Flea Yatsenko
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Posts posted by Flea Yatsenko
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20 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:
I find it interesting that most of what you list seems to be "website-related", not "in-world" issues. Just an observation!
Well, the majority of the SL economy depends on LL web because most of it is via marketplace. Even if you just want to search for something to buy, you're usually going to the marketplace before in world search. At least that's what I do.
SL grid has become extremely stable compared to what it used to be 10 years ago, with it being closed for a day for maintenance. They've done great there, honestly. But I worry about the web part of things, which is where people buy and sell L$ as well as buy in world stuff for SL. If that part is broken, the SL economy is broken for the same time too.
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6 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:
..there is a LARGE number of fixes in the most recent viewer release.
Except the ongoing Marketplace search and listing issues, exactly what is not running smoothly, can you give any recent examples?
Well. I leave my SL dashboard pinned as a tab in my browser and check it often. There have been a few weeks where just clicking a link or reloading the page gives a 500 error. And then the status alerts show up. Sometimes it's so bad I have to retype in secondlife.com again to get it to work. I'm not sure if it's a hosting problem or a code problem or what. But if you have the luxury to check SL web properties often, 500 errors, long loading times, etc tend to crop up a bit.
I also watch the status page often. I've always noticed a correlation between sales being bad and billing and other types of maintenance, with the cycle I've stated in my other post about maintenance, low cost sales, high cost sales, maintenance, repeat.
SLMP is running quite nice right now though.
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42 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:
I am pleased about all of the "positive changes" and "improvements", whether planned or still in-progress.
Many will definitely benefit "new users", such as the Welcome Hub.
However, many do not apply to me or fall within my interests, such as:
- Linden Homes
- Senra Avatars
But, advancements in LSL Scripting functions and the possibility of a good new Mobile Viewer are positive points for me.
Many of the other "extremely important" improvements are "still in progress" which interest me "somewhat" but not too much. I think those will improve the quality of Second Life overall, including:
- Advanced graphics
Sorry if my list is poor, I saw a squirrel over there * chases after *
I am actually quite concerned that the focus on PBR and mobile viewer has left not enough people to focus on maintaining and keeping SL running smoothly. Given LL's business environment, I imagine a lot of people are really excited to be working on those projects, but when "SLMP is throwing a ton of 500 errors, can someone look into it?" type of things comes up there's probably a lot of crickets. I'd imagine there's a couple really awesome Lindens doing all the dirty work and they're totally over worked.
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It's not just you. I've always had kind of niche products and never really had to do events or advertise and did well. I've been very fortunate. But for the last year or so, things have been very bad year over year. I'm talking about half of what has been traditionally normal.
Some things that have changed for me
1. Customers who come and make huge bulk orders are basically gone
2. More low cost items selling more than higher end products
3. Massive droughts in sales where I'm making like a quarter or less of what would be normal
4. Poor search placement, older products being shown more. Even results when just searching my own store aren't what I expect. And I'm used to doing SEO from my other work
5. High end products aren't selling and instead it's very cheap builder's kits or older builds
6. The good times that would be offset by sales droughts are not nearly as good as they ever were
I really don't know what's going on. I blamed SLMP search for a while, because the results were bad. But they have improved a lot and things are still rather poor. I've always noticed a pattern with sales where things would get good, SLMP/billing/etc would have maintenance and have problems, sales would dry up, then lower end stuff would start selling, eventually moving to higher end stuff and great sales until the process repeated. But it feels like now that process is broken and it never gets past SLMP/billing/etc maintenance and "entry level" product sales.
I have no doubt events have become saturated and they're not what they used to be. But I have never even done an event and have done well (I thank the market I'm in being not overly competitive), and I'm still having lots of problems.
This is definitely, for me, the worst part of the year in sales and I usually get bummed this time of year. But even comparing year over year (i.e. this 2023 sept to 2022 sept) things are bad. And they weren't actually very good in 2022 either.
