Wagner James Au / New World Notes

PBR before/after comparison from the official Firestorm blog

If you're a Second Life user excitedly waiting for shiny and reflective PBR graphics to get added into Firestorm and other popular third party viewers, here's an important update: 

After some 13 years project managing the large volunteer developer team of Firestorm, the most popular TPV, Jessica Lyons recently announced that she'd handed over the role to Beq Janus. (Jessica will remain CEO of The Phoenix-Firestorm Project, Inc.) So now's a good time as any to thank Jessica for her tireless (and frankly, not fully appreciated by the community) work running the project.

Over the holidays, Beq updated me on the status of PBR in Firestorm:

An early New Year's gift. Firestorm PBR Alpha 7.1.2.72848 is now available from the Phoenix-Firestorm Preview Group.

For all the creators who were at a loss cos rigged LocalMesh has been broken, I have a fix in this update. So please take a look and let me know of any issues.

— Beq (@BeqBeqBeqBeq) December 30, 2023

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

"We updated our alpha release right at the end of December. Right now we still consider it alpha, but that should change real soon, we are waiting on the first big set of Maintenance updates from Linden Lab. Those were (I believe) expected before the holidays, but a last minute issue held them back.

"Once those land, I would like to move us into a beta phase; that essentially declares that the next release [of Firestorm] will be a PBR release (without slapping a date on it)."

Emphasis mine, as it bears emphasizing!

More from Beq:

"PBR is running and stable for many of us. I use it as my daily viewer. However, there are a number of big ticket items, that we are exploring along with Linden Lab (common issues), such as objects failing to render and textures that stay blurry."

"I also have concerns about the user base," as Beq puts it. "Questions such as, how much RAM is really needed now for 'typical' use? I suspect that 16GB is starting to be a minimum requirement, and that leaves a lot of people out in the cold. I'd like to get my head around some stats and then see how we can best support those impacted to make the best of it."

That strongly suggests most laptop owners will not be able to run Firestorm with PBR enabled.

"I would not go so far as to say 'not run'," Beq tells me when I raise that point. "People are still 'running' on 8GB but to get a reasonable experience without having to pare back the settings entirely, 16GB seems to be what you should be aiming for. But as I say, that data is only starting to emerge as more people test and get a broader range of hardware being reported."

For now, if you want to be the first to play with Firestorm updates, click here to join the in-world group.

I am concerned about the added memory requirements for PBR. Then again, I continue to be concerned that Second Life's evolution basically depends on an unpaid, under-appreciated team of volunteers.