Can I Delete Windlight Settings?

[Czari Zenovka]

There are a handful of windlight settings (although I have not yet gone through all of the ones provided in the Singularity viewer, but there are TONS!) that I enjoy using on a semi-regular basis but have to scroll through a long list to find them, if I remember their names at all.  Is there a way to delete windlight settings that I won't use or, better yet, (and possibly wishful thinking) a way to organize my favorites?

[Dresden Ceriano]

You just need to delete them from the folder in which they are installed.

Windows XP

• Skies - C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\SecondLife\user_settings\windlight\skies
• Water - C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\SecondLife\user_settings\windlight\water

Windows Vista and 7

• Skies - C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife\user_settings\windlight\skies
• Water - C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife\user_settings\windlight\water

Instead of the Second Life folders, look for the Singularity folders in the same directory and that should get you where you need to go.  AFAIK, there's no way to organize them.

...Dres

[Czari Zenovka]

Woot!  THANK YOU, Dres!!!

Yeah, I didn't have high hopes for the folder organization thing.

[Venus Petrov]

Once you delete, you may wish to copy and paste those remaining into a folder and store them in a separate place on your hard drive (and offline storage for safe-keeping).  Then, when you decide to update your viewer you can delete the WL settings that come in with the new viewer and C&P those you have saved into the appropriate folders.

[Perrie Juran]

I've not messed with this so someone else could comment whether this is viable, but it would seem simpler to me to copy the ones you do use into a folder and use that instead.  There are so many it could take you forever to delete all the ones you don't like or use.

[Ceka Cianci]

hey how is this Singularity viewer nowadays compared to FS..

i used to  use this before they went v3..

how are they as a v3?

i mean performance wise?

[Czari Zenovka]

Great idea, Venus...thank you.

[Czari Zenovka]

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Ceka Cianci wrote:

hey how is this Singularity viewer nowadays compared to FS..

i used to  use this before they went v3..

how are they as a v3?

i mean performance wise?

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I have only been on FS for limited amounts of time here and there so I can't personally speak to a comparison but I can say that I really, REALLY like Singularity.  A good number of my friends use/d FS and were regularly complaining about crashing, slow rezzing, etc.  Granted a lot of that has to do with one's PC and ISP so that has to be factored in; however some of my friends switched to Singularity when I told them how much I was enjoying it and now use it as either their primary or secondary viewer of choice.  It is considered a "lighter" viewer in that it doesn't put as much strain on one's PC.

Even though FS can be run in Phoenix mode, which I tried, Singularity (imo) looks and performs much closer to Phoenix than FS in Phoenix mode.

[Coby Foden]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

There are so many it could take you forever to delete all the ones you don't like or use.

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Indeed so Perrie. Hopefully the viewer developers invent a way to organize the WindLight settings somehow. In Firestorm there are:

• 725 WindLight sky settings

• 57 WindLight water settings

      

It may well be that the number of those will increase and increase.

For example when taking photos it takes forever to scroll through all of those to find something specific. And it is a pain in the butt to go and delete all what one thinks one would never use.

[Tamara Artis]

What you can do is use the Edit sky settings and, after finding your favorite windlight change something in it, one  number will do, then rename it by putting a ! sign in front of the name and save as a new sky setting. This will automatically put that setting on the top of the list so you can find it quickly next time. 

[Perrie Juran]

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Tamara Artis wrote:

What you can do is use the Edit sky settings and, after finding your favorite windlight change something in it, one  number will do, then rename it by putting a ! sign in front of the name and save as a new sky setting. This will automatically put that setting on the top of the list so you can find it quickly next time. 

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Great suggestion!

I do that with my Inventory Folders to float the ones I use the most to the top also.

[Czari Zenovka]

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Tamara Artis wrote:

What you can do is use the Edit sky settings and, after finding your favorite windlight change something in it, one  number will do, then rename it by putting a ! sign in front of the name and save as a new sky setting. This will automatically put that setting on the top of the list so you can find it quickly next time. 

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Oooooooo...brilliant!!!!

[Griss Alexandre]

!!WARNING!!
Please don't do what I did and delete a bunch of windlight sky files, then log in and get a bazillion error messages! These popups (The day cycle file references a missing sky file) appear when you first log in, and you won't be able to do anything until you keep clicking until they quit popping up. It is not pretty. I did this a couple of years ago and restored my windlight sky backup files to get rid of them. But now I know the correct way to prevent these errors. Why did I recently need to solve this issue? Yes, I forgot and did it again!

The problem was day cycle files. See Torley's video on day cycles here:

I had not been using day cycles, and didn't even know what they were. I had been making a change in windlight and it would look that way until I went in and changed it again.

I use the Firestorm viewer & WIndows 7 at the moment. Firestorm has several day cycles you can choose from, not like in Torley's video where there was only one and it had to have a certain name. Getting to the day cycles was slightly different in my version of Firestorm than in the video, but not difficult.

Here's what I recommend you do:
(1) In the same folder that contains the windlight sky files there is another file called days. In it are the day cycles. Make a backup of the sky files and a backup the day cycle files.
(2) Take a look all your day cycle choices inworld.
(3) If there are some you don't think you will ever use, make a note of their name(s).
(4) Browse to the day cycles folder.
(5) Now you can remove any of the day cycle files you don't want to keep.
(6) For the day cycle files you are keeping: You will need to double click and open each xml file and see which of the windlight files are referenced there. If you delete those windlight sky files, you will get the error messages.
(7) For the files that aren't referenced in the day cycles you want to keep: You can remove the sky files you don't want.

I used a program called Duplicate File Finder, from http://www.ashisoft.com, to clean up all the sky files I had been keeping from various viewers for years. I had about 1200 of them! What it did was find all the xml files that were identical, not by name, but by contents. That cut the number down by almost half. I still will be weeding some out, but more carefully next time.

I hope this helps,

Griss