The real world economy is also very bad. I had a lot of RL work lined up this summer with a lot of people promising me tons of work. It never came. One RL place I work for had a ton of clients cancel a ton of work. Another had a million dollar house and the $300 check they wrote for some small work bounced when cashed on the same day. I think things are very bad in RL, more than anyone is admitting. Which is actually very scary to me. I have been selling in SL for a long time, I've noticed that usually recessions are great for SL because it's a lot cheaper to have fun in a virtual world than to go out and have dinner and some booze. In fact right now that's even truer, because a dinner for two with booze is easily $50+ here in the states. But that shift when people would come to SL instead seems to not be happening either. It's pretty scary because it makes me feel a lot of people don't even have the money to avoid RL and instead buy a parcel and build a home or hangout or whatever. I think it's easy to point the finger at LL and SL but there's a bigger picture here and I really don't think it's very good. I think people are struggling to pay for food and dropping $20 on a mesh body or something isn't really a luxury a lot of people can afford.
This post is getting rather long winded, but I will make one complaint about SL and LL, and it's the reliability of the grid and SLMP, which completely reduces user's ability both to find and purchase content as well as to use it. As an ecommerce site SLMP is horribly outdated, slow, and shows irrelevant stuff way too much. I always say that people should consider if Amazon worked like SLMP. Sometimes pages throw 500 errors, sometimes your order doesn't go through for 12 hours. You search for NIntendo and get SNES games instead of Switch. But I think a lot of people have lost patience with trying to buy things and being able to use the things they've bought. There's so much fighting for people's attention on the internet and honestly their dopamine receptors are fried. They have zero patience now. And if things aren't working they just leave and don't care.
Also, this is a hot button political topic so I'll try and present it in the most reasonable way. But people from developing countries have found SLMP is a way to make money and they have driven down the prices of content.
QuoteFrom an economic point of view, I have never made so many things, I have never participated in so many events. I also organize events. And yet my sales remain stable. Sometimes anarchic: one calm day, the next day explodes. I sell old stuff on the Marketplace and new stuff almost exclusively in-world. Strange, no?
This, definitely, and it's demoralizing me for making content for SL like none other. I finally set up in world vendors and yes, that's the stuff that sells mostly in world while old stuff keeps selling on SLMP. Why spend money and time making new stuff if it's not going to sell and you're just going to end up coasting on old stuff? My sales are so low that a major build costs so much it's no longer worth doing anymore. There's something massively broken technologically with the SL platform. And guess what? All these people being shown old, outdated stuff think that's what SL is and that's all that exists so they get discouraged. If you're not making stuff like you used to, you are seeing sales drop massively. Being an SLMP merchant isn't about creating new things and making more L$ now, it's about trying to make enough stuff so you can still make as much as you used to. In the last year I have never sold so much outdated, sub L$100 products ever (excluding my cheap sculpty rock pack people seem to love for some reason I'll never understand).
In fact I used to get excited when I got an email about a sale. Now it's more an annoyance because it's probably some L$99 thing I made in 2015. And I'm in a pretty unique situation to analyze sales because I'm working on a new search engine and sales analysis platform and I imported the last like 5 years of sales data and have been making web pages and doing all sorts of cool queries to look at things.
Anyways, this ended up much longer than I thought. But I do feel strongly that there is something very wrong with SL on a technical level and it's not making any progress at improving.
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4 hours ago, CherryChantal said:
I noticed some improvements regards „relevance“ search in september … but i guess there are still issues left to fix. Example: If i search with a blank search field (to find out which products are actually „hot“ at mp) and switch between both tabs „Relevance“ and „Best Selling“, the products on result page are listed in exactly the same order. Same happens if i browse categories and switch between both „Sort by“ options.
I noticed more of my modern products are selling well, but there's also an uptick in SL maintenance related to billing, SLMP website, etc.
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On 9/21/2023 at 4:35 PM, AmeliaJ08 said:
Curious how does Nvidia's much maligned (rightly) Linux driver perform? is it as good as on Windows?
I definitely feel something has to give with SL though, an engine update is more than overdue and we're already seeing a pretty unacceptable difference in performance between brands despite hardware being roughly equal due to this reliance on what is effectively a dead graphics API. The counter to this is that you don't fix what isn't broken but how long can we even be sure OpenGL will remain relevant enough that both Nvidia and AMD even bother including compatibility? probably a long time to come but it does seem like something that will disappear eventually.
