Environmental Enhancement Project (aka EEP!) Feedback Thread

[Marianne McCann]

On 4/12/2019 at 2:42 AM, dstauffsl2 said:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/99805182@N05/

I know a thing or 2 about wind light. Being able to get a single sky to look passable using edit environment isn't the point.  Having every sims cycling winlight ruined the default ruined as well as the 100 custom wind lights ruined is. Everywhere I go in sl looks ridiculous now and I'm not interested in opening edit environment and using you up is down left is right logic to fix it. There are many threads on FB of bloggers very upset that they can't photograph now because of this. 

 

I feel your pain, but in your first post, you mentioned "Firestorm." You may be experiencing issues with the transition from "traditional" wind light at the EEP enhancements. Firestorm doesn't have the code yet. Sit tight. 

[Marianne McCann]

On 4/12/2019 at 3:58 PM, Kurshie Muromachi said:

I agree with some of the comments above that a better default sky and water (maybe even a day cycle) could be considered. Explore different possible default textures even for clouds, water, etc.

I manually fixed the super glowy issue by changing the RenderGlowStrength debug setting from .350 to like .220 - .250. That might be a bit hacky way about it though.

Beautiful work.

I'll echo what many others have said. I think it would be wise, once some of these bugs are worked out, to consider some updates to the SL default day cycle utilizing some of what EEP will bring too the table. Nothing overly dramatic, because change is hard -- but our skies can be this breathtaking.

[NiranV Dean]

Ugh. I've had my first test run just now, a short one but i just couldn't care less anymore after seeing this cluster*****, all i wanted was get it over with as fast as possible and close down the Viewer again. Whirly absolutely insisted i should look into EEP and i've made a few notes about everything i've seen and what i've seen is by

FAR.

THE.

WORST.

And i really need to put these words in cap and bold them. I am absolutely speechless what a pile of broken mess you want to sell us. This has been by far the worst experience i have had in Second Life so far, it was a displeasure from login to logout and i could cry tears, that is how much this hurt me.

This is going to be a super rant, by far the biggest, probably most aggressive, destructive and downright insulting rant i have ever written to date and i have done a lot of bad things already.

I'll go through it one by one... where do i even start...

Rendering

It is absolutely, totally and completely broken from back to front. Shadows, lets start with shadows. Shadows have become noticeably worse, they are ugly, pixelated, bad, inaccurate and constantly bug out, clip away and shadow blur is at a point it basically starts destroying itself when i turn around the camera and that's with the minimum draw distance (shadows in your Viewer are draw distance dependent and are most accurate at lowest draw distance).

Note how the shadows are much more pixelated all around.

Shadow pixelation in action when changing angles.

Shadows cutting off on slightly elevated camera angles. This picture almost looks like shadows never existed.

Next up we got water, the water is downright broken the water has many issues, from not being fogged correctly (or at all) to harshly cancelling out sky and its effects and weirdly mixing with suns and moons. Not only that the Viewer seemingly tends to forget to render it at all such as when turning around and sometimes it simply ignores atmospherics completely. To make matters worse it also vanishes when camming close to it.

Image courtesy of Whirly. You can see the moon/sun being clipped by water, you can see what looks like them being applied to the fog.

You can see its not fogged right or at all and vanishes when zooming closer a bit.

It lags behind and clips out when turning you can easily see it with foggy skies.

Here it forgot to add atmospherics completely, it happens at random and stays like that for up to a few seconds...

Next topic, the sky. It's a mess, sky ignores any kind of atmospheric completely its completely immune and as mentioned above sun and moon textures seem to be applied on top of the fog layer which makes them clip through various terrain and waters in an absolutely catastrophic way. The sky and gamma is also way too bright but also too dark, the contrast is too high and the colors seem broken too.

You can also easily see that the sky is not the only thing completely immune to fog, fullbrights were always immune to fog but now they stick out like a sore thumb, this needs fixing bad.

Colors are different, contrast is higher (shadows are darker), clouds look completely off and the sky is much brighter as well as sunlight.

Last topic, reflections, they are broken over saturated and glow like crazy, i checked against the official viewer for default glow settings, this is definitely a shader issue, it does not seem to affect glow in general, only sun reflections, they also seem to have a blueish tint and also environment reflections seem to be brighter/different.

You can see the roof reflection glowing like crazy and you can clearly see that the shiny/environment reflection is darker and has a blueish tint to it.

