New updated enviroments

[Love Zhaoying]

8 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

That is coming and with elevated priority at the whim on one particular developer.

Priority over dozens of more important things that would make SL/content operate more efficiently.

Priority over requests filed by actual users. Many users, over many years.

It's nice to be a developer. 

[FairreLilette]

I haven't read the whole thread but read enough to take a break for a bit.

What I am wondering though does EEP get rid of the MIDDAY light because that does make skin look horrible and that did need improving.  However, MIDDAY is the best light for building.

I also cannot lose FPS.  I just got mine up to where SL is great like the old days because of the cloud.  I went shopping (at an event) for the first time recently on HIGH graphics and advanced lighting.  I don't want to lose that, although I'd like a better lighting for skin than MIDDAY but also a good light for building too! 

Reading all this has made me disappointed.  Is this still in BETA as far as FS?  I haven't checked yet.

Edited December 11, 2020 by FairreLilette

[Bree Giffen]

If you're the kind of person who just makes one nice windlight setting and uses it all the time then EEP will not be a huge problem for you. I made a few, imported a few, set my viewer to one persistent EEP and that was it. To non-parcel owners, EEP is pretty much windlight but just accessible as objects in your inventory. I guess if you're a photographer who made a hundred personal windlight settings there might be some pain converting all of them but it's like getting spanked 100 times. The pain will go away eventually.

@FairreLilette EEP doesn't get rid of MIDDAY light. In the LL viewer, it's one the default environments that is built into the system and is not an inventory object.

[Sassy Kenin]

9 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

If you think EEP is a s*itstorm, wait until you see what they are going to do with terrain & sim "surrounds".

New viewer update on FS  has me not able to even login..have tried for over an hour😖

Please tell me they are not really going to remove them like one of the last deathblows they did to the land tools in Sansar?

[Penny Patton]

Most of the complaints I'm seeing are:

• the interface
• Linden Lab's default skies

I imagine TPVs will streamline the interface in time, and Linden Lab's default windlight skies were bad so I'm not overly concerned about either of those issues. I'll continue to use my own settings for the most part.

What does worry me:

• the lack of contrast Chic talked about
• faint/few stars when maxed out
• the intense shine on everything

 I'm not sure if the lack of contrast is an EEP shortcoming, or if we're all just so new to the settings that we haven't figured it out yet.

 I like that the new stars twinkle, but I swear that no one at Linden Lab must have ever seen a night sky outside of a city.

 I thought I heard LL was going to reduce the shine issue? Or did they decide not to? I was under the impression that that was what Firestorm was waiting on before implementing EEP. I suppose this is something the userbase can fix by adjusting the materials settings, but it won't be easy and it won't happen quickly, given the sheer amount of affected content.

On the whole, I've only played with EEP a little so far and have had mixed results, but I'm not sure how much of that are the limitations of EEP or my own lack of familiarity with the settings. I adore the new features, I really do, but I worry that we won't be able to make SL look as good as it did with windlight. Time will tell.

 

[ChinRey]

On 12/11/2020 at 7:55 AM, Lucia Nightfire said:

Priority over dozens of more important things that would make SL/content operate more efficiently.

Priority over requests filed by actual users. Many users, over many years.

Unfortunately LL is still running the "Love Machine" scheme, one of Cory Ondrejka's less than brilliant ideas. The Love Machine is a popularity contest where LL employees vote on which development projects they like the best and there is even extra money to make for the developer who can come up with the most popular ideas. The result is of course that projects that the Lindens fancy themselves tend to be preferred over the ones that would be more useful for the customers.

Edited December 12, 2020 by ChinRey

[Marianne Little]

(About requests: I have wondered why we can't have a slider for Full Bright as we have for Glow. Unrelated to this theme - but such a small thing. Why not make it so? 100% or 0% is the alternative today. I can see where 0.10 and 0.20% Full Bright would be useful and actually pretty. Instead it is huge projects like this that have priority.)

Over to something related! I logged in the Linden viewer yesterday, after I read that Firestorm has gone full EEP. I expected to hate it.

I don't hate it. 😮

Whoever posted that the environments is found in a folder in the Library - Thank you! I found Nams, I found Phototools and all other windlights I am used to. The official viewer must have borrowed them from Firestorm.

Since I can deal with EEP on the Linden viewer that I dislike, I think it will be much better for me in Firestorm that have more intuitive controls. So now I dare to install the new Firestorm.

I shall not say I am turned into a fan. I can't see that EEP is better than Windlight now, but maybe I find it better as I use it. I decided to start using it, and not wait until the last Firestorm viewer with Windlight is so old that we can't log in with it.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 hour ago, Marianne Little said:

So now I dare to install the new Firestorm.

OMG DON'T DO IT!!!