Any time you introduce binary packages into a Linux build from a third party that's not open source, whatever libraries that proprietary package was built against can conflict and cause problems. I had an Nvidia a long time ago. This has probably been fixed but what would happen is Xorg would update before the graphics drivers and the drivers would break because they wouldn't support that version of Xorg.
Also, once your card gets dropped from support you have to stay on the same version of Xorg or switch to the open source drivers.
I built a 24 core server board a while ago for baking. It had an ATI Rage Pro 128. The open source Radeon drivers worked out of the box (but it was so slow you wouldn't have known unless you checked glxinfo lol).
People complain about the Nvidia driver because it's the better performing and working driver compared to nouveau. But it's never fun to add proprietary software to an open source ecosystem, unless you're running it in a container or something. But the video driver is so embedded into crucial parts of your desktop environment, it gets difficult. I haven't had a Linux and Nvidia build in a very long time, things have probably changed a lot. But I remember a lot of system upgrades only to find 3d was broken and I had to roll back packages until Nvidia updated their driver.
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Unity, the viewer being used for the mobile client, can also make DirectX Windows and Vulkan/Metal versions for Linux and OSX. I think OpenGL might not be relevant for SecondLife forever. But buying anything on a future promise is also a terrible idea. Regardless I agree with Amelia, OpenGL isn't really all that relevant anymore and it's been replaced by Vulkan, Metal, and DirectX. SL's problem is more about being a 15 year old game engine that's using outdated technology, and what graphics card can handle outdated stuff better than the other.
Personally I think we'll see 7800XT hit $350 to $450 by April 2024. I'm going to wait, but I use Linux and the open source AMD drivers are extremely good. The graphics card market is really messed up right now. I.E. everything is over priced and it's still selling out very quickly.
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I am a big AMD fan and I would never buy a new AMD graphics card within the first 3 months of it releasing. The price almost always goes down and the early drivers are usually terrible. Sometimes they're not even properly supported in Linux.
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SLMP search will never be good. There's too much legacy content and all the content is organized in archaic ways, like categories and keywords. There are too many items and not enough computational resources to accurately use sales data, especially for products more niche than mainstream clothing and home related stuff. Last I heard only the top 50k selling items on SLMP have their sales data weighted in results. When you consider there are people here who have 10k+ items in their gacha store, you realize how small and futile that number is. I don't even know what kind of sales data SLMP tracks.
But if it's anything like what we see in the merchant dashboard, it's just lifetime product sales. Which is completely useless data for old stores, because people will buy old stuff and older products which are worse will have to be dethroned by newer products. I.E. 10 years of a product making L$10,000 a year needs a new product to make L$100,000 in the first year to beat it in the sales data SLMP dashboard has. If that's all they're using for sales data, they are in trouble.
You know the old phrase, "garbage in, garbage out"? That's what SLMP's product database is right now. Poorly organized and labelled products missing important data for sorting and organizing. The expectation that it'll be fixed and anywhere remotely close to Google product search or Amazon can be dropped forever.
SLMP has rewarded poor listing practices for a very long time. I.E. if you spam keywords, make 10 different listings for 10 different color variants, edit your pictures and make them deceiving, etc., you will make more L$ and still rank high. Now the SLMP database is filled with inaccurate and low quality listings that SLMP team has to try and make sense of and deliver to potential customers.
No amount of tweaking or adjusting things is going to make things better. SLMP search needs a radical change and it needs to accept that there's a lot of low quality listings and outdated content that needs to be removed from default search results unless a searcher actively makes a selection to show those types of products.
SEO for web pages is an ongoing battle that web sites constantly have to fight to keep up with. SLMP has none of that, a listing that's 10 years old for a prim build has as much relevancy and power as one that's 3 days old (at least looking at the current state of search). I'm not even happy with the results SLMP gives when searching just my store.
