Environmental Enhancement Project (aka EEP!) Feedback Thread

[kiramanell]

On 4/11/2019 at 4:09 AM, dstauffsl2 said:

The sky is completely ruined on Firestorm period. The clouds when i can get them to appear now move from the top of the sky to the bottom rather than east west left right it's completely unnatural. All of my windlights are ruined none work as intended. The sky looks as bad as Everquest did, in 1998, no wait that looked better. I realize that if i get on the EEP viewer it's better but no one wants to use a LL viewer. Why break the game for countless months by rolling out a beta? 

 

As a fervent user of the FS viewer, I can't say this alleged fail reproduces for me. In fact, all windlights I set (via land descriptions) still look exactly the same as before. EEP is a different matter, but the FS 'legacy' windlight system works just fine.

[kiramanell]

On 4/15/2019 at 12:59 AM, NiranV Dean said:

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.

 

And I thought my previous 2 posts above were harsh. 🤩 Feeling a lot better now, LOL.

Edited April 29, 2019 by kiramanell

[kiramanell]

@Rider Linden A picture is worth a thousand words, right?! So, let's have a look at things (slightly reduced in size for upload). Now, on the left is a still from my recent 'City of Glass' skybox: meticulously lit up, so as to be absolutely perfect for what I made (with the exact amount of ambient light and skylight transparancy to light up the bedroom carpet just enough). On the right is what EEP made of it. EEP indeed! It looks so grossly distorted, there's no beginning to tweaking it, making EEP, in its current incarnation, completely useless to me, and potentially damaging (should LL ever force EEP-only on everyone).

[kiramanell]

^^ P.S. Both pictures above are taken in FS. The EEP one (on the right) is just without land description, having it default to EEP's region interpretation of 'Alien Sky'. And it looks like the one on the right in the LL viewer too, btw.

Edited April 29, 2019 by kiramanell

[Whirly Fizzle]

On 4/26/2019 at 3:32 PM, NiranV Dean said:

Correct me if i'm wrong but i don't remember EEP adding parcel lighting, only height-based presets. FS will keep its hacky Parcel lighting as far as i heard. Whirly?

EEP adds serverside support for parcel environments.  Firestorm will be removing it's "hacky parcel lighting" & converting to EEP.

[Whirly Fizzle]

11 hours ago, kiramanell said:

 Let's start with the most egregious (and most obvious) error so far: you can no longer 'Apply' a windlight setting to a region (via the regular method). That's pretty sloppy, tbh, as you'd think something so basic was tested before pushing everything online.

To be honest, it's actually easier to apply a "windlight setting" to a region using an EEP viewer.

You can apply a setting to the region via My Environments.
World -> Environment -> My Environments

 

Or World -> Region/Estate (Region Details on Firestorm_ -> Environments

Just click the "Use Inventory" button to apply any environment asset to the region, or you can just drag & drop an environment asset from Inventory or My Environments into the relevant slot on the right.

11 hours ago, kiramanell said:

Also, the Import function downright sucks. Which is to say, I'm not sure what the guy has been smoking who implemented it, but what gets imported, more often than not, doesn't even remotely look like the windlight I chose. Not even close. As an art teacher of mine once said "It's always about the light." And he was right. Or, to quote a legacy movie, 'Close is a lingerie shop without a front window.' Aka, either you get it right, or the windlight import was utter fail. Like on my own region. I had set 'Alien Sky' (from FS, iirc). When I logged in, though, the other day, my region was set to a weirdly numbered, weirdly looking windlight (presumably your failed attempt at conversion of the original 'Alien Sky' windlight. And I can't even apply the correct one any more.

You posted screenshots in another post so I'll reply to that later post.

[Whirly Fizzle]

11 hours ago, kiramanell said:

@Rider Linden A picture is worth a thousand words, right?! So, let's have a look at things (slightly reduced in size for upload). Now, on the left is a still from my recent 'City of Glass' skybox: meticulously lit up, so as to be absolutely perfect for what I made (with the exact amount of ambient light and skylight transparancy to light up the bedroom carpet just enough). On the right is what EEP made of it. EEP indeed! It looks so grossly distorted, there's no beginning to tweaking it, making EEP, in its current incarnation, completely useless to me, and potentially damaging (should LL ever force EEP-only on everyone).

Your bottom EEP image isn't EEP - you're still using Firestorm Release viewer which doesn't have EEP support.
Unfortunately when the grid was rolled in an attempt to fix the teleport disconnects, it badly broke the legacy windlights set on all regions & how they look in non-EEP viewers.
The different lighting in your bottom image is probably mostly down to the fact that the sun position will have been set to default.