It's a plot by the LL Illuminati and FIC to implant a microchip in your avatar so that Patch and the other Silicon Valley Liberal Technocommunists can . . .

. . . TRACK YOU IN-WORLD WHEREVER YOU GO!!!

I know this for a fact because I read it on Parler and One America.

RUN, Marianne! RUN!

[Qie Niangao]

3 hours ago, Marianne Little said:

(About requests: I have wondered why we can't have a slider for Full Bright as we have for Glow. Unrelated to this theme - but such a small thing. Why not make it so? 100% or 0% is the alternative today. I can see where 0.10 and 0.20% Full Bright would be useful and actually pretty. Instead it is huge projects like this that have priority.)

/me flutters in wearing his Tinkerbell costume. "POOF! Behold Alpha Mode = Emissive mask"!

You need control of the texture itself and it only works on opaque-looking surfaces (can't simultaneously use the alpha channel to code transparency), but it's actually cooler than merely a Full Bright slider setting because

• you can have different levels of Full Bright on the very same textured surface, e.g., signs or maps with highlighted text and graphics on an unlit background, and
• the texture can be animated so your Christmas lights can blink on and off or in fancy patterns, or your neon tubes can dim and brighten, etc., all with a run-once texture animation script.

Edited December 12, 2020 by Qie Niangao

[arton Rotaru]

21 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

I thought I heard LL was going to reduce the shine issue? Or did they decide not to? I was under the impression that that was what Firestorm was waiting on before implementing EEP. I suppose this is something the userbase can fix by adjusting the materials settings, but it won't be easy and it won't happen quickly, given the sheer amount of affected content.

I guess what Firestorm was waitng for was the issue where the shine was too weak. This one: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-228581

That has been worked on but it's still nowhere near as it should be like in Pre-EEP. Specular reflections are still too weak at sunset/sunrise.

Unfortunately we also have way too much shine at midday sun angles in EEP as well. This one:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-229448

Then there are point lights which do pretty much behave as they did in Pre-EEP.

Fixing this on the content side will be nearly impossible, because the only thing you can do to reduce the blown out spec at midday, is to dail down the spec maps, which will result in even weaker reflections at sunset, and under point lights.

It was quite difficult to get somewhat good material definitions under all these lighting conditions in Pre-EEP already. But it was more balanced between all of them. This balance is far off in EEP now. This really has to be addressed globaly in the shader. But my hopes are very low that this will happen actually. But as we know, hope dies last.

 

Edited December 12, 2020 by arton Rotaru

[Silent Mistwalker]

10 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Unfortunately LL is still running the "Love Machine" scheme, one of Cory Ondrejka's less than brilliant ideas. The Love Machine is a popularity contest where LL employees vote on which development projects they like the best and there is even extra money to make for the developer who can come up with the most popular ideas. The resultis of course that projects that the Lindens fancy themselves tend to be preferred over the ones that would be more useful for the customers.

The Love Machine was Philip Rosedale's idea.

[ChinRey]

Just now, Silent Mistwalker said:

The Love Machine was Philip Rosedale's idea.

Oh kay.

[Maitimo]

I installed it this morning and I've been having a play around with it.  I don't hate it, actually I quite like it. All the windlight presets I use regularly are in the library, and it's still easy enough to edit/create settings "on the fly" for photography.

One thing I really love is being able to have different settings at different altitudes. So now I have a day-cycle running at ground level (with a 24 hour day/night cycle instead of 4), and a fixed high-ambient setting on my sky platform.

[Solar Legion]

Just now, Maitimo said:

I installed it this morning and I've been having a play around with it.  I don't hate it, actually I quite like it. All the windlight presets I use regularly are in the library, and it's still easy enough to edit/create settings "on the fly" for photography.

One thing I really love is being able to have different settings at different altitudes. So now I have a day-cycle running at ground level (with a 24 hour day/night cycle instead of 4), and a fixed high-ambient setting on my sky platform.

I just wish we could change those altitude markers. For my rental parcel, anything that is not at ground level is presently above 3000 meters and would be a right pain to move to new altitudes - under the way Firestorm had things set up originally, I could set my sky presets such that everything from ground to just under 3800 meters was one preset while the rest was another.

Though that's more or less a personal thing as those who are regularly on the parcel tend to use their own settings anyway. Still, would be nice ....

[Silent Mistwalker]

11 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Oh kay.

Let me be a bit more specific. It would have helped it I hadn't left out the first two words of the sentence... "I thought". lol

In Cory's own words:

 

Quote

what's in a name?

Monday, November 16, 2009

In 2005, Second Life and Linden Lab were both growing. For a company with a “no management”-mantra, communication and feedback were becoming a challenge. One of my tasks was to invent a new system for employees to give each other feedback, one that would be fun, so easy everyone would use it, and that would generate interesting aggregate information about how individuals and the company were doing.

