Bellimora

Woot, There's a Linden response to the JIRA, looks like the issue is already fixed in an unreleased next build for EEP viewer.

Several builds back I'd log on to EEP and gradually after a while, something about the colors and shadow would annoy me enouhg I'd switch back. Now I only switch back because I need to use a feature that's only on another viewer. I was going to say I lack any huge complaints, but then I put on an avatar that made heavy use of emmissive masked textures and thought I had accidentally set the coloring of the textures to a dark grey, I mean everything looked dark. Upon investigation I found that the emissive masking was the culprit and any texture using emissive masking comes up real dark for the non-glowy pixels. So I filed a JIRA: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-228172 Also I poked about this way back in early development and said this was all rather WIP at the time: The floater for setting the sun/moon position. Could you please insert some boxes for numeric entry of the sun/moon positions so we can fine tune position. The Current tools for that work alright for course positioning but if you want some rather fine tuned sun/moon position it can get a little clunky.

Yeah, but I'm not saying you need to reproduce existing content precisely. I'm saying we ought to nail the level of light/shadow to be in the vague ballpark as it in the very least. If everyone finds every single one of their sims washed out and lacking contrast there shall be butthurtedness. If everything is kinda different but dark is still dark and bright is still bright and they got awesome windlight tools they probably won't notice. And i'm not about those weird artsy windlights either where everything is like two-tone, I figure those are a lost cause. I'm talking like your bog-standard day/nights with a bit of tint to make the sim look different. Though I am pleased night time has moonlight now. I was trying all sorts of shenanigans to try to sneak the sun behind the moon between sunset and moon rise. This may be crazy talk, but if you are up to your elbows in editing up the default day cycle windlight you should totally get a mole to kick it up a notch. Though I may just be a helpless mole-fan. I JUST DISCOVERED A THING after posting this. In this jira I had reported some strange parallax between the stars and the moon. I noticed I couldn't get stars in an elevated desert scene. Well, right now I tried flying up. The stars are on a dome that are affixed to the ground. The star "ceiling" is at 780 meters. If you are above this point you can not get any stars above you. I added a comment to the previously linked jira to that affect.

So, I talked to the owner of the "Lower Planes" sandbox and adult fantasy sim and we managed to wrangle it on to bluesteel and wrangle me rights to edit the parcel windlights there. The results are interesting. I have that bloodshot sky I did earlier installed in the desert area and rigged it into a day cycle. (Note: Stars are only rendering near ground level likely related to earlier Jira I did about the star parallax being off.) Black hole sun won't you come and cast a strange purply illumination about the ground level sandbox area. That's the stuff. I got the underground areas rigged to their own custom cycle-less day that constantly dark with no sun or moon above the horizon and only ambient light working things. Gamma darkened a bit to make it dreary. That way all the light sources can cast illumination and you get no weird underground day cycles. http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Lower Planes/111/109/2026 is the sim if anyone is curious. I will note a couple of those skies had a sculpy aurora in them which is still there in the photos. So not alllll the affects you see in the sky are EEP

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-226217 Was in an EEP sim and someone pointed out the stars were doing a weird thing. I looked up and lo and behold parallax betwixt the stars/moon/clouds made it look like the stars were the nearest objects, rendered on a dome about the breadth of our sim surround. On the plus side, the moon does obscure out the stars. Which is kinda trippy since the parallax makes the moon look distant and the stars look near.

I don't mind not matching precisely with legacy if it is a qualitative improvement. However, if it murders all contrast on all existing content and forces everyone to create/purchase custom content or suffer washed out color. Then it isn't good. However I do understand it is a work in progress. I will keep making noise where I don't like the look. Hopefully it ends up looking attractive in the end.

Someone asked me to compare windlights. So I used Doomed Space Ship. This is Doomed space ship on a standard viewer. It is dark, it is sinister. It is red. This is Doomed Spaceship on EEP. My existence is now pink. The ground is lacking in a texture because I had teleported a few times, and group chats happened and my VRAM was like "that's it I'm done." Earlier EEP that was dark and this iteration share a similar problem: the color is just lacking contrast.

