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Official Viewer's EEP <3


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(photo above is only a screen capture using snipping tool app in windows10) location: Sirens Isle, Blake Sea / setting: Shared environment

 

I am really enjoying the updated official viewer no. The graphics and performance is much better now compare to firestorm plus the EEP is really stunning. I love the illuminated moon and stars! Official viewer will be my default viewer as of now until Firestorm update to EEP. I stillwant the convenient features FS.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Firestorm 6.4.5 beta does have EEP (and so do some other third party viewers like Kokua). Personally, I'm looking forward to Love Me Render RC becoming the default release, hopefully soon. The sun and moon specularity has been fixed now, in my opinion, in LMR RC. There may still be some work to do fixing the presets, especially sunrise and sunset, but otherwise it's looking very good.  LL's current release viewer and the TPV EEP viewers still have very dull looking sun and moon specular shine, which looks rather unnatural especially when compared to the point and spot lighting shine.

Firestorm 6.4.5 beta EEP image:

No Photography

Love Me Render RC EEP image:

Diving Backwards

 

Edited by KjartanEno
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23 hours ago, KjartanEno said:

Firestorm 6.4.5 beta EEP image:

No Photography

Except this picture all the ones from EEP i've seen so far that praise EEP look just like normal windlight. This one truly looks special, it has a touch of realism due to the colors, the background sky and desert look really good.

Everything else i see so far i really don't understand why its praising EEP. Everyone is just posting boring, normal pictures that they could have done before EEP and say "WOW EEP SO GOOD". The above picture doesn't even use anything from EEP, this looks more like you've played with Tone Mapping and Color Correction. Something that was there before EEP as well.

Here

Snapshot_115_small.png

Wow EEP looks so great. So great in fact that there is nothing in this picture even showing any of EEP's capabilities (which are basically almost none and mostly just gimmicky *****) but EEP looks so great! They totally returned EEP looks back to what it was before with Windlight but lets just continue patting EEP's back for doing literally nothing.

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42 minutes ago, NiranV Dean said:

Except this picture all the ones from EEP i've seen so far that praise EEP look just like normal windlight. This one truly looks special, it has a touch of realism due to the colors, the background sky and desert look really good.

Everything else i see so far i really don't understand why its praising EEP. Everyone is just posting boring, normal pictures that they could have done before EEP and say "WOW EEP SO GOOD". The above picture doesn't even use anything from EEP, this looks more like you've played with Tone Mapping and Color Correction. Something that was there before EEP as well.

Here

Snapshot_115_small.png

Wow EEP looks so great. So great in fact that there is nothing in this picture even showing any of EEP's capabilities (which are basically almost none and mostly just gimmicky *****) but EEP looks so great! They totally returned EEP looks back to what it was before with Windlight but lets just continue patting EEP's back for doing literally nothing.

I used the Personal Environment settings dialog to set the sun direction and mess about with the lighting and sky colors in that and other images on my Flickr page which were taken with the Firestorm beta. No post effects were added. I'd happily use Black Dragon, but I spend 99.9% of my time in Linux, which is significantly faster at rendering SL for me.

I listed my settings and computer specifications in this post, promising more info when I had a chance to duplicate the test in Windows:

And my results in Windows:

FS EEP 6.4.5 12 fps

Black Dragon 3.8.10 AVX EEP 14 fps

Cool VL Viewer 1.28.0.6 EEP 14 fps

Singularity 1.8.9.8338 WL 23 fps

Linux (again, for reference):

FS EEP 6.4.5 22 fps

Cool VL Viewer 1.28.0.6 EEP 20 fps

Singularity 1.87.8193 WL 32 fps

The difference may have something to do with Windows performance settings, but nothing I found in that convoluted mess of an operating system indicated Windows was not using optimal settings. I certainly have no problem playing the few games installed via Steam on the Windows partition with very high to ultra settings...

Now, whether or not EEP is better looking than WL, I think it's a matter of preference. I do see your point, however, since WL renderer is very capable in experienced hands. Nevertheless, if LL saw the need to update the code in order to prepare for the deprecation of OpenGL on Apple products in the near future, then the WL renderer's days were numbered anyway. I don't usually log in Firestorm 6.3.9 anymore, and I only use Singularity for clubs since it's very good at rendering many avatars without reducing my experience to a slide show. Otherwise, it's EEP all the time now, and I'll get better at using it for photography.

