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Are you using a PBR viewer?
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It's apparent that some users struggle with the performance of the newest FS viewer (7.1.13) and others like myself don't, which indicates it is likely not a viewer problem. More likely it's either hardware or network related, grid related, or there might even be a geographic component.
I have two very heavy regions on Wolf territories grid, Lunaria Emporium and Luxor, both with lots of large structures, large meshes, large textures, and about half converted to total PBR. I run ultra graphics while I'm there on both my older and newer desktop. Personally, I think a lot of my region performance comes from the grid I'm on. Lone Wolf has built an incredible server infrastructure for the grid that I have never seen anywhere except for big online games. I know because I am a co-developer in a new mmo game, and those are ALL about sufficient infrastructure.
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I have two very heavy regions on Wolf territories grid, Lunaria Emporium and Luxor, both with lots of large structures, large meshes, large textures, and about half converted to total PBR. I run ultra graphics while I'm there on both my older and newer desktop. Personally, I think a lot of my region performance comes from the grid I'm on. Lone Wolf has built an incredible server infrastructure for the grid that I have never seen anywhere except for big online games. I know because I am a co-developer in a new mmo game, and those are ALL about sufficient infrastructure.
As I've said elsewhere: OpenSim is where SL users go when their machines can no longer handle any of the viewers that are allowed into SL.
If you're on a discounter-grade consumer notebook that cost €300 a decade and a half ago, i.e. a machine that shouldn't be used for any kinds of 3-D applications, then SL was dead for you the instance you were no longer allowed to use anything that offers Forward Rendering with only the very bare basics of 3-D graphics. In OpenSim, on the other hand, just about every grid and almost every sim lets you use viewers that are so old that even displaying mesh is optional.
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If you're on a discounter-grade consumer notebook that cost €300 a decade and a half ago, i.e. a machine that shouldn't be used for any kinds of 3-D applications, then SL was dead for you the instance you were no longer allowed to use anything that offers Forward Rendering with only the very bare basics of 3-D graphics. In OpenSim, on the other hand, just about every grid and almost every sim lets you use viewers that are so old that even displaying mesh is optional.
I still use 6.6.8 . For me the fastest and most stable Firestorm as MacUser. For me it is more important to have higher framerate on my 7x7 sim than to have 3D effects in textures that can be also managed otherwise. The mirror effect is nice. But that's all. I tried out Firestorm 7 but it was for me horror. In SL I am online with the newest SL viewer and is perfect. But we can't use the SL viewer in opensim. That's the problem.
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"3D effects in textures that can be also managed otherwise"
Yeah, like taking a flat surface that should have four vertices, and then building rivet heads and screw heads and seams and dents and little surface imperfectioins directly into the 3-D model until that self-same surface has 200,000 vertices.
That'll totally be easier on the GPU than the same surface with four vertices and a bump map. (Spoiler: No, it isn't.)
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Yeah, like taking a flat surface that should have four vertices, and then building rivet heads and screw heads and seams and dents and little surface imperfectioins directly into the 3-D model until that self-same surface has 200,000 vertices.
That'll totally be easier on the GPU than the same surface with four vertices and a bump map. (Spoiler: No, it isn't.)
Funny how many people love PBR, considering many of them have probably never even seen Blinn-Phong in action. I mean, next to no imported SL content had its Blinn-Phong materials restored when it was put back together.
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I still run into people regularly who still don't know what the older blinn-phong materials are, even though they've been around for over a decade. They would visit my Luxor region and their first question would be: how did you make it look like that? The same when eeps were introduced - instead of embracing those, some focused on creating workarounds to use the old Windlight settings and now 7 years later some still have no idea what shared environment is. I remember the same reactions to the OS code upgrade several years ago from 0.8 to 0.9, and the addition of YEngine and ubode.
So it is now with pbr. Some will never see it the way I make it because they've stayed with the old viewer they're comfortable with - that's their choice to make and I respect that. They have their own grids and regions and have worked hard to achieve a specific look and are quite happy to keep it that way. I applaud them, for they know what they want and don't want.
