Low hanging fruit - massive improvement to mobile experience/non PBR clients
tracked
CarterWolff Resident
Fairly simple one this. Grid wide, where we have objects that are textured with ONLY PBR textures, replace the blinn phong "default" plywood texture, with the "Base Colour" from the PBR material.
This will have the effect of instantly "texturing" a VAST amount of objects that otherwise look like bare plywood on mobile, or just a blank texture on older clients.
Now, in fairness....
I understand it's likely not feasible to retrospectively apply this to every item created since PBR was a thing - However..
It
would
be feasible to make the default blinn phong texture change to the base colour texture from the PBR, where not other blinn phong texture is selected
. In other words, when a PBR is applied, "if blinn phong texture = default, change it to pbr base colour map." The same thing can be done with the normal map as well. Huge improvement, super easy. Just pull the UUID of the base colour material from the PBR and apply it as the blinn phong. The server has to call it anyway to build the PBR right? So, have it use that UUID string in 2 places not one and it's GG, EZ.
This would mean people building stuffs with PBR would automatically be texturing their objects for mobile / older / web clients, but would retain the option to specify a different texture
if they chose to
. LindenLab has stated that PBR is the future (I agree, I love it) and blinn phong is going to be phased out, but I also know the lab has plans to use mobile as a big onboarding tool, and unless you plan to offer cloud compute to
every
mobile device, for free
, forever
, then those mobile devices will never
be able to handle PBR. So some kind of accommodation needs to be made, or the retention of new users will be pants because vast parts of their world will look like untextured plywood. At that point we'll really have to work hard to remind ourselves why their experience is an improvement over a good text-only client.Log In
animats Resident
Agreed. It's easy to do. If legacy base color is UUID zero, send the PBR albedo color in that object update slot. It's not perfect, but it beats using the wood texture (which is what UUID zero gets you.
Jvk1166z Resident
i think this is a great idea, and honestly it's something i've thought of before myself. shouldn't be too hard to implement, so arguments against this being a feature because eventually everyone will have PBR are a little bit silly and avoiding the problem. lots of people don't run PBR, and while most of them will eventually upgrade, there are still people that wont or cant, people that are stuck on crappy hardware for whatever reason, phones or otherwise. its really not any of our business as to why, and saying they should just upgrade to keep playing the game is a rather privileged perspective, some people cant, either financially or for other reasons such as location and availability, maybe they're on deployment in the military for example. either way, arguments relating to how many people will or will not be using PBR in the future are entirely aside the point. the fact of the matter is, right now, there are lots of people who would benefit from a very simple feature like this. as OP mentions, it's low hanging fruit. everything necessary to make it happen is pretty much already there, and just needs to be glued together. huge bump to compatibility and user experience for not that much effort. and to add to it, the segment of the user-base that'll see the most benefit from this will be the poorest residents on the grid, people that are already struggling IRL. and, if you're someone who designs your builds in a way that takes these users into account, this will also reduce your workload considerably.
Kuuko Shan
I understand your point, and isn't a totally bad idea solely due mobile viewers. But I can tell you that mobile viewerd could potentially handle pbr just fine. PBR on itself isn't as performance hungry as it seems. It's the lack of control on the content from the creators what causes the performance issues. There are many mobile games that works with PBR and even some other more advanced graphics features just fine. Mobile viewer is still in a very early stage. By the time that the stage is advanced and stable enough, every phone should be able to handle it decently enough.
Dana Enyo
I make clothes using PBR, and put a nice-looking fallback B-P texture under every one of them. I guess I see it as the creator's responsibility. I'm assuming that the day of 100% PBR-enabled viewers is far away (if ever), and it's up to us to make our objects look good for everyone, even if it's more work. (I'm talking here about items to be given or sold to others; if you're making something just for your home, do whatever you like.)
SL Feedback
tracked
SL Feedback
Hello, and thank you for your detailed feature request regarding improving the mobile experience and non-PBR clients by using the base color from PBR materials as a fallback texture. This idea has been brought up in the past and is currently tracked. We understand the importance of ensuring a seamless experience across different platforms and appreciate your thoughtful suggestions on how to implement this. While we have no estimate on when this might be implemented, please keep an eye on future updates. Your input is invaluable, and we hope you continue to share your ideas to help improve Second Life. Thank you!