Interface

The interface. You are spitting into my face, the previous Windlight floaters were huge, wasted a lot of space and generally didn't look clean and sleek but the new interface and how it works EASILY takes the cake, you have designed the worst UI i have ever had to witness in my entire 21 years of seeing completely different, good, bad, creative and not so creative UIs. Not only is your "personal environment" thing a downright INSULT to me and anyone who does photography and/or machinima, you have made ME, the guy who can use any Viewer at any time waste 3 minutes to realize that there is in fact no goddamn way to customize my Windlight without creating a preset for everything first, what an unfriendly unintuitive and unusable design, how you came up with this is absolutely beyond me.

The comparison between bad and worse. EEP being the clearly worse here, more wasted space, more space between every widget and even less screen to see what i'm actually editing and this is only the beginning.

This thing here, the "Personal Lighting" how you call it is pure garbage. It is obsolete, it is pointless, convoluted and has so many goddamn flaws, starting with half of the controls are missing: Density Multiplier, Distance Multiplier, Max Altitude, Cloud Density, Cloud Detail, Cloud Scroll X/Y and its lock functions, Moisture Level, Droplet Radius, Ice Level, Cloud Variance, Cloud Image, Sun Image, Sun Scale, Moon Image, Moon Scale and Moon Brightness. WHERE ARE THEY?

I know what you did, you made this mess as last resort to save something that you have broken completely. Not only have you destroyed the little workflow that existed before when creating Windlights, you have also made it so goddamn cumbersome and unusable to simply change the sky... i have to create an inventory object, then "use it" to open the editor for it to get all available controls, where is the quick sky/water/daycycle editor? Why can't i simply edit them directly like we did before like the "Personal Lighting" window does, why do we have to create inventory items to do so?

Switching between Windlights has become very slow and cumbersome too, you give us a new inventory view to see all our presets rather than a simple list like we had before, 3 lists to be exact, one for sky, one for water and one for daycycles if we used them, where are those? Gone because you got rid of local saved presets completely. Now you can only import them which is slow and cumbersome, do you even realize what it means to import 200 sky presets? Why couldn't you just leave the goddamn list there.

Further you intertwined this entire nonsense with the inventory system to have a weak excuse to be able to make these items marketable. You removed our ability to locally save presets, you removed the ability to edit skies directly, you removed the ability to edit water directly, you removed the ability to save/load presets locally, you half-invalidated all our presets we've been making and collecting over the past years and only offer us a measly and cumbersome import function which's only function is to keep us at bay because we would set your labs on fire if our old presets were gone. But does it stop? No. Not only is selecting windlights impossible now, we first have to import them and fill our inventory with even more potentially corruptible trash, we also can't simply and efficiently switch between them now, we can't edit them. What can we even still do? Nothing.

But what about the UI in itself? The new UI widgets they are cool and all but they have a lot of weaknesses, low sun angles are nigh impossible (you have to use the slow and cumbersome NSWE buttons) because the position can only be dragged to the edge which is not enough.

This right there is impossible, i can't drag the sun there because the widget doesn't allow me to, i have to use the buttons and what about the "invert" mode, when the sun is below the horizon? Why can't we simply "invert" the sun directly and easily.

Shareable Settings

The idea was nice but the implementation is as bad as a simple implementation can go, add a new inventory type which is basically a Notecard with values in it, make permissions not work on them have a system folder for them to be stored in so floaters can easily automatically read from this folder as well as the library.

What did you do? You added permissions to them because you want it to be a fully marketable item, big mistake number one. People will abuse the crap out of this. This inevitably leads to another issue: Now that these items are marketable you also consider them copyright-able, they become full content, as such you seek out ways to protect this content, this turns into cutting features, adding limitations and breaking features or adding new ones that make no sense.

What baffles me most is the pure ignorance from Oz's side towards this, he wants to pull this nonsensical bull***** through and while doing so steps from one mine into another. Not only do you offer a window called "Personal Lighting" you also show all values OPENLY to everyone, this opens all gates and doors for everyone to EASILY copy any region Windlight which you so desire to protect from copying with your Personal Lighting window in the first place, not only that, i asked you to add back the function to save Windlights like we used to because Windlights are useless items and should not be considered full content, instead i was told off that this choice is not up for debate and that you will pull this crap through. Why do you so insist on preventing us from clicking a save button that does what every Viewer can do today and was able to day since Windlight's introduction and why have you seemingly not considered what i said above, you cut your own flesh with this window, you open up all values and make it merely a minor inconvenience to copy any Windlight but at the same time you want to prevent us from doing so by not giving us what is considered a simple QoL feature. Click save and you'll save everything except textures (they are full content) just like before, what is the goddamn issue. Instead you even make what sounded like threats that if i were to add this "QoL" feature my Viewer would violate the TPV ruleset and action would be taken against me. I'm not only sad, maddened and disappointed but i'm also shocked that you go this far to pull through with this.

