Mari Moonbeam I have to agree. I have a high-level 12th Gen i5 computer, 16 gigs on BUS, a GeForce 3060 with 16 gigs GRAM on the card, a 2TB SSD drive and a fast cable internet connection... and crashed regularly at Fantasy Faire. I never crashed before PBR.

Dan Linden fortunately directed me to the Firestorm BETA release and things improved considerably, showing that there is at least hope... for MY machine. Not so much for others.

Someone on these forums stated that my system is not "gamer level". My response to him was that while it's not top-shelf it is most certainly gamer-level... and that if anyone needs any more power than my system to use Second Life... something is wrong with Second Life, not their computer. I hold to that statement.

SL is absolutely the most demanding application I run; not even the most powerful game even comes close to the graphics-card burning, RAM-sucking nature of SL. How many people left SL due to PBR? How many are currently considering doing so, for the first time in years?

I'm going to lay the cards on the table: Linden Lab has a long history of making knee-jerk decisions without any consideration for the welfare of customers. Their profit bottom-line has always been their top priority. But at times that viewpoint has bitten them in the butt (such as when the system lost 16 to 20% of its regions and tens of thousands of users due to a price-gouging price hike).

These types of decisions need to stop. Linden Lab has failed to learn a very basic lesson: they will not gain new customers by making the system more difficult, confusing, or equipment-demanding to use. They will in truth lose customers over such issues. Second Life does not have to perfectly imitate real life; Minecraft proved that beyond all question (as have other games). Graphic perfection is not required on this platform. Usability by all residents most certainly is required, because when a resident can no longer use Second Life (or SL crawls to snail pace on their computer)... that user will cease using Second Life.

Like you, I'm not going to buy a new computer every two years just to use Second Life. Every one of my other applications works fine-- even direct competitors to the SL platform. That is a reality LL really should consider before making further system-shaking decisions.

If anything, Second Life needs to simplify use, not make it more difficult.

Zalificent Corvinus "that's why everything looks like its been sprayed with polyurethane varnish."

I had to love that comment. I think you covered the issues quite well. So one has to wonder why Linden Lab has not... and whatever in their collective thinking lead them to believe that bringing a not-even-half-baked PBR to the SL platform would be beneficial.

Unfortunately it's here to stay and all they can do is rush to try and make it a viable system. That's kind of like trying to stop a train wreck after the train brakes have already failed. Trying to fix those brakes while the train is moving is one bear of a problem.

I wish I could give your comment 20 likes... and I definitely hope Linden Lab reads it. I saw a YouTube vlog by a systems tech who took 20 minutes to explain exactly why PBR isn't working on Second Life. It was most informative. Your post pretty much nails the boards in place. A company does not gain new users by alienating them with heavy-handed, square-peg-in-round-hole, equipment-abusing non-upgrades.

Jessica Hultcrantz I appreciate your viewpoint and opinion, but as a user of 21+ years with a pretty decent desktop gamer system, I have to say that while some of the points you make are valid... you may have a different outlook entirely if your computer wasn't up to top-shelf specs.

"I think that is the issue. The broad userbase doesn't seem to understand the need for adjustments, for a good experience."

I disagree. I'm pretty sure most users are aware of their equipment limitations and needs. The real issue is Linden Lab not stopping to think about or understand the needs and situation of their users, especially in these tough economic times.

I've seen such comments throughout these forums. Yours is one of the least-objectionable. Others are basically, "If you want to use Second Life, buy a better computer"... which is hogwash mentality. While true to a certain extent, the demands that Second Life puts on computer equipment exceeds every other piece of software that I own... excessively.

cont

cont...

One should not have to own a top-shelf computer system to use SL. As Zalificent states, such mentality if continued, will eventually drive the everyday user to other platforms (and frankly, already has, by the millions). Does Linden Lab have any real idea how many millions of people have tried Second Life, thrown up their hands in frustration, and never returned?

While Linden Lab is taking their $millions a month to the bank, other less-intensive systems are taking their tens-of-millions. There is a reason for that: Second Life has a nearly straight up learning curve and extreme equipment requirements, greater than any computer game I've seen on the market. This is the ONLY platform I've ever found that can challenge the performance of my hand-built, custom-specs gamer system.

Bottom line, Linden Lab doesn't seem to know when to say "Good enough, now let's fix the foundation and general performance." They are constantly adding half-baked, poorly-implemented additions without consideration for what this is going to do to the end user. The gave us mesh, but no in-world mesh-building tools-- and thus pretty much destroyed the in-world creative community and experience. Now we have to EXIT Second Life and create on Blender or other 3D program. What were they thinking? We used to have in-world building parties and contests. That environment is now almost dead (or is dead and simply twitching).

