The roads are too shinny. But the leap in logic to making them PBR isn't the correct solution and makes zero sense. Go outside and look at a road in RL. It's not shinny. It's made out of asphalt. A road can be made, and should be, out of the simplest textures possible. Oj, and they should be seamless.

I understand that the Zindra roads were originally made to look shiny to simulate a metallic feel which matched the "futuristic" theme of Zindra and Horizons when it was new in 2009. And it worked (sort of) when Second Life only had Blinn Phong and Materials shine.

Nearly two decades later, SL now has PBR too. The metallic roads of Zindra still retain their Blinn Phong shine settings, but now because of PBR, this legacy shine has been vastly increased to the point where it now has the appearance of shiny polished glass and not metallic and it looks strange, cheap looking and outdated.

Because of PBR's effect on Blinn Phong shine, I would suggest either turning off the road's shine altogether, or change the road's surface to a new PBR low metal shine setting. But doing this will make the roads look plywoody or white to those still using non PBR viewers like Firestorm v6.6.17

Redoing Zindra's roads is a big job, Zindra now has over 400 regions (including the new expansion) and Horizons adds even more to that total...

This road has always been one of the worst on any continent. Even back in 2009, it was unimaginably ugly and unrealistic.

Besides, we’re talking about the adult continent here—it should be warm, inviting, and charming.

It’s hard to understand why LL manages its projects so poorly; it’s self-sabotage.

Alright, finally I could spend a few minutes playing with this, so I made a comparison of the Zindra road prims and what they could be with PBR materials. I've applied a metallic material based on the "Metal - Polished" material available in the Library but with a base color of HSV 200,25,15 (Hex #1c292f) and roughness factor turned down to 0.100. Very basic but the result already speaks for itself. If you look at the original surface closely, it's not bad, but the source of the problem with it in PBR is that the environmental reflection doesn't apply properly. This is because the shininess value of the face is set to Low, in the old old shininess system before "advanced lighting model". As you can see in some of the pictures attached, I've remade the surface to see the difference, while the edit tool indicates the Low shine setting would be equal to a 0 glossiness, 100 environment reflection setting, in fact it is not. Applying a default blank texture as specular and setting 0 glossiness and 100 environment, the result is already better. So the problem is not the shininess but the extremely outdated method to apply shine.

The metallic PBR material I've applied to my demo prim is very basic so it can be much better than this with a proper material, it doesn't need to be this shiny, however in my opinion it just looks so much better. Zindra roads are supposed to be made of metal (or some futuristic alloy that looks similar) so as I've said earlier, removing their shininess would ruin them. As you can see in the pictures, with a proper metallic material they can be easily moved forward from 2009 to 2025.

I am highly amused that a user named Oil Supply voted for a proposal to de-shiny the roads on Zindra. Makes one wonder why they got so shiny �

Agreed, though it gives the roads a nice after rain look.

I like the shiny roads, maybe they would really need proper materials now that we have PBR, but completely changing their design or making them matte would ruin them.

Please just replace the roads. They were good when put in, but need a massive overhaul.