Comparison time again. Current EEP and Current Viewer. Current Viewer Midday on my build platform. EEP viewer, midday on my build platform. Very similar, we are getting somewhere. We do, however, lose some shadow depth. Shadows are a bit deeper and darker on official viewer. I kind of like it that way. The lighter the shadows become the flatter the colors grow. EEP shadow is has a Value of 51. Official viewer shadows have a value of 37 and are ever so slightly blue (5D5D5E). White in both values is a true white of FFFFFF. Light is where I like it, but the shadow needs to deepen a hair. Same location, midnight. EEP version. Moonlight is back YAY! night is oddly bright, BOO! I had a hard time finding that photo in my heap of pictures because my eye kept registering that thumbnail as not-night. SL midnight shadow has a V of 15. It's 1D2027. Dark dark darks as heck. Oppressive, makes you want to turn on a light if you are in a room with shadows enabled, kinda like how you would if you were in an unlit room in the middle of the night in other life. EEP midnight shadow is 4a4e57. It's a softball shadow with a V of 34. EEP midnight shadow is MORE then twice as bright as SL midnight shadow. Lit white platform is 5A5A9A. It's almost like you take swatch of SL noon-shadow and double down on the blue and leave R and G where it is. Current midnight is blue as all get out. This is not an uncommon thing in games to project a feeling of darkness, even if you look outside and things are mostly just dark in real life. Blue colors just feel darker. EEP midnight platform is kinda a midtone grey. It might actually work if some more murk was thrown into the shadows. The narrow color depth though kind of kills the feel for me. Makes night feel weirdly bright. And now that I nitpicked the extremes of light and dark, I'll do a quicker go over of sunrises and sunset lights. official Sunrise I like the mistiness. The perceived depth though is again off. Shadows oddly light. I am unsure how I feel about whiter sunlight. Sunrise Good news is, the sun in and of itself remains nice and vivid as it always did. Color and shadow though sorta mute the mood. Overall impression, current EEP lighting feels a lot flatter and lacking in depth. If you could keep the light where it is in a lot of the scenes and deepen the shadowy darkness I think we could have a winner.

Hmmm I didn't get the alpha blend one, that tail is alpha blended and ALM is going in those photos. Though I have seen that in not-eep in rather specific dark conditions at a club. This one club I dance at regularly my lipstick is always blackish as is my tail. Next time that DJ does a show with that light system she likes to use I should take an EEP viewer there and see if the issue gets more pronounced.

Toying around with the EEP viewer my one biggest gripe is https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-225812 Except it's not just darker it is lighter too in certain issues. Depth of color is shallow or something. I'd comment on the JIRA in question but I appear to have no means to add comments to JIRAS or perhaps I just can't figure out how. I notice this dark outfit I sometimes wear really highlights it. Both these photos were taken on the fringe of a point light in a dark night interior scene with shadows enabled. That is a the scene with an EEP viewer. That's the scene in a not-EEP viewer. The not-eep skirt is near pitch black in the night light the dark furniture is dark almost black. The EEP scene is oddly washed out except for the dark creases across the skirt. So like in the light colors are dimmer and the dark colors are brighter. A friend who sticks his nose in viewer rendering code for <censored> and giggles claims gamma and light sources are borked. Though honestly I have no knowledge that'd let me verify that claim but something is definitely off and it kinda drives me nuts the longer I use a EEP viewer. Particularly the dark scenes.

Cripple the viewer? Nope. You got to realize the core aspect of experiences that makes them awesome is you can nope your way out of them. This is way better then the old-school permission system because once you said yes you had to relog. Heck, for non-global experiences you can just step out of the parcel that has the experience and all your experience attachments fall off your avatar. Me (Avatar for firestorm users) -> Experiences -> Allowed tab, drop it. DONE. Not even a minute of work. And if you look there's this handy dandy little "report" button for experiences that got downright abusive with you. So you can be rid of the experience and report the creator in one fell swoop. There's a block button too so you'll never get another permission prompt ever again. If you aren't sure what did what there's a rather convenient events tab which spells out who did what to you so you can dump them. When they do that llAgentInExperience() will toss a FALSE. As a programmer I can ask them to get back in experience or get to the spectator booth. There was apparent wailing and gnashing of teeth when LL added the ability to force sit and LOCK an avatar to an object making them unable to rise unless the script said they may. And everything seems fine. If someone really gets abusive with it there's a "report" IF this were RLV you'd have to toggle an option and then reboot your entire viewer and it would be kludgy and you'd have to use specific viewers which would remove entire portions of your user base. And that reboot would disable every other RLV thingy not just the offending object. Experiences are way superior. Finer control for the end user and the ability to take abusive elements to task. The ability of these tools do not need to be hamstrung. All the power is at your fingertips. The power of nope is readily yours.

