NiranV Dean

Not possible. The way controls play out would have to be changed, this means the physics would need changing. Right now everything has a constant movement speed, having full controller/steering wheel support would mean not emulating keyboard controls but rather making use of everything between not pressed and pressed, e.g only a quarter, half, two thirds and so on, right now there's only move or don't move. Pretty sure LL will never implement this, we've been asking for changeable movement speed for a long time, doing so would pave the way (although a bit hacky) for full controller/steering wheel support as you would be able to change how fast you'd like to move left or right, this in turn could be couple with "how much did you pull that trigger down or pull that steering wheel or stick over" and boom, driving vehicles would become much better, not to mention movement would be much finer. Never ever will it happen, it's a super fundamental change and although it wouldn't break anything nor would it change how any current item would behave, it's something so basic that LL fears touching it.

The information is still quite accurate. Nothing has changed since then but i'd like to note that Black Dragon has made several attempts to make controllers (specifically Xbox360 Controllers) much more usable with remappable axes and buttons and several fixes and performance improvements regarding how the "joystick controls" work.

The UI is not exactly close (or anywhere near) the legacy windlight UI. Besides it doesn't explain why they are so huge and waste so much space when not necessary. You shouldn't expect us to get the UI in a decent working condition, we do this because we must, not because we want to. It would be much better, for everyone, if we had a good UI to start with, it would reduce the work on us to clean up behind you and would also bring all viewers closer together in its layouts, which in turn means less headaches for everyone when changing viewers or trying to help people with different viewers. Not to mention i wouldn't have to go on a crusade every time. You really need someone to work on the UI and only the UI, someone who's job is nothing but going through the entire UI, cleaning up the code, fixing things, simplifying logic, adding QoL, making sure everything is consistent and nice. The difference with marketed items pre-EEP is that those items, specifically you mentioned "cloud textures" are textures, as such they are proper content, unlike skies, the sold skies usually come with these textures because they were made with them in mind. Selling the textures is something entirely different than selling the skies. Anyone with common sense would never pay for skies when they can make them themselves.

That's intended behavior and is old, i reported that long ago. The moment you add any of the "advanced features" such as materials you activate the new Ll calculation. Correct me if i'm wrong but i don't remember EEP adding parcel lighting, only height-based presets. FS will keep its hacky Parcel lighting as far as i heard. Whirly? It's save to assume that an UI is massive it features only a few sliders (hardly more than before) and covers half my screen on a standard 1920x1080 resolution. These windows roughly waste 800 pixels in each direction. While they are only needed while "setting up" how are you going to set things up and see what you are trying to set up if the whole screen is covered by the UI? Do you want to move the window out of the screen or minimize the windows all the time? That's exactly what i'm concerned about, people WILL hold you ransom to get their windlights, that's exactly what i'm complaining about in this new system, LL gave them the tools to do so and we all know what people will do if you give them tools to do stupid. People sell shapes too even though shapes can be created by anyone at any time in mere minutes, yet they make them no mod and basically hold you ransom with it. EEP will just do this again, people will create no mod environments and force you to buy them to be able to edit and save them for later (given they are mod to begin with), the only other option is creating a new preset from scratch. I want to be able to quickly edit windlights i'm seeing and i want to be able to save my changes if i so desire, that's how lots of cool windlights get made, this new system doesn't allow us to anymore. EEP doesn't pull anything closer together than everything was already, worst case we split everything even more. We are just getting a few more features, some of which are logical improvements (such as decoupling the moon), changing the texture of the moon (just like clouds) and some other are things we already had (24 hour daycycles which could have been extended to 72 hours easily). I honestly fail to see how it is better. They hand you a sweet bonbon while holding a knife in the other hand behind their back, for every improvement they added something that totally destroys it again. I don't know what's up with this "learning something new". EEP works exactly the same as Windlight when it comes to actually tuning the windlight, you move sliders around, except a few additions they are all the same, there is nothing new to learn. The new UI doesn't need to be learned, it's quite straight forward, straight forward unnecessarily big and clunky compared to the old. You're right, people will always find things to complain but i'm not one who complained about Bento or Mesh or Materials or Fitted Mesh or any of these new cool things, because they were truly cool and fine basically without exceptions, there were no strings attached to them unlike with EEP, people who truly complained about those for other reasons than "its broken" simply didn't know what they are working with because they are resistant to change. This is however something entirely different, i'm not complaining that EEP is bad because its different, i'm complaining because i have legitimate reason to be highly concerned about basically everything that EEP means for us. That's something completely new, i have always been bashing LL for when they do something badly again, everyone does that because its deserved but i have never been truly concerned about a project like i am now. I'm highly worried and you should too.

