PBR Coming to Firestorm "In Weeks" -- And It Will Make Second Life a Much More Game-Like Experience, Explains Firestorm Dev

Image featuring PBR by Terry Fotherington

After a much anticipation, the Firestorm viewer -- by far the most-used Second Life viewer --  will very soon going to add PBR:

Since Linden Lab released the PBR viewer last November, we have been working with them to identify, prioritise, and squash numerous bugs and usability issues. Our team called out the issues we felt were show-stoppers as part of that effort. That list can be found linked deeper in this post, but suffice to say that over the last 5-6 months, Linden Lab has been working on those bugs alongside their continued enhancements programme.

To get to the front of the crowd and try things early, join the Phoenix Firestorm Preview Group in-world and grab the download links from the notices there.

By soon, Firestorm development head Beq tells me, she means "weeks not months". Physically based rendering will greatly enhance the Second Life experience visual experience, giving it much more vivid lighting. (And yes, mirrors.)

Interestingly, Beq tells me the update will also make Second Life feel decidedly more like a AAA game:

"The mantra 'SL is not a game' has and I guess always will apply in the sense that SL itself has no progression, no score, no plot, but the underlying software is very much a game engine," she elaborates. "Modern game engines expect you to be focused on them, they own the system while you are playing, and the viewer is now a bit more like that than it ever was before."

That means Second Life will more immersive, but as Beq notes, that runs counter to how many power SLers experience the virtual world:

"I am not yet convinced that this is ultimately what people want," as she puts it. "Many of us live in SL 24/7 , but a lot of that is just sitting about in our fancy 3d chat room, while we get on with whatever RL we are doing. The viewer needs to know its place, to shrink into the background when we want to be doing other things. Of course, as soon as we are finished in RL we want snappy game-like responses, we want to drive, sail, ride at speed to dance and enjoy music with large crowds. So suddenly we want the viewer to be full on, in our faces."

But with PBR enabled, running SL in the background will consume quite a lot of compute.

"[Y]ou can only get higher frame rates with more demands on the hardware. Being ready and able to use most if not all of the VRAM would be a good example. This makes for a smoother experience but means the viewer will fight other apps more. Consider running Photoshop, Blender, Maya etc alongside. All of them want VRAM and so the operating system has to manage those demands. When the viewer was more 'restrained' it was a nicer neighbor."

If you're playing say Fallout 76 on your PC, you don't usually minimize your Steam screen to check email or whatever. But with PBR in Firestorm, the free and easy multitasking days of Second Life may be ending:

"It's not a problem per se," says Beq, "the operating system can for the most part deal with it, but people who do swap back and forth a lot will probably notice that it takes longer as there's more swapping happening."  Or maybe SLers will become more like AAA gamers, multitasking via their phones.

By the say, "Second Life is not a game" is quite literally a marketing positioning statement by Linden Lab. And now it's becoming even less technically true.

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Comments

[Jane Teague-Urbach]

Second Life is abandoning what made it great. Ordinary people could create and experience things they could not in real life, due to limited resources, opportunities, etc. With a reasonably priced setup, you could literally accomplish almost anything you wanted, and experience companionship, friendship, even love while doing it. Gradually, Second Life has recently started creating classes of people, those who can afford more can now do and accomplish more and PBR will render them more impermeable. The people who benefitted the most from the Virtual world experience will be shut out of it. I hope the well to do future SL'ers realize that there were many who created the best of that world who will no longer be able to be there.

[Jin]

What kind of rig is this designed to run on?
I’m using an i7-13700k / RTX 3070 and the Firestorm PBR release has been horrible.
While the viewer reports I am getting 40-70fps, the camera movement stutters as if I were only getting 5-10fps. Lowering graphics does nothing to improve performance and just makes the world look worse. If I can’t find any solution by this evening, I will roll back to non-PBR Firestorm. If there are not major improvements before the old version expires, I will be retiring from SL.