That sums up Linden Lab and SL for the two+ decades I've been a member. They seldom seem to stop and ask the simple question: "Will this be of benefit to our customers overall?"

Telling customers to "keep up with the tech" is exactly the wrong message to send to SL residents. While some degree of tech is necessary, no customer was ever gained by forcing entire systems to become obsolete overnight. PBR did just that.

Marie Nebestanka I was around in 2007, which was considered "golden years" for Second Life. The repetitious crashes had stopped for the most part, lag had decreased, people were happy. I was also around in 2008 when LL made one, single "kill the golden goose" decision that cost them a huge hunk of their grid. They used to post region counts on their splash page; they ceased doing that (likely due to embarrassment). I wonder to this day if their region count is as high as it was 4th quarter 2007 / 1st quarter 2008. I can't help but wonder if the platform as a whole ever recovered from that debacle.

I am glad to see many of the changes that have happened on SL. Not so glad to see others. Mesh made the world prettier... and at the same time killed out in-world creation for the most part (because LL didn't think it necessary to create an in-world mesh editor or a basic mesh sphere shape). We have regularly seen new toys introduced while core-foundation bugs still exist that have been on the board for years.

The point you make is a good one, and one I've made to LL time and again: Second LIfe graphics don't have to be perfect / real life to be enjoyable. The legacy graphics worked fine, and frankly I don't need a mirror to see what my avatar looks like. I understand there are advantages to PBR, but certainly not as it was implemented on SL. They could have set PBR on the back burner and SL would have been just as profitable and functional for the next year or two or three. PBR was not an essential update, and certainly not worth the extreme trouble it caused. It was another in a long line of blundering decisions. At least Philip Linden had the grace to publicly and earnestly apologize for the error. Gotta give him creds for that, but it didn't fix the outrage from angered customers.

2007 to 2008 saw a drastic and extreme change on Second Life. One would have hoped LL would learn from that to stop making knee-jerk decisions without sufficient forethought, planning, and covering all the bases.

I'm not trying to be mean to LL; this is just straight business talk. It's a reality of life: one doesn't gain customers by alienating them.

Jaden Nova Yours is one of the better posts I've seen, because it discusses the basic problems of PBR without getting overly-technical. Bottom line: SL PBR isn't PBR. Never was, still isn't, likely never will be.

You also touched on a user reality: even if they posted an extensive tutorial on PBR and how it works etc etc... how many people would actually read it? I'm a creator / scripter / merchant of 21+ years... and frankly I'm sick of SL tutorials. A tutorial is only beneficial if people read it. I would venture the vast majority of SL users will not read it-- many because they simply don't want to. They're fed up, and tired, and SL made too many demands on our brain cells before they implemented PBR.

I have a high-mid-level gamer system: 12th gen FAST i5, 16 gigs on board, GeForce 3060 GPU with 12 GRAM, a 2 TB SSD, and high-speed cable internet. When PBR was first released I took a good, hard look at it. Seriously: if I was not the sim manager for a good friend who had just invested in her region, I would have strongly considered leaving Second Life.*

Perhaps LL should consider the old cliche: "The straw that broke the camel's back."

* Not the first time I've done so. I left between 2011 and 2020 due to outrageous price hikes. Shut down 8 regions and closed the doors. Only returned in 2020 because of Covid (little else to do except Netflix) and the fact that SL was under new management and they'd lowered prices back down to less-insane levels. You wouldn't believe the number of people I've spoken to since returning who did exactly the same thing I did... and at approximately the same time. Tick customers off enough, they cease becoming customers.

But now they're using ridiculously-priced Premium accounts to kill the golden goose again, rather than doing the sensible thing and offering a one-price account and throwing in the kitchen sink. One just has to wonder.

"A lot of people's computers can't handle it for some reason, despite every other game having used PBR for a very long time."

13 Years ago for the FIRST PBR-look-a-like game, a couple more over the next couple of years, then a whole bunch of MMO Shooters based off Unreal.

A "standard" in some genres of games, for say a decade, certainly not "every other game has used for a very long time".

And the reason people have problems with it is the same reason for most of LL's Feature-rollout fiascos, take a 3 month project for a REAL Game Dev Team, that almost nobody wants and which isn't that useful to SL, give it to LL, it becomes a SEVEN YEAR project that management lose patience with half way through and roll out even though it's nowhere near ready.

Then they sit on their hands for 6-12 months, THEN panic, and desperately try some low quality fixes for another 6-18 months, then they just give up.