I'm curious what the reason is behind thoroughly enjoying anything of the EEP Viewer in its current state. I have been using Windlight since the beta (because it also added cool post processing glow which was absolutely amazing back then) and i do a lot of photography too but i simply cannot enjoy EEP even a tiny bit. Me as graphics fanatic should be excited to see more cool features to fancy up my pictures, instead i'm disappointed and pissed about pretty much the entirety of EEP, there is currently nothing in EEP except the new UI widgets that i'd like to use for something i don't know yet (i'll find something). I don't know if its the lackluster improvement, the buggy rendering, the abysmal UI design or the downright spit-in-your-face implementation of marketable inventory objects that make me not even look at EEP with my ass. Everything in EEP seems wasted, there is literally nothing good about EEP, nothing of what EEP does couldn't have been done without massively altering the entire windlight project and breaking it this much, nothing in EEP is a reason to over complicate this entire system. I don't know, really... when a graphics fanatic is more excited about a new UI widget than the entirety of the graphic-focused update something must be wrong. Whats even more is that you do not seem to be at all concerned about all the problems listed here that i was able to find in mere minutes of starting the Viewer, nor does it look like you noticed them, you didn't yet mention that you encountered any issues at all. I don't want to sound like an *****, which i do anyway but... it appears to me that you have extremely low expectations and/or requirements for any of this. If you truly enjoy the EEP Viewer you also enjoy the new UI to some extend, which begs the question, who would ever enjoy an UI that fills your entire screen and why? I'm really curious.

I think i'd use regio-light (estate time) more often if it didn't look like crap everywhere.

The basic idea of EEP was good. More features and new graphical stuff. Their implementation and how they handled the inventory part however is way over the top. You can ruin an entire good project with a simple bad decision. In this case it was making the presets a full fledged marketable item and handling it as such (seeing copying local graphical presets as violation of the permission system)

Doesn't surprise me my users don't have these issues, no one uses regio-light, everyone just makes their own stuff or uses their presets and edits them.

Whaa... why am i the only one who haven't seen these "issues" in pre-EEP yet. I still see all my normal windlights, no black stars, no randomly changing presets, presets all look fine and work fine... haven't had any of my users complain that presets are broken either...

I see. You meant they are now broken rather than "you can't stand pre-EEP anymore since you've seen EEP".

"Amateur graphics" lol. You're trolling right? EEP is a miniscule improvement without proper atmospheric scattering. You really haven't seen what SL is capable of if you think pre-EEP are "amateur graphics" in comparison to EEP. Current EEP implementation is more like a framework to build upon (and not a good one at that)

I'm sure those guides have already told you to reduce your draw distance until you become a mole, turn off advanced lighting, atmospheric shaders (probably basic shaders too), set the complexity limits super low, max avatars super low and generally keep all settings to an absolute minimum but i highly doubt that's going to help you run SL decently. The reality is your laptop is way outdated (it was even for 2011) and you're not even going to win a thumbs up with it. Just loading an empty SIM will almost fill your entire GPU memory, let alone basic shaders will totally destroy your GPU and if that wasn't enough all the unoptimized crap going around (which is only going to get worse) are not going to be gentle to your CPU either, this kinda stuff grinds high end hardware into dust even on lower settings, there really isn't any hope for you to run this unless you like single digit framerates and input delays longer than your ping to russia.

You cant. Your GPU is hopelessly outdated. It's going to struggle to even keep the UI loaded.

I wouldn't exactly consider a "plastic look" natural. Your last picture shows this issue very well, the snow looks like its made out of plastic, the very subtle shiny applied to them goes absolutely bonkers on EEP and ruins a lot of ... everything really. Also i'm not sure why but the background mountains... i don't like them, especially the left side of the last picture looks very much out of place, when i look at the right side i can see that the sun should clearly be able to light the mountains at least a bit, they are not, not even a bit and the sun angle doesn't look like it would cast shadows across the entire mountains, the sky looks extremely bright too, unnatural bright. You are highlighting the issues of EEP pretty well... but ohwell you said you tried to make it as natural as possible, not you did make it look natural. The point of my rant is that i'm trying to protect the little "artistic photography" that is still there. There are still a lot of people who don't use editing tools to take great snapshots, i'm one of them, i hate photoshop and all photoshopped/edited pictures. Have one of my unedited pictures as comparison.

I didn't scare you did i? I sure hope not.

The only gag placed on anyone is going to me if at all, the radio silence appears like they might be re-evaluating what they want to do, which would hopefully turn out for the better but that's my hopes.

