Environmental Enhancement Project (aka EEP!) Feedback Thread

[Pat Perth]

I just tried creating environment settings under the new EEP regime and I was pleased to see that we will no longer have to deal with the weird astro-mathematics imposed by the original designers (e.g. "east angles").

I do hope that eventually we will be able to create sky-presets (or change parameters) with scripts. While using a mouse makes it easier to understand what you're doing, it's difficult to do things with any precision, and if I want to set up a whole day cycle, I will want to make the parameters change smoothly from one preset to the next. Hard do do this if you don't really know the parameter values. (Almost as good would be to make it possible to set the parameters in the dialog box you now offer to set them with a mouse.)

However, I'm really happy with the direction this is headed. 

Edited May 11, 2019 by Pat Perth

[Silas Merlin]

I made my sky setting freely available on Marketplace in the "beta test" category https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Silas-EEP-sky/17229649

Edited May 11, 2019 by Silas Merlin

[Whirly Fizzle]

Wrong thread - deleted.

Edited May 12, 2019 by Whirly Fizzle
Need more coffee

[Rider Linden]

On 5/11/2019 at 7:04 PM, Whirly Fizzle said:

Edited Saturday at 07:05 PM by Whirly Fizzle 
Need more coffee

 

[Pyewacket Bellman]

I just happened to have a video clip of how windlight worked originally.  I was making an odd sky at the time - so you don't get the full spectrum - but note the controls - No color picker boxes- just sliders - and you could watch your surroundings while the lighting changed. Just one step to start editing - and no save or load or ok when you were done. Just close the editing window and get on with it. 

The biggest pain with the EEP interface is that you have to start from scratch instead of adjusting  what you already see. That's a HUGE drawback if you do a lot of seat of the pants filming.  The biggest heartbreaker is that the lighting seems to have lost it's dynamic range. 

 

 

[Rider Linden]

@Pyewacket Bellman

You can use the "Personal Lighting" floater if you just want to make minor adjustments to an environment for filming or photography and these will be reflected immediately in your viewer. 

If you want to make grander changes that you can save and apply to yourself or your parcel, there are several hundred skies in the library, provided by FS, that you can use as starting places to create your own. 

 

[Nathan Zetkin]

The May 16 EEPs viewer update really messed up lighting. Everything looks horrible now. Can we revert and fix it back the way it was? Seriously this is the worst it has ever been, everything is so flat. Lighting is way blown out. I am using advanced lighting model with shadows on. Also all HUDs are darkened a lot. First pic is the way it was before. There are just 3 candles lighting the scene

 

Second Life Release 6.2.3.527250 (64bit)
Release Notes

You are at 123.1, 186.7, 2,298.5 in Elpenor located at sim10760.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.56.50:13003)
SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Elpenor/123/187/2299
(global coordinates 254,075.0, 261,051.0, 2,298.5)
Second Life Server 19.04.25.526669
Release Notes

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700K CPU @ 4.20GHz (4200.01 MHz)
Memory: 32706 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 17134.765)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 1080 Ti/PCIe/SSE2

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 25.21.14.1967
OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 419.67

Window size: 3440x1382
Font Size Adjustment: 96pt
UI Scaling: 1
Draw distance: 112m
Bandwidth: 2000kbit/s
LOD factor: 2
Render quality: 6
Advanced Lighting Model: Enabled
Texture memory: 512MB
VFS (cache) creation time: October 28 2017 17:24:00

J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.10.4
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Ex 4.44.64
Dullahan: 1.1.1320 / CEF: 3.3626.1895.g7001d56 / Chromium: 72.0.3626.121
LibVLC Version: 2.2.8
Voice Server Version: Vivox 4.9.0002.30313

Packets Lost: 156/140,216 (0.1%)
May 16 2019 16:27:49

Edited May 17, 2019 by Nathan Zetkin

[Nathan Zetkin]

Just me and the poor lighting from the latest release. Please fix it. That's not how I look.

 

Edited May 17, 2019 by Nathan Zetkin

[Miller Thor]

Second Life Release 6.2.3.527250 (64bit) is the best EEP built I ever saw in the current test series. The depiction of the times of day as well as the shadow rendering are top notch. This is how it looks like in the morning

 

And so in the Afternoon

 

Ist really more than realistic and beautyful.

Edited May 17, 2019 by Miller Thor

[Nathan Zetkin]

Those scenes do look great but it is light objects that have a problem along with HUDs. Lights are overblown and HUDs are too dark. Looks great outside and awful inside. Daytime shadows may be a bit too strong. There should be plenty of global ambient light in daytime but it looks more like night time even in Miller Thor's post above.