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3 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:
There's a real mess of information on Apple's App Store policy out there, I can't seem to find a straight answer. The above would suggest that all would be required is a 17+ rating (weird age, usually this would be 18+ to be acceptable world wide) but you can just as easily find sources saying adult content like 'explicit' nudity or pornographic depictions are completely banned from the platform:
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/34873
"18.1 Apps containing pornographic material, defined by Webster's Dictionary as "explicit descriptions or displays of ****** organs or activities intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings", will be rejected"
As someone who works with larger platforms like this, they intentionally make them confusing and borderline contradictory so they can do whatever they want with regards to banning or keeping content on their platforms.
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9 hours ago, Jaylinbridges said:
I don't see any Adult sex in M rated regions. It has to be hidden from public view, which is simple to do. I doubt any region owners are going to move to a G-rated region to run a club, or open a clothing store, or sell avatar parts. Mobile could be limited to M-rated regions. That at least seems sane.
You think that limiting mobile users to G-rated regions will attract that many? If I recall, interest in sex starts at a rather young age and peaks in teen age years, and slows down for some, rather slowly. SL, a social "game" where sex is not allowed for younger mobile users (and most over 21), doesn't exactly compute for me. What kind of "sex" is allowed in a G-rated region? Sounds like you are proposing bringing back the teenage grid for mobile users.
SL mobile is going to have to play by Apple's rules if they want to appear on the App Store.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-states-of-america
iOS is the majority of mobile devices in the US. You really don't have to shoot the messenger here, LL Is going to have to play by Apple's rule or else the mobile SL client is just going to be deleted from the App Store forever, with no way to reliably sideload. Like it or not the mobile client being on Play and App Stores is probably going to see a resurgence in something like a teen grid.
You're free to look at the App Store guidelines or look at the App Store to see if you can find anything that remotely offers what you mention as adult content.
Roblox has "17+" content and to access it you have to upload a government ID and I don't know how it works in iOS.
Fact is because of Google and Apple's rules, you're not going to be able to download the SL mobile client from an app store and have the "full SL experience" some of you want. No need to kill the messenger, but Apple can tell LL they don't want SL mobile on iOS for pretty much any reason. If you think Apple is going to be fine with people having sex in private areas on their phones, you're nuts. That's pretty much porn.
Again, you can stop with your laughing emojis or whatever. I'm not the one that's got a problem with this stuff, Apple and Google are. And LL is going to have to do something about it.
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10 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:
I think this is how it will go too. apk for Android users to side load and access all content if they want but Google Play Store/Apple App Store versions restricted to G rated sims only.
Not ideal imo, not enough G rated regions in SL to really show off SL to the wide audience but any other way will cause upset with Google/Apple they probably don't want. At the very least new users could be informed of the imposed limitations and the possible ways of bypassing them on Android at least in a way that doesn't anger Google... if that's possible.
As far as I'm aware side loading on IOS is near enough impossible isn't it? do people still jailbreak their Apple devices to enable this? I doubt it.
I looked a little bit about iOS and it's a nightmare, hosting your own local server, signing certificates every few weeks, etc. It's simply not feasible.
I don't think a lot of G rated sims becoming popular in SL would be bad. I think it would be great, actually. Leave the adult/mature stuff alone and it could bring in a whole lot of new users and a different audience. And I think that's what LL wants. As long as they can leave the existing users alone and not change anything for them.
Let's be honest, SL is for power users who have a high end laptop or desktop and that market is doing nothing but shrinking. No matter what LL does to make SL better, it's going to be stuck in a shrinking market. PBR, all this other stuff they add, it's amazing. But it's not going to bring in new users.
Right now there's no reason to make a G rated sim. In fact it's discouraged. Why make a G rated sim and risk getting in trouble for breaking the rules when you can just make it adult and the same people are going to show up? Now, if you make a G rated sim and it means you get a lot of mobile users to show up and get involved, you're into something. And mobile users are generally pay pigs. I.E. running a G rated sim that mobile users like would probably become very lucrative. I'd actually like to see SL go back to that, that's how it was 10 years ago and now it's just sex everywhere. I'm not saying get rid of it, calm down. But to get more options for just social places and to make it so the people who run those places can make money off of it, that's what I miss about SL and I really hope mobile brings in new users who can bring that back.