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Could these images come from a Windlight viewer? These were all taken using the Love Me Render RC viewer (on Windows).

Route 9 in Jeogeot #1

Driving Jeogeot Route 9

Route 9 in Jeogeot #2

Into the Tunnel on Jeogeot Route 9

Route 9 in Jeogeot #3 (I like this picture in spite of the blurry texture on the "donut." LL seriously needs to reconsider that 512MB texture memory limit.)

XING

Route 9 in Jeogeot #4

Evening Drive on Route 9

Route 9 in Jeogeot #5 (Specular shine on the building, dune buggy, and skin of the avatar would not be visible on LL's current release EEP viewer or Firestorm 6.4.5 beta. It makes a real difference in the scene, and I would go so far as to say that it's better than the old WL viewer Sun/Moon specular shine.  I beg to differ with anyone who says that it is too much shine, especially if the complaint comes from someone who only uses the [old and in need of updating] Sunset preset as a point of reference.)

Let the Sun (Really) Shine

While I have made a couple of completely original EEP day cycles for myself, I used the Personal Lighting dialog to set up the sky and lighting for these images.

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17 hours ago, KjartanEno said:

I used the Personal Environment settings dialog to set the sun direction and mess about with the lighting and sky colors in that and other images on my Flickr page which were taken with the Firestorm beta. No post effects were added.

Now, whether or not EEP is better looking than WL, I think it's a matter of preference. I do see your point, however, since WL renderer is very capable in experienced hands. 

No.

Technically speaking EEP looks better, it has the slight advantage of being able to change the sun and moon texture as well as 3 completely new sliders for wetness which can create a rainbow. It also uses correct gamma and color space now which should make colors look better and how they were actually meant to be.

HOWEVER. We assume that EEP is just Windlight plus these tiny few extras, which it isn't. It has seen a lot of revamping internally which caused some major changes in how lighting and some of the rendering works in general. Shadows, sky and water were affected in addition to lighting itself. And all of these have not improved neither from a technical standpoint nor from their actual looks, except sky all of them have been visibly downgraded in fidelity.

EEP has made so little improvements and weighted them against its own massive amount of mistakes and bugs that the outcome was overall the same (or worse) than what we had with Windlight. Neither looks better apart from the fact that both EEP and Windlight were capable of doing everything shown so far here in the thread... which brings me to:

9 hours ago, KjartanEno said:

Could these images come from a Windlight viewer? These were all taken using the Love Me Render RC viewer (on Windows).

Route 9 in Jeogeot #1

Route 9 in Jeogeot #2

Route 9 in Jeogeot #3 (I like this picture in spite of the blurry texture on the "donut." LL seriously needs to reconsider that 512MB texture memory limit.)

Route 9 in Jeogeot #4

Route 9 in Jeogeot #5 (Specular shine on the building, dune buggy, and skin of the avatar would not be visible on LL's current release EEP viewer or Firestorm 6.4.5 beta. It makes a real difference in the scene, and I would go so far as to say that it's better than the old WL viewer Sun/Moon specular shine.  I beg to differ with anyone who says that it is too much shine, especially if the complaint comes from someone who only uses the [old and in need of updating] Sunset preset as a point of reference.)

While I have made a couple of completely original EEP day cycles for myself, I used the Personal Lighting dialog to set up the sky and lighting for these images.

Yes. All of them. In windlight, set to default sunrise/dawn and you'd be very close to that, open the sky editor and tweak a bit. None of your pictures show anything EEP specific.

But that's exactly my point. Everyone seems to praise EEP but... you show Windlight. You are literally praising EEP for something Windlight already did since 11 years. I can show hundreds of pictures both from random users or from me from Windlight times that look no different than what i can show you now... because EEP IS no different (aside from the slightly altered colors) in 99.9% of the cases. The 3 new sliders hardly if ever get any use (they are honestly almost useless to begin with) and changing the sun or moon texture is rarely used too because most of the time you don't see them, moving them independently is only useful if you want a crazy picture like planets in the background or something.

----

Don't get me wrong, i'm not saying these pictures are bad, i just hate it when people praise something that doesn't deserve it (or gets the praise of something else). In this case EEP being praised for being... Windlight.

Anyway, here are 2 random pre-EEP pictures for lighting or something

Snapshot_001_smol.png

Snapshot_5384_small.png

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12 hours ago, KjartanEno said:

I beg to differ with anyone who says that it is too much shine, especially if the complaint comes from someone who only uses the [old and in need of updating] Sunset preset as a point of reference.)

