SL’s Big EEP Fear

It is April 1… but I’m not putting you on.

In week 13 there was a third-party viewer UG meeting. A significant part of the meeting was spent discussing the EEP – Enhanced Environment Project (EEP).

The EEP Viewer is in RC and has been for several days. It is the big push in the viewer pipeline. Vir Linen thinks the Love Me Render viewer is the likely next candidate to be promoted. But, EEP should be ready to release in 2 to 3 weeks… Firestorm thinks they will be 2 to 3 weeks behind that. I think 5 or 6 weeks behind, but I’ll be happy to be wrong.

EEP Editing Problems – 4/2019

As soon as EEP releases the Lab will move on to EEP2. Some of the things people want in EEP are being put into EEP2 to allow EEP to release sooner.

EEP is causing the current black stars and changes in the appearance of some Windlight (WL) environments. So, lots of complaining going on. I’ve turned off ‘Use Region Default’ on my Firestorm viewer. You do that in Preferences->Firestorm->Windlight->Automatically change environments… (uncheck). I can still control whether WL is using the region-default WL or not with the Photo Tools controls. 

I set an environment that works well with Firestorm and then manually set to a local region-default when I want to see the local’s lighting. This makes for a much nicer flying or sailing experience.

However, there is a big problem coming with EEP for the photographers and machinima makers. The new WL settings via EEP are ‘environment’ objects with permissions. As it is now there are no permissions on environment settings. We can move the sun around and change other settings as we please. But that is going to become awkward with EEP. Try it with the 6.2.0.525395 RC version. It’s like where did my controls go?

If you are looking for them… World->Environement->My Environments… then look for the GEAR  icon, lower left, and find EDIT in the dropdown menu. This gets you into the environment editor. You can jump over to Hippotropolis Theater (URL) or Denby to see the problem. There is no way to get to the controls for the local sun. EDIT is grayed-out until you select an environment from the list. Clicking EDIT then makes that environment the current one and changes the local environment. So, if you just wanted to move the sun… you are screwed.

I also expect a No-Mod EEP environment to be even more difficult. So, moving the sun for a better photo is going to be a big problem. So, expect to hear screams and to do some screaming.

The Lindens and third-party devs are looking for how they might work around this. Firestorm, of course, has to get their Photo Tools working in the EEP version of their viewer. They are going to have to figure out how to make environment changes to an existing local environment and protect the original environment from theft.

This will likely be a big deal in EEP acceptance with users. I expect EEP use to start slow and build. Initially, few region owners will be using EEP environments. As time passes more builders will take advantage of the extended capabilities in EEP. Many of them will want to sell their EEP environment and will be putting them out with No-Mod permissions. Mod or No-Mod as more of the EEP environments come into use the more photographers will run into this restrictive problem.

I expect there to be a workaround in the Firestorm viewer when it releases. I also expect the Linden Viewer to have a workaround soon, possibly before EEP final release. Think weeks.

It will be interesting to see if the problem can be solved before EEP releases. While moving the sun and making small environment tweaks for a photo may not be as convenient as it is now, I do expect a workaround soon. The problem isn’t with people changing things for their personal experience. But, with stealing EEP Settings from No-Copy-Mod environments or using them for a starting point for their environments… sort of a back door theft.

3 thoughts on “SL’s Big EEP Fear

  1. “Theft” is the word i keep hearing, it’s being thrown around like it means anything, it doesn’t. This whole situation is complete bs and i won’t support LL’s decision here at all.

    For years we had this no-mod bs going around, no mod on sounds, no mod on notecards, no mod on textures, no mod on meshes… one being more pointless than the previous one.

    Having no mod on shapes and selling them has been a big no-go for me for years now, they are not content worth selling, they are literally a few slider values anyone can change at any given time in a few minutes, not being able to edit your shape is a big no-go anyway… who uses pre-made shapes…

    Then came this pose nonsense with the Poser. Why are we even talking about pose theft? Poses are not worth a dime the moment we get a tool with which anyone can create them at any given moment in mere minutes and make them better, more accurate and fitting than anything anyone else could ever do, bought poses become worthless, it should not matter whether they can be “stolen” or “edited”, this is the whole point of the poser, editing already existing poses that didn’t match well and make them match well.

    And now to top this all off we get this windlight preset nonsense, shapes… ooookay meh. Poses….gggrr… but local sky effects, come on, this is the biggest fuck up LL has done so far in that regards, windlights are an invaluable tool for machinima and photographers, editing already existing ones is a valid and probably even the most often used way of working with them, sometimes a windlight is almost perfect but needs a tiny change, with this new system we won’t be able to do this anymore and even with a workaround (which consists of allowing modifications but not allowing us to save these changes) we are still absolutely being fucked. Why are we even considering a few worthless local graphical effects driven by a few sliders that change a few values inside a file used to change the sky/sun a sell able object that needs copyright protection? Don’t they see that we are unnecessarily limiting the creativity and easy-to-use features that we’ve had for so many years? Why take all of this away out of the sudden, why monetize something that shouldn’t be monetized at all? This whole content theft discussion for windlights make absolutely no sense, whoever cares that their stupid windlight values have been “copybotted” shouldn’t be in SL anyway. I’ll absolutely go against this and i will have talks with LL’s about this. This nonsense needs to be stopped before it is introduced, people should tell LL that they think this is bad.

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