I said i wouldn't do this but i tried it again and when just logging in already noticed another issue. Your own windlight is not permanent, every time i login i'm forced to see the awful daycycle that someone has decided would be great to use. Everytime i login i think "ohgod no it looks even w... oh it's just the daycycle that keeps getting worse". Why are we forced to use region light every time we login? Oh right, because we don't have the say anymore, the Viewer doesn't remember what windlight we use because you got rid of the entire windlight system as a whole, with it you got rid of the settings that kept track of our preferences. Great. But that's not all, nonono. That wasn't even the reason i started it up again. I just wanted to take a look into the XML files and what i can do with the UI. That's when i found the next thing, you don't even have a "Debug" menu anymore, with it the XUI Preview Tool is gone as well, without it you are a sitting duck in the dark blindly editing files and relogging for hours to see the difference of what you just did, isn't it like that? It doesn't surprise me the UI is such a mess and that's before i even got to dive into the UI itself! When i finally did i was shocked to see you still keep using questionable layout stacks in layout panels in layout stacks in layout panels in layout stacks in layout panels, for what? So you can "neatly rearrange whole setting groups in code"? You're not even doing that aren't you? Take one of these stacks or layout panels away and the entire thing falls apart like a house of cards, your widgets don't use follows properly, they don't use layout properly, often times they dont have width or height attributes making them randomly and for no reason break and making changes to the UI as a whole a messy work that i'd take days if not weeks to get into some usable state if i had to relog every time. It doesn't stop there! You still keep doing this nonsensical splitting of panels into multiple XML files, why? what are you achieving with this? Oh, i see you are adding the panels as cumbersome mess later in code similar to how you did in the snapshot floater. Please for the love of god, stop this overly complex mess, its cumbersome and just fills the code with unnecessary trash, you could have done this UI easy and straightforward, you can enable/disable/hide/show tab container tabs in code, slap them all in show them on demand. No 10 different files required, no 10 different special panel objects required, just straightfoward getChild<LLTabContainer>("") and then do stuff with it, added plus if you save it somewhere to save getChild calls. Ugh. For the love of god get someone who understands your XUI system, many of the things you do multiple times in code can be easily done with the XUI system without any code needed, much of what you do could me much simplified and goddamnit, get that XUI Preview back in there, i swear to god you'll praise it like Jesus's second coming when you make any window or edit them. It saves you tremendous amounts of time. But that's not what i'm here for either, no! I'm here to show you what i've done in mere 2 hours half-assing my way through your windows (and starting over with the edit environment window rather than the personal environment window as before). Funny fact, the new window is even smaller than the old edit windlight windows in my own viewer, i easily had space to spare. You should really get that looked into.

