that stuff if they don't want it anymore. So that's not really a problem. I don't think any inactive in world stuff is a problem because someone is paying to keep it around and they have the ability to make it go away with a few mouse clicks. I don't understand why people are getting so heated about this. I have an in world store, if I decided to leave SL forever and just abandon my store as it, the sim owner would return all my stuff and rent it to someone else. Two cases of people who left SL with in world stuff I can think of and none of it is a problem. If someone is the sole land owner and they leave and stop paying, how long do you honestly think that land is going to stay in the state they left it? Old in world stuff isn't a problem, at all. Because having to pay for in monthly ensures whoever has in world stuff is active enough to pay for it. However, SLMP is a mess and this horse has been beaten to death. But I'm gonna share another angle since the only people who really complain are merchants. It's not fair to customers who buy things from people who aren't active merchants anymore. Customers have no way of knowing from a marketplace listing if a merchant is active or not. People are gonna feel a lot better about buying things if they know they'll get answers. Merchants have a lot to lose from all these outdated listings but customers have a lot to lose too. But no one ever stands up for the fact they basically get ripped off buying some outdated product because of the listing and how SLMP works. All they can do is leave a review. Who here hasn't bought something off SLMP because it looked good in the pictures, realized it was outdated, then went to the profile of the creator and see they've left SL? It's happened to me more than I want to admit. Do you think the average new user or casual SL user knows what mesh, PBR, etc is? Or do you think they just buy by pictures? This old content is hurting customers, especially new users who are buying old outdated stuff and don't know any better. Imagine knowing nothing about SL other than it's some game you found online or a friend told you to play. So you set up your stuff to buy L$, spend some real life money on L$, then go buy some random old stuff from the first page of search results. You honestly think keeping around a bunch of old stuff on SLMP is worth putting new users through that? SLMP is LL's chance to show a new user the exciting and cool content SL has. We all know SL's content is ridiculous in scope and quality compared to other virtual worlds. Right now it's completely failing to do its job. And the MAU is shrinking. It's not hard to understand. If reddit was filled with old posts from 2010 and people started freaking out because they thought about removing old stuff or burying it in an archive or something, no one would be using it.

Those conditions are not very good. If it sells, it stays. And SLMP search has been borked recommending ancient and outdated products which people are buying because they can't find newer stuff since search has been so bad. People are buying old stuff and not realizing it. It's happened to me because sometimes you can't tell if something is mesh or whatever just from the pictures. SLMP only ranks the top 50k selling items. They need more requirements to filter out active merchants and modern content from the older stuff. The whole point in wanting to clean up old listings and stuff is to make it easier to find newer stuff. Gaslighting about saying this is deleting history or censorship or whatever. It's not. It's about making SLMP search not have to rank the 15 year old prim shoes with keyword spam and heavily edited promo pictures against some brand new rigged mesh material shoes and trying its best to show you what you are looking for. If you're really so upset about this "deleting history" and giving LL "censorship powers" then put your money where your mouth is and move into a 15 year old prim house, get rid of your mesh AVs, and support historical SL by making sure you are wearing all sculpty and prim clothes. Get yourself some nice flexi prim hair and support vintage builders and make sure you keep SL's content history alive and well! Or are you going to tell me you don't actually want to buy that stuff?

I don't want to get too off topic, but they had a mobile viewer before the current Unity engine one. And they stopped development because they realized it wasn't what anyone wanted. IIRC it was more like speedlight, which already exists, and wasn't anything like the new mobile viewer they're supposedly still working on. They've been very quiet about it lately so I'm not sure what's going on. But there was a mobile viewer before the current one in progress and people were not excited about it. AFAIK the Unity mobile client is still being worked on. I would not give up on a mobile viewer yet. I think LL knows laptop and desktop is a shrinking market and they have to do something to get on other platforms.

