Need some plans, target dates for long-awaited Mainland projects
Qie Niangao
Several Mainland-wide update projects have been pending for a very long time, something no serious Estate owner has left untouched for so long, which makes Mainland less and less viable as a place to own virtual land.
One for which I found a Canny feedback suggestion is the request to update Mainland's default EEP to something less dark and dreary. (https://feedback.secondlife.com/bug-reports/p/fix-eep-mainland-environment-cycle-are-way-too-dark) This has come up many times in user groups but nothing like a delivery plan has emerged. I understand work was completed by the Server team to facilitate spreading this update grid-wide, but there's no word on when we might expect that work to pay off with actual updated default EEPs. (This problem actually antedates PBR, but is more urgent than ever with PBR.)
We also need updates to 2K terrain textures, and then PBR terrain textures, or do both at the same time, whichever has greater and more immediate impact.
There are other Mainland-wide projects needing attention, but these may be a good start for establishing a working process for implementing updates.
As a strawman, I suggest targeting the next Land & Support User Group, February 25 2026, to have an official blog post outlining the planned milestone dates for these two projects.
These projects may have significant scope, but delay has done nothing to reduce that scope.
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Miro Collas
I agree with the need to update mainland EEP.
But 2K PBR terrain? No. Remember that quite a few people are on low end hardware; such a change would probably "kill" them.
Qie Niangao
Miro Collas It may be wise to do the 2K terrain textures first because I personally haven't done due diligence on how PBR has worked out on those Estate regions that have used it so far. The 2K part, though, should be done without delay, once the updated textures are created (and that's one of those things that does not get magically easier by delay). There are only a very few textures involved in a whole region worth of terrain, and improved resolution would have outsized impact on Mainland where there's a
lot
of exposed terrain.Miro Collas
Qie Niangao OK, well, I still feel that will have a negative impact on those on low end hardware. Going from one 512 to 3-4 2K is a huge jump in texture memory use.