There is a bug filed about this here: 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.

You need to look at that location using an EEP viewer to judge whether it's broken or not.

[Whirly Fizzle]

@kiramanell If you can give me access to your region, I'll come & look how the skybox looks with EEP if you don't want to try an EEP viewer yet.

[kiramanell]

1 hour ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

Your bottom EEP image isn't EEP - you're still using Firestorm Release viewer which doesn't have EEP support.
Unfortunately when the grid was rolled in an attempt to fix the teleport disconnects, it badly broke the legacy windlights set on all regions & how they look in non-EEP viewers.
The different lighting in your bottom image is probably mostly down to the fact that the sun position will have been set to default.

There is a bug filed about this here: 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.

You need to look at that location using an EEP viewer to judge whether it's broken or not.

 

Thanks for your willingness to look into this!  Soon as I get home, I will set up the region so you can enter, and have a look.

P.S. You also, indirectly, answered the question (which was posed on channel, the other day) on whether the FS viewer -- while it has no EEP controls yet -- would still show EEP effects.

[kiramanell]

On 4/26/2019 at 1:20 PM, Aida Lundquist said:

But I remember back when most people complained about mesh. Now most of them use mesh bodies and heads too and never want to step back. How loud was the complaint about bento. We dont need it they yelled! Today we dont want to miss it. In one year 99% of the users like the EEP. So why shall we renounce an improvement to satisfy 1% of the users? They tell they go elsewhere because SL is broken but you see them writing in the EEP forum every day.

 

"It's always about the light", as I quoted a former art teacher of mine, elsewhere. So, mesh bodies is one thing, but messing up light, everywhere, is of quite a different order of magnitude. I would hope LL takes more of a "Above all, do no harm!" approach to EEP here.  Would I personally leave SL if EEP -- in its current broken state -- were pushed on everyone, without having Firestorm's windlights available for fallback? Well, like you said, ppl often make threats like that, and then stay after all. So, I probably would not depart in a huff either. But if windlights remained so broken, without the prospect of ever being able to recreate the myriad of windlights I had in effect before, then, I dunno, that would certainly be a biggie. And not something I think LL should make 'light' of (pun intended), as I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be the only one severely bummed out.

[kiramanell]

1 hour ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

EEP adds serverside support for parcel environments.  Firestorm will be removing it's "hacky parcel lighting" & converting to EEP.

 

Oh NO! Eeek! Firestorm's "hacky parcel lighting" is what's working: EEP is not. Especially per-parcel height settings. I have currently different height zones defined per parcel (for various skyboxes at various altitudes). And even in that vid you linked, I didn't hear the Linden talk about per-parcel heights. So, only 4 global height zones would assuredly break things for me already, for that reason alone.

[kiramanell]

Okay, lol, I had forgotten: as of 1,000m, that windlight was supposed to be "Annan Adored Light Explosion III". Not to worry, that one is messed up too. ☺️ (See below). And 'Alien Sky' (on my landing zone) is messed up, regardless. In fact, have yet to import a windlight that works properly under EEP. In ny 'City of Glass' skybox, it seems '"Annan Adored Light Explosion III" primarily is missing the adored light explosion. 😛 It's all bland.

Edited April 29, 2019 by kiramanell

[Rider Linden]

19 hours ago, kiramanell said:

 

It really still does need some work, yes.

@Rider Linden Let's start with the most egregious (and most obvious) error so far: you can no longer 'Apply' a windlight setting to a region (via the regular method). That's pretty sloppy, tbh, as you'd think something so basic was tested before pushing everything online.

I am unsure what you mean by "the regular method".

Open the Region/Estate floater and go to the Environments tab. The "Use Inventory" button will open a picker that allows you to select any setting from your inventory and apply it to the entire region. You may also drag a setting from your inventory and drop it directly onto the elevation that you would like to apply it to.

The "Customize" button will open the editor an allow you to make any fine tuning adjustments you like and either apply them immediately of save them to your inventory for later.

The "Use Default Settings" will remove any environments that you have set and apply the system default day cycle to the entire region. 

 

[kiramanell]

3 hours ago, Rider Linden said:

I am unsure what you mean by "the regular method".

 

By 'regular method' I meant opening up region manager, and picking a sky/water from the environments to 'Apply' (which doesn't work any more):

Edited April 30, 2019 by kiramanell

[kiramanell]

3 hours ago, Rider Linden said:

The "Customize" button will open the editor an allow you to make any fine tuning adjustments you like and either apply them immediately of save them to your inventory for later.