Ellestones hit the nail on the head really. If someone is in the combat area I want them to have the shared windlight as everyone else. If they are fighting in a shadowy nighttime environment I don't want them cheating themselves some midday sun. So I use an experience to staple a windlight to them. If they do not like the windlight and duck out of experience. I will detect that via some easy to run LSL checks and my script will ask them nicely to get to the spectator area or get back in experience with a hud. If they fail to comply I'll eject them. If they don't take the hint I'll upgrade that to a ban. Automation for the win. I have accepted a heap of experiences. None have played rough with me to date. One experience tossed annoying messages when I tried to cam around and it had features that didn't make me comfortable (even though I didn't run afoul with them) so I simply just left the sim and moved on with my life. If ones does I'll revoke it's privleges. I'll lose maybe 1 minute of my life. Considering all the time I saved by being lazy and not micromanaging all the accepted experiences I consider it a fair deal. Granted I'm the sort of person who has no security or banlines on their house. I reckon if someone irritates me I'll right click and ban them and get on with my life. I mean if I wanted to make your life miserable I wouldn't staple a weird windlight to you, I'd rez an annoying prim to follow you while it emits a high pitched shriek while using llSEtTextureAnim to cycle through bright colors at epilepsy inducing frequencies. But I wouldn't, because that's be an increadibly jerk move, and most people, thankfully, are not jerks. It's just that when you do get a jerk boy its it memorable. But that shouldn't hamstring our tools. We don't need them hamstrung. You have the power of no, you have the power of escape. If a sim uses experiences in an annoying way, don't be there. Don't try to bend the rest of the grid to your rules.

Yeah fog doesn't cover fullbrights but it tends to just look horrible in murky settings as a consequence. Even if you do your entire build fullbright the avatars will not be properly lit and look oddly murky.

As someone who works on SL games I'd really really really dislike it if someone can simply locally override an experience applied windlight. Ducking out of experience to shake off windlight is perfect behavior. We always need an escape option. But overriding a valid experience override that you are still part of is not cool. Let's say You set a rather dark windlight in one combat map through the combat hud and experience because you want to make a certain combat map a unique experience. Well what if players could just set it to bright sunny day at a click? It defeats the point. You can't just trust an honor system of no cheaters. Such power should of course be stapled to an experience. And ducking out of the experience should shake off all the effects. I can detect people leaving experience, I can react accordingly. But just saying nuts to my game experience and injecting your own rules. That's not cool. If you don't like what the experience is doing to your windlight. Don't be in it, or better yet explain to the person who coded it why you didn't like it. I mean, we got spectator areas that don't require the combat meter and you can use whatever windlight you want for photography. LL didn't pull punches with the force-sit capabilities for experience tools and made it pretty powerful. I rather appreciate that they did that. I'd like a way to keep a windlight locked on until someone leaves experience.

From Inara Pey's blog:

The godrays are a feature added to EEP. Two layers of clouds are not in the current implementation. However, someone suggested the idea of making a custom sky-dome, and Rider was keen on that. With that idea you could put those feathery cirrus clouds on the skydome layer and have your faster moving roily clouds on the classic cloud layer to accomplish something more akin to the lower picture. Now, clouds remain largely of a similar nature that they are now. Sorta-two-dimensional but with some sort of bump/normal map to make sunlight play off the edges like it were 3d. You can throw in custom cloud textures to try to make the roiliness more to your tastes. But 3 dimensional towering cumulus clouds won't be a thing.

I am going to assume your hope is your question. In which case, yes, you can make the ambient conditions so murky and misty and thick that you can scarcely see your own hand in front of your face. Bear in mind this'll keep your ambient conditions persistently foggy and murky, but it's possible. Takes a little fidgeting with the sliders though.

I didn't even notice initially because I kept hanging out in Rider's neat-little-pyramid parcel which is lit by a variety of point lights and whatever this is it doesn't seem to be affecting point lights.

I just noticed if you compare current default noon day against EEP default noon day eep default Noon is a lot more dreary and weak. Is the lightning change intentional? I thought about JIRAing it but I didn't want to JIRA an intentional change... Noon Day current official LL viewer: Noon Day EEP viewer:

Remembered I had a copy of a texture generating program, so I threw some frosty prefabs at it gave it a mug of hot chocolate and kidnapped a picture of hoth and out popped this.

Step one go here and download the EEP viewer: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Alternate_Viewers Step two get to an EEP enabled region: Two options: -Option 1: Get yourself on the beta grid and get to the sim EEPTesting. This option is kinda better for full hands on testing because that sim is filled with parcels for sale that you can use your imaginary beta-not-money to buy and test fully. Drawback: any skies you make exist on beta grid and not main grid so you'll have to remake all that stuff on the main grid later. -Option 2: Go to one of the following sims on the main grid: Hoppotropolis, Hippo Hollow, Denby, Longfellow, Hanley, Cirano. While you can not own a parcel on those sims likely you can set a windlight to display for you only and work on it in those sims and snaps creenshots with it. Benefit: you get to make and stash your windlights ahead of time. If you want to show off your windlights there's a thread here that I discovered only after posting a couple on this thread.

