Firestorm version 7.1.9.74745

[Ozwell Wayfarer]

Well, the good news is both of those tree families are already updated, along with pine trees. Still working on the silver birches. The willows pictured above were taken in the new viewer at midday and they look nice and vibrant. Just very shiny. I have also at least halved the geometry in most cases. I imagine there are some wind light settings that are not going to look very good anymore. Are you sure that is "true" midday? it looks rather overexposed compared to what I am getting. I think the KWC does have a custom setting applied.

I have 4 regions full of content just waiting for this update to drop (and once I can make sure it all looks correct in full PBR). This is exactly why I have been extremely torn about releasing any new stuff until this update happened. I knew it was going to really fundamentally change things and basically break a lot of content, and having lived through the 0.9 update, I decided to preserve my sanity and quietly get on with building stuff.

So everyone who purchased those trees (and indeed many items from my store in the past) will get a 100% free update with full PBR textures.

I will of course update the KWC too when I get the time. But I cant do everything at once, so it might have to be a mess for a while unless the community can step up and help me. Maybe a topic for a future community meeting.

Now as for everyone else's content...... especially creators not active anymore.....yeah, that's a huge problem. I shared a tool here on the forums called Materialize, that can make PBR textures from diffuse textures, but you have to be able to download the diffuse (color) map in the first place. Which is not going to be possible in most cases.

EDIT: Also consider we are currently not looking at the full product. We are in a borked halfway-house situation right now.

[Crash McCloud]

Wow, all of this stuff and all the tech stuff with all the acronyms discussed at today's meeting is far beyond my capacity to comprehend. I'm an old-fashioned VW user from 2008. It was all just fine the way it was. It didn't needed to be "fixed," although from what I heard at the meeting, it was all made worse, and everything created before OS Version 9.3 is going to stop working eventually. Being disabled, having no REAL life outside of VWs, being unable to read on a backlit screen, keeping the brightness as low as possible on my laptop, I hope that I cease to function first.

[Tess Juel]

Hi Crash,

Things created before PBR support is added will not stop functioning, but they may look different from what they did previously (better in some ways, worse in others).

[Tess Juel]

Wow, all of this stuff and all the tech stuff with all the acronyms discussed at today's meeting is far beyond my capacity to comprehend.

Yes, that meeting got a bit techy and confusing. And of course people tended to focus on the negative sides of the changes - we always do.

But let me try to clear up some of the confusion:

• This is not about Firestorm. The changes are implemented by Linden Lab and all viewers will eventually have to comply with them.
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• The complaint that things don't look how they used to is a bit tricky since nobody can really say how things used to look. The visual appearance depended a lot on the graphics settings of the each user's viewer. One of the aims of the update is to reduce this difference and make the look of the sceneries more predictable.
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• It's not actually about "PBR". We've had PBR in SL/OS for more than ten years now, it just that we haven't used that name for it (LL called it "New Materials").
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• PBR is a concept, an idea, not a fixed and defined way to do things. Strictly speaking we can't have PBR in a virtual world or even in a normal 3D/Graphic design program. Full PBR is so complicated even a supercomputer might need minutes and even hours to render a single frame. What we do have are a number of highly simplified PBR inspired rendering system. Each and every developer of 3D related software came up with its own system and there was no standard at all. Recently the Kronos Group launched "glTF PBR" and proposed it as a standard. This is what Linden Lab has introduced to Second Life now and what the OS developer is working on implementing in opensim. GlTF PBR isn't actually more advanced than the old "New Materials" but it does things in a different way.
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• GlTF PBR is different enough LL's developers had to bury deep into the rendering engine and make some significant changes to make it work. While they were at it, they also tried to fix a couple of old issues and limitations. The huge difference in visuals depending on the viewer's graphics settings was one of them. It's those changes that make the big difference, the impact of glTF PBR in itself is fairly minor by comparasion.
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• The old render engine's limited dynamic range is another problem they tried to fix. This has been a headache for content creators for a long time. We often had to seriously tweak textures that looked great everywhere else to make them work OKish in SL and on opensim.
  The SL/OS render engine hasn't really been updated for more than 20 years and this change was long overdue but it does of course cause problems for textures that have been modified to work with the old one.
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• One issue the developers seem to have completely missed, is the interaction between texturing/surface effects and the atmospheric rendering system. Windlight was revolutionary for its time but it's old and dates back even to before PBR became a thing. We don't actually use Windlight anymore, we use EEP, but EEP is just a fairly minor update to Windlight and the update seems to have been more focused on adding fancy special effects than to upgrade the fundamental functionality. Windlight/EEP does not work well with PBR, neither the old New Materials, glTF PBR or any other flavor. Unfortunately it doesn't seem LL's developers are even aware of this so I don't think we can expect a fix anytime soon.

[Trouble Ahead]

This is a very useful article to read so you know about the changes.

https://modemworld.me/2024/06/20/firest ... ors-oh-my/

As in my experience, ( im on a MAC Ventura 13.7 ) the SL viewer is really wonderful, but one needs to change some settings and jiggle around with graphics settings , LOD and DD until the best results are shown. This depends on your system's hardware and Im afraid you need to adapt on your own system. Fact is, the new viewers are way more demanding on your hardware and very old computers might be not able to handle well. Ventilators will do overtime Especially ones with old video cards with lack of memory. I feel the new looks as a great improvement though and a good thing our virtual worlds won't look like cartoon movies anymore! As in all new things, bugs need to be fixed.
The Firestorm new version for OS seems not working too well for us now on our sims due to the many different textures used on the sims and some are not loading well enough to look good ( some stay grey ) , we will wait with upgrading the viewers until Kitely did their upgrade as well. Very rarely some textures show in a complete different color. I guess we need to repair this...