By all due respect to those that worked on this and invested so much time into this but your work is being wasted and whoever is in charge of this lost all my respect.

I'm sure i've probably missed a thing or two in my rage writing this but if my opinion counts anything in this, this thing you have been praising to us for so long so far has been a catastrophic disaster and it hurts my feelings to see this, what could have been a major extension to the Windlight system and a big boon to all photographers and machinima people is being raped like this for no good reason.

I for my part are done with EEP. If i were you i'd delay EEP for the unforeseeable future and rework this entire thing until the very last bug is fixed and i'd expect it to take at least a few more months seeing how completely broken beyond recognition EVERYTHING is.

An eternally saddened and pissed Niran.

Edited April 14, 2019 by NiranV Dean

[Marianne McCann]

There's one big thing that Niran made me think of that has been nagging on me.

I kinda thought of EEP as an enhancement. That is, we're taking things that exist now and enhancing them. But so much seems not enhanced, but rewrote/changed. The way the sky renders seems so much different from the previous sky, with different overall lighting, etc. 

I love the idea of finally getting inworld windlight assets. I love getting different sky settings at different altitudes. I'm even keen on rainbows and the like. Also, tinkling stars, even if they do seem to twinkle awful fast.

But Niran has a point. So much looks so different. Things look Foggy. Skies seem dimmer. water effects are odd. Heck, one minor thing that bugs me is that when I logged in, I now have to wait for the moon's texture to load with all the others, leaving a floating box in the sky, while it used to just be "there."

I want to feel like the project is done, but render-wise, it kinda feels like it's barely at the start.

Edited April 15, 2019 by Marianne McCann

[Chic Aeon]

Other than trying EEP when it first came out (like the first day) over on the beta grid I have left it alone. It is easy to see simply by reading the first couple of lines in post that show up in my forum listings that things are not happy.

I can say on the plus side that "I" have had no issues with any of the old Windlight settings used under the current Firestorm. Others have it seems -- especially on heads and makeup layers -- but I have an OLD Lelutka head and it works "as always". I haven't stopped blogging and have plenty of photos in my Flickr feed since the server updates.

BUT, should we actually GET this new enhancement  rammed down our throats when it really isn't an improvement (to most folks it seems) I would sincerely hope that the third party viewers would make EEP and "option" and not a necessity. Since things are working fine under the current FS viewer it seems like that "could" be an possibility but of course I am not techie in that area. 

 Personally I have loved the old Windlight for so many years I will hate to see it go and will probably just use the "adapted" Windlight settings from Firestorm and from my own records. 

[loverdag]

11 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

I know what you did, you made this mess as last resort to save something that you have broken completely. Not only have you destroyed the little workflow that existed before when creating Windlights, you have also made it so goddamn cumbersome and unusable to simply change the sky... i have to create an inventory object, then "use it" to open the editor for it to get all available controls, where is the quick sky/water/daycycle editor? Why can't i simply edit them directly like we did before like the "Personal Lighting" window does, why do we have to create inventory items to do so?

Switching between Windlights has become very slow and cumbersome too, you give us a new inventory view to see all our presets rather than a simple list like we had before, 3 lists to be exact, one for sky, one for water and one for daycycles if we used them, where are those? Gone because you got rid of local saved presets completely. Now you can only import them which is slow and cumbersome, do you even realize what it means to import 200 sky presets? Why couldn't you just leave the goddamn list there.

Further you intertwined this entire nonsense with the inventory system to have a weak excuse to be able to make these items marketable. You removed our ability to locally save presets, you removed the ability to edit skies directly, you removed the ability to edit water directly, you removed the ability to save/load presets locally, you half-invalidated all our presets we've been making and collecting over the past years and only offer us a measly and cumbersome import function which's only function is to keep us at bay because we would set your labs on fire if our old presets were gone. But does it stop? No. Not only is selecting windlights impossible now, we first have to import them and fill our inventory with even more potentially corruptible trash, we also can't simply and efficiently switch between them now, we can't edit them. What can we even still do? Nothing.

