PBR Re-Education
Princess Evergarden
Linden Labs,
Users do not understand PBR technology and they see it as a negative based on the implementation that has transpired over the last year. PBR doesn't work for users on lower-end computers. Color mapping has changed and many do not understand this or even know that it has happened.
It is important that you, Linden Labs, do your due diligence to make sure users are educated and understand PBR so that creators are actually able to make the transition to PBR without angering a portion of our user base.
We hear things like, "Even on PBR viewers, I don't like how colors look." "I don't like PBR so I won't by any PBR items." "PBR should never be used on clothing." "PBR is just to make things shiny."
My suggestion to combat this is for Linden Labs to produce a series of short, easily digestible to the public, tips or videos on PBR & ACEs color mapping. This will not only help users understand the reasons for the change and the purpose but why PBR is a good technology. Even asking users for tips to submit and have a place where people can view these tips to try to be able to use PBR.
To be fair, I think this should start with a heartfelt apology to the community for the poor implementation of PBR and lack of education on your part.
I think you'd be surprised to see how many still are not on the PBR hype train. There are many creators who have not done a single PBR release. They are still hanging on to Blinn-Phong. I suspect they worry about sales, knowledge on how to transition from BP to PBR, etc. These are all things that could be helped or solved with Linden Labs actually explaining what happened and how they are working to fix it and education on PBR and how it will help lift Second Life into the next decade.
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Mari Moonbeam
During the just closed Fantasy Fair a goodly portion in one region was PBR -part appeared as full bright white [I'm on last FS non PBR viewer], I let creator know and the full bright was promptly turned off, the white remained and creator said they could not SEE what I saw on their PBR viewer . Back up textures -don't in all cases back up I guess.
I have a 2k 2 year old machine that well exceeds the specs of today - fans never on except when I'm in PBR areas with PBR viewer. Settings 80m two avatars max 20k avatar and I'm at ARC below 30k. I am not of the mind I wish to buy replacement machines annually for SL to see that weird plastic PBR shell and lousy water [in a world with sailing and beach homes? ]. I fried a few computers in the early years but am being prudent today .
When I started SL I was told we should all see and experience the same thing. PBR - even with experienced builders can't do this.
Why did anyone think the residents want to fiddle and stick probes as if every teleport is a cover shoot? The only education I want is how to go from place to place
immersively
. Don't tell the customer how to behave - have the providers provide what we CAN see . Give them the tools , guidance to- from what I read above -is a complex process that needs to be "dumbed" down for SL's platform and user's base equipment . Or look for/invent another approach. Don't expect your customer to do it.Zalificent Corvinus
"Users do not understand PBR technology"
Some of us understand it all too well, we've seen it on other platforms, we KNOW it's strengths, AND WEAKNESSES.
"they see it as a negative based on the implementation"
Of course we do, it's a fustercluck coded half finished abortion of HALF of the lowest standard of PBR, rolled out about 3 years too early.
The entire lighting system on which any PBR system depends, hasn't even begun to be implemented, the tone mapping is a bad joke, and the shaders are childishly bad, especially the way it handles speculars on matte surfaces, that's why everything looks like its been sprayed with polyurethane varnish.
"This will not only help users understand the reasons for the change"
Some backoffice types listened to bad advice, and fraudulent claims that "adding PBR will bring in vast numbers of new users", which it hasn't, almost a year and a half now, where is this vast number of PBR loving newbies we were promised by the loudmouthed know-nothing Futureness cultists?
"so that creators are actually able to make the transition to PBR without angering a portion of our user base"
Now there is a worthless nonsense statement, a portion of the userbase are guaranteed to be "angered" by transitioning to PBR, because they can't run a PBR Lag-tech viewer without blowing a grand or more they currently don't have spare.
Spamming people with "Educational" propaganda about how the new thing that's ruined their SL is "hella kewl" won't stop the anger, just increase it.
"have a place where people can view these tips to try to be able to use PBR"
Such a place already exists, it's the official SL forum, and the threads you describe are full of Tech Illiterate Futurenes Cultists screaming "works fine for me go buy a new PC".
"I suspect they worry about sales"
Welcome to Marketing 101... If you make ugly crap people don't like and don't want, don't be surprised when they refuse to BUY IT.
"I think you'd be surprised to see how many still are not on the PBR hype train"
No, I wouldn't, based off the typical PC specs for GAMERS on Steam, we could expect PBR as it is currently to drive off 15-30% of the userbase over the next few years.
That's enough to push SL into the red, and get it closed.
"education on PBR and how it will help lift Second Life into the next decade."
As the situation currently stands, I doubt it will help SL into another decade.
Jessica Hultcrantz
I think one of the big issues is to teach the userbase that lacks technical knowledge about the technology. People still think fullbright is a thing.
I've been in SL since 2007, and experienced the transition to windlight, the move to ALM, and now PBR. (Yes I enjoy PBR). What hits me as being an absolute necessity is to adjust as a user. Every technology trasision has demanded adjustments to the viewer settings to maintain the look and feel.
I think that is the issue. The broad userbase doesn't seem to understand the need for adjustments, for a good experience.
It can be done, I frequently sail with a PBR viewer f.ex., but it has taken time to tweak graphic settings for performance. Like every previous technology update also needed.
Perhaps explain in easy wording how the rendering pipeline has chaged over the years, and what each version's special terminology actually means in reality for a non-technical average user?
That's my l$ 0.02 worth of thinking out loud today
Marie Nebestanka
I've enjoyed SL since 2007 with a series of average desktops. I am not going to replace my 4 year old PC just because LL thinks PRB is an upgrade. They are making a huge mistake if they can't keep SL available to most people. SL was great in 2007 when we all looked like the first crude Tomb Raider Lara Croft.
steph Arnott
99% of SL clients could not care less and all the information is online if one is interested. As a creator what irritates me is the massive amount of trash on the MP.
