Firestorm Team Finally Adds PBR to Second Life's Most Popular Viewer; User Reaction Is Firestorm Of Its Own.

Image featuring PBR by Terry Fotherington

A week after Linden Lab added PBR-based mirrors to its own Second Life viewer, the third-party Firestorm Viewer has added physically based rendering to its latest build:

It is time! After nearly seven months of testing and seeking bug fixes and merging improvements and features, we are unleashing the Firestorm PBR viewer today. PBR was first released by Linden Lab back in November 2023. We have been working with them to help ensure that bugs and glitches in those early releases were addressed before we passed it on. Since then many improvements have been made

Much more info here. Since Firestorm is overwhelmingly the preferred viewer of most active Second Life users, this update essentially means PBR is now a core feature to the virtual world.

For regular SLers, as Firestorm project lead Beq tells me, that means being ready for some major adjustments:

"In terms of tuning the release blog [post] has some advice on tools we've provided. The biggest problem people have is lighting, not understanding (not reading and/or not wanting to understand) that a new lighting model means that you need to review all aspects of a scene, from the WindLight/EEP to the local lighting.

"There's a new normal in town, it'll take time for people to adjust to countless years of bleached out colors that we (as creators and users) have overcompensated for, leaving things super saturated now that things are being re-aligned to a real world standard."

With the need for adjustments and many not understanding those needs, we're already seeing the user community generate another firestorm of controversy and questions. That's perhaps best expressed in this Reddit meme from on Charity-418 /SecondLife.

Some comments from that thread:

People are losing their dang minds.

People are realizing they may need to upgrade or even replace their ancient potato PCs if they want decent performance using a PBR viewer. You can no longer turn off advanced lighting or all of the PBR rendering to compensate.

It's the same thing every time FS updates the client. As FS has in world support in the way of volunteer CSR's people tend to take their frustrations out on them. Even worse when it's a change like PBR.

More SL sturm and drang here. Much of this should blow over as the community figures out how to adjust (as they always do), but this enforces Beq's prophetic warning to me last month: With PBR full integrated, Second Life now performs like a PC game with AAA graphics.

Please support posts like these by buying Making a Metaverse That Matters and joining my Patreon!

Become a member!

Comments

[wmg]

The arrogance of technologists is not doing anything to calm this firestorm down — "not understanding (not reading and/or not wanting to understand)." Honestly.

There is not a single appliance in my house I am expected to replace as often as a computer. Many regular users of SL cannot afford to jump on this AAA-graphics treadmill tech-forward people seem so attached to. I get that people want to keep improving capabilities, I really do, but it's not surprising that dismissing people who can't afford it with such condescension generates some heat.

[not that simple]

@wmg - Agree!!!

[Jorge Alberto]

ancient potato pcs? not all have money to buy a gamer pc

[Lusus]

@wmg Very well said. There will be many residents effectively locked out of SL now. The irony of this is, that Second Life is itself apparently built on outdated tech, yet LL is beginning to turn away those who can't afford to keep updating their PC.

[Luther Weymann]

New Firestorm viewer
Rez prim
Follow everyone's mirror directions over and over
No mirror
Repeat many times
Get BugSplat for the first time in years
Firestorm closes
Mirror attempt fail
Go watch Netflix. It is more fun

[Denise]

"Replace ancient potato PC's".

Ok, but here's the problem. Linden Labs OWN MIN SPECS on their website is for...a potato PC. Second Life is NOT a triple a game. It's running on 20 year old OpenGL calls on 25 year old base code. Triple A games do NOT make my RTX3080's fans run at full bore the second I open the game. Second Life however with its poorly implemented and badly applied PBR does make my 3080 fans run at full bore.

As a former game developer (Activision) I know exactly what's happening in the background with the Lab's forcing of Vulkan platform technology into the outdated and poorly patched OpenGL technology, the simple fact is, they done a piss poor job. The Vulkan platform, which is where PBR is taken from, was never intended to be shoehorned into the 25+ year old platform of OpenGL. If Linden Lab really wanted to update Second Life, they would replace the basecode of the viewer with Vulkan code, which is the successor to OpenGL.