Seems entire EPP, and esp. this part, is complete disaster for SL photographers.

To whom and for what purpose is this supposed to serve? To make skies sellable items? Then let me poin out one one thing - there are many ways, direct or not, how are photographers connected to SL economy. Make photographers to lose the tools and abilities they have today and many of them will lose interest about SL photography. (And I don't talk in theory, those voices can be heard in the Flickr community already). 

I don't have numbers to share statistic, but I wonder if someone did think about possible consequnces of such a situation.

- some photographers can leave SL because there will be nothing to do for them anymore - many of them are the people who spend big money for their avatar's customisation and for their homes as well, because they want both to look good on pictures. So if they will stop, thats not only they would not buy land anymore for themselves, but it would lower income of creators who would lose customers (big shoppers) that way.

- some photographers are bloggers and their community connection and advertisings make sales for creators - and some of the creators would have incom very lowered (or even would not survive) without them + bloggers are usualy shoppers too, see the point above. Make bloggers to stop = creators can lose interest or ability to buy land.

- some sims owners (for Patch: regions owners) see the community as part of the fun and they would not keep and build their places if destination's bloggers and entire photographer's community (on Flickr, Instangram etc) would be weakened and would not bring them new visitors. Some people would not be satisfied to build only for themselves, so they would stop to do so = they would not buy land and landscaping / home decor stuff anymore.

Those are just examples, there are more "threads" how is SL photography connected to entire "net" of community life and economy as well. As I said, I just wonder if someone did think about it from that angle. Maybe someone should - before we would be forced into something so bad as EEP seems to be for now.

[Silas Merlin]

I wish to say that I am loving my EEP sky now.
 

I'm not seeing the flickering black frames in the viewer, it is only after I I "produce" the video capture that they appear.

 

Edited April 15, 2019 by Silas Merlin

[NiranV Dean]

I said i wouldn't do this but i tried it again and when just logging in already noticed another issue. Your own windlight is not permanent, every time i login i'm forced to see the awful daycycle that someone has decided would be great to use. Everytime i login i think "ohgod no it looks even w... oh it's just the daycycle that keeps getting worse". Why are we forced to use region light every time we login? Oh right, because we don't have the say anymore, the Viewer doesn't remember what windlight we use because you got rid of the entire windlight system as a whole, with it you got rid of the settings that kept track of our preferences. Great.

But that's not all, nonono. That wasn't even the reason i started it up again. I just wanted to take a look into the XML files and what i can do with the UI. That's when i found the next thing, you don't even have a "Debug" menu anymore, with it the XUI Preview Tool is gone as well, without it you are a sitting duck in the dark blindly editing files and relogging for hours to see the difference of what you just did, isn't it like that? It doesn't surprise me the UI is such a mess and that's before i even got to dive into the UI itself! When i finally did i was shocked to see you still keep using questionable layout stacks in layout panels in layout stacks in layout panels in layout stacks in layout panels, for what? So you can "neatly rearrange whole setting groups in code"? You're not even doing that aren't you? Take one of these stacks or layout panels away and the entire thing falls apart like a house of cards, your widgets don't use follows properly, they don't use layout properly, often times they dont have width or height attributes making them randomly and for no reason break and making changes to the UI as a whole a messy work that i'd take days if not weeks to get into some usable state if i had to relog every time. It doesn't stop there! You still keep doing this nonsensical splitting of panels into multiple XML files, why? what are you achieving with this? Oh, i see you are adding the panels as cumbersome mess later in code similar to how you did in the snapshot floater. Please for the love of god, stop this overly complex mess, its cumbersome and just fills the code with unnecessary trash, you could have done this UI easy and straightforward, you can enable/disable/hide/show tab container tabs in code, slap them all in show them on demand. No 10 different files required, no 10 different special panel objects required, just straightfoward getChild<LLTabContainer>("") and then do stuff with it, added plus if you save it somewhere to save getChild calls. Ugh.

For the love of god get someone who understands your XUI system, many of the things you do multiple times in code can be easily done with the XUI system without any code needed, much of what you do could me much simplified and goddamnit, get that XUI Preview back in there, i swear to god you'll praise it like Jesus's second coming when you make any window or edit them. It saves you tremendous amounts of time.

But that's not what i'm here for either, no! I'm here to show you what i've done in mere 2 hours half-assing my way through your windows (and starting over with the edit environment window rather than the personal environment window as before).

