Henri Beauchamp

If your PC is ”too old” (5 years or more) or ”too weak” (no discrete GPU) to run the PBR renderer at decent frame rates, you can try the Cool VL Viewer: it got both the PBR renderer and the legacy ALM/forward renderer. You will be able to choose which one to use, in real time (CTRL ALT P to toggle between them), depending on the circumstances (such as standing in a place where there is PBR stuff around, or not, for example) and/or on PC processing power vs the complexity of the scene to render.

The inventory thumbnails are all resized to 256x256 pixels max, even if you are using a 2K texture as the base for one such thumbnail. Also, your 4K texture will be downsized to 2K on upload, even for other usages.

Hmm... The Cool VL Viewer official builds requirements are glibc v2.28, libstdc++ v6.0.25 and glib v2.58.3 or newer. I doubt Ubuntu 18 can make it, unless you somehow got newer packages for these libraries installed. As long as you have either gcc v8.1 or newer, or clang v7.0 or newer (i.e. 100% C++17/C17 compliant compilers), you should be able to build it yourself from its sources on your system, but maybe the pre-built libraries will then not make it (depending wether they use newer versions of the glibc/libstdc++ functions compared with what you got on your system), and then you would also have to rebuild the pre-built libraries from sources... See the Cool VL Viewer repository for all the sources. One component will however not make it at all: CEF (its current versions require Ubuntu 20.04 or equivalent). So you would not have a functional web plugin. Same with WebRTC voice (but thankfully, this is also implemented as a plugin in my viewer, so it won't prevent you to launch the viewer itself, unlike what would happen with all other WebRTC-capable viewers).

A last one... Still taken at SL21B Noxia Elements, with custom environment settings.

More beauty. SL21B Noxia Elements

Please, define ”beauty”... 😜 SL21B Noxia Elements

Just follow the link and read...

Not again ”shared experience” non-sense, please... This rule (rule 2k of the TPV Policy) is not about what you see in your viewer, but about what a non-compliant viewer you are using would cause others to see in their own viewer. See this message of mine for a full explanation, message that by the way was related to someone else suggesting my first dual-renderer viewer (the one used during the Windlight to Extended Environment transition, and which became moot after LL came up with their ”performances viewer”) would be ”non-compliant”... You see, it's not the first time I deal with transitions (Pre-WL (v1.19) to WL (v1.20+), WL to EE and now EE to PBR) and help SL to retain in its user base people that would have otherwise given up by lack of an ”adequate” computer to run it decently...

The ”inventory thumbnails” (the name says it all, about their size) are not charged to you: they are uploaded for free, even for someone with a free account. But they are not free for LL to store in the SL database, and the smaller, the less storage used, the cheaper; a 1024x2024 texture takes 16 times more space than a 256x256 one (a bit less, once compressed to JPEG2000, but this is still the same order of magnitude). Not to mention they would become a resource hog, should everyone use inventory ”thumbnails” (not thumbnails any more) at 1K resolution for every outfit or inventory item (since not limited to outfits) they got in their inventory.

Sorry, but this is an OpenSim server issue... Please, ask to the support team for the OpenSim server software: I am not one of them.

Likely the Windows firewall blocking access to the network for the viewer: make sure to grant the latter full network access (as well as to SLPlugin.exe, for media plugins, and SLVoice.exe, for voice). For further issues, please ask the official support (I have enough work providing support for my own viewer 🤣).

If you get this message, you already deleted it: just click the ”OK” button, and the viewer should run just fine...

Yes: delete SLVersionChecker.exe from the viewer installation directory. The viewer will complain it cannot launch it, but will run fine nonetheless...

Try by yourself: get the Cool VL Viewer, log in, switch between PBR and legacy renderers (CTRL ALT P) and ALM and forward for the latter (CTRL ALT D): watch the frame rates... I did some testing too, a few months ago, after someone pretended they could do shadows ”just fine” on a potato PC: here it is. It has been years (like 10+ years) I never used less than 256m DD in sims with neighbour sims, and 512m in islands... But my main PC is always kept updated (currently with a Ryzen 7900X and a RTX 3070), which does not mean I act like an ass towards people who must do with a weaker PC... On the contrary, I provide a transition path for them, via my viewer.

Yes, ”just fine”, at 64m draw distance and reduced LODs settings, when the same PC can still run ALM at 128m DD and max LODs, or even forward at 256m DD... But it's not a problem: the poor deserves a miserable SL experience ! 🤪

But they are useless, as they won't shield the shiny objects from the sky (see posts above, and try by yourself)...

By ”we”, you mean people who could afford a gaming PC, or build their own PC and make it evolve over time (like I do). Many, many SLers just have mainstream PCs, and many others notebook PCs that do not even have a discrete GPU. For them, PBR cannot run at decent frame rate. Period.

This looks flat after login, because my ”probes refresh” code kicked in, and then the probes will rebuild over time and as need be, depending on the camera FOV. Here is what I get in SL21B, after a manual ”refresh probe” which flattened them all, and some caming around: But yes, I will see to exclude automatic probes from that ”refresh” code (which mainly exists to make manual probes properly refresh after TPs).

Hmm... Interesting ! I will definitely have to have a closer look at this arbitrary ”automatic probe” code, and get it to work better, at least in my viewer... A ”good automatic probe” should be able to detect the bounding box of the smallest enclosing object, and build the probe around it... But that's basically the feature I requested (excepted that the latter would be activated on demand, via a flag on the root object).

Supporting a 5 years old PC is not insane. It is normal, but for the rich who can buy a new PC every year...

Advanced -> Rendering -> Info display -> Reflection probes But I did not modify this part of LL's code, so it should behave exactly the same, and the non-working example I posted was taken with LL's viewer (I could also reproduce the same issue consistently ever since LL released their first project PBR viewer).

Well, even if there is indeed apparently an automatic probe (confirming that it in my case, there should have been one too, but since there was none, then there is a bug in LL's code), your probe does nothing at all to shield your sphere from the sky as it should do ! So, yes, you get the same blueish cube too (less blue because there's likely some ambient white lighting in your sky box)...

So I'm afraid your counter-example is invalid... If anything, go in a sandbox sim, rez a sky-box, and verify by yourself.

Ah, yes... We shall ban from SL people who do not have enough money to buy a new PC... Let's ban the poor ! 🤪🤪🤪🤪🤪 On my side, I'm getting sick of pedantic reactions such as yours...

The only (nonetheless interesting) ”proof” your counter-example brings, is that there is a bug in LL's auto-probes generation (*)... 😛 Also, I would be curious to see what a white shiny cube looks like in your environment... --- (*) That is, if your sky box does not have its own reflection probe, of course, but I assume you did make sure about that.