My card is a GTX 4070 Super, but I made these changes and will check frame rate later. I attended a DJ/dance at Cafe Wellstone with NO issues and good framerates.
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I’ve got back rent to pay and a mess in my inventory; some of my mainland parcels went poof and it’s time to scale back even more. It’s time to think about deleting a lot of my “store” and try to unload the no-copy DFS items that technically can be sold. Dhughan may be scaling back greatly, also.
The latest Firestorm is too much for my 12-15 year old CPU and I was limping along on a “Legacy” PBR viewer. I looked weirdly shiny and only lasted 20 minutes at a friend’s DJ event before I got a memory error and crashed out.
A couple of days ago I posted on the Community Technology forum (SecondLife.com)looking for reasons to buy a new desktop instead of a new laptop; the discussion was actually helpful (rare in Community Forum threads).
Available at a local PC store that specializes in both pre-built and custom built computers, this looks like a winner. I may wait for the Black Friday sales but this is already a pretty good deal. I haven’t tried to compare this to a “specced out” build part by part yet.
ASUS ROG Strix G16CHR-MS776S Gaming PC Intel Core i7 14th Gen 14700KF 2.5GHz Processor; NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Super Dual 12GB GDDR6X; 32GB DDR5-4800 RAM; 1TB Solid State Drive
This is one reason I fell out of Second Life. Technological advances that got beyond my ability to adapt.
Lost interest after making some progress in classes, as the new techniques got more complex.
Also, I was waiting for Firestorm to update, as I dislike the main viewer.
I could no longer get excited and make things. But hey! There’s other reasons to log in, like socializing, shopping, etc.
side note: I deleted the mirror site at WordPress.com as there was no reason to keep it, and it was having a tech issue.
Via: PBR Materials
It’s been a year since I last logged in to Second Life, or updated here. Why?
- I got frustrated with trying to learn Blender yet again, with PBR just coming in
- I got frustrated with feeling like stuff I had created was hopelessly outdated
- I felt pressured by another resident to be! Friends! In! Voice! And felt skeeved.
- I realized that I no longer wanted to take the time to “craft” and “sell” stuff.
- I recognized that my desktop computer might need to be replaced with PBR coming.
- First Life got busy over the holidays
- My couch was much more comfortable than my computer desk
- My laptop couldn’t handle Second Life at all, what a wheezer-geezer
What do I want to do now?
- I’d like to socialize with old online friends again and listen to music. I’ve kept up with some of their updates via blogs and Mastodon. I miss my friends.
- I’d have to agree to share my Mastodon account with the cat. She is adorbs.
- I want to downsize my multiple Second Life paid accounts. Just wasting money.
- That would mean cleaning up my mainland parcel, reducing the footprint
- I’d like to shut down all my SL Marketplace stores (Dhughan’s too).
- I’d like to sell off the DFS stuff if possible – I was in the middle of that last year.
Meanwhile, an old friend is having an event in Open Sim tomorrow. The last time I tried to install and run the Dreamgrid software and get my old Haleakaloha island sim up, it failed. I didn’t feel like trying to figure it out on my own, and my in-house tech support, Rock Fall, is totally uninterested in this Second Life/Open Sim stuff, especially if it involves messing around with our household network router settings. But I feel a sort of pull toward trying to get my old castaway island OAR started up again, and restarting my tropical island mystery narrative again.
It would be satisfiying to get stuff running again and enable hypergrid teleports so that I could pop in to my friend’s event and see who else makes it there, but… so much Real Life stuff to do today.
Bread to be baked – it’s got great riz and it’s ready to go in the oven
Porch planter mess to clean up and re-pot while weather is still nice
Postcards to Voters to write. Enough said about RL politics but there it is.
At least this blog is still working, and I’ve found a solution to not wanting to even touch my desktop machine (there’s some sort of aversion thing there, probably due to the feelings of frustration and avoidance detailed above).