Funny fact, the new window is even smaller than the old edit windlight windows in my own viewer, i easily had space to spare.

You should really get that looked into.

[Marianne McCann]

That is really a pain point for me, and has been since the last time the Windlight windows were updated, years ago. Because, well, we used to have these tight little numbers:

And the others still at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Environment_Editor

These were super, and thanks to their size, they didn't get as much int he way of actually seeing the environment.

[Devin Heartsong]

Please listen to Niran. Please do not foist this garbage DOWNGRADE onto us! I've been around for nearly 14 years. I use SL primarily for photography and machinima. The current rendering and windlights have their issues, sure, and the IDEA of being able to set a windlight on your parcels that others will see BY DEFAULT is a good idea!  But this implementation? It's TERRIBLE.

You really need to go back to the drawing board on this. If you foist this on us, you're seriously breaking what I still find valuable and fun about Second Life. (Because you're KILLING social interaction by not optimizing for mesh--when being around more than a handful of other avatars can blow up your client, you simply avoid all the old ways of socializing.) And you'll probably lose me for good. I maintain 6 premium alts, and to this day still buy a fair amount of stuff from creators. You want to lose that revenue? You want to kill off your economy for creators even more? Then push this on us when we're asking you NOT to.  Go back to the drawing board.

And yeah, about NOT optimizing for mesh... WTF? Forcing us to choose between looking like Ruth just so we can socialize is NOT a choice. People want to mesh. They want to look good. So figure out how to constrain and guide the mesh makers so that you can effectively optimize for mesh. Like I said above, the only thing SL still really offers me is photography and machinima. You're killing the club/music/social scenes by stubbornly refusing to optimize for mesh.

Edited April 16, 2019 by Fushichou Mfume

[Cube Republic]

3 hours ago, Fushichou Mfume said:

And yeah, about NOT optimizing for mesh... WTF? Forcing us to choose between looking like Ruth just so we can socialize is NOT a choice. People want to mesh. They want to look good. So figure out how to constrain and guide the mesh makers so that you can effectively optimize for mesh. Like I said above, the only thing SL still really offers me is photography and machinima. You're killing the club/music/social scenes by stubbornly refusing to optimize for mesh

This is out of touch with the reality of the engineering behind our beloved ancient game. 

It's up to the creators to optimize the mesh avatars and clothing for the second life system. A single avatar can contain 100,s of 1000s of triangles when you account for the mesh bodies, head, feet, hands, clothes, hair, eyes, jewelry, etc. You're wanting the system to be modified to cope with streaming and you rendering more data than an average block-buster video game. Really it's a miracle any of it works at all given that a lot of content looks like it came straight from Zbrush or with subdivision applied. Part of the problem lies with there being no incentive for creators to optimize their meshes for the grid. Why spend time baking a normal map or making LOD when the land impact is going to be identical or less in some  cases. Plus there isn't anyway of accounting for object count on avatars like there is for land with the 'land impact' settings. Perhaps if avatars were given a kind of land impact setting that they couldn't go above creators  may take some time to look into optimizing their items more and using materials to display creases rather than modelling every one. 

[Miller Thor]

It's like everything new. What the farmer does not know, he does not eat and everything in which one has to get used to probably causes most of the problems here because then they would have to strain their brains to adapt to the new situations. We are not in the land of milk and honey where the roasted pigeons fly into their mouths and Linden-Labs takes everyone's thinking away. New technologies also require the conversion of those who use them. No wonder people still mess around with the old Windows XP and outdated PC's because they are too lazy and sluggish to adapt to Windows 10. You would have to use your brain and learn something new. @ Marianne: Instead of moaning over the interface for weeks, you would have had enough time over to think about the change of perspective to have a clear view of the timestamp being edited.
New technologies also mean finding alternatives to adapt and no longer riding old habits.
As for the story with Ruth ................
The conversion has been announced long enough in advance see https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/2142-new-assethttp-project-viewer-is-now-available/ or https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/2513-obsolete-asset-fetch-disabled/ and who was still too lazy to update his viewer is to blame if he runs around as Ruth. Do not blame it on Linden, but on your own laziness to move your goddamn ass and bring your software up to date.
@cube republic. I fully agree with you. It's actually a miracle that SL still works at the enormous load the servers have to charge. It is up to the manufacturers to continuously optimize their products but also to the customer who should adapt his buying behavior to the circumstances and if necessary should also go deeper into the wallet to get really qualitative products. We also buy only inworld and let us, so no demo available, objects that we want to demonstrate and it was not only once that we then talked to the manufacturer about problems and errors and asked for rectification. About 75% of them also agreed with us and therefore have a much higher reputation and are also recommended much more often than those who have been resting for years on their former glory and are unwilling to improve.