 

And this is what I meant by 'Alien Sky' being off: top image is what EEP made of it, and bottom one is set 'regularly' with FS windlight system. The images may look similar, but are quite different, really (especially sky and mountains):

 

[Marianne McCann]

7 hours ago, kiramanell said:

Okay, lol, I had forgotten: as of 1,000m, that windlight was supposed to be "Annan Adored Light Explosion III". Not to worry, that one is messed up too. ☺️ (See below). And 'Alien Sky' (on my landing zone) is messed up, regardless. In fact, have yet to import a windlight that works properly under EEP. In ny 'City of Glass' skybox, it seems '"Annan Adored Light Explosion III" primarily is missing the adored light explosion. 😛 It's all bland.

I'm not trying to be snarky here, but you keep addressing EEP issues using a non-EEP enabled viewer. It's a bit like asking why your command key doesn't work in Windows.

[ChinRey]

44 minutes ago, Marianne McCann said:

It's a bit like asking why your command key doesn't work in Windows.

Since you mention it, I have been wondering about that. Why doesn't it?

[kiramanell]

4 hours ago, Marianne McCann said:

I'm not trying to be snarky here, but you keep addressing EEP issues using a non-EEP enabled viewer. It's a bit like asking why your command key doesn't work in Windows.

 

Huh?! The picture in the post you quoted, about the "Annan Adored Light Explosion III", was assuredly taken in LL viewer, as you can clearly see.

As for the 2 region pictures above, for comparison, region windlight is server-side: once set, ANY viewer will show the same (when set to use region environment, of course).** If you read my posts even further, in Firestorm, you can no longer even change the region windlight via the region manager; it's hardcoded to a numbered-one, and while you can select a different windlight, you can no longer 'Apply' it. So, my region is showing (a numbered) windlight that apparently is an erroneous 'translation' of the Alien Sky windlight it was set to. And yes, it looks exactly the same wrong in LL viewer (see below).

** Region environments have always been server-side. This was done so by design (so you can still see the envo, exactly the way the Estate Manager/LL intended, without the need to have the specific windlight in your viewer). This, btw, I believe, is why you can no longer Apply a region environment in Firestorm, as the underlying, server-side, code will now just show you its conversion of whatever windlight you had set (based on EEP). Hence, for region environments, it makes no difference whether you watch with LL viewer (as evinced below) or Firestorm: you get to see the server-side environment setting.

 

Edited April 30, 2019 by kiramanell

[Rider Linden]

21 hours ago, kiramanell said:

 

By 'regular method' I meant opening up region manager, and picking a sky/water from the environments to 'Apply' (which doesn't work any more):

 

Open the region manager, select "Use Inventory" and pick the environment from your picker.  No need to click apply, the change is done immediately.  Alternately, you can drag and drop the environment from either the My Environments window or from your inventory.

Bit of trivia.  In the windlight system, every one of the windlights in your windlight directory was loaded at startup and kept in memory.

[Rider Linden]

21 hours ago, kiramanell said:

 

And this is what I meant by 'Alien Sky' being off: top image is what EEP made of it, and bottom one is set 'regularly' with FS windlight system. The images may look similar, but are quite different, really (especially sky and mountains):

 

Yes.  There are still a number of issues that we are working through with the shaders.  If you see something please enter a JIRA and describe the issue so that it gets into the queue of things to be fixed.

[Rider Linden]

14 hours ago, kiramanell said:

As for the 2 region pictures above, for comparison, region windlight is server-side: once set, ANY viewer will show the same (when set to use region environment, of course).** If you read my posts even further, in Firestorm, you can no longer even change the region windlight via the region manager; it's hardcoded to a numbered-one, and while you can select a different windlight, you can no longer 'Apply' it. So, my region is showing (a numbered) windlight that apparently is an erroneous 'translation' of the Alien Sky windlight it was set to. And yes, it looks exactly the same wrong in LL viewer (see below).

 

I think I understand what you are saying now. Are you getting an error when you click apply or just incorrect conversions?

There were a number of server side changes that were rolled back while we were addressing the teleport issue.  (This caused a couple of bug to resurface.)  Hopefully the next set of simulator rolls should put those things right. 

About the naming.  If you submit a legacy windlight using a legacy viewer the simulator will assign the translated settings a name.  If memory serves that name is the region plus a hash of the the EEP settings. (I considered calling calling them "Bob"... because more things should be named "Bob"... but that didn't seem very informative.)