Fancy new Bluetooth keyboard and my perfectly adequate ipad Mini make for a comfortable and portable blogging experience.
What to blog in future?
Probably my latest gaming obsession, the Habby Souls game. And fun things that I do online if I manage to get back into Second Life. I used to really enjoy photography and Flickr, but there again, is my graphics card up to the task? Or is a new gaming desktop required to really do it justice?
Hmm. What shall I do?
I may experiment with installing the ActivityPub plugin and making this blog a federated instance, but for now the little “repost to Mastodon” plugin is fine.
Beyond that, who knows? Meanwhile, I have RL actibbities to accomplish. So many actibbities!
Sounds interesting, were any #SecondLife #machinima works submitted? There’s a separate immersive exhibition, patronised by artist Jean-Michel Jarre.
For its inaugural edition, a committee of industry experts and Festival de Cannes representatives, under the supervision of the General Delegate of the Festival de Cannes, will select eight immersive works in competition. Additionally, a curated selection of non-competitive works, illustrating the synergy between immersive experiences and cinema, will complement the program.
My chosen community in Second Life is going through some exciting changes – Sheriff Fuzzball Ortega is reorganizing things, and a crew of folks are working on various remodeling and rebuilding projects around Steelhead City. There will be parcels available for rental very soon, and my shop is probably going to move across the street to make way for a civic improvement project.
While thinking about these changes, I rezzed out some of the buildings I have in inventory to see if I’d want to change things completely. Most of my DFS items are packed and ready to sell in another platform sale, probably this weekend, but a few things like seeds and so on will still be sold at St Helens Dry Goods, as they’re “in theme” for the shop as of yet. New products are in the vapor-pipe that is my brain. Updates are planned. Stuff happenin.’
Here are the buildings that I may swap around, or lend out for the big civic refresh. Some of them I included just because it was a long time since I’ve seen and evaluated them – the best of the lot are the mesh “Soho” ones, which are modular, and the Trompe l’Oeil ones.
Chic Aeon raised an interesting point on the transition to PBR:
On the plus side folks that are still building using inworld tools (prim builds) will have new options for a better look and that might encourage some new users to become simple creators. There was definitely something –well just GOOD — about building out on the sand box starting with a cube.
Yes, I think so. I uploaded my coffee mug today to the test grid, Firestorm PBR viewer, but using the current materials workflow. It was gorgeously glossy. Uploaded for realsies, normal Firestorm, and it was harder to get the nice ceramic satin-gloss. But possible! Old stuff looked good, and the glTF test was drag-and-drop easy.
The test grid is one big sandbox. Social building can be a thing again. glTF materials will make texturing easier for new builders. Now to provide those textures…
Whoa! While browsing Rei’s site, stumbled on to this open-source tool. #SecondLife is moving to a PBR workflow “real soon now,” and the big content creators will have a painfully steep learning curve converting their products’ textures. This will help, expect SL to bury this info deep in the PBR wiki.
While doing homework for the coming #glTF workflow in #SecondLife I struggled with #channelpacking textures for manipulating how light reflects off of materials in a game engine. It’s easy in Photoshop, harder in GIMP.
There used to be a plug-in for extracting different kinds of “maps” from images, but it was easy to screw up. The manual method is tedious; you can’t just plop a texture into an RGB channel, you have to make each greyscale.
This open source tool might be helpful, and the aiaicapta.in is cited in the SL wiki as authoritative. The same site also has a good explanation of the pending PBR workflow, but for backwards compatibility, it’s good to know both.
Now some more fundamentals for review. If you find this series of posts tedious – please filter on #BlenderGoon as I’m trying to watch all his instructional videos in order.
Goon (Goonther Blackcinder) is a #SecondLife resident who teaches at #BlenderSchool inworld at (SLURL) GoodVibes
There’s an active Discord group – there’s an invite link in the school landing area. You can support his work on Patreon at this link.