It's the rest who seem confused and intimidated because it's an unknown feature that does things differently, looks different, involves a new learning curve, and they have no idea about the simple adjustments they can make to the graphics settings to see things nicely.
Second Life understands that they need to become more on par with modern games to keep bringing in new users after the current older generation of users age out. Opensim devs also understand they need to keep up with SL for the same reason. Otherwise both grids get relegated to retro game status. Recently, my adult son mentioned that he played Second Life to one of his friends and the response was, 'Second Life? Isn't that where old people go to dance?'
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So it is now with pbr. Some will never see it the way I make it because they've stayed with the old viewer they're comfortable with - that's their choice to make and I respect that. They have their own grids and regions and have worked hard to achieve a specific look and are quite happy to keep it that way. I applaud them, for they know what they want and don't want.
It's the rest who seem confused and intimidated because it's an unknown feature that does things differently, looks different, involves a new learning curve, and they have no idea about the simple adjustments they can make to the graphics settings to see things nicely.
Second Life understands that they need to become more on par with modern games to keep bringing in new users after the current older generation of users age out. Opensim devs also understand they need to keep up with SL for the same reason. Otherwise both grids get relegated to retro game status. Recently, my adult son mentioned that he played Second Life to one of his friends and the response was, 'Second Life? Isn't that where old people go to dance?'
Speaking of EEP, then there are those who have never seen EEP in action because they've had their viewer permanently set to (legacy) midday for as long as they can think. Unfortunately, including many sim owners who, for this reason, have never noticed that there's stuff on their sims that's glowing in the dark although it shouldn't.
I think I should really complete my custom EEPs that aim to even defeat the shaders completely by moving both sun and moon underground and illuminating everything only with ambient light. Those who want no point light sources should finally get what they want.
And as for PBR and older viewers, there's offering a Blinn-Phong fallback that's sufficiently convincing (good thing I've learned that trick to obtain a Blinn-Phong specular map from downloaded PBR maps in the SL forums). There's only offering a diffuse map as a fallback. And there's offering no fallback at all so that everything looks grey for all those who don't have a powerful enough machine.
Also, it isn't just old people. It's also old machines. Machines that are too old and weak for SL. Good thing that OpenSim still lets you use a Firestorm that's so old that you can still turn mesh off. And then blame everything looking weird on all those who think they must use all that newfangled stuff (where "newfangled" means everything that came after flexi and/or mega-regions).
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I think I should really complete my custom EEPs that aim to even defeat the shaders completely by moving both sun and moon underground and illuminating everything only with ambient light. Those who want no point light sources should finally get what they want.
And as for PBR and older viewers, there's offering a Blinn-Phong fallback that's sufficiently convincing (good thing I've learned that trick to obtain a Blinn-Phong specular map from downloaded PBR maps in the SL forums). There's only offering a diffuse map as a fallback. And there's offering no fallback at all so that everything looks grey for all those who don't have a powerful enough machine.
Also, it isn't just old people. It's also old machines. Machines that are too old and weak for SL. Good thing that OpenSim still lets you use a Firestorm that's so old that you can still turn mesh off. And then blame everything looking weird on all those who think they must use all that newfangled stuff (where "newfangled" means everything that came after flexi and/or mega-regions).
You only get grey textures because some people only add PBR textures to objects, but no legacy/Blinn-Phong textures as a fallback.
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for example my new welcome region was built way before pbr even came out. how would i fix the grey textures. I even tried with an alt in os and all grey textures/
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As we discussed, this is not a common occurrence with pbr so there may be something else going on there
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I use it but, as many have said, it only keeps dragging further the pre-existing technical debt that the viewer does. Even with a monster of a PC and an Astral NVIDIA 5080 OC...it's just too laggy...
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Ryzen 3600X. 16GB of RAM. Radeon RX 590 with 8GB of VRAM. Upper-mid-range as of 2018. Running Debian with the open-source amdgpu driver (I may try Endeavour soon or see what the new testing will have to offer).