Why do you think Pathfinding gets so little use in SL? Why do you think Sansar failed so badly? Why do you think web-cam based facial expression mo-cap got cancelled?

LL Standard operating Procedure. Listen to a handful of noisy idiots, accept a bad idea, waste years mucking it up, waste years trying to fix it, give up, lose more customers at every step along the way.

Nelani Dyrssen: Roblox, VRChat, Zepeto, Unreal, Unity etc all have at least a baseline of decent documentation. "Industry Standard" also implies you're being driven by a team lead or senior who has figured this info out for you and presented it to you in documentation while you're in studio.

If you give your self taught community no direction - you're expecting them to be performing at a senior level and figuring the engine themselves, blind. The documentation has to cover at least what an 3D artist (Industry or not) would expect going into any project or nobody will even know what your system needs from its artists.

This isn't a "Just get good" situation, it's a "We just left a bunch of artists with no direction and expected them to deal with it" situation. Without documentation, barely anybody will be able to understand what this system needs; coming from industry or self taught. It doesn't matter.

Iki Akiri "Industry Standard" means it's a format or program that's become the default for most people working in a specific area. It's never a team lead's or senior's job to teach their people how to work with these standards, they just decide whether they're gonna use the standard or something else. Just as it's not your internet provider's job to teach you how to use Microsoft Outlook or jpg images, it's not a hosting provider's job to teach you how to work with a file format that is the default format for almost all 3D design out there. And that's essentially what LL are - they're a webhosting provider, just for a 3D world. And all they did was implement and support a new file format in their platform that everyone else out there already uses.

As for "a baseline of decent documentation" - this exists. https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/PBR_Materials

Nelani Dyrssen Second Life has its own standards they don't disclose in any easy to read way. The baseline and requirements for every engine and virtual world is different and that's why most of them -have- documentation.

Second Life is its own beast and no amount of bruteforcing "Does this information work with SL too" will ever be more efficient than just telling your userbase how to use your engine, how it works and its base level requirements through documentation.

Every single "real" project has a period of time where people are onboarded onto the requirements and scope of the project so everyone knows what they're aiming for and the specifics of the engine they're working in (Not everyone has experience in every engine, so we get documentation from people who do)

You seriously don't just throw an artist in the deep end and expect them to just osmosis the information. Maybe that's what engineers do; but for artists they need that initial direction to know what scope their assets need to be.

You do know the requirements for SL PBR and PBR in other engines are completely different right? It has less available to us, it runs on a web standard so a whole bunch of tutorials about it are still useless for someone just learning this. They may not be able to tell the difference between the PBR requirements of the tutorial and the cut down version SL has.

Documentation is required to allow people to know what those differences are without tanking 15 years of theory to get good enough to know that. You're literally asking for every self taught designer in here to go get a degree and tank a couple of AAA titles to catch up. Is that fair when LL could just write some better documentation?

Nelani Dyrssen Well, Nelani, you miss the entire point. This would be true if Linden Labs implemented PBR without screwing it up and making it unusable for a portion of their user base. If they want to keep these users who can't upgrade their PCs they are going to have to educate their users or face alienating more of their shrinking user base. You can say whatever you want but this simple fact above all is what matters. If there are no users, creators don't make money, Linden Labs stops making money and then Second Life ceases to exist.

For the record I didn't say this education was for me, I have done my research on PBR clearly. I only create in PBR. However, my customers don't understand no matter how much I tell them how good it is unless they hear it from the horse's mouth (Linden Labs in this case) they won't believe it.

"If they want to keep these users who can't upgrade their PCs they are going to have to educate their users or face alienating more of their shrinking user base"

That is some world class, Olympic Gold Medal standard Futureness Cultist codswallop right there.

How is reading some blog post by an LL Non-Technical staffer telling them how hella-kewl PBR would be if LL weren't the ones making it, going to avoid "alienating" all the people who can't afford a new Gamer Grade PC, and are having their SL ruined by LL-Fail-PBR, and being constantly belittled and insulted by Goose-stepping Tech-Illiterate Furureness Cultists, who slavishly repeat the lies they heard from other Cultists.

Lies such as

"We must haz PBR for mirrors" - Sims 2 had better mirrors back in 2006 with NO PBR under directx 9c.

"We must haz PBR for better terrain" - Skyrim had better terrain texturing in 2011, with NO PBR under directx .

"We must haz PBR because it R an industry standard for 20 years" - PBR was in exactly NO games until 2013, nd didn't become a standard until several years later, and mainly because it was a standard in Unreal Engine, a kit used to make games that are completely unlike SSL, static pre-backed level maps.