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1 hour ago, Arwyn Quandry said:
I also have concerns about how adult content will be addressed on mobile. LL has Tilia, so they're not at risk of having a payment processor shut them down for adult content existing in SL, but app stores can be super weird about games that contain it. It makes me wonder if there will be extra age verification hoops to jump through or if they'll restrict access to anything above M if you're on the mobile app. There's also the issue of the weirder adult content that's allowed in SL... Humans with human genitals interacting with each other are kind of the least of anyone's concerns.
Not as bad as you think. LL Hosts their own APK for android users to side load. It's a pain to side load on iOS, which is a bummer for iPhone users. But the versions in Play and App Stores are going to be massively limited, probably no adult regions at all. no adult anything on marketplace.
I wouldn't be surprised if the app store versions were limited only to G rated sims and G rated sims suddenly became very, very moderated.
LL has control of everything though, they could easily just flag sims as "App Store Approved Content" and the mobile client from the app stores could only access those sims.
Lots of ways for LL to go about it, none are perfect. But if they host their own APK Android App, LL won't be held to any standards. But sideloading iOS is still a pain and it's going to be the biggest problem with letting mobile users get the full SL experience.
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8 hours ago, Aethelwine said:
It has just occurred to me it was only last night I bought someone a jedi costume because we were running a sci-fi themed party and they said they had nothing suitable. The outfit remains on marketplace, so this purge may not be total. Perhaps just "rips" from other games?
It has always been tricky area where fan creations are concerned, subject to the whims of the legal departments of the IP holders.
The rights holder has to contact LL for it to be removed. Copyrighted material on marketplace falls into three basic categories
1. Merchant has worked a deal with the IP holder of the copyright material and it's legitimate
2. The rights holder doesn't know the infringing IP is being sold and hasn't filed a DMCA yet
3. The rights holder knows the infringing IP is being sold and doesn't care because they'd rather have the advertising or whatever while someone makes money from their IP
The rights holder technically owns the rights to everything on the grid that uses their IP, so if they file a DMCA and want it removed entirely from the grid, it can be. If they just want it removed from SLMP and being sold, it can stay in people's inventories.
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The mobile viewer will be free, though. So it won't directly generate any revenue. LL's revenue comes from marketplace commission, tier, premium, etc. There will be no revenue from the mobile viewer. It only exists to get new users into the ecosystem to start paying.
LL has to have something worked out with Unity, because there's a chance for hundreds of thousands of installs for $0.
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Part of the TL;DW for that video is they are trying to find ways to not show highly outdated products. They are requesting marketplace to detect what kind of items are in the listing (mesh, prim, sculpty, etc). Also multiple variants for a single listing, but that's a dead horse we've been requesting for a very long time.
I think what they really need is to pick a date, like 5 years ago, and mark older products as "legacy" content. Notify all merchants that their products are about to be moved to legacy status. Give them a chance to update them, like 3 months. Then make search only show non-legacy products by default and then let them show legacy only or include legacy if people want to when they are searching. Every 6 months or so, products move to legacy that are older than X years, merchants are notified they should update their products, and after a certain window the products that aren't updated are moved to legacy. All it really needs to do is even just have the listing updated, because merchants who aren't in SL aren't going to update their stuff and it'll be able to slide into legacy mode no problem. There are also plenty of other metrics you can use, like the last time the merchant logged in. I.E. if they haven't even logged in in the last 2 years, move them to legacy. Haven't made a new listing in several years? Move to legacy. Hasn't sold in over X amount of years? Move to legacy. Using a legacy content status allows older items to not show up in search while not deleting older content. I don't want to delete old stuff either. The more old stuff they get out of search results, the better search results will be for finding new high quality stuff.
Time frames are up for debate, obviously. I don't know what's best. But LL needs to do something because the current search results actively discourage creating new quality content because older stuff will be prioritized in search.
They are also talking about variants and how to get merchants to actually use them. My thoughts are simple, multiple variants in separate listings are hurting search results and quality of search. So, marketplace should search stores for similar listings where the title and text are very similar, and penalize listings that have other very similar listings in search results until they are merged into one listing with variants.
Google, Bing, Yahoo, all will absolutely obliterate you if you're harmful to their search results and you're trying to rank in them. SLMP has like no penalties for bad behavior. And I'm talking things like spammy listings, not so truthful listings, etc.