You don't seem to understand the concept of providing repro steps as simple as possible when pointing out an issue. So that they can be reproduced quick and easy by anyone. This has nothing to do with personal preferences.

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Many SL users are super into the static images they see on their screens, even to the point of preserving those images and calling it "photography." Even for this limited use-case of static environments, EEP makes it easier to exchange those environments (assuming the shutterbugs ever STFU about which film is better and get serious about creating and exchanging environments).

But as I keep saying in these threads, EEP's most powerful feature is the Experience-linked ability to specify timed environmental transitions experienced by specific agents viewing the scene. This can be as simple as lighting that changes according to the room the avatar visits or cams into (not limited to parcel and altitude boundaries) to a full orchestration of changing weather effects that play out over time after an avatar arrives, perhaps depending on and responding to their personal role-play situation.

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1 minute ago, Qie Niangao said:

Many SL users are super into the static images they see on their screens, even to the point of preserving those images and calling it "photography." Even for this limited use-case of static environments, EEP makes it easier to exchange those environments (assuming the shutterbugs ever STFU about which film is better and get serious about creating and exchanging environments).

But as I keep saying in these threads, EEP's most powerful feature is the Experience-linked ability to specify timed environmental transitions experienced by specific agents viewing the scene. This can be as simple as lighting that changes according to the room the avatar visits or cams into (not limited to parcel and altitude boundaries) to a full orchestration of changing weather effects that play out over time after an avatar arrives, perhaps depending on and responding to their personal role-play situation.

The problem with experience based stuff is that it is... well experience based. Not everyone can have experience. I for instance cannot develop for experience because i'm not premium. Which is an incredibly stupid limitation. Until experience becomes a full free-for-everyone feature i simply cannot count experience as part of its feature set.

It's sad that RLV, something that has been around for a decade (if not longer already) supported this long before experience did and in such a way that everyone can both use and develop for it without a stupid premium requirement. It's these kind of things that make me think of this:

image.png.80f40b1aeda010556c11b234344e6cdf.png

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Of course a non-Premium developer can develop and deploy Experiences as long as some Premium member trusts that developer won't use their Experience to endanger their RL-linked account. It's more practical than requiring every visitor to use an RLV-capable viewer and enable RLV in it.

That said, I do think it would be useful -- not only for Experiences, but also for Mesh uploads and possibly other actions -- to require and support an alternative way, distinct from Premium membership, for creators to establish a traceable, ongoing link from their RL identity to their SL account, beyond the wishful thinking of "payment info used."

Anyway, there are many things (besides EEP) that Experiences can do that are completely irrelevant to RLV. In fact, comparing Experiences to RLV is quite like comparing EEP to Windlight.

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I am holding back on EEP  because materials I have set up under Windlight look so different under EEP, and EEP frame rates are so much lower.

Windlight and ALM have some features for compatibility with non-ALM rendering. It's sort of OK that they have been dropped for EEP, but a lot of existing content does use them. And some of it is surprisingly recent.

I doubt EEP was adequately tested. The bug-fixes coming through will be welcome, but they will change the overall effect.

I regularly check my monitor settings to make sure I can see as near the full colour range on my screen as I can. With the effects of room lighting, it can be hard getting to see the full range. And it's not a good idea to use the extremes in a material, texture or colour setting, because there's no room for shadows and highlights.

Right now, it feels as though EEP has wasted all my efforts. A knitted sweater, which uses just enough specularity to show the normal map effects, suddenly looks like embossed latex.

I was making some auto wheels, trying to get chrome plating looking like chrome plating. Arguably, until Firestorm switched to a bug-fixed EEP as a full release, I should stick with Windlight, since that is what most people use.

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4 minutes ago, Candide LeMay said:

how would you script that?

For the camming-into bit, Experience scripts can watch llGetCameraPos (and -Rot) because they get PERMISSION_TRACK_CAMERA as a side-effect of llRequestExperiencePermissions, so the script can know what Experience participants are looking at and where their cam is looking from.

For changing the lighting effects, I wrote up a very quick and dirty sample script  (based simply on avatar presence on the parcel, not the cam bit) ... which unfortunately lost its formatting somewhere in the blogging process.

