Why World's End will NOT be supporting PBR, for now.

I have spent August back in Second Life, getting to grips with PBR properly and reading the forums to inform myself and gauge sentiment.

Wow, people really seem to hate it. lol. Maybe that's not fair, but the reception seems to be fairly "mixed", and for good reason. In typical Linden Labs form, they have delivered a hacky half-baked version of PBR seemingly designed to annoy as many residents as possible.

I have come to the conclusion that, as it stands I will not be supporting PBR content until PBR becomes more generally established in SL, a process that could take years.

This is for a number of reasons. The TLDR is: its very buggy and will be too demanding on hardware for the average user to create a full PBR region for quite some time. 

The increased texture load is not insignificant and a single region fully loaded with PBR content + PBR avatars will bring even my 4090 + 64GB RAM rig to a stuttering limp.

Reports from the SL community so far have been mixed. Some getting mild performance gains, others barely able to login. 

Furthermore, the complexity of setting up PBR for the end user currently is rather convoluted. As I understand it:

For PBR content to look "correct", you have to use reflection probes. Which are essentially invisible prims that have to be placed all over your sim to create reflection data. 

This is fine on the surface. These are required for PBR to work in most settings. BUT......They cannot be larger than regular prims, which is INSANE. This means you are going to be using 100-200 overlapping prims per region JUST for decent reflection probe coverage.

And that is not the end of it, I recently found out you cant even use the updated daylight settings. You need to use an EEP setting specifically "tuned" for PBR, as legacy ones contain too much blue.

I just cant picture the average end user jumping through these hoops.

And the bugs.....oh the bugs. Currently I have identified:

*Scaling objects with legacy textures no longer works, they scale with the object and need to be reset with each alteration of the mesh or object. if this is a setting somewhere we now have to activate, I cant find it. When working with legacy Blinn-Phong textures, they also sometimes distort and "break" if a PBR texture is also applied. This bug is unfortunately already present now in opensim too.

*Firestorm and LL viewer both seem to suffer from constant "texture thrashing" (reloading over and over) for certain users (myself included). it seems to be an issue with the rendering pipleine, as Cool VL viewer works correctly for me and they have apparently made some enhancements. 

*Screen Space Reflections is required for mirrors to work correctly, but it breaks sim water - making it flicker constantly. 

I'm sure there are more I didn't find yet. So yeah, overall I am not convinced currently. There are many bugs to iron out, and it remains to be seen how adopted it will become in the short term.

But there IS good news. Regular old BP textures look pretty nice under normal daylight conditions. So my plan is to begin releasing things and only switch over to "full" PBR when I see there is demand and people actually want to use it.