What does "sim sun override" do?

[Moni Duettmann]

What does "sim sun override" do? It's in the world pop down menu in the developer settings. What I really want to know: how can I override the daylight settings a sim provides, while I'm there?

[Nalates Urriah]

There are easy ways and more difficult ways to handle your lighting in SL. You have been around SL long enough I would think you would know about Windlight/EEP, which most of us use for taking photos in SL.

The override you ask about is for controlling the position of the sun. There is another setting that allows you mouse-click-drag the sun to any position.

To change the lighting in a region click World (top menu)->Environment->[select one of the 8 options]

If you go with Personal Lighting... you get a control panel that lets you adjust all the Windlight settings.

 

[Moni Duettmann]

Ok, thx, wow. Moving the sun somewhere... that's interesting. I actually did not know, that is possible in SL. Gotta check it out. Sounds like it can be very useful, when you take photos or film videos.

 

[Rowan Amore]

36 minutes ago, Moni Duettmann said:

Ok, thx, wow. Moving the sun somewhere... that's interesting. I actually did not know, that is possible in SL. Gotta check it out. Sounds like it can be very useful, when you take photos or film videos.

 

You can also just Apply a setting to yourself...there are many included in the library section, Setting folder.  Right click, scroll down to apply to self only.  If you want to go back.to using the Region settings, that's under the World menu, environments, use shared environment.

Edited June 12, 2023 by Rowan Amore

[Henri Beauchamp]

On 6/10/2023 at 2:37 PM, Moni Duettmann said:

What does ”sim sun override” do?

In modern viewers ?... It does nothing at all. (*)

This is a pre-Windlight, totally deprecated setting (I found its trace back in my archived v1.19.0.5 SL viewer sources, that is, the last non-Windlight SL viewer version). It was used to override the time of day and Sun angle transmitted by the simulator to the viewer, but this code was removed from the new Extended Environment code (the debug settings and menu code are therefore inoperative remnants)

I therefore removed that setting entirely in the Cool VL Viewer, when I cleaned up the Windlight (WL) code while backporting the Extended Environment (EE) one.

14 hours ago, Moni Duettmann said:

Moving the sun somewhere... that's interesting. I actually did not know, that is possible in SL. Gotta check it out. Sounds like it can be very useful, when you take photos or film videos.

Yes, you can change the Sun direction and elevation, using the Local environment editor (and not that deprecated Sun override setting); however, with EE viewers, you cannot change the ”time of the day” (which varies the various other settings than just the Sun) any more while preserving the parcel environment settings (you need to apply a fixed setting instead). With the Cool VL Viewer I therefore preserved the WL settings editor, and using it, you can still apply the WL settings you want, adjust the time of day, and then hit ”Preview frame” so that they get translated into their EE counterpart and get used as a local fixed setting...

 

(*) For Lindens and TPV devs, have a look at process_time_synch() in llviewermessage.cpp, which used to deal with that setting: you will also see that the remnants in that function do nothing at all (only _PREHASH_UsecSinceStart is extracted, but its value is sent to the LLWorld::setSpaceTimeUSec() method, setting mSpaceTimeUSec, which is never used anywhere any more in the viewer)... process_time_synch() and associated ”SimulatorViewerTimeMessage” UDP message could be removed entirely for SL (still useful for OpenSim however, on the condition the OpenSim-compatible viewer kept the WL code making use of that UDP message values).

Edited June 13, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp