The major reason my store has not reopened thusfar is this looming PBR update. The lighting model we use inworld is going to fundamentally change with the introduction of "light probes" (essentially a localised HDRI). This has the potential to break a LOT of stuff.
For the record, my experience of PBR so far in SL has been to go and visit the "Full PBR region" Winter Wonderland with the official viewer. It was a mixed bag, some things looked nice, some things looked odd (like the textures were unintentionally in full bright mode). But honestly, there was nothing there that blew my mind and it took fooooooreeeeeeever to load.
I have a RTX 3090 TI and a ton of RAM, so goodness knows what it will be like for people on less powerful machines, but I have NEVER heard my fans working so hard. My desk was literally vibrating. Once it had all loaded, I was getting about 30-40fps. Normally I get at least 40-60, even in heavily built out regions or large crowds of avis.
But besides that, I have seen some worrying comments over at NWN. https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2023/12/pbr-second-life.html
The consensus in the comment section seems to be "meh through to bad". Though there is one (very long) and mostly positive comment too, with some interesting points about the impact on the SL economy/content creation. The one comment that really has the potential to keep me awake at night is from Dancing Lemon.
"At this point in time, it's not good. Most objects at midday lol like they are fullbright, and transparent-to-opaque gradient textures are no longer smooth, but have a 'stepped' appearance.
The result being that most of our products now look awful, and with 100's of products we are looking at YEARS of work to fix them.
The irony is, LL are so scared of rolling out scripting updates in case it breaks some ancient item or other, but with this one change, they have broken pretty much every existing item on the grid." - pure nightmare fuel right there. lol
From what I hear, Firestorm is holding off from implementing PBR until the bugs are ironed out. As I mention on my blog, its taking so long, and I expect uptake is going to be quite slow, so I am now pushing on regardless. But I would be lying if I didn't say I am a tad concerned, considering I am in the middle of updating hundreds of items myself at the moment.
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