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.
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Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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