Windlight/EEP help!

[Tess Juel]

I've tried to change the windlight ... I mean EEP ... settings of my sim to something more useable than those dodgy default midday ones. No problem I thought but when I did, the water changed to a horrible bright blue cartoonish color and I can't find any way to fix it.

Can anybody help?

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Tess,

This article or the SL article it links to may help: https://www.kitely.com/virtual-world-ne ... scripting/

[Tess Juel]

This article or the SL article it links to may help.

It doesn't, unfortunately. What I need to know, is how to change the water and there's no mention of that in your article nor in LL's EEP documentation. I know I can do it in the Customize tab but that enables day cycles and I don't want that.

On a different but related topic, the only way I found to disable day cycles was to upload my backup OAR. It was up to date so I didn't think that would be a problem. Unfortunately it turned out the file was corrupted with 368 prims missing, several mesh assets broken and there seems to be something wrong with the RAW terrain file too. Is there any way to restore it or do I have to rebuild everything?

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Tess,

I can easily restore your world from one of our daily world backups (we keep 10 days worth of automated daily backups per world).

Which of your worlds would you like me to restore and how many days back do you want me to go?

[Tess Juel]

Which of your worlds would you like me to restore and how many days back do you want me to go?

Thanks a lot, Ilan!

It's OPQ HQ.

Hopefully the July 3rd backup was taken before I uploaded my local backup. Can we try that one? If not, the latest one before that. I've done a lot of work on it recently and any backup that is more than a week or so old will be even less complete than my broken one so using one of them would only make matters worse.

---

With that (hopefully) sorted out, it's back to my original question: How on earth do you add custom static sky and water to a sim??? There has to be a way. I know this is Linden Lab code but not even they can mess up things this badly ... can they?

[Kimm Starr]

Hey Tess, talk with Koshari about EEPs. She did a ton of them at the OpenSim Worlds Fair. When you get them right, it makes the sim look amazing

[Tess Juel]

Hey Tess, talk with Koshari about EEPs. She did a ton of them at the OpenSim Worlds Fair.

Great tip, Kimm! I definitely have to contact Koshari, I think we need to figure out a good setting for the Memorial Park too for a start.

At this stage my ambitions for my sim is a bit more modest though. Of course I'd love to have amazing light settings but right now I'm more than happy to settle for decent.

Let me show you what I mean. Here is one scene with three different EEP sky settings:

EEP comparasion.jpg (251.61 KiB) Viewed 4865 times

The top one is the legacy midday. It's a bit meh. I can live with it - I did live with it for almost ten years while the builds was up in SL - but I'd rather not.
The middle one is the current midday default. It's obviously totally useless. I can't for my life understand how LL's developers could implement this garbage as the new standard.
The lowest one is what I've set as the default for my sim now. It's not great but it's perfectly ok, vastly superior to the other two and it took me less than ten minutes to make.

The problem isn't how to make better EEP skies. Anybody with even the faintest hint of aestethic sense can easily do better than LL's developers. The challenge is to figure out how to implement a custom EEP for your sim. To call the interface for that function confusing and counter intuitive would be a gross understatement.

I think I've figured out the most important parts now though and here are some tips in case somebody else wants to give it a try:

• When you create a new sky, the first thing you do is change the Reflection Probe Ambiance (HDR) value. The default is 1.0 and that's the one and only value that can not possibly work. Anything higher or lower will do although you probably want it either somewhere between 0.6 and 0.8 or somewhere between 1.5 and 3.
• When you try to create a new custom daycycle, it initially comes with several skies preloaded for different times of the day. You have to delete all of them one by one and substitute with your own.
• Some of the sky parameters will also seriously affect how the water looks. They shouldn't of course but they do. This means that a water setting that looks perfectly fine under one sky can be totally off under another.
• Like so many people with no knowledge about visuals, the LL developers seem to believe that water is bright blue by default. With some sky settings it simply isn't possible to reduce the bluishness of the water enough to make it look realistic. The only solution I can see is to switch back and forth between the sky and water settings and keep tweaking them until you get a decent compromise.