Ugh. I've had my first test run just now, a short one but i just couldn't care less anymore after seeing this cluster*****, all i wanted was get it over with as fast as possible and close down the Viewer again. Whirly absolutely insisted i should look into EEP and i've made a few notes about everything i've seen and what i've seen is by FAR. THE. WORST. And i really need to put these words in cap and bold them. I am absolutely speechless what a pile of broken mess you want to sell us. This has been by far the worst experience i have had in Second Life so far, it was a displeasure from login to logout and i could cry tears, that is how much this hurt me. This is going to be a super rant, by far the biggest, probably most aggressive, destructive and downright insulting rant i have ever written to date and i have done a lot of bad things already. I'll go through it one by one... where do i even start... Rendering It is absolutely, totally and completely broken from back to front. Shadows, lets start with shadows. Shadows have become noticeably worse, they are ugly, pixelated, bad, inaccurate and constantly bug out, clip away and shadow blur is at a point it basically starts destroying itself when i turn around the camera and that's with the minimum draw distance (shadows in your Viewer are draw distance dependent and are most accurate at lowest draw distance). Note how the shadows are much more pixelated all around. Shadow pixelation in action when changing angles. Shadows cutting off on slightly elevated camera angles. This picture almost looks like shadows never existed. Next up we got water, the water is downright broken the water has many issues, from not being fogged correctly (or at all) to harshly cancelling out sky and its effects and weirdly mixing with suns and moons. Not only that the Viewer seemingly tends to forget to render it at all such as when turning around and sometimes it simply ignores atmospherics completely. To make matters worse it also vanishes when camming close to it. Image courtesy of Whirly. You can see the moon/sun being clipped by water, you can see what looks like them being applied to the fog. You can see its not fogged right or at all and vanishes when zooming closer a bit. It lags behind and clips out when turning you can easily see it with foggy skies. Here it forgot to add atmospherics completely, it happens at random and stays like that for up to a few seconds... Next topic, the sky. It's a mess, sky ignores any kind of atmospheric completely its completely immune and as mentioned above sun and moon textures seem to be applied on top of the fog layer which makes them clip through various terrain and waters in an absolutely catastrophic way. The sky and gamma is also way too bright but also too dark, the contrast is too high and the colors seem broken too. You can also easily see that the sky is not the only thing completely immune to fog, fullbrights were always immune to fog but now they stick out like a sore thumb, this needs fixing bad. Colors are different, contrast is higher (shadows are darker), clouds look completely off and the sky is much brighter as well as sunlight. Last topic, reflections, they are broken over saturated and glow like crazy, i checked against the official viewer for default glow settings, this is definitely a shader issue, it does not seem to affect glow in general, only sun reflections, they also seem to have a blueish tint and also environment reflections seem to be brighter/different. You can see the roof reflection glowing like crazy and you can clearly see that the shiny/environment reflection is darker and has a blueish tint to it. Interface The interface. You are spitting into my face, the previous Windlight floaters were huge, wasted a lot of space and generally didn't look clean and sleek but the new interface and how it works EASILY takes the cake, you have designed the worst UI i have ever had to witness in my entire 21 years of seeing completely different, good, bad, creative and not so creative UIs. Not only is your "personal environment" thing a downright INSULT to me and anyone who does photography and/or machinima, you have made ME, the guy who can use any Viewer at any time waste 3 minutes to realize that there is in fact no goddamn way to customize my Windlight without creating a preset for everything first, what an unfriendly unintuitive and unusable design, how you came up with this is absolutely beyond me. The comparison between bad and worse. EEP being the clearly worse here, more wasted space, more space between every widget and even less screen to see what i'm actually editing and this is only the beginning. This thing here, the "Personal Lighting" how you call it is pure garbage. It is obsolete, it is pointless, convoluted and has so many goddamn flaws, starting with half of the controls are missing: Density Multiplier, Distance Multiplier, Max Altitude, Cloud Density, Cloud Detail, Cloud Scroll X/Y and its lock functions, Moisture Level, Droplet Radius, Ice Level, Cloud Variance, Cloud Image, Sun Image, Sun Scale, Moon Image, Moon Scale and Moon Brightness. WHERE ARE THEY? I know what you did, you made this mess as last resort to save something that you have broken completely. Not only have you destroyed the little workflow that existed before when creating Windlights, you have also made it so goddamn cumbersome and unusable to simply change the sky... i have to create an inventory object, then "use it" to open the editor for it to get all available controls, where is the quick sky/water/daycycle editor? Why can't i simply edit them directly like we did before like the "Personal Lighting" window does, why do we have to create inventory items to do so? Switching between Windlights has become very slow and cumbersome too, you give us a new inventory view to see all our presets rather than a simple list like we had before, 3 lists to be exact, one for sky, one for water and one for daycycles if we used them, where are those? Gone because you got rid of local saved presets completely. Now you can only import them which is slow and cumbersome, do you even realize what it means to import 200 sky presets? Why couldn't you just leave the goddamn list there. Further you intertwined this entire nonsense with the inventory system to have a weak excuse to be able to make these items marketable. You removed our ability to locally save presets, you removed the ability to edit skies directly, you removed the ability to edit water directly, you removed the ability to save/load presets locally, you half-invalidated all our presets we've been making and collecting over the past years and only offer us a measly and cumbersome import function which's only function is to keep us at bay because we would set your labs on fire if our old presets were gone. But does it stop? No. Not only is selecting windlights impossible now, we first have to import them and fill our inventory with even more potentially corruptible trash, we also can't simply and efficiently switch between them now, we can't edit them. What can we even still do? Nothing. But what about the UI in itself? The new UI widgets they are cool and all but they have a lot of weaknesses, low sun angles are nigh impossible (you have to use the slow and cumbersome NSWE buttons) because the position can only be dragged to the edge which is not enough. This right there is impossible, i can't drag the sun there because the widget doesn't allow me to, i have to use the buttons and what about the "invert" mode, when the sun is below the horizon? Why can't we simply "invert" the sun directly and easily. Shareable Settings The idea was nice but the implementation is as bad as a simple implementation can go, add a new inventory type which is basically a Notecard with values in it, make permissions not work on them have a system folder for them to be stored in so floaters can easily automatically read from this folder as well as the library. What did you do? You added permissions to them because you want it to be a fully marketable item, big mistake number one. People will abuse the crap out of this. This inevitably leads to another issue: Now that these items are marketable you also consider them copyright-able, they become full content, as such you seek out ways to protect this content, this turns into cutting features, adding limitations and breaking features or adding new ones that make no sense. What baffles me most is the pure ignorance from Oz's side towards this, he wants to pull this nonsensical bull***** through and while doing so steps from one mine into another. Not only do you offer a window called "Personal Lighting" you also show all values OPENLY to everyone, this opens all gates and doors for everyone to EASILY copy any region Windlight which you so desire to protect from copying with your Personal Lighting window in the first place, not only that, i asked you to add back the function to save Windlights like we used to because Windlights are useless items and should not be considered full content, instead i was told off that this choice is not up for debate and that you will pull this crap through. Why do you so insist on preventing us from clicking a save button that does what every Viewer can do today and was able to day since Windlight's introduction and why have you seemingly not considered what i said above, you cut your own flesh with this window, you open up all values and make it merely a minor inconvenience to copy any Windlight but at the same time you want to prevent us from doing so by not giving us what is considered a simple QoL feature. Click save and you'll save everything except textures (they are full content) just like before, what is the goddamn issue. Instead you even make what sounded like threats that if i were to add this "QoL" feature my Viewer would violate the TPV ruleset and action would be taken against me. I'm not only sad, maddened and disappointed but i'm also shocked that you go this far to pull through with this. By all due respect to those that worked on this and invested so much time into this but your work is being wasted and whoever is in charge of this lost all my respect. I'm sure i've probably missed a thing or two in my rage writing this but if my opinion counts anything in this, this thing you have been praising to us for so long so far has been a catastrophic disaster and it hurts my feelings to see this, what could have been a major extension to the Windlight system and a big boon to all photographers and machinima people is being raped like this for no good reason. I for my part are done with EEP. If i were you i'd delay EEP for the unforeseeable future and rework this entire thing until the very last bug is fixed and i'd expect it to take at least a few more months seeing how completely broken beyond recognition EVERYTHING is. An eternally saddened and pissed Niran.