Cheers!

[Ozwell Wayfarer]

Unfortunately, as with many things in the 3D world, terms can be a bit "fluffy", adding to the confusion for all users. All of the points Tess makes are indeed correct, we are not getting "true" PBR, but it is even more long-winded and technical to explain that in the format of a meeting where everyone is a bit confused and talking over each other.

For example, at some point there was even confusion for some over exactly what was meant by "texture". Many users simply think of the colour map as the texture. Lets not even get into the fact that a colour map can also be called a diffuse map. Or an albedo map. Depending what side of bed you got out of today. It all basically means the same thing. The layer with the colour information.

But under the old/current system of texturing we also had two other maps we COULD use (many simply ignored them or like me, only used them when I felt they were justified or added something). These textures "sit on top" of the colour information in your diffuse/colour/albedo map. The Normal Map and the Specular Map. The normal map creating additional surface details and shading, the specular map creating reflectivity and/or highlights. So 3 "maps" to one complete "texture".

Now with "PBR" we will be using 5 maps per 1 complete "texture". You will also need to still do the textures the old way as "fall back textures" for those without PBR enabled, and suddenly you now need to create 7 maps per 1 texture.

That's going to be a bit of an issue for merchants like me who like to ship textures with our products or provide large texture packs, as the Kitely market can only support 100 objects per listing. If you want to cover all maps for all circumstances, a texture pack can now have a maximum of 14 textures included (14 x 7 = 98).

And I am surprised to hear they are changing nothing about windlight at all. That's rather disappointing.

[Crash McCloud]

Thanks for attempting to clarify, but even in the article you linked, Trouble, there are just too many terms I don't understand the meanings of like "materials," "Blinn-Phong," "Physically-Based Rendering," etc. The only things I understand are prims, sculpties, and adding a texture on them so they look real to me. I don't see what we have now as being cartoonish at all. I think I need a basic primer with full illustrations starting with the very basics and what they're called before you all start talking about having to put 14 textures on a single surface!

The only thing I think of during these meetings (and I think Fayre is thinking too) is, "Will my laptop still be able to access virtual worlds, and how much more lag will it add to what mesh and windlight settings, which I don't turn on in my Preferences and keep my draw-distance pretty low (no more than 120 meters), already do?" Because if I have to buy ANOTHER new laptop when I already finally got one with an AMD graphics card and am subsisting on my disability income with my checking account being overdrawn & being unable to pay my bills for the past two months, I will be excluded from using virtual worlds at all.

So when I hear you guys using all these acronyms and saying how much more complex the viewer is going to be, it just makes me want to give up on virtual worlds altogether before they're taken away from me and other people with "very old" (is 2019 what you consider "very old"?) computers by Linden Lab, which I thought Open Sim was supposed to be the alternative to.

I just probably shouldn't be coming to any meetings anymore because the thought of losing my "life" here in the absence of a real one (see video below) is making me severely depressed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQw02-me0W4

PS (edit): The view from my viewer doesn't look anywhere close to Draxtor's fancy machinima graphics set-up. But I like mine (see my profile pic for an example) just the way it is, whether anyone else thinks it's cartoonish or not. I think we can all at least agree that it's nowhere near as primitive as Facebook's laughable re-invention of the "Meta"-verse!

[Ozwell Wayfarer]

I have been getting to grips with PBR in Second Life today and.....oh boy.

Firstly, I would really recommend everyone watch this video, regardless of if you are a content creator or not:



It gives a good overview of what these changes imply. I cannot say for certain yet if the way PBR is applied in SL is going to be the same as OS 100%, but its likely to be extremely similar.

That said, my takeaways:

*Its going to become more difficult and expensive to be a content creator in SL, or to import your own work into SL, as the cost of uploading all the textures essentially doubles (you need 3 "fallback" textures(colour/normal/specular), plus a GTLF material file containing 5 textures.) So it will now cost L$80 per texture to cover all eventualities. Up from L$30 (colour/normal/specular).

*Any existing content that is not modifiable is going to be a problem to continue using into the future, as there is no way of updating that content with new PBR material textures. Why? See next point.

*The graphical upgrade is significant, but you can see from the objects Boston shows in the video why older content will look completely "flat" and wrong next to a PBR item. The lighting is much more dynamic and realistic. As we have been discussing earlier in the thread, currently I think the new viewer lighting model makes everything feel much more flat/lacking in depth.

But that does also seem to come down to the fact we dont yet have the lighting model fully implemented server-side. While in SL I took the below snaps.

First, this is "Legacy Midday" - As you can see, pretty much what we used to have, just a tad darker. Note that with this setting, the "sun" is set directly overhead.



The following lighting mode does not currently work in Kitely.

This is the "New Midday". Note that with this new setting the sun is offset to the north west. So depending which direction you are facing, it will seem drastically lighter or darker.

Sun behind


Sun overhead - true comparison



Sun Infront


Overall, it feels quite a bit darker, the shadows have more dynamic range and materials "pop" a lot better. I apparently am wearing a specular map on my chest that I was totally unaware of, but shows up quite clearly in the 3rd and 4th pictures.

There's definitely no sugar coating it - its a huge change for creators and residents and is likely to be hugely disruptive to everyone, certianly for months, possibly for years to come. I do understand Crash's sentiment and worry that its going to push a lot of people on older, lower powered machines out the door.

But on the other hand, this will MASSIVLY increase the realism of content overall, which if we want to compete with newer virtual worlds we do need to do.

But coupled with the scripting changes also incoming....I dunno. It does kind of feel like a bit much for the average user to take in and cope with.