Firestorm 7 runs like a charm. Faster than Firestorm 6 actually. I can safely cap Firestorm at 30fps, and the GPU fan purrs like a kitten. In fact, I could often exceed 60fps if I wanted to. All with shadows, ambient occlusion, static & dynamic reflections etc. Even tricking out the graphics further doesn't put that much of a dent into the performance.
Maybe I've found a hardware sweet spot.
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Firestorm 7 runs like a charm. Faster than Firestorm 6 actually. I can safely cap Firestorm at 30fps, and the GPU fan purrs like a kitten. In fact, I could often exceed 60fps if I wanted to. All with shadows, ambient occlusion, static & dynamic reflections etc. Even tricking out the graphics further doesn't put that much of a dent into the performance.
Maybe I've found a hardware sweet spot.
I have two rigs. One is a 7+ year old desktop with core i7-10700 cpu, 64gb ram, and an Nvidia gtx1070 gpu. On my heavy 4x4 store region that's been half converted to pbr, I always run ultra graphics with no lag, even with 20 people at an event. Keep in mind my network connection is 2 gig service up and down, which makes a difference. My second desktop is one I built last year with a core i9-12900 cpu, 64gb of ram, and an Nvidia RTX4060 gpu. That one doesn't break a sweat at all. As for the new viewer, it is actually more efficient at handling the display since it uses more of the cores on your cpu, whereas FS 6.6.17 only uses one core, creating a bottleneck. Hopefully something I said here helps, because your pc is certainly not the culprit.
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I think part of it might also be related with the Alienware monitor (
Dell Alienware AW3225QF 32" QD-OLED UltraHD 4K 240Hz 0.03ms ) and how it syncs with NVIDIA settings and the PC... I just deactivated Windows HDR for one..
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Dell Alienware AW3225QF 32" QD-OLED UltraHD 4K 240Hz 0.03ms ) and how it syncs with NVIDIA settings and the PC... I just deactivated Windows HDR for one..
Nope, 10Gbps here so definitely not that. 4k screen with G-Sync...64GB RAM....AMD Ryzen 9 X3D.... Def not the specs
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I think it's optimization issues, overall. If you've hung around in the last couple of years in the SL forums, a few of its posters have clarified this end of it very well. My favorite posts over there on the matter come from Henri Beauchamp, a French programmer who's maintained the oldest TPV for SL and Open Sim, Cool VL Viewer. He runs a similar newer system to the one Luna has and still deals with optimization problems while maintaining his viewer. (Not a shill or a tester for his viewer, but I do use it occasionally in SL and Open Sim.)
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I personally feel that anything added to the viewers there will always be someone that uses that added function, I'm not for or against, however with that said the mirror idea is just amazing and has been a long dream of SL/OS, also the addition of pbr has forced the hand of fixing many parts of the viewer, for some odd reason I find that comical.
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i built my tower around 2013 and cant afford to build a PBR-nor-Windows11-capable rig at this time.
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My oldest rig of 3 is about 7+ years old. I replaced the cpu and motherboard a few years back but it wasn't with new tech at the time. The gpu is a gtx1070. It has no trouble at all with either pbr or Win11. My new HP laptop with Intel ARC graphics has a harder time than that older desktop does.
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I've nearly completely converted my regions over to PBR, but I've been doing that since late last year. The only real failure I've seen in the launch is the near total lack of communication about what it is, what it does, and how to use it. I literally had almost nothing to go on last year when I first dug into it, but wow, what a difference.
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We started embracing PBR early on in GroovyVerse. We use it rather sparingly, but it does make certain items beautiful and really pop. And you can make some really gorgeous skies! The newest viewer does have some issues, like all new versions of Firestorm. But that is improving, and overall, I think our grid runs very smoothly with the new updates. I would definitely recommend adopting it, and taking the time to adjust. Just avoid using the huge 2048x2048 textures. That is what causes the lag.
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Firestorm is getting smoother and smoother as far as PBR is concerned. I'm daily-driving the 7.2.0 beta now, and it seems to perform even better than 7.1.13.