Just needs a secret key given to real world users, which gets sent to the servers on login. If it's a valid key and client, you are flagged as a trusted agent or something and you count towards traffic stats and all that. If you don't have a valid key, you are flagged as a scripted agent or unofficial client or whatever and you get restricted in specific ways like having your presence not count towards traffic. You still have to deal with people who want to run 10 instances of a viewer, but most people can barely run a single instance of SL. How many have a computer good enough to run 10 SLs at the same time? You aren't ever going to completely stop people from gaming traffic numbers and stuff. Just like no one can stop spam emails. You can only minimize them and their bad effects. There are coding libraries you can use to write your own bot software for SL. It's not like all these people with group inviters and stuff are using the official SL clients.

Would be interesting to see if people running these bots are using a VPS/remote hosting or if they're running them off their own computers. No doubt all the serious ones are using IPs from datacenters. LL doesn't need to try and stop them, they need to make it a pain in the butt for people to run bots. I.E. every new client has a unique key tied to the version number. Third party devs get a login key from LL for each version. If you don't get a key, you aren't a valid user. LL can block clients from logging in. Bot people could try and spoof the keys or whatever but LL and third parties can keep updating them. It's going to be a lot more resource intensive to run 15 viewers at one time than it would some custom program running in a terminal. And you couldn't use a datacenter or another 24/7 hosting service. You'd need a complete desktop. There is no guarantee all these people are running these bots on their own computers. They could easily afford a VPS and run their bot software on the VPS and it would be very cheap. VPS are very cheap right now. Having a bad key wouldn't stop you from logging in, it would just limit your account and treat you like a bot. Your AV wouldn't contribute to traffic stats, you'd have a special label on the minimap and in your profile, etc. Bots can be very useful in SL and there are some really cool use cases, like store mannequins. But SL isn't accommodating that and it's letting those valid use cases poison their data for determining traffic. The problem is if your competition is going to start using bots to boost traffic, you get no reward for playing by the rules and registering as a scripted agent. In fact it hurts you. Using bots for traffic needs to be stopped. If someone has a valid use case for a bot, they won't care if the traffic doesn't get counted for that bot. In fact I think they would be pretty happy because they more than likely have competitors filling their land up with bots for higher traffic numbers. And I don't just mean competitors with stores. I mean two competing social venues. One has 3 real people in it who are willing to chat and make friends. The other has 25 bots. People go to the one with 25 bots and miss out on actual humans.

I've been here for 15+ years, and yeah, that describes it very well. It was a lot more dense before. Which is what's wrong with SL right now, too much land and builds and not enough people to go there. It was also a lot more unique. A lot of us old timers came from AIM, AOL, Yahoo or MSN Chat, etc. We were used to nothing more than text based pop up windows, and SL at the time was absolutely mind blowing. Right now, it's not. It's just another drop in the virtual world ecosystem. I don't want to sound salty and old, wasn't my intention. But SL has definitely changed and it needs more density, which is what I'm hoping the mobile client can bring. Right now current SL is vastly a "I'm going to sit around AFK and show off my AV and hope someone cool IMs me." That doesn't mean that's all SL is. But it's the majority. There are still awesome people in SL, just as there were in the past. Land owners using bots are just trying to fake having density that's lacking. SL has intense competition now. 15 years ago, first signing on was one of the coolest experiences I ever had using a computer. Today SL isn't close to that. And back then, it was nearly impossible to make an SL bot. And this is someone who was very familiar with chatbots on other platforms. Now it's pretty darn easy if you just have basic coding skills since there's libraries that do all the hard work for you. I know as long as I've been here there's been people who think SL is going to die next year. I've been hearing it for 15 years. I don't think SL is going to die. I think it has some problems they can somewhat easily fix and make SL a major player. I want this place to do well. I have a lot of memories here, live with someone I met in SL. For all it's problems it's still amazing. But it needs growth and it's been on a slow trend downwards. Nothing wrong with that, it can be fixed, which is what I'm suggesting and I'm just trying to point out why SL might feel a bit different for us old farts.