And here's YOU, suggesting all the people seeing their SL flushed down the toilet will feel less angry if you tell them that SL will EVENTUALLY look SLIGHTLY nicer for the people who remain, if they accept a massive cut in performance.

Nice.

Zalificent Corvinus When you can have a conversation without hurling insults we can talk but until then have a great day.

So you DON'T have an explanation for why people being driven off SL won't feel alienated if some Cultist with a room temperature IQ score ( and we're talking degrees C here, not not degrees F ) "educates" them on how great PBR will be in 10 years when LL finally fix it, for the handful of Cultists still using SL.

What a surprise, Tech-Illiterate Cultists have no answers, as usual.

Zalificent Corvinus

Directx is a Microsoft windows® technology, that route would drive away a bigger cake of the user-base not on mentioned OS. No fair comparison against OpenGL.

Firestorm's user OS data showed that Awful Mac makes up about 5.5 % of SL, while Linux is about 1.5 %, the rest is pure MW Windows DirectX compatible.

Linux can use DirectX, so, go down a directx route 20 years ago, and it works for 94% of your userbase, or go broken-pbr-fail last year and lose 15-30% of your userbase.

The Math is simple, Awful Mac users have been holding SL back for 2 decades, and before you complain about kicking 5.5% to the kerb for "holding us back" 20 odd years ago, is exactly the attitude and response used by LL-Fail-PBR Cultists for kicking 15-30% of the userbase to the kerb today.

Ah, the inevitable low point of thread reached!

[image 1]

While we are at skewed statistics, do you realise that there is more of SL than just Firestorm? Unless you have access to statistics from LL your numbers are moot and invalid as it is just a chunk of the userbase you are quoting. Firestorm is just 1/12 of viewers in the TPV, acually 1/16th if you count subset viewers. Taking LL's own veiwers into account your statistics are broken down out of 1 out of 18 viewers, and that is just the officially registred ones.

True, Firestorm has a majority userbase among TPV's, but how can you be sure that the "Awful Mac" people use Firestorm? What I know you'll find many of them on different viewers. And regarding Linux, even LL once offered a beta viewer themselves.

But if we continue to play foul and stick to muddy statistics we find that around 80% of all FS users are running a PBR-capable viewer. The question, and the guts of this canny is how do we help the remining 20% forward?

[image2]

Rebuilding the viewer from scratch is too resource eating and will create an even bigger cry out from tech illiterate users with or witrhout potatoes. The only graphical upgrade has been pointed out before by devs and is a switch to vulcan, but that is also a major rework of codebase taking resources from other more important issues.

Sure SL has a huge technology debt, but it is what it is, former tries to rebuild anew has failed miserably. The best option is to accept what we have and find out how it is best managed as is. I will dare to say we need a "PBR viewers for dummies" of some sorts.

And with that I'm out of this thread, peace and lag everyone :)

[edit] Fixed spelling[/edit]

Ah talking of low points...

"While we are at skewed statistics, do you realise that there is more of SL than just Firestorm? Unless you have access to statistics from LL your numbers are moot and invalid as it is just a chunk of the userbase you are quoting. Firestorm is just 1/12 of viewers in the TPV"

Last time I saw LL's official figures, handed to TPV devs, and passed on by them, FS was about 70 % of the userbase, so no it's not "just 1/12th or 1/16th".

Many of the other TPV's don't support Awful Mac at all.

"Rebuilding the viewer from scratch is too resource eating and will create an even bigger cry out from tech illiterate users with or witrhout potatoes."

But THAT is exactly what the Futureness Cultists are calling for, THAT is the PBRR plan, or did you MISS all the official LL talk about PBR terrain, PBR bom, GLTF scene uploads and Vulkan.

Speaking of Vulkan, Awful Mac hates Vulcan, they want everyone to use Awful Mac Metal, so maintaining viewers for Awful Mac means two completely different graphical API's, talk about a coder nightmare.

"I will dare to say we need a "PBR viewers for dummies" of some sorts"

And THERRE is that condescending BS we've come to expect from the LL-Fail-PBR Cultists.

"The question, and the guts of this canny is how do we help the remining 20% forward?"

See THJERRE is the assumption by LL-Fail-PBR cultists, that those 20% NOT using PBR are "dummies" who need "educating", rather than people who either...

THIS canny isn't moving the non-PBR people forward, it's demanding that LL piss down their backs and tell them it's raining...

"You dirty poor and old people can't use PBR in SL because you are a dummy, not like the clever tech-illiterate PBR Cultist pwincesses who have $3000 PC's... "