Edited April 17, 2019 by Miller Thor

[Linnrenate Crosby]

No reply for a long time by Rider Linden, did any of you place a gag on him?

[NiranV Dean]

8 hours ago, Linnrenate Crosby said:

No reply for a long time by Rider Linden, did any of you place a gag on him?

The only gag placed on anyone is going to me if at all, the radio silence appears like they might be re-evaluating what they want to do, which would hopefully turn out for the better but that's my hopes.

[Rider Linden]

9 hours ago, Linnrenate Crosby said:

No reply for a long time by Rider Linden, did any of you place a gag on him?

I'm simply lurking.  

[Coffee Pancake]

1 minute ago, Rider Linden said:

I'm simply lurking.  

On company time ? Tsktsk.

[NiranV Dean]

6 minutes ago, Rider Linden said:

I'm simply lurking.  

I didn't scare you did i? I sure hope not.

[dstauffsl2]

19 hours ago, Miller Thor said:

It's like everything new. What the farmer does not know, he does not eat and everything in which one has to get used to probably causes most of the problems here because then they would have to strain their brains to adapt to the new situations. We are not in the land of milk and honey where the roasted pigeons fly into their mouths and Linden-Labs takes everyone's thinking away. New technologies also require the conversion of those who use them. No wonder people still mess around with the old Windows XP and outdated PC's because they are too lazy and sluggish to adapt to Windows 10. You would have to use your brain and learn something new. @ Marianne: Instead of moaning over the interface for weeks, you would have had enough time over to think about the change of perspective to have a clear view of the timestamp being edited.
New technologies also mean finding alternatives to adapt and no longer riding old habits.
As for the story with Ruth ................
The conversion has been announced long enough in advance see https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/2142-new-assethttp-project-viewer-is-now-available/ or https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/2513-obsolete-asset-fetch-disabled/ and who was still too lazy to update his viewer is to blame if he runs around as Ruth. Do not blame it on Linden, but on your own laziness to move your goddamn ass and bring your software up to date.
@cube republic. I fully agree with you. It's actually a miracle that SL still works at the enormous load the servers have to charge. It is up to the manufacturers to continuously optimize their products but also to the customer who should adapt his buying behavior to the circumstances and if necessary should also go deeper into the wallet to get really qualitative products. We also buy only inworld and let us, so no demo available, objects that we want to demonstrate and it was not only once that we then talked to the manufacturer about problems and errors and asked for rectification. About 75% of them also agreed with us and therefore have a much higher reputation and are also recommended much more often than those who have been resting for years on their former glory and are unwilling to improve.

The thing looks like ***** on the EEP viewer or have you not been reading. There is NO upgrade only a downgrade and no serious SL photographers use SL viewers. It may have been announced for some time but the fact that it's broken hasn't changed.

[Jo Yardley]

All I wanted was 24 hour days...

[Devin Heartsong]

On 4/16/2019 at 3:44 PM, Cube Republic said:

...Part of the problem lies with there being no incentive for creators to optimize their meshes for the grid. Why spend time baking a normal map or making LOD when the land impact is going to be identical or less in some  cases. Plus there isn't anyway of accounting for object count on avatars like there is for land with the 'land impact' settings. Perhaps if avatars were given a kind of land impact setting that they couldn't go above creators  may take some time to look into optimizing their items more and using materials to display creases rather than modelling every one. 

This is why my OP that you responded to specifically said "...So figure out how to constrain and guide the mesh makers so that you can effectively optimize for mesh..."

[Miller Thor]

@dstauffsl That's the joke of the day. No serious photographer uses an SL viewer? But then I wonder how you and others log in SL. Every viewer, regardless of whether Firestorm, Black Dragon or the standard viewer of Linden Labs is an SL viewer because it was designed for use in Second Life. The problem is not the viewer but how the respective setting was set. My wife and I have worked on our settings for days and tested again and again to make it look as natural as possible. All just a matter of patience. Here are some pictures taken with the standard viewer that show our regions at different times of day and with different weather settings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you can easily see, it is only a matter of patience, learning and a good eye for the right look to make a region look good with EEP.

