PBR Survey Results: Nearly Half of Second Life Users Waiting for PBR to Work in Firestorm & Other Third Party Viewers!

Here's the results of our survey on PBR in Second Life, and they may be surprising: While over 1 in 4 are excited by what they see with physically based rendering... nearly half (44%!) are waiting for PBR to be integrated into Firestorm and other third party viewers.

Firestorm alone is the most popular viewer among active SL users, far outstripping the official Linden Lab viewer, and as cool as the PBR reflective surface effect is, the plurality are preferring to wait until Firestorm has it.

The good news is the volunteer team that services the Firestorm project announced PBR integration is coming back in August. The less good news, as one reader notes, is it may take awhile for Firestorm to glitter with PBR:

There is a lot of potential there, but right now there are a lot of glitches that need addressing, and we're in a holding pattern because Firestorm is holding back until PBR's glitches are ironed out, and since that's the most widely-used viewer the number of people who can make use of PBR, as users and creators, is going to remain small. Don't get me wrong, I'm enthusiastic about it from what I've seen so far, but my impression is that it's not fully baked yet. (Pun intended.)
Posted by: Spiffy Voxel 

Or to put it another way, a major graphics improvement to Second Life, a highly profitable virtual world, is effectively waiting the efforts of a voluntary development team. Anyway, watch an early test demo from Godiva of Firestorm running PBR above, to see what's coming (eventually).

Comments

[Judas]

I did log in to the sl viewer to have a look. I struggled to find a good showcase pbr sim. And all my neighbours who I had de rendered re appeared and my built in ao had gone so I deciced to wait . I wish Linden lab and firestorm could meet half way. Switching between viewers is kinda jarring.

[SilverPieces]

@Judas -- but what did the PBR look like to you? Did you like it? If you didn't, why?

[BeqBeqBeqBeq]

Thank you, Hamlet,

The chicken and egg position that we face is not entirely new, but it is one that we
at Firestorm take seriously. We have a responsibility not just to the few early adopters but to the wider audience that we serve, and while we will never please everyone (this is SL, one of the most diverse communities you'll have the pleasure to find, to try to please them all would be futile!) it is important that we try at least to reach a point where we feel that the viewer is ready for the majority of our users to adopt. But while, as you correctly note, a lot of the pressure and responsibility falls upon our small band of unpaid volunteers, it would be disingenuous in the extreme to not acknowledge the reality that most of the rough edges that remain are going to be solved not by the FS team, but by the ongoing efforts of the teams at Linden Lab.

We do, of course, have our part to play, both interacting with the lab to help them help us, and in cleaning up our own house too. PBR breaks a number of features our users love, and we need to fix those or find alternatives where necessary. We also need to be sure that it fits our user base the full breadth of which runs the gamut of hardware from high-end gaming machines to very low-end bargain laptops. In fact, our lead developer, Ansariel, has spent months trying to pin down a performance issue that many would not have noticed. It affected only the "lower-end" machines, those who, one could argue, could least afford that performance loss. When LL released their PBR viewer, we were still gathering data points from our testers; the good news is that Ansa has not only identified and fixed the issue, and it can be tested by anyone in our preview group, but it will soon be part of the next LL Maintenance release, benefitting the wider community.

We are not there yet, but we are getting there. LL released what they themselves have said was not entirely as ready as they'd have liked in an ideal world, but in doing so, they have opened up the space, and raised the profile of the project. It was the right thing to do; they have the product live, and the feedback is coming in where perhaps it had plateaued in the enclosed pre-release audience.

People who are really eager to sample PBR, see what the noise is all about, or just help us and LL get things to a point where it's ready for broad consumption are very welcome to join the Secondlife group "Phoenix-Firestorm Preview Group" where they can find the early access builds of Firestorm PBR. We have only one real rule, don't share the links outside the group; it is not a supported viewer, so you need to join the group to keep in the loop with issues and advice, and if you cannot live with a problem, then you move back to the release viewers and try again later.

Beq
One of those FS devs.