The design that emerged was tipping.

Tipping — via an internal web tool — would be a positive-sum, transparent game, a way to publicly thank a fellow Linden for going above and beyond. Finding a crucial bug, crunching some extra numbers, helping you figure out the right person to take a question to. Think “Twitter plus $1.” The key was to make it a small amount of money, as a payment makes it real but you don’t want to distort behavior with meaningful payouts.

Tipping was designed to solve three problems: help Lindens know what their fellow employees were doing, generate aggregate data on connections within the company, and identify extreme outliers. It wasn’t clear to me if your tipping rank would be important, but it might be meaningful data if you were generally at the top or the bottom of the list.

Philip loved the idea and renamed it “The Love Machine.” He carved out some time and built the first prototype implementation in November of 2005. It was a serious hit and people started using it. As far as I know, it is still in use today.

What happened was Philip wanted the system and it was Cory's job to come up with one. So it was Philip's idea to start with and Cory was assigned to develop the idea. That's what I was trying to convey before having my first cuppa. Sorry about that.

 

ETA: Forgot the link: http://ondrejka.net/metaverse memory/2009/11/16/whats-in-a-name.html

Moar pleeze ☕

Edited December 12, 2020 by Silent Mistwalker

[FairreLilette]

The download of the EEP viewer has corrupted some of my files and I cannot get rez of some of the corrupted files by installing the previous version of the FS viewer.  

I just tried to contact inworld FS support but my question about my corrupted textures would not go through.

Also, FPS started at about 3 and finally went up to 11.

Something is buggy here but for now, it's ruined my stuff.  

[ChinRey]

2 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

What happened was Philip wanted the system and it was Cory's job to come up with on.

Oh, that explains it. I first read about it in an old comment from Cory and got a very strong impression he owned it. The two were all but joined at the hip during those first years of LL anyway.

I was surprised by all the sad face responses my post got btw. Not because people are unhappy about it - that goes without saying - but because I didn't think it was news to any experienced SL users.

[Silent Mistwalker]

2 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Oh, that explains it. I first read about it in an old comment from Cory and got a very strong impression he owned it. The two were all but joined at the hip during those first years of LL anyway.

I was surprised by all the sad face responses my post got btw. Not because people are unhappy about it - that goes without saying - but because I didn't think it was news to any experienced SL users.

A lot of people still get a little pang of that sadness they experienced when Cory left. They miss him much the same way that I miss Vektor Linden. LL "stole" Vektor from Active Worlds and then, because LoveMachine, he left LL.

https://secondlife.fandom.com/wiki/Vektor_Linden

 

[Rowan Amore]

20 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

A lot of people still get a little pang of that sadness they experienced when Cory left. They miss him much the same way that I miss Vektor Linden. LL "stole" Vektor from Active Worlds and then, because LoveMachine, he left LL.

https://secondlife.fandom.com/wiki/Vektor_Linden

 

If employees got an incentive to bring out new features, what should we do with the employee that gives us something more complicated and buggy (EEP)?  I still don't understand the reasoning behind it.  What was wrong with sharing WL settings if someone came to your region?  A lot of places did that.  I, personally, will not be seeing anyone's oh so awesome EEP as once I'm forced to use an EEP viewer, I'll have it set at my own personal WL as I do now.  

The only time I do use a region WL is when I'm doing a mostly landscape photo and the region recommends using what they have set.

I'm just not seeing the LOVE for the actual SL residents in this whole update?

ETA:  I'm not whining at you specifically, @Silent Mistwalker.  Just in general and yours was the last post.

Edited December 12, 2020 by RowanMinx

[ChinRey]

22 minutes ago, Maitimo said:

I installed it this morning and I've been having a play around with it.  I don't hate it, actually I quite like it.

I used the official SL viewer almost exclusively when EEP was launched and I was really enthusiastic about it at first. The thrill didn't last very long though and although I never thought about it until now, I do think it's one of the main reasons I kind'a gravitated towards FS shortly afterwards.

I'm less worried about EEP in itself than the process that led to it though. The last few years, while most of the Lindens were having fun in Sansar, Oz and his crew were developing routines for long time strategic development. It's been three steps forwards and two steps back but they have made considerable progress. As Lucia pointed out, although it's always nice to have better atmospheric rendering it's really strange they chose to give it priority at this stage and all those silly bugs are also rather worrying. To me this seems to be the kind of project they used to do back in the six dark years: spur-of-the-moment idea, little or no consideration of how it fits into SL as a whole, little or no task analysis, launch-and-forget. I really hope it's a one-off case and that they aren't reverting to old sins.