[kiramanell]

8 minutes ago, Rider Linden said:

I think I understand what you are saying now. Are you getting an error when you click apply or just incorrect conversions?

 

Funny thing is, in Firestorm, selecting the windlight you want (for your region), will show it exactly as it should (the same way as it operates when using the land description fields: 100% correct). You don't get an error when pressing 'Apply': it just simply doesn't take, and immediately reverts to what it was before you tried to change it.

In the Linden viewer (which is, in all fairness, most relevant to you, I reckon) almost all windlights are off, like in the last image I posted: 'Alien Sky' (or, rather,  LL viewer's interpretation thereof, really), still looks kinda pinkish, but the clouds are different, and most importantly, the sun-angle and intensities. Same as 'Blue Hour', and pretty much all the other windlights I tried. This is currently not a major issue for me, as I can still fall back to using the land description field (in FS viewer) to get a correct region 'default' sky, after all. But @Whirly Fizzle already announced the Firestorm team will, at some point, do away with what I believe she essentially calls a 'hack' (which, in all honesty, the FS description way of setting windlight kinda is: but fortunately one that has worked very well).

I just dawned on me, that I don't even know how wrong the LL viewer's rendition of these windlights actually are. I mean, prior to EEP, things may always have looked like that in the LL viewer (I haven't used LL viewer in years, sorry). Things like sun-position intensity, and angle are definitely different, though, from the windlights I use in FS.

At any rate, I really do appreciate you taking the time to look into these matters, even when I may sound a bit frustrated at times.

P.S. The forum should allow for an extra 'Kudos' button, as you assuredly deserve them for wanting to rename the conversion to 'BOB*'. 😼

[Rider Linden]

6 minutes ago, kiramanell said:

 

Funny thing is, in Firestorm, selecting the windlight you want (for your region), will show it exactly as it should (the same way as it operates when using the land description fields: 100% correct). You don't get an error when pressing 'Apply': it just simply doesn't take, and immediately reverts to what it was before you tried to change it.

Ah.  Ok, that sounds like the validation issue  (I'm surprised I don't send back a "Hey! Don't Do That" error.)  We validate ranges pretty aggressively. Hopefully that will be taken care of on the next set of simulator rolls.  We've been re adding some of the fixes that got dropped during the great Teleport Calamity of 2019.

[kiramanell]

1 minute ago, Rider Linden said:

Ah.  Ok, that sounds like the validation issue  (I'm surprised I don't send back a "Hey! Don't Do That" error.)  We validate ranges pretty aggressively. Hopefully that will be taken care of on the next set of simulator rolls.  We've been re adding some of the fixes that got dropped during the great Teleport Calamity of 2019.

 

Cool. Appreciate all the work you do!

And speaking of work, could I ask whether one of you guys/gals do one of those awesome EEP vids on how to do per-parcel height settings?  Someone mentioned 'tracking' once, on a channel, but the wiki doesn't, and I have no clue how this is supposed to be done. And no one else seems to know. It's a huge mystery.

P.S. As for renaming things to 'bob', guess you should call yourself 'Bob, the Builder' then 🤣 (Sorry, couldn't resist)

[kiramanell]

22 hours ago, kiramanell said:

I just dawned on me, that I don't even know how wrong the LL viewer's rendition of these windlights actually are. I mean, prior to EEP, things may always have looked like that in the LL viewer (I haven't used LL viewer in years, sorry). Things like sun-position intensity, and angle are definitely different, though, from the windlights I use in FS.

 

 

@Rider Linden   Looks like i was right: LL simply shows things differently (very differently). I did as you instructed, and applied the new windlight object to the Region. Then I went to Firestorm to see what the sky would look like with a blank land description (since, as I outlined to others, Region windlight is server-side, so should show up accordingly in FS as well). And, lo and behold, it did!  The left part of the image below is Firestorm's 'description' rendition of the scene, and the right part of what the Region windlight (set with EEP, using LL viewer) looks like in FS (with blank description). Firestorem's rendition is slightly hazier, and a wee brighter, but overall, the imported Annan windlight (shown as Region windlight) is almost identical -- at least nothing a few minor tweaks won't solve.So, pretty happy about that.

Ironically, I should not have allowed myself to be thrown off-track by others wanting to see LL viewer results, and just have stuck to doing consistency checks within the same viewer (only possible via Region environment for now), as it now turns out, the differences are only minute, and things were always going to look drastically different to begin with, as LL is simply a completely different viewer.