Rendering bug found: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-225834 Basically if you got an object intersecting the water plane reflections get weird especially if it's a long bright object. Also found out I had a reply from Rider on one of my jiras sitting there for 2 days. Sorry Rider I normally don't go and snag a beta viewer and test ride it a lot, but this is a real fun feature. I can't wait until it starts rolling out for the other mainland servers. I really like where this is going.

New EEP suggestion. Jira: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-225793 Long story short look at that post and look at how I had to edit the gas giant to make it look more natural against the sky. I think it would be beneficial if it were a toggleable option for how sun/moon objects are rendered. Bonus points if you can use the alpha-channel of the image to determine if stars are blotted out at any particular point.

Since I was on the space mood I decided to make an alien sky. And now one that is just freaky eyes and tendrils and stuff. The thought was a gas giant in the background. So I fished up everyone's favorite windbag: Jupiter. I tried placing it in the sky. We had an issue though. The black areas just render black when they ought to be blue (Sky glows over the blackness of space and everything else's shadows. Also we had the not-quite-512 image being downscaled to 256, when displayed at near screen size it came out blurry as all get out. So, first order of business, upscale it to 512. Second order of business, use GIMP to convert the brightness to an alpha mask, and then use the curves tool to tweak it to add more "oomph" to the bright areas. I also twiddled the hue so it's a not-Jupiter color to make it more alien. Tried that, much more natural looking: Only issue is if I use a starry sky it'll render right through the "dark" areas of this moon. Time for some jira. Set the star to a blue color set the star glow to very faintly blue (be very careful with your sun light color you generally want to stick to those grey tones with a hint of the color you want, otherwise it'll come out real funky). Added some slight tints to the sky dome and the clouds to make the sky a little more weird. Focused the snapshot off of Zoober Linden's castle and back on to Rider Linden's pyramid since it's far more sci-fi. His flock of birds only helped the shot. ALl my photography is in linden village because that's the area that's Snack Enabled. The moon is still a little blurry because it's 512 stretched to screen size, but I think it's acceptable enough. It's more of a backdrop then the focal point of any scene. Not enough of a hassle Pondered changing the cloud texture but I kinda like default lindo-clouds for natural scenes so I left them as-is.

Decided to try a spacey sky. Core features are it has to have no clouds and atmospheric haze. The sun is yellowish when viewed from the earth because the atmosphere strips high frequency light from the sun. This light is glowed back at us (and some out to space) as a blue glow in the atmosphere. Which is why the sky is blue and the sun is yellow. This affect grows more pronounced when you get the sun plowing through more sky, which is why sunsets are reddish with an orange sky. When the sun is coming in at you edge-on on the atmosphere it strips out lower and lower frequency light until more reddish colors survive. This causes something interesting on mars, the martian air is normally too thin to scatter sunlight unless its coming in on the horizon, leading to blue-sunsets. Otherwise it just shows up as the color of the reddish dust. Since there is no atmosphere for a spacey sky you got a nice black sky and lower ambient color. Lunar landing photos are actually pretty interesting. Look at how dark those shadows come up. The astronauts are all wearing heavily tinted visors so much so they are like reflective sunglasses. Any images have to narrow aperture or fast exposure or whatever you do to dim the lights and miss subtle lights (hence it isn't catching any stars). So this image is likely rather bright and harsh to unshielded eyes. Horizons are always short on the moon because it's a smaller sphere. Those factors combine to cause these photos to look "unnatural" or "faked" to people, leading to those sensationalist claims of hoaxes. Darkening ambient light in a sky only goes so far. So I set alpha to about .5 (this was the lowest I could push it before colors started to get weird). Ambient light as dark as I could. Sunlight very white and brighter to compensate for the alpha darkening. The default sun vanishes under these settings because the default sunglow is a function of atmospheric haze in SL windlight skies. So, we supply a custom skin PNG I fished up on the net. Set the cloud texture to none. Do what you will with the moon. If you are setting up a lunar scene you probably want to blank out the moon. Make sure you got plenty of light sources on interior areas, also if you got a night cycle make sure some exterior lights come on at night or you'll have some rather dark drab scenes. I went to the "moonbase" sim ( http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Moonbase/134/132/48 ) and snapped some shots with my work. Here's how it came out.