Update February 25th: As per a comment from Jessica Lyon, Firestorm have now merged the Server-side Baking code and updates to RLVa into one of their private repositories.
On the 13th February, 2013, the Firestorm team hosted a question-and-answer session in which they could outline the current status of the Firestorm viewer, the issues the team (and SL) are facing, and outline plans for both the immediate future and longer-term as well as address questions from the audience.
While the meeting was recorded, the Firestorm team are aware that many of their users have hearing difficulties, and / or prefer to read text. It is because of this that this transcript has been provided, otgether with the original recording itself. When reading it, please remember:
- This is not a word-for-word transcript of the entire meeting. While all quotes given are as they are spoken in the video, to assist in readability and maintain the flow of conversation, not all asides, jokes, interruptions, etc., have been included in the text present here
- If there are any sizeable gaps in comments from a speaker which resulted from asides, questions to other speakers or requests for images to be displayed, these are indicated by the use of “…”.
- Timestamps are provided as guidance should anyone wish to hear the comments in full from any speaker on the video
- Questions were asked in chat during the meeting and while speakers were talking. This inevitably meant that replies to questions would lag well behind when they were orginially asked. Therefore, to provide context for both questions and answers, questions have been included in the transcript and timestamped at the point at which each is addressed by a member of the Firestorm team
- The meeting proper commences at 16:36 into the video, and this is the point at which the transcript starts.
Related Links
- Meeting video on YouTube
- Firestorm: where next and early looks
- Avatar Baking: “and the clock has started!”
- CHUI: no, not a Wookie, a viewer from LL – with feedback requested
- Materials processing: the what, why and where
- Materials processing: more sneak peeks
- Firestorm classes
Please use the page numbers below to start reading / navigate through the transcript.
Looks like SSB introducction should be put off until mid-May…
Where are classes? Thanks
Information about Firestorm classes (location, schedule, etc.) can be found in the wiki at http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/firestorm_classes
Have added the link into the two Related Links sections and the body of the transcript. Thanks, Ansariel
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Pingback: Q&A Results « Firestorm Viewer – The Phoenix Firestorm Project Inc.
Isn’t anyone besides me a little concerned that an annoyance or a pet peeve dating from 2011 when sl adopted openGL3 is seemingly the logic behind moving a setting currently required for seeing materials in SL in 2013 is getting bundled off in to the “ultra” graphics settings? I refer to comments from 1:06:45 – 1:09:35. Also saying if you want to see the “materials project”, makes it sound as though materials are a temporary feature or something, which is not my understanding at all. I see them as a very welcome much anticipated and permanent new feature of content creation in SL, though obviously optional rather than required.
I guess I can see a TPV deciding to use different default start up settings than the LL viewer for any number of reasons or even on the advice of an astrologer, but taking what the LL (sort of a default itself) viewer uses as a medium high default, (which on my set up is the same as what they used to call “medium” and moving that off to “high ultra” strikes me as a bit more than merely choosing a different set of defaults. In fact it strikes me as flat out misleading and irresponsible unless the FS team knows something about the terrible costs of running deferred rendering, why not just leave it in medium or medium high?
I was hoping that we could at least potentially start using normal maps without having to put in a note card explaining why the product you just rezzed might not look nearly as nice as the picture you saw in the ad. If this note card must also explain that the setting the end user needs to apply will be in different places on different viewers, and that some viewers might have even have re-branded as ULTRA HIGH what other viewers will treat as commonplace, then I don’t see this boding well for materials being welcomed as the prim savers and realism enhancers they can be.
Sorry for that run on sentence.
In closing please, people QUESTION the wisdom of this sort of move and what it means for the community as a community that might one day see the same stuff the same way and even maybe the way the person who created it hoped they would. Meantime, you can detach and delete your invisi-prims, open GL3 rendered that ‘project’ obsolete a while ago.
I can see both sides of the discussion – so to take the flip side to your comments…
Many people in SL are, as Firestorm state, entirely unaware of deferred rendering, what it does and what it means (e.g. in terms of non-functional invisiprims). I’m not talking relatively new users either – I need both hands and my feet to count the number of people of 4+ years experience in SL as to the problem of invisiprims and deferred rendering – as they all still wear boots /shoes which rely on invisiprins and couldn’t understand why people kept nudging them about “broken shoes”.
Materials aside, running the viewer in deferred mode comes at a performance cost. How ig a performance cost really depends on a wide variety of things – and not always purely the GPU someone has (I’ve had comments passed in this blog that my Ge9800GT running a 5+ year-old PC gets far better frame rates in deferred than more recent PCs with more capable GPUs. As a result, and in addition to the above:
When all of these factors are taken into account, and even with the best will in the world in trying to communicate to everyone what materials actually means and what is required to see the benefits of materials once it starts to make it presence felt – particularly given that so few people actually read blogs, be tween LL’s owen, the Firestorm blog, this one, or any other reporting on SL news – then it is very possible a lot of people are going to get upset for one of two reasons:
While these might sound like trivial matters, they can rapdily add-up in terms of support calls, etc.
Ergo, one can actually understand the Firestorm team erring on the side of caution initially – particularly given that materials, with the best will in the world, isn’t going to transform the look of SL overnight – or even in a couple of months. It will take time. Plus, there is no reason why, as people become better acquainted with materials as the usage spreads, the Firestorm team cannot adjust their default settings to be more in-line with LLs.
For my part, as both a Firestorm user and someone keen to play more with materials, I didn’t really have an issue with Jessica moving on the side of caution.
Deferred not only causes a perfomance hit, but in it’s current state it opens a can of new bugs that are all long-known to LL but haven’t been fixed since.
Personally, the most annoying bug is that LL didn’t just only break the invisiprims, they also break partially transparent textures in the form of colors being calculated wrong if they get hit by projector lights. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, have a look at this picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ansariel/8492749359 While the transition of the foot to the lower leg looks perfectly okay in non-deferred mode, you will look just as somebody wearing invisiprims: plain stupid! And this is going to happen to a lot of content, especially content using the currently highly used blending textures for seamless transition of mesh body parts – for instance the shoes, mesh hands, other “bits”…
This is a common issue in deferred rendering and there are actually ways to mitigate this effect. Also this bug has been reported to LL almost 1.5 years ago until it was finally closed as expected behavior due to performance reasons: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SH-2638
While the materials project itself is really nice, the bugs in the current state of the deferred rendering pipeline renders it pretty much useless. Unfortunately nobody seem to care at least until now. Maybe it changes if more people will suddenly find themself looking stupid – or somebody will rise some awareness of the issue… /me looks at Inara
Yeah, aware of the other issues, and have poked about some of them. confined myself to invisiprims as Jess mentioned them in the meeting, so it’s a point of contact / context with her comments
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Not sure – from a lay user’s perspective (as opposed from apurely technical standpoint) – bugs in deferred rendering leave it “useless”; “problematic”, yes, but many do actually get by with it in the state it is in. But the fact there are issues is a valid point.
As to raising awareness … with whom? If LL, then I can always shuffle along an d make room for you on the bench at the Opendev meetings
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i get the ‘caution’ approach, but to me erring on the side of caution would mean stopping short of making an ultra graphics settings requirement for what other viewers decide deserves treatment as a mid range resource user. at any rate it isn’t about what i want or think, i was hoping to just get people to think and debate it a bit more. and in fact it isn’t really about any particular setting or this particular setting that i think there needs to be more thinking and debate on. the real issue to me is, is it helpful, is it in the service of or on the side of caution to further divide people’s view of and experience of the same place and the same things? i think the popularity of invisi-prims (sorry i ever mentioned them now lol, but btw, they were not so great with semi trans or trans textures either) is insufficient reason to send the message that this setting and features dependent on it should be approached by everyone with caution. when i say everyone, what i mean is maybe there is a computer that on first install would get a recommendation of an ultra high graphics setting, but i have no idea what it would be comprised of, and i sure don’t run one. like you my 5 yr old clunker is a good quality one and gets me around in style, but it is hardly a high end machine at this point.
speaking of which, curiously, in terms of caution a clean install of Firestorm starts me off with higher graphics settings recommendations and a higher LOD than a clean install of the LL viewer, which leads me to mistrust both equally in terms of what either can glean about my hardware capabilities or preferences are likely to be.
@ Anseriel i had never noticed the semi trans and projector thing, i’ll go test it, but since you can’t get projectors except in deferred lighting, maybe the projectors are to blame somehow not the lighting mode(?). anyway i have used deferred lighting daily since it became available and also do have nice mesh feet with semi trans blending, so i will go shine a light on those puppies.
Actually it is a common issue with how deferred rendering works. Semi-transparent objects also contain the color information of the object behind it and this will fool the lighting model, resulting in wrong colors. I also have a (NSFW
) video where the effect is pretty obvious as certain body parts suddenly turn into awfully wrong colors.
Oh, I’m in full agreement as to trying to encourage discussion, etc. I’d rather see to it that people are informed as widely as possible through available means – blogs, forum posts, etc., both via LL and elsewhere sooner rather than later, even allowing for my earlier statement that not everyone reads blogs, etc.
Leacing invisiprims / alphas aside (I also regret referring to the former in my reply), deferred does present a significant performance impact on the viewer. Until materials gain widespread use in SL, this is potentially going to leave a lot of people upset, regardless of the information available regarding the benefits for materials, etc. All people will see is a sudden drop in viewer performance between installs for little real benefit (as it is going to take time for materials to make their presence felt) oir real understanding as to why, despite any campaign to raise awareness. So there is going to be be shouting and gnashing of teeth and possible backlash. That’s got to initially weigh on any decisions made towards defaults, at least in the first instance, when it comes to changing things, particularly given the size of the FS user base.
Which is not to say I necessarily agree with the FS team’s decision. Just that I can understand it – and as mentioned, it doesn’t have to always be that way. As materials usage spreads across the grid, there will be more time to better educate users (and for users to educate one another), and encourage them to try deferred and witness the results first hand. As such, I don’t perhaps see the Firestorm team’s decision as necessarily dividing people’s in-world experience to any great extent when it comes to seeing the impact of materials (as opposed to the impact of deferred on performance). And at the end of the day, it’s not as if enabling deferred requires the download of another viewer or a relog or anything – it’s just a tick in a check box in Preferences.
I use Niran and exodus always with defered rendering and ful, shadows.
My soulmate the same!
We only have issues with the inv prims, nothing else!
I just wanted to thank whomever for the transcription. Also thank you to JL and EM and the whole team whose names I don’t know WF and others too. And the support group. Given I consider myself an intermediate-semi advanced level computer user and it made me sad only 2% read the blog. I see why you have the post up on the viewer log-in screen. I sure don’t know what else to say, but, I am glad LL is fixing the texture problem (I’m assuming this has to do with copybotting textures and their huge leak of info finally being closed.) so good for them! Huzzah! Hopefully they give everyone the time they need. Thank you so much everyone for doing this, unpaid. Thank you, thank you thank you.
Thank you, Rebecca
. Putting the transcript together to a bit of time, but happy to have been able to do so.
Gald you’re also enjoying your time with Firestorm, and I know the Firestorm team appreciate positive feedback, so thank you for that also. However, and without wishing to sound in any way rude, this blog isn’t directly associated with Firestorm, so I’m not sure as to how many of the team read articles / comments here. Might I suggest you consider posting the feedback also to their blog, so they will be sure to read it and appreciate it directly?
As to testure problem – I assume you’re referring to the Server-side Baking – this may offer a sort-term solution for some elements of copybotting, but that’s not the primary aim of the project. It really is directed towards resolving the long-standing issue of avatar bake fail. However, as the new viewer side code might take a while to filter out into the wider world and malicious viewers, it may lead to something of a reduction in copybotting instances – but if so, it’ll only be unless / until those producing such viewers implement the code at their end. As such, I wouldn’t look upon it as a resolution to the broader issue of skin / clothing content ripping.
i see the video but did not see the transcript, where is it?
If you look at the section under the video – below the LIKE THIS options, there is a series of page numbers (1 through 7) – click on these to read the transcript. Sorry it is not any clearer, but that’s how this particular WordPress template opts to place page numbers.