Jaden Nova
But that’s not really true PBR and I think that’s at the core of why so many users are confused or unhappy with it.
Second Life’s version of PBR is not equivalent to the industry-standard PBR found in engines like Unreal, Unity, or even Blender. Instead, it is a simplified, SL-specific approximation designed to fit within an aging engine. While it utilizes the term “PBR” and draws from the glTF 2.0 format, it does not support the full range of physically based rendering features or lighting models you would expect from a true PBR pipeline. This disconnect between the label and the actual results is one of the main reasons people feel misled or disappointed, resulting in a lackluster experience.
That said, I completely agree with the spirit of your message. The rollout has been poor, not only from a technical standpoint but also in terms of user education and communication. Most users (and many creators) were not provided with the context or tools needed to understand the changes. The shift to ACES color space, alterations in lighting behavior, and the new material workflow caught many people off guard. It’s no surprise that some now say, “I don’t like how PBR looks,” or even avoid PBR content altogether.
Another significant issue is performance. PBR rendering can be quite demanding, especially on lower-end hardware. For many users, PBR content not only appears strange but also runs poorly. When you add the inconsistency of materials across different viewers and hardware setups, it’s easy to see why skepticism surrounding PBR exists.
Cooter Coorara
I'm a builder. Mainly homes, but also everything that goes along with it such as doors, windows, and lighting fixtures. I leapt on the PBR train as soon as it was introduced. To me, the difference is astounding. Everything I build is PBR, with the exception of painted or wallpapered surfaces. I removed all of my old products from my MP store and holo-vendors. Customer response has been very positive.
Builders who cling to Blinn-Phong are doing their customers a disservice, in my humble opinion. I know they've invested a great deal of time and money building their old products, and I understand not wanting to remove them, or spend a great dealt more time updating them. Eventually, as more and more customers see the difference, upgrade their computers (which, like it or not, everyone has to do every few years) I think they will be left behind.
My own sales have increased steadily since PBR. Some of that may be as we builders get more name recognition over time, but I think some of it is due to customers choosing PBR over Blinn-Phong. Part of the success of PBR is due to Linden Lab's effort to educate its users, which I feel was more than adequate. PBR has been with us for 1 1/2 years now, if I remember right. Blinn-Phong will go quietly into the night.
Observation Arcana
Is it 're-education' if many people don't go digging to get educated about it in the first place?
PBR is great for creators, I use and love it, but hell, even I have zero clue how to get optimal ad photos anymore due to tone mapping. 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.
PBR's implementation itself needs some nudges, and any guides made aren't as likely to be seen (not everyone follows Announcements or any of the social medias), but it'd be nice for a easy breakdown I can link to people with a side guide on how one could reduce lag enough to use SL's PBR on older PCs.
Just a "shadow bakes here, shiny here, metal here, combined texture. Needs a probe to get surrounding color data correctly, better shaders used. Here is some settings you can try for your potato of a computer" would be helpful.
Zalificent Corvinus
Observation Arcana
"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
I fail to see the need for a game developer to explain an
industry standard
to users. It's easy enough to educate yourself on what PBR does and how it works, there are hundreds of Youtube tutorials about this - if one wants to look. What you're asking LL to do basically equals, "I am failing in my business because you didn't tell me how to use Photoshop!"Was it a shoddy implementation with a lot of hiccups and some differences to the actual industry standard? Yes. But was it the right decision to help elevate SL to a creation standard that equals other games? Hell to the yeah. (Bonus fact: it's the first step to implementing full GLTF support because that will allow us to upload industry standard FBX mesh models. Because guess what, .dae is a dying format. Blender is going to remove it soon as an export option. It's already marked as "legacy format" in the latest Blender versions. So if LL don't ensure the system can take other formats - this platform is dead.)
I was around at the time Blinn-Phong materials were introduced and let me tell you, for many years people reacted the same way to it. For the longest time people refused to use them. A lot of creators still rely on just baking everything into a diffuse map and refusing normals and shine maps, even after that many years, because they still don't understand how materials work and because up until the introduction of PBR, people could simply turn the advanced lighting model off.
And there is nothing wrong with just using baked textures. You can do that forever, Blinn-Phong isn't going to go away, and no one is going to shun you for it. Non-PBR creators will probably always have customers. Personally, I have noticed that in the PBR viewers, even boring flat diffuse textures look much better than they used to, so this benefits all brands of texture artists.
Iki Akiri
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.
Nelani Dyrssen
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
Iki Akiri
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?
Princess Evergarden
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.
Zalificent Corvinus
Princess Evergarden
"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
EXACTLY
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.
Princess Evergarden
Zalificent Corvinus When you can have a conversation without hurling insults we can talk but until then have a great day.
Zalificent Corvinus
Princess Evergarden
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.
Jessica Hultcrantz
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.
Zalificent Corvinus
Jessica Hultcrantz
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,
THAT
is exactly the attitude and response used by LL-Fail-PBR Cultists for kicking 15-30% of the userbase to the kerb today.Jessica Hultcrantz
Zalificent Corvinus
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]
Zalificent Corvinus
Jessica Hultcrantz
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...
- Can't afford to drop a grand or two on a NEW PC just for SL or
- HATE the way broken LL-Fail-PBR makes SL look, the polyurethane varnish over everything, the nauseating LL water, the fubared tone mapping, the need to manually add probes all over the place because the LL-Fail-PBR messes with lighting really really badly, or
- Because it's making content creation a total pain, becausse of the impossibility to predict what colour or finish anything will have when uploaded, because fubared PBR with fubared tone mapping, and fubared shaders, and fubared eep settings.
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... "