Why is it a successor? Because as a platform...OpenGL has been dead for about 7 years. Linden Lab KNEW development of openGL had ceased seven years ago, because myself and a lot of other people TOLD THEM. Linden Lab KNEW the developers of OpenGL had launched Vulkan. Linden Lab KNEW that their game was now sitting on a rotting pile of code that was no longer being updated. Linden Lab KNEW the longer they waited, the worse it would get.

The moral of this story? Linden Lab is incompetent.

[jackson redstar]

maybe that is it we are just too used to it the way it was - but right now, this really doesnt look good. Colors are too over saturated and skin tones in particular quite funky looking. Every day sims with every day EEP everything is too bright now ... I am sure either we will get used to it or more tweaks are coming, but it is what it is

[Tiara]

The solution is simple, that Firestorm should stop blocking old versions, so anyone can choose which version to run, and not force people to buy super pcs

[Clara Seller]

It's nice to see the sane comments here. I have a decent gaming PC and this new Firestorm version is buggy, buggy, buggy and a drag on the frame rates. Clothes and attachments don't rez after teleports. Things look different, but not necessarily better.

We are hearing the usual gaslighting cheerleaders drag out the old pom-poms and bullhorns and accuse customers of being "bad", "cheap" and "change-resistant" At least now we can point to Sansar with our middle finger and say "mmmmmhmmmmm".

[Val]

I like it.

[Graeme]

It's shite, I'm sorry to say. It does very little to enhance the Second Life experience and is extremely buggy and takes forever to load textures. It doesn't look more real life-like, it makes SL look like a 1990's Star Wars movie.

I lasted an hour with it, found that no amount of tweaking made it less twitchy, and went back to the old FS Viewer.

[Vivienne Schell]

Visual Improvement: SL in Technicolor. Woha, what an improvement. Back into the colorful 1970´s. Besides that earthshaking change: Performance killer. LL can say byebye to everyone running a midrange PC now. Because no one will go for a RTX 4080 only to prevent the inavoidable GPU overheating - in exhange for 50 fps. What a mess of badly coded crap.

[Jorge Alberto]

Why does Roblox have 200 million users? because any potato pc can run that crap. It's a shame that SL now aims to become an elite platform. Since the pandemic and the cryptocurrency mining craze, PCs have become a luxury item. Hopefully SL reconsiders and doesn't scare away the few users it still has left.

[Blaze]

so far all i know is how hostile PBR is to my non PBR viewer. I end up in a PBR area and my system crashes, and it doesn't even know what PBR is. I have one of those so called "potato PCs" but it outperforms all others i;ve used. it even runs ultra when my old gamer could not. This one isn a dell inspiron intel gold dual core processor. intelgraphics 4GB of RAM and .5 TB HDD. Gamer was AMD Radeon Chipset 16GB of RAM and 1 TB SSD it choked on medium. i exclusively run the Genesis viewer. I knwo i can't afford a high end computer to run SL so where does that leave folks like me? we put money in LL pockets

[Tummy McWigglesworth]

Dear average and valued normal users of Second Life:
Simply stop putting your money into SL and cancel your premium accounts.
Linden Labs doesn't care about you, and is now willing to eliminate you from the experience by personally insulting you for not being able to run their ramshackle super-patched and obsolete software base + PBR on your 'potato' PC.
The snobby users (who also happen to be top creators and sellers on the markeplace allegedly making a living) are happy to insult you, shame you and shake their finger at you to upgrade your PC - that does fine EVERYWHERE ELSE!
"Oh potato PC user, buy super $$$ computer to run my unoptimized assets with sloppy PBR addition - and oh don't forget you'll have to learn about EEP, reflection probes, etc to get everything to look right", etc
SL effectively is now a tech nerd experimental platform - if it hasn't been all this time.
If you want to build and create here - good luck! With recent changes and overall, more and more PRO creators are in the arena, making better and better stuff, selling for SUPER LOW prices - so there is no point for you to even compete with them here! The fun, the average user and creator pales in comparison. If you're an aspiring creator don't get entangled with SL which will waste your time and energy, with custom pipelines and workflows and go to a true AAA platform where you will get paid what you are worth, and your REAL skills and time benefit you in the long run.
Slapping PBR and more shiney things into SL isn't going to make it better, but it will certainly lock out many many users.