 

Edited May 17, 2019 by Nathan Zetkin

[Miller Thor]

@Nathan Zetkin: The first Picture i made at 8am CEST and the 2nd one at 3PM CEST so ist normal that the sun wont be high above the Mountains surrounding the Village Gosau and make the Picture more bright.  

 

And so at the Afternoon:

 

 

[Nathan Zetkin]

If I didn't know that it was 3 PM I would guess it was moonlight. Even the sky looks dark instead of bright blue as it should.

[Pyewacket Bellman]

23 hours ago, Nathan Zetkin said:

Can we revert and fix it back the way it was?

I sure hope so - because this is just plain ugly.  I love new toys  - but I wasn't prepared to lose EVERYTHING just to put a picture on the moon or buy skies on marketplace.

Didn't anyone check to see what the new lighting was going to do to existing content?  Most people run around on midday - and the new default lighting is extremely unflattering.  The colors are all off, the effect of "scattered light" is totally gone, the clouds have no depth,  and it seems that I'll need to bring my own water texture everywhere I go because the default water is now equally transparent at every depth.  

I can import my old windlights but,as the Lab well knows, they're not even similar in the new viewer - AND - it's a big pain in the butt to have to fix the lighting and water every time I move to another parcel.

The UI is impossible to work with. It's so huge that I can't see what I'm lighting.

So, there's my two cents.

 

[Morena Tully]

I'm actually very happy right now.. The past week or two, I couldn't get the light on my sim how I wanted, and the haze was missing again no matter what. The thing is, you do need to edit it with the EEP viewer, and have an alt on at the same time on your normal viewer, to see what the editing is actually doing. Because it looks wayyyy different between viewers. It was looking bad like how the most recent pictures in this thread are, but with adjusting gamma and making atmospheric colors lighter or darker in the EEP viewer, I actually got it looking exactly how I wanted it (on firestorm). The lighting is gentle now, soft, not harsh like how it's been ever since LL applied EEP to sims. You just have to adjust things some.

*edit!*  I turned the personal setting to default mid day on my sim, and ewwwwww yuck! I see an issue there for sure! Default SL region settings are horrible compared to before. Water see-through and funky color, oh it's soooo bad.

Edited May 18, 2019 by Morena Tully
adding

[Miller Thor]

@Nathan Zetkin : Some little Corrections on the Gamma fader and the Blue Horizon Color made it a bit brighter but not too much so it looks good as well and wont make you blind.

Ist as i said it up from the beginning. You never stop learning and with each Setting you make you learn a bit more.

Edited May 18, 2019 by Miller Thor

[Miller Thor]

@Silas Merlin : Your Skypreset you sell on MP is a very good made Base for a new Daycycle my Wife and i made for our Region. We made some little Adjustments and now it looks brilliant on our Regions on cloudy Days.

Edited May 18, 2019 by Miller Thor

[Silas Merlin]

Ah I'm glad you find it useful, Miller.
I think I should unlist it now, because when I installed the latest EEP viewer, I found that my sky is completely broken now. Much brighter, haze vanished. Also, the second rainbow which was hidden on the horizon accross from the sun produces a halo which becomes just as bright as the sun itself when you face it with your camera.
Light changes when you rotate your camera now, as if your eyes were adjusting, but not quite right.

[Nathan Zetkin]

To Miller Thor, Your skies are completely white now instead of blue. So you over brightened a scene that should not need it. It's still broken. I had to go back to the regular viewer for now, hope they fix it soon.

[Cube Republic]

I'm really excited with this release. I make a lot of meshes in zbrush and bake normal maps onto low poly for in-world. I've often found that data from the normals is lost in second life. They seem to have a greater fidelity now. Both images are taken with midday light settings. There still seems to be a problem with gamma though, the vanilla plywood texture blows out under the standard midday setting. 

[Miller Thor]

1 hour ago, Nathan Zetkin said:

To Miller Thor, Your skies are completely white now instead of blue. So you over brightened a scene that should not need it. It's still broken. I had to go back to the regular viewer for now, hope they fix it soon.

Yea thats true and we moved ahead to Silans Setting witch we implemented into a 24h Daycycle. 

Tomorow we start with new Tests and learning more how to fix Problems like that.

For my Wife and me ist a permanently learning by doing to find out more about EEP and all his funktionality.

Edited May 18, 2019 by Miller Thor

[Coby Foden]

The default midday light is too harsh, light surfaces are washed out. Even light ground textures are washed out.
Shadows look too dark.
The clouds look totally flat and featureless. White cloud reflections on water look really weird - you can see this clearly when looking around at sea.
Water is very transparent - too much so.
HUDs on screen are too dark.

Many issues still need fixing in EEP. It's not ready yet.