I was able to download and test the Singularity Alpha just now (the website was down), the latest Singu doesn't have this issue anymore either but Singu has massive performance tanks while holding shift or hovering with mesh picking enabled, currently talking to Liru to help them get this fixed.

Poor Catznip, burns just like tinder. With 4 fps still better than the latest LL release but again Catznip does not have the 6.1.1 code merged yet. Should i test Firestorm too? Singularity?

Pretty sure Catznip 12.1 doesn't have the latest 6.1.1 changes yet, there would be no point in trying it but i'll do it regardless later, i wonder if Kitty has implemented a similar performance fix for selections like i did *checks their repo...*

This is not only a long standing issue but its also an issue that just got worse with the latest release for no good reason. The overall problem is that the selection can never be truly efficient unless we do some fancy shader magic perhaps (such as doing a cell-shading like post processing shader that does the outlines which would be... a lot buggier than what we have now) and since meshes are getting worse by the second since they are getting less and less optimized, this issue is only going to be worse although i'm unsure how much worse it can get i mean i'm clearly down to 0.6 FPS already... that's worse than Belleza (which dropped me to 1-3 FPS previously). It needs to stop. Went to Ark to find a Belleza Body, note that im already down to ~20-25 FPS due to the avatars around but even with Belleza selected i still get 8 FPS and that's with realtime updating wireframes, if i did that with the new code i'd blow up the Viewer in an instant. This thing has 500k polygons. I selected her entire goddamn avatar (minus the tail and 1-2 belly piercings, couldn't get them selected...) I'm still getting 6 FPS. I have roughly a million triangles in selection.

I got fed up with the performance in my own Viewer today and downloaded the latest 6.1.1 animesh release to get a fresh look at how the official Viewer is doing. Needless to say it was running a good bit faster, but when i started going through a few menus, freezes here, hangs there, performance tanks everywhere, i lose half my framerate with just having "People" open but when i right clicked a mesh and my framerate went down below 1 FPS it dawned upon me, this is even worse than i remember. I just recently merged the latest code and saw some face selection fixes coming in and i got the suspicion that whatever happened is now in my Viewer too. I booted up my Viewer again and selected the same mesh and what i saw really was to my dislike. Again less than 1 FPS. I booted up an older version just to make sure, ~30 FPS... what happened? It seems like in the attempt to fix face selection they made some very costly code run per face per prim/mesh part rather than per entire selection as one as it was before, depending on mesh this can easily multiply the amount of run-throughs by the hundreds. This is not okay, watch out when you select rigged meshes! Just look at the difference. Soon in all your Viewers™

Distance hover tips? Never heard of that.

Firestorm might have fixed it too then. I'm sure they know more about that than i do.