The simpler the solutions the easier it's going to be to create and the better results should be, in theory. Switching to legacy content listings should help.
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12 hours ago, Rejeanne Cannoli said:
I hope it runs on iOS. All the preview demos I've seen seem to be on Android, which does nothing for me.
If it runs natively on iOS, then it's a hop and a skip from running natively on Mac without OpenGL, and THAT is my real hope.It's using Unity game engine. Unity can make it work on Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS, and more.
https://support.unity.com/hc/en-us/articles/206336795-What-platforms-are-supported-by-Unity-
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16 hours ago, Jaylinbridges said:
When Brad O was first interviewed one of the key growth strategies was to get the youngest crowd in SL now (16 and over I guess), and let them migrate as they age into the full adult SL with of course desktop computers. I think most that stay in SL have or will have desktop setups. The smart phone is just to always be in touch so they don't miss any rumors or parties. Mobile phone video sex is rather common now, as was phone sex before the internet. Once the mobile crowd finds out what is going on in SL I think they will be assimilated. The DD regions should have record growth.
I don't think people realize how bad that demographic is with computers. A lot of them only grew up with touch screen devices. I can't find the pictures or stories now, but there's plenty of content of college students using touch screen keyboards to code, not understanding how folders and files work, taking screenshots with their phones, etc. Current Second Life is completely inaccessible to that crowd, because they don't have the technical skills required to figure it out and they probably don't have a compatible device that runs Windows or Linux since they're probably on Android or iOS. Some of that generation are fantastic with stuff and some are absolutely clueless beyond Android or iOS.
LL is going to have to meet Play Store and App Store rules, the mobile client you download from those stores is going to be neutered based on what content it can access. I am hoping they have a direct download on the website that doesn't have to comply with the regulations on app stores.
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If you use copyright content, the rights holder can have it deleted from the grid at any moment. Do you really want to sell stuff to people when it can be deleted from their inventory at any time? Do you want to deal with customers wondering why their stuff they paid you for was deleted from their inventory? Are you going to refund them? Can you replace it with something that's not the same?
It's not worth it, you might make a lot of money quickly but you always run the risk of stuff being deleted unless you can acquire proper permission to use it.
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That's awesome Niran, that's the kind of little stuff that SL needs to get more wide stream appeal.
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LL has done an amazing job of attracting great content creators and keeping them. Meta could only dream of having some of the content creators LL has in the metaverse. Look how many stores have been around for 10+ years. That's ridiculously good for a content creation platform. I mean to get random creators from all over the internet to to produce all sorts of content, and to continue to produce content, is honestly amazing.
The place where LL hasn't done well is attracting content consumers. There are empty sims everywhere, major lack of people in tons of places. SL's biggest problem is lack of people to consume content and just spend time in world. Mainly because the barrier of entry is too high from a hardware and software perspective. It has a learning curve, you need a good enough computer to run it. The end result is a bunch of power users who would rather create content than make stuff and use SL as a social platform.
But I think a lot of what LL creates for SL is focused on content creators. They need someone to come in and start pushing ideas for people to use the content. Social features, almost like Bumble-type stuff. They need an outside perspective to get SL to start attracting more people who want to use SL, not make stuff for SL. And that includes people who just want to make their own sims or in world places, not even mesh, textures, scripts, etc.
I really hope this listing is a sign they realize they aren't ever going to grow if their business model is to get people to pay for sims and land that will be shut down because they weren't socially successful. It just has turn over at this point. Someone builds a sim, they have tons of content to pick and choose from, they build something really neat, no one really shows up, they realize it's not worth the money, then a new one shows up and the process repeats. The end result is just people replacing people and no real growth happening. Unfortunately this is a really easy problem to diagnose and not easy to fix. I think the idea is to have the mobile client try and fill that role. And I wouldn't be surprised if LL was realizing their limitation here. They have some great talent there but they are more like game engine designers than they are game creators.