Enclosed should be noted. The days when your SL photographer was still the true artist are long gone. Today, kids at school are already learning how to use Photoshop or other imaging programs, and they'll soon be able to do it better than you old age ever could. So get off your high horse back down to the ground of reality.

Edited April 19, 2019 by Miller Thor

[Morena Tully]

I for one am not happy at all about EEP. At least not how those of us who spent hours getting windlight just right on sims can no longer get the same look. Not even remotely close. I can have no atmospheric mist whatsoever now after the last rolling restart. Only crystal clear. The sun position is opposite where I had it, and can't be adjusted. I fix the settings in edit, hit apply, and it completely reverts back to something I don't want. If this is working as intended, I fail to see how this is considered an improvement. If it's still getting the bugs worked out, why is it being forced on everyone in a broken state? I feel like giving up and no longer owning land. Pictures are 1) my windlight as I want it, and 2) what happens when I apply it to the sim. I am not using an EEP viewer, yet am subject to changes that aren't even ready yet or officially released.

[NiranV Dean]

8 hours ago, Miller Thor said:

@dstauffsl That's the joke of the day. No serious photographer uses an SL viewer? But then I wonder how you and others log in SL. Every viewer, regardless of whether Firestorm, Black Dragon or the standard viewer of Linden Labs is an SL viewer because it was designed for use in Second Life. The problem is not the viewer but how the respective setting was set. My wife and I have worked on our settings for days and tested again and again to make it look as natural as possible. All just a matter of patience. Here are some pictures taken with the standard viewer that show our regions at different times of day and with different weather settings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you can easily see, it is only a matter of patience, learning and a good eye for the right look to make a region look good with EEP.

Enclosed should be noted. The days when your SL photographer was still the true artist are long gone. Today, kids at school are already learning how to use Photoshop or other imaging programs, and they'll soon be able to do it better than you old age ever could. So get off your high horse back down to the ground of reality.

I wouldn't exactly consider a "plastic look" natural. Your last picture shows this issue very well, the snow looks like its made out of plastic, the very subtle shiny applied to them goes absolutely bonkers on EEP and ruins a lot of ... everything really. Also i'm not sure why but the background mountains... i don't like them, especially the left side of the last picture looks very much out of place, when i look at the right side i can see that the sun should clearly be able to light the mountains at least a bit, they are not, not even a bit and the sun angle doesn't look like it would cast shadows across the entire mountains, the sky looks extremely bright too, unnatural bright. You are highlighting the issues of EEP pretty well... but ohwell you said you tried to make it as natural as possible, not you did make it look natural.

The point of my rant is that i'm trying to protect the little "artistic photography" that is still there. There are still a lot of people who don't use editing tools to take great snapshots, i'm one of them, i hate photoshop and all photoshopped/edited pictures. Have one of my unedited pictures as comparison.

[Miller Thor]

@ NiranV Dean : The Winterpicture showing Gosau is made with the very first EEP-Viewer after we got EEP on our Regions.

That Picture now shows the complete Area so you can see where the Mountains you meen are. The Picture is made today at 6pm CET and the Weather is really so good also in RL.

 

And so from the other Side:

 

 

And here for comparison the real picture. We are very close to reality with our setting, but we are still working to perfect it.

Edited April 19, 2019 by Miller Thor

[Whirly Fizzle]

14 hours ago, Morena Tully said:

I for one am not happy at all about EEP. At least not how those of us who spent hours getting windlight just right on sims can no longer get the same look. Not even remotely close. I can have no atmospheric mist whatsoever now after the last rolling restart. Only crystal clear. The sun position is opposite where I had it, and can't be adjusted. I fix the settings in edit, hit apply, and it completely reverts back to something I don't want. If this is working as intended, I fail to see how this is considered an improvement. If it's still getting the bugs worked out, why is it being forced on everyone in a broken state? I feel like giving up and no longer owning land. Pictures are 1) my windlight as I want it, and 2) what happens when I apply it to the sim. I am not using an EEP viewer, yet am subject to changes that aren't even ready yet or officially released.

Yes this is a bug that started after the grid was rolled back to the previous OS version yesterday.

Here is the bug report: BUG-226815 - [EEP] Since the grid was rolled to 19.04.15.526263 yesterday, region windlight is broken for all legacy viewers - settings reset on Apply.

Edited April 19, 2019 by Whirly Fizzle