[Tari Landar]

15 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

I'm less worried about EEP in itself than the process that led to it though. The last few years, while most of the Lindens were having fun in Sansar, Oz and his crew were developing routines for long time strategic development. It's been three steps forwards and two steps back but they have made considerable progress. As Lucia pointed out, although it's always nice to have better atmospheric rendering it's really strange they chose to give it priority at this stage and all those silly bugs are also rather worrying. To me this seems to be the kind of project they used to do back in the six dark years: spur-of-the-moment idea, little or no consideration of how it fits into SL as a whole, little or no task analysis, launch-and-forget. I really hope it's a one-off case and that they aren't reverting to old sins.

Thanks for putting it into better words than I have the grace to utter, atm.

It's really hard to give kudos to LL for anything, when they have a glaringly obvious pattern of simply not listening, or acting without thinking.

I still give them props when due, well, I try, but this trend of, as you said, reverting to old sins, is wearing thin on people. It's not so much just one thing, but a culmination of lots of things, even if some of them are little, minor and affect a smaller group of people negatively. It speaks volumes to people that have been waiting for LL to actually listen on age old problems, or even new problems that arise.

Though mostly unrelated to the actual topic at hand, EEP, the whole MP is one giant LL fiasco that has been barreling down in a massive spiral since its inception, and it's not getting any better over time. In fact, they're listening less and less at this point. It's only slightly related because it just shows how little thought LL puts into some things, and how very little they listen when residents tell them "this isn't working", "something's broken", "HELP US", or anything of the sort.

It makes me sad to see them continue on that pattern when the potential to be better and do better is right there at their fingertips. Set it and forget it only works on (some) kitchen appliances, not virtual environments and their development, or mere existence. 

[FairreLilette]

46 minutes ago, RowanMinx said:

If employees got an incentive to bring out new features, what should we do with the employee that gives us something more complicated and buggy (EEP)?  I still don't understand the reasoning behind it.  What was wrong with sharing WL settings if someone came to your region?  A lot of places did that.  I, personally, will not be seeing anyone's oh so awesome EEP as once I'm forced to use an EEP viewer, I'll have it set at my own personal WL as I do now.  

The only time I do use a region WL is when I'm doing a mostly landscape photo and the region recommends using what they have set.

I'm just not seeing the LOVE for the actual SL residents in this whole update?

ETA:  I'm not whining at you specifically, @Silent Mistwalker.  Just in general and yours was the last post.

It's terrible.  It's ruined many of my items even.  I cannot even get through to FS Support Group inworld...?  A friend told me to close FS for now and use SL viewer.  He also feels the bugs are not out of the FS viewer yet.  

I don't know what to think.  But, I will issue a ticket with LL because my textures are all screwed up now.  

[Rowan Amore]

2 minutes ago, FairreLilette said:

It's terrible.  It's ruined many of my items even.  I cannot even get through to FS Support Group inworld...?  A friend told me to close FS for now and use SL viewer.  He also feels the bugs are not out of the FS viewer yet.  

I don't know what to think.  But, I will issue a ticket with LL because my textures are all screwed up now.  

I recently downloaded the official viewer to check out EEP.  Needless to say, I was not impressed at all.  Besides the fact they can't seem to implement features that people love in firestorm, I'd hardly call the newest toy an upgrade in any way.

As I have used firestorm for the better part of my SL, I will not be updating to the newest version until if becomes necessary.  

Once again, if it ain't broke, why the hell are you fixing it?

[Chic Aeon]

12 minutes ago, FairreLilette said:

It's terrible.  It's ruined many of my items even.  I cannot even get through to FS Support Group inworld...?  A friend told me to close FS for now and use SL viewer.  He also feels the bugs are not out of the FS viewer yet.  

I don't know what to think.  But, I will issue a ticket with LL because my textures are all screwed up now.  

Just go back to the previous FS viewer.  LL KNOWS it is wrecking your textures and does not care so at ticket will get you nowhere. It isn't FS; it is EEP in general.  Again, those of us paying attention have known this was in the works for years now (and not been happy about it).  The FS folks as far as I know don't "love" EEP either. 

[FairreLilette]

9 minutes ago, RowanMinx said:

I recently downloaded the official viewer to check out EEP.  Needless to say, I was not impressed at all.  Besides the fact they can't seem to implement features that people love in firestorm, I'd hardly call the newest toy an upgrade in any way.

As I have used firestorm for the better part of my SL, I will not be updating to the newest version until if becomes necessary.  

Once again, if it ain't broke, why the hell are you fixing it?

I didn't like a single thing either about the look nor the features either nor would I really want to import windlights due to the hassle, although my friend said if you want to view (meaning a general you), use the SL LL viewer.   I did view SL on LL viewer yesterday, their EEP is a bit interesting but still I was not a taker nor taken of it.

However, broke?....it just might be and "buggy".

I issued a report with LL.