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6 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Of course a non-Premium developer can develop and deploy Experiences as long as some Premium member trusts that developer won't use their Experience to endanger their RL-linked account. It's more practical than requiring every visitor to use an RLV-capable viewer and enable RLV in it.

That said, I do think it would be useful -- not only for Experiences, but also for Mesh uploads and possibly other actions -- to require and support an alternative way, distinct from Premium membership, for creators to establish a traceable, ongoing link from their RL identity to their SL account, beyond the wishful thinking of "payment info used."

Anyway, there are many things (besides EEP) that Experiences can do that are completely irrelevant to RLV. In fact, comparing Experiences to RLV is quite like comparing EEP to Windlight.

...right

Someone's just gonna hand me his experience for me to test out stuff.

Also, yes the comparison is the same as EEP and Windlight because its literally doing the same. We get something that we already had and downgrade it in such a major way that it is unfun to use, then add stupid limitations on top and call it an "improvement". Nothing EEP has done couldn't have been done easily in Windlight, all of what EEP did improve was either already there (presets as inventory items, cloud textures) or could have been easily added (such as changing moon texture, sun texture, 72 hour daycycle) or added with a bit effort (altitude presets, experience implementation and so on). This would have been outside of major rendering changes which could have been put into a separate "rendering overhaul" project that could have been further and specifically tested (for rendering rather than windlight). Just how many issues slipped in a project they called "release worthy" should tell you that EEP was a massive backfired project that went way over their head, i'm not even counting the issues that are still there now that EEP is actually out. I would have rolled EEP back, ripped out the Windlight additions and ported them into the main release without all the breakage, then have the major rendering changes put into a separate project viewer and have the two new graphics developers work on it exclusively (aside from fixing other rendering related issues in main release) until everything is done from start to end. No "part 2 will fix it" excuse. It's going to release when its done, not while its a half-baked broken mess. EEP was severely mismanaged (and still is)

Edited by NiranV Dean
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6 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

Nothing EEP has done couldn't have been done easily in Windlight

Perhaps, but it wasn't, for over a decade. Compared to EEP as it is, Windlight functionality was very limited.

Just as RLV, I suppose, mighta been extended to do all that Experiences can do, in theory, but it's not clear how the KVP persistent store and other server-side Experience functionality fits into the viewer-centric RLV architecture. Sure, KVP mighta been a separate thing, but it wasn't; Windlight mighta been extended to have all the dynamic EEP features that it never had, but it wasn't.

Could they have gotten to the same EEP feature set by using more of Windlight? Probably, maybe even with less effort. But this is far from the first time a software shop spent extra time replacing functionality with something shiny and new, rather than building further on "ugly" code. Of local relevance, Sansar comes to mind as such a boondoggle on a grimly large scale. So yeah, better they hadn't made that mistake, but as much as I griped about Sansar, griping wasn't what made it go away.

6 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

EEP was severely mismanaged (and still is)

Whatever. You go to war with the army you have.

7 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

Someone's just gonna hand me his experience for me to test out stuff.

On the off-chance you're not merely fussing out of habit and genuinely don't know: they'd simply edit the Experience profile to add you as a Contributor, or even an Admin.

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8 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Perhaps, but it wasn't, for over a decade. Compared to EEP as it is, Windlight functionality was very limited.

Just as RLV, I suppose, mighta been extended to do all that Experiences can do, in theory, but it's not clear how the KVP persistent store and other server-side Experience functionality fits into the viewer-centric RLV architecture. Sure, KVP mighta been a separate thing, but it wasn't; Windlight mighta been extended to have all the dynamic EEP features that it never had, but it wasn't.

Could they have gotten to the same EEP feature set by using more of Windlight? Probably, maybe even with less effort. But this is far from the first time a software shop spent extra time replacing functionality with something shiny and new, rather than building further on "ugly" code. Of local relevance, Sansar comes to mind as such a boondoggle on a grimly large scale. So yeah, better they hadn't made that mistake, but as much as I griped about Sansar, griping wasn't what made it go away.