The mobile viewer is amazing for this and I hope it ends up on Windows, Linux, and Mac too. That said there's a lot of competition in that space. SL can do very well though, you can find practically anything for SL. Other platforms not so much. I really hope they are planning on putting the mobile viewer into an entirely different team's hands and try and target a completely different market while they continue to keep the SL viewer and the power user features going. I am optimistic that's the plan. At least I sure hope. As long as I've been in SL it's just been spinning wheels with places opening, closing, creator leaves, cycle repeats.
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17 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:
I'm a little confused what this means. PBR-capable viewers will have the old non-ALM "forward rendering" engine removed, which to me is the most exciting part of the whole development because finally creators will be able to use materials, whether glTF or the existing "Blinn-Phong", without having some folks unable to see them. But perhaps the "old deferred rendering engine" is also being "removed" in a sense, in that Advanced Lighting will look dramatically different in a PBR-capable viewer, regardless of materials.
But I'm not aware that the user will be able to disable PBR in a PBR-capable viewer: if the glTF materials are present, they'll be rendered, correct? (Or maybe this was referring to the transition interval while both current and PBR-capable viewers will be extant on the grid? I may be just misreading this.)
I'm actually not so sure about that anymore. I logged into beta PBR grid and changed my settings to low, and metallic PBR and a lot of materials are just black instead of their proper colors. I think it's still using PBR because when you change settings it does the screen dim and undim thing only the PBR rendering engine uses. I thought they were going to leave ALM in for low end computers, but I guess it really doesn't make sense as PBR renderer runs far better on my machine.
Even if PBR isn't enabled on your region, you can use the PBR viewer to see how the new renderer handles legacy content.
Also I can't believe I didn't say this early but thank you so much firestorm team. Now I don't have to run the SL viewer on WINE anymore for PBR stuff. And yes with a little bit of testing the PBR renderer works great on Linux for me with AMDGPU .
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2 hours ago, Candide LeMay said:
Does the upcoming mobile viewer from LL based on unity really not support PBR materials? That would be very weird if they released it like that.
It doesn't. And you will be able to use the standard viewer with ALM instead of PBR. The old deferred rendering engine is getting removed and ALM will be the low end version.
The content creators who think PBR is a replacement for textures are going to be very disappointed. LL can at least block older versions of viewers to get people on PBR quicker. But with ALM still being around I'm sure given the SL userbase there will be a lot of people who hate change and hate PBR and refuse to give up ALM. Anyone who was around for the change from prim to sculpty or sculpty to mesh knows that it takes a long time for things to change.
Now if you are building a sim or even a little parcel or skybox, some of the stuff won't have PBR and some will. More growing pains. Standards take time to change. Yes legacy content will still look good. Yes a lot of people won't care that some stuff has working reflections and some are baked reflections (or something in between). But it's not going to be a clean break.
I do not mean to hijack the thread about PBR. It's great it's landed in Firestorm since that's the only viewer I really use. But people who think we're just magically going to have PBR everything and everyone will use PBR are out of touch. Baking is never going away, it's a feat LL got the mobile viewer to look that good on what is basically a GPU/CPU around a low end celeron in performance, to think they will have PBR and all this other stuff on that sort of hardware is not reasonable.
PBR is more about the lighting engine than the materials. Lighting, reflections, etc all look way better
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28 minutes ago, Jaylinbridges said:
How long before a non-PBR viewer, third party or SL, will no longer function in SL? That's the real question.
I hope my smart phone doesn't need PBR for SL. As if I want to be in SL w/ a smartphone, squint...
the new mobile viewer is non-PBR. Basically, the existing diffuse textures will be the fallback if you don't have PBR enabled. It should look very similar and won't break existing builds, but it will have different lighting.
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The Metaverse Is The Worst Thing Ever Made
in General Discussion Forum
Posted
Metaverse is the peak attempt to bridge the gap between internet personas and real life. It's the next step up from "share everything about your real life on our website and apps", moving to "live your life on our website and apps." It's terrifying. People who have been on the old internet abhor it. We grew up being told things like "never use your real name on the internet." and now we're reaching a point where they want you to live your own life attached to your real info online. They don't want it to be a world you just leave behind. SL gets it, you log in, live a second life (literally), then log out and go back. Metaverse doesn't want that. It's like if Second Life was designed to be your real life. Avatar looks like you, friends list is your facebook friends list, etc. No one wants that.