EEP Tutorial – Second Life

Penny Patton has a new written EEP tutorial out about how to use the Enhanced Environment Project, the Windlight update, on your land. She uses the Black Dragon viewer in her tutorial for the source of the illustrations. Most viewers have the exact same panels for setting up the environment. So, the only problem for Firestorm and other viewer users is getting the initial About Land panel open. About Land allows you to edit the parcel’s environment settings. Otherwise, you are editing your personal view of the environment.

Custom Environment

At ground level in Firestorm, you can right-click the ground and select About Land. You can then edit the environment at the parcel or region level. Easy.

In Firestorm, the World->Region Details or Alt+R and then the Environment tab opens the same environment panel but, for Estate Managers until you right-click the ground you are editing your personal settings. And if you click on anything else you snap out of the parcel environment edit mode.

Also, if you teleport up to a high altitude you will likely lose the link to the parcel and can’t edit the environment.

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The Firestorm Viewer and EEP

EEP is the Enhanced Environment Project. I consider this a step in the Lindens rebuild of the render engine. Whatever it is, the Firestorm team has released a Beta version of their viewer with EEP.

Photoshop Play Time

Beta, in this case, means the software is not yet ready for prime time. It also means it is your choice as to whether you install this version. And for those of you using a version three versions back, this does not count as one of the three allowed versions. So, you aren’t going to have that 3rd old version blocked from the grid. Yet…

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Second Life EEP Coming… coming… soon…

The Second Life Environmental Enhancement Project (aka