By the way, I've dumped a few PBR and Blinn-Phong materials at Dingleberry next to my usual stash. Juno has imported them from ambientCG to experiment with texturing shoes. Just in case you're looking for something to experiment with. I myself will probably import some building materials that I need for a Selea Core house next.
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By the way, I've dumped a few PBR and Blinn-Phong materials at Dingleberry next to my usual stash. Juno has imported them from ambientCG to experiment with texturing shoes. Just in case you're looking for something to experiment with. I myself will probably import some building materials that I need for a Selea Core house next.
8. I use one but don't feel the improvement in graphics is worth the processing power.
CPU is getting much hotter with the PBR viewer and being summer its not fun.
Also the script engine is missing functions to make use of PBR textures. The suitcase has no materials folder so I cant accept a material directly without it being packed in a box first.
Having 2048 textures is nice for covering large areas, though I'm not sure my database agrees.
The extra faff to package a GLTF texture is really annoying.
They removed the "Find All" option in the edit menu to select all duplicate materials in a linkset. That really annoys me.
The "Align Planar Faces" option is broken with PBR materials.
The camera no longer collides with the walls if you have "Disable camera Constraints" on. I want the old behavior back.
Generally buggy and I'm not a fan. I hope it will get better.
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CPU is getting much hotter with the PBR viewer and being summer its not fun.
Also the script engine is missing functions to make use of PBR textures. The suitcase has no materials folder so I cant accept a material directly without it being packed in a box first.
Having 2048 textures is nice for covering large areas, though I'm not sure my database agrees.
The extra faff to package a GLTF texture is really annoying.
They removed the "Find All" option in the edit menu to select all duplicate materials in a linkset. That really annoys me.
The "Align Planar Faces" option is broken with PBR materials.
The camera no longer collides with the walls if you have "Disable camera Constraints" on. I want the old behavior back.
Generally buggy and I'm not a fan. I hope it will get better.
Your grid needs to upgrade to 0.9.3 before the Materials folder will show in your inventory. That also is likely the cause of some of the other related issues you're having with it, since the grid upgrade provides essential support for pbr.
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I just realized it was your suitcase that didn't have a materials folder. Thanks for sharing, I never noticed that since I only use those I upload myself.
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I had uploaded a few test materials on my osgrid account, when i tried to pass them to my account on my grid it said couldn't find folder and failed. I had to put them in a box to get them to transfer over.
I don't hate PBR but it has issues that need fixing to make it workable. The last three points I mentioned are starting to annoy me more than it should lol.
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I don't hate PBR but it has issues that need fixing to make it workable. The last three points I mentioned are starting to annoy me more than it should lol.
I just transferred a material successfully by creating a Materials folder in mysuitcase with my Wolf Territories avatar, adding in a material with its attending textures, hopped over to Osgrid and gave them to my avatar there who was offline. When I logged her in, everything was there, including the material that actually went into her official Materials folder, and I was able to use it.
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osgrid doesn't use the suitcase folder so users have full access to their inventory from anywhere. Passing a material to an osgrid account won't be a problem as the main inventory has the materials folder already.
The default when running your own grid is the suitcase. So when you receive items from the hypergrid they end up in the suitcase. I tried making a normal folder called materials in my suitcase, but its not seen as the proper materials folder with the proper icon and file associations, so it doesn't work for receiving a material that is not boxed. It simply doesn't know where to put the item and fails. Boxing it will treat it like an object and it will land in the objects folder. I can of course manually move a material to any folder in my suitcase and it will be available to me on the hypergrid, but if I try to pass it to someone using the suitcase system it will fail as they wont have the proper materials folder for it to arrive in.
Boxing the material is the solution for now, but its just an annoying thing to do with PBR that I mentioned.
The funny thing with adding PBR is the blinn-phong materials were rarely used to its full potential in open sim. 95% of buildings and items i pick up only have the diffuse texture set and make no use of the normal and specular maps. With the extra annoyance of packing a PBR material with a GLTF packer I can see it being used very little in open sim. If people can't be bothered to use the simpler method to its full potential I find it hard to see people adopting the more complex system. If Blinn-Phong was used fully everywhere, the difference in graphics between it and PBR would be much less noticeable.