The Windlight code might have been old but it was simple, easy to extend, extremely well known by everyone and was by all means not bad, it didn't use the newest of the new fancy stuff (which arguably EEP doesn't really either) but that could have been easily changed and it wasn't limited at all. Anything can be unlimited as much as you want if you are just willing to unlock the limitations that may be in place none if which i know existed in Windlight. EEP's replacement was unnecessary and basically just a remake from scratch "just because", the whole replacement has brought nothing but confusion and internal complexity while at the same getting rid of what was essential features to make way for "replacement" features that were never asked for as replacement but as extension to the already existing system (inventory presets), which like i already said existed previously already in TPV's. This isn't the first time, not the second time, this is the X time LL does something that is much requested and was already offered by TPV's but totally misunderstands what has made these features really great and what we really want and expect from them and thus implements them in a horrible way that breaks the original intend. I can tell you from personal experience that they are going to do it again at least one more time (my poser).

I simply cannot believe that a lot of people really tested EEP and gave them feedback nor that people were really okay with what they were getting. Either they didn't care or didn't really know what Windlight really needed. Then again EEP was so buggy that the "planned release state" had so many bugs that i could write them an extensive list by just using the Viewer for mere 30 minutes, most of which were spent actually writing down the bugs than using the Viewer and most of them weren't reported even though anyone starting the Viewer up should have seen them immediately. Almost like no one actually looked at EEP. 

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2 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

Almost like no one actually looked at EEP. 

That may be pretty close to the case, at least as far as I know. Personally, I certainly never filed any jiras on EEP as a Windlight replacement because I pretty much never really "used" Windlight, so I'd be the last to detect any differences at that level.

I only ever got interested in EEP because of scripted server-side per-avatar dynamics. I didn't ask for it, but now that it's here, it's the first time I've had any interest in EEP or anything Windlight-related. In my 14-odd years on the platform I could probably count on two hands the number of in-world images I've taken for any reason other than illustrating a bug or adfarm violation. So I have no idea how static EEP differs from Windlight, and whether those differences might be bugs or features or noise.

So yeah, they had to continue serving static, Windlight-equivalent functionality with fidelity because there are plenty of folks who, unlike me, do use static in-world imaging. And I admit to being a little surprised how much of Windlight seems to have been re-implemented and replaced with EEP. I don't know why that approach was adopted.

But I just want to say again, for the first time ever, I'm actually interested in the dynamic server-side functionality and the immersive emotional response it evokes.

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1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

That may be pretty close to the case, at least as far as I know. Personally, I certainly never filed any jiras on EEP as a Windlight replacement because I pretty much never really "used" Windlight, so I'd be the last to detect any differences at that level.

I didn't use/test it either until the very end simply because everyone was telling me not to until sometime in the middle of the development and then i didn't care for EEP because i trusted LL to do an acceptable job. I wouldn't even have looked into it until Release if it wasn't for Whirly who made me look into it. By that time it was too late though, everything was already set in stone and the project was and still is a huge bugfest. EEP is an absolute masterpiece if you see it as something that is as far away from what the community actually wanted while at the same time being what they asked for. I'd have fired everyone who worked on it (minus the new graphics devs who tried to salvage as much as possible).... i think Graham is gone now isn't he? I don't want to sound like an ***** but i'm gonna quote this :"You might as well ask a horse to fix a merry-go-round, i mean he's going to try his best but mostly he's just gonna get horrified". In other words Graham was simply not a developer for this kind of stuff.

Edited by NiranV Dean
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I went to a sim with a "moon base" set in a skybox and took some pictures. I made my own EEP Sky setting with a starry black sky, bright sun, and a custom Earth image to replace the "Moon" texture. I have had a Blender file for many years that renders the Earth using the old Blender render engine. It renders quickly, so I was able to come up with a crescent phase of the Earth for my sky. This particular skybox has an object positioned off sim to show a planet, but I derendered it because it didn't look good and interfered with my sky. Being able to use a custom "moon" is a great feature.

Ambient Color, Blue Horizon, and Blue Density were set to black. The Sun was set to the maximum brightness and the scene gamma was set as high as needed to get sufficient contrast. All images were taken using Cool VL Viewer 1.28.0.7 (Linux) since it has correct Sun specularity and allows much greater than 512MB of Texture Memory (my GPU has 8 GB VRAM). My only issue was getting just the right amount of glow around the Sun itself. There had to be no atmosphere to get a black sky in the daytime, but then there needed to be a tiny amount to allow the Sun to 'glow' instead of being a white disk in the sky. The images I made with the Sun in them didn't make the cut this time. Anyway, on to the pictures.

Moonbase 1

Crescent Earth

Moonbase 2

Home Away From Earth

Moonbase 3

Big Blue Marble

Moonbase 4

Moonbase

 

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