[Penny Patton]

I finally got around to installing the EEP viewer and playing around with it. The main thing that stuck out at me, and something I haven't seen anyone else bring up, are the stars.

First, I love that they sparkle. That's always been a gripe I've had with the stars in SL. These stars look much nicer. That said, I wish I had more control over them.

 I've seen some people do fun things with cloud textures to replace the stars, but then you can't use the sun/moon features, because the stars will sit in front of them and that just looks bad. You can adjust the brightness, but they remain tiny and there's not a lot of them. The sky feels empty, or like I'm perpetually in the city, unable to get a good look at the night sky. Maybe we could get a slider that lets us increase/decrease the amount of stars in the sky? Maybe a second cloud layer that sits behind the sun/moon and has glow/brightness controls of its own so we can do more with custom textures? Or perhaps the ability to set minimum and maximum star sizes and the variance between them?

 Just some thoughts. And, of course, these are just a first impression. Maybe I overlooked something?

[Conifer Dada]

As I posted on another thread, EEP came to me unexpectedly, as a routine viewer update.  Importing my own custom Windlight settings from my PC looked complicated so I decided to make new settings.  I've done these and I'm very happy with the result as far as natural lighting goes.  

The only downside is that artificial lighting, both projectors or old-type, messes up the look of avatars.  It's fine for surroundings but my avatar looks like it's bleached or over-exposed - paler with less contrast.  I turned down the brightness of lights which improved things a bit.  It's like I'm wearing a something like a 75% transparent white tattoo layer over my skin, which I'm definitely not!

To re-iterate, my avatar looks fine in natural light, the problem is only with artificial lighting.

Edited May 20, 2019 by Conifer Dada

[Conifer Dada]

I've looked more closely at the problem with artificial lighting with the EEP viewer.  

In artificial light avatars are 1) too pale compared to their normal tone, 2) too little contrast and 3) not enough colour saturation.  Artificial lights seem much brighter than before.  When they are dimmed down the surrounding environment reverts to being OK but avatars still look odd.  

Another thing I've noticed is that shininess is more now more shiny, so "low" looks more like "medium" or "high" used to.

Edited May 21, 2019 by Conifer Dada

[NiranV Dean]

I gave the new EEP release another spin.

Shadows:

• Shadows get stuck and rotate with the camera when looking top down from max camera distance
• Shadows vanish or completely shadow the entire scene when looking topdown from max camera distance
• Smaller shadows vanish immediately after zooming away 1-2m visible on the feet of my skunk
• Shadows still cut off when zooming too close from a vertical angle

Lighting:

• Lighting is absolutely overblown now
• Glow on shiny is still too strong
• Projectors are still cutting off hard on shiny and alpha surfaces (seen on spheres)
• Projectors light surfaces are flickering like crazy
• Shininess on some metallic beams are way too weak or non existent at all
• HUDs are darkened
• Lights are being culled much further away than anything else even when everything is already gone they are still there
• Fullbrights still shine through fog, weaker but still do, really foggy ones show this problem well.
• Sky is still only very weakly fogged in comparison to the world and water

Water:

• Water is unfogged
• Water still vanishes when zooming close
• Water randomly flashes brightly or darker
• Water is too bright on shorelines
• Water reflections are too bright
• Water reflections from beneath are too dark
• Water vanishes from beneath as well when zooming too close
• Water reflections get culled when zooming flat too close to the water surface
• Water still occasionally is not rendered fast enough at the edge of the screen when rotating the camera around

UI:

• Lots of important controls are still missing for personal lighting
• Water settings are completely missing for personal lighting
• You still cannot bulk-import windlights
• You still cannot simply use local presets rather than importing them (compatibility with old presets is basically 0)
• The UI is still huge and wastes tremendous amounts of space for no reason
• Selecting personal presets is still cumbersome and done via the inventory or an extra inventory list rather than a simple dropdown menu
• There is no window anymore to have all preset types and general settings in one window (the old Environment Settings window where you could select all presets easily from dropdowns)

Needless to say given by the many many obvious issues still i'd say EEP is still far far away from a release or even a release candidate, the amount of bugs that immediately jump at you the moment the progress screen vanishes is enormous, project viewers and betas up to this date were more stable and less broken than what you call a "release candidate" right now.

I might or might not add pictures to all these issues above but for now i'll leave it as list, this was just a quick test (half an hour of a 1 hour test was basically wasted running around and ranting before i decided to write everything down).

You better go back to the drawing board with this and if this continues i might just decide to implement as many features of EEP as i can in my own Viewer my own way without breaking everything just to show you that what you have done here is questionable, i already started adding additional windlight features with my new water height feature that allows changing the water height locally, something thats really simple but incredibly helpful for photographers and unlike EEP it didn't break everything.

I'm still incredibly pissed.