I do like it when an object comes with all the defuse textures in its contents as I can then at least use them to make the normal/Specular maps if I desire. While PBR is generally good, I can't see it being widely used to its full potential just like Blinn-Phong isn't.
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The default when running your own grid is the suitcase. So when you receive items from the hypergrid they end up in the suitcase. I tried making a normal folder called materials in my suitcase, but its not seen as the proper materials folder with the proper icon and file associations, so it doesn't work for receiving a material that is not boxed. It simply doesn't know where to put the item and fails. Boxing it will treat it like an object and it will land in the objects folder. I can of course manually move a material to any folder in my suitcase and it will be available to me on the hypergrid, but if I try to pass it to someone using the suitcase system it will fail as they wont have the proper materials folder for it to arrive in.
Boxing the material is the solution for now, but its just an annoying thing to do with PBR that I mentioned.
The funny thing with adding PBR is the blinn-phong materials were rarely used to its full potential in open sim. 95% of buildings and items i pick up only have the diffuse texture set and make no use of the normal and specular maps. With the extra annoyance of packing a PBR material with a GLTF packer I can see it being used very little in open sim. If people can't be bothered to use the simpler method to its full potential I find it hard to see people adopting the more complex system. If Blinn-Phong was used fully everywhere, the difference in graphics between it and PBR would be much less noticeable.
I do like it when an object comes with all the defuse textures in its contents as I can then at least use them to make the normal/Specular maps if I desire. While PBR is generally good, I can't see it being widely used to its full potential just like Blinn-Phong isn't.
Thanks Snoodle, I was able to duplicate the issue with transferring materials. I traveled to Mobius grid from Wolf Territories and gave my Mobius avatar the same material and textures. I got the textures but the material didn't make it, although there was a question mark in the materials folder with the correct name.
As for blinn-phong materials (and eep before it), I've always used them in everything, regardless of how widely adopted the tech was among the user base. And as with pbr now, the primary early adopters are usually artists, designers, and creators, because we are are supported by a great group of patrons which enable us to keep doing what we love and push the limits of creation on this platform. So, if a user doesn't want to upgrade, we understand and we accommodate, but if they do, they're in for a treat :-)
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As for blinn-phong materials (and eep before it), I've always used them in everything, regardless of how widely adopted the tech was among the user base. And as with pbr now, the primary early adopters are usually artists, designers, and creators, because we are are supported by a great group of patrons which enable us to keep doing what we love and push the limits of creation on this platform. So, if a user doesn't want to upgrade, we understand and we accommodate, but if they do, they're in for a treat :-)
i was try 3 times the New Viewers and was end always in the same Trouble ,Textures was blurry and need long time to be clear ,than laggy and not really funny to run around with. i prefer to be so long it works with my 6.6.17
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PBR and Blinn-Phong won't look identical anyway unless the materials aren't really materials.
But seriously, it doesn't matter because the users can't switch back and forth between Blinn-Phong and PBR at will and compare them anyway. They won't notice.
It just has to look convincing enough.
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But seriously, it doesn't matter because the users can't switch back and forth between Blinn-Phong and PBR at will and compare them anyway. They won't notice.
It just has to look convincing enough.
For that reason I always add both the PBR textures and Blinn-Phong to every build, so that no matter what viewer they're using, they will see my best work for that particular rendering engine. That being said, I get far superior results with PBR.
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Pbr materials can have up to 6 textures if ao and emissive are added. It sounds like a lot but the 7.1.13 viewer has been designed to use multiple cpu cores to process everything instead of the single core that 6.6.17 uses. For a casual user this sounds like overkill, but for a designer and artist that's exactly what you want. It gives you some modern game capabilities we've never had. The result of last night's event on my heavy store region inside a full pbr ballroom was actually very smooth. I've been happily surprised at the performance. However, it's also important to remember that this is all very machine dependent. The older the machine beyond 8 years, the more likely it will struggle. I use a 7 yr old desktop, a brand new gaming desktop I built last year, and a newer business laptop, and all perform admirably on these regions.
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