How the new version of the Firestorm viewer with support for Physically-Based Rendering enrages its users

As to be expected, the Second Life community is completely exploding over PBR, now that the single most popular viewer has rolled out the first version with Physically-Based Rendering. And I don't mean exploding with cheer.

The announcement thread on Reddit shows people with Nvidia GeForce RTX cards who suddenly have slideshow-like FPS for some reason. I must admit this makes me wonder because I get fairly great results out of a Radeon RX590 which is even less high-end. Under Linux. With an open-source driver from the Debian testing repos. In OpenSim, but that shouldn't make so much of a difference unless Second Life surrounds you with 2K PBR content everywhere now.

Another Reddit thread is about how Second Life users take their frustration out on the volunteer Firestorm support in Second Life as in in-world. They catch all the anger that should rather go directly to Linden Lab.

Despite what some users experience with dedicated video hardware that partly isn't even six years old, it's apparent that many of those who complain about the PBR viewers being slow are on toasters that shouldn't have been used for anything 3-D in the first place, especially not virtual worlds full of amateur-made, unoptimised content. Worlds in which optimisation is quality degradation, and ARC is a measurement for good looks.

At least among the Firestorm users, over 10% of them are on mobile hardware that's at least ten years old which usually means on-board graphics. In fact, people are still whining over 32-bit Windows support being axed because their only (or most powerful) computer is so ancient that it still boots 32-bit Windows. And yet, they use it for 3-D virtual worlds because they haven't been able to afford any computer, new or used, in a decade and a half.

So the sharp drop in FPS came not only from a new rendering engine, but also from turning stuff on that was off before and then ripping off the switches. Advanced lighting model, bump maps and normal maps, transparent water, shaders, light sources other than the Sun, the Moon and ambient...

The irony is that Linden Lab and the Firestorm team decided to turn the Advanced Lighting Model including normal maps and specular maps permanently on to make normal maps more convenient and more attractive for content creators. I mean, what they currently do is make their content for potato computers on which all graphical bells and whistles have to be turned off, including normal maps. So how do you make small surface details if you can't rely on normal maps? You build them into the mesh itself, making it vastly more complex in the course and cutting into everyone's FPS.

It's also apparent that nobody could be bothered to read up about PBR. Many seem utterly surprised about the FPS drop. They're used to Firestorm becoming slower and slower to them with every release, but not by such degrees. They seem not to have read that this would happen.

The complaints about how stuff suddenly looks differently come for the same reason: People didn't read up on PBR. They seem to think that PBR is ALM with mirrors instead of an entirely new lighting and rendering model. However, PBR also includes High Dynamic Range, and at least in Second Life, both forward rendering and the old ALM have such a low dynamic range that they render everything in pastel tones, and content creators had to tint everything in garishly cartoonish colours to balance that.

What's happening is largely exactly the same as whenever Linden Lab introduces something new: Conservative users reject it because they reject all changes that actually change stuff and can't be turned off. I guess the outcry when viewers dropped the mesh option and permanently forced everyone to see mesh must have been as big as the outcry when mesh was introduced.

At this point, it really is a pity that there's no real OpenSim forum on which people from all grids can congregate and discuss things. OpenSimWorld has built-in forums, but hardly anyone knows because nobody ever pays attention to the left-hand sidebar.

If there was a central place to discuss OpenSim matters, I guess the outcry against the new Firestorm would come a bit more slowly, but be even more extreme, and even more people would be opposed to it and PBR in general. Including those who say they'll never upgrade to Firestorm 7 while still using Firestorm 6.5.6 or 6.4.21 or so.

There would be four reasons for this. One, while the Second Life community is already so old that it needs newbies who stick around to equal users passing away, the OpenSim community manages to be even older on average, and that means even more conservative. Even more than Second Life users, OpenSim users are likely to want OpenSim back the way it was when they joined. There are still people in OpenSim who vocally oppose mesh. And it isn't too unnormal in OpenSim for users who have been around for long enough to have avatars on a 2010 or even 2007 level whereas you risk being ostracised in Second Life if your mesh body is older than 12 months.

Two, OpenSim is basically Second Life for those who can't afford Second Life. You can get land for dirt cheap, and you can get e.g. a Maitreya LaraX, LeLutka EvoX heads and Doux EvoX skins and hair for absolutely free. The latter isn't legal, but still. So it isn't only the cheapskates and the anti-capitalists who flock into OpenSim, but especially those who genuinely don't have the money to have a decent Second Life experience. And if they don't have money for that, it's highly unlikely that they have money for a decent computer. In other words, many of those who use the Firestorm Viewer on mobile hardware from before 2015 are probably OpenSim users. OpenSim has to have an even higher number of toasters per 1,000 users than Second Life.

Three, and this comes on top: Second Life has a three-versions rule. Only the three most recent versions of any given viewer are allowed to connect. OpenSim doesn't have such a rule. Certain grids or sims might limit which viewers their visitors are allowed to use and mostly do so to keep copybotters out, but in general, such a rule doesn't exist. You can use OpenSim with a Firestorm 5.x if you want to, and if you're living in a bubble on a grid that still runs on OpenSim 0.8.2.1 in which next to nobody has a mesh body, and nobody uses BoM. Absolutely having to upgrade your viewer is not part of OpenSim's culture. Instead, it's perfectly normal to keep using old viewers if you reject certain new features, e.g. EEP.

And four, most OpenSim users aren't even used to seeing Blinn-Phong, i.e. the old normal map and specular map model. Most of the time when content is illegally exported from Second Life and put back together, normal maps and specular maps are omitted. Doing so saves time that can be used to churn out more stuff which probably also explains why some importers don't even add the missing AVsitter back into furniture unless it's sex furniture. And besides, so many OpenSim users are on toasters and have normal maps and specular maps off anyway, and it isn't worth adding what next to nobody can see. It's really mostly only a few of OpenSim's own original creators who add normal maps and specular maps, but their creations aren't available on the big popular freebie sims where everyone picks up their stuff nowadays.

So criticism on PBR in OpenSim would be mixed with a lot of "change is bad" attitude. Expect people demanding OpenSim's development split from Second Life's, and OpenSim finally get its own viewer, just so that OpenSim doesn't have to take over all the "new crap" that Linden Lab whips up. Expect some saying this should have happened long ago, up to the point of some old-timers saying that the introduction of mesh was a mistake already and basically wanting OpenSim to look like Second Life did in 2008 for all eternity because that's what they're used to. And that's what they think their toasters can handle because they've all but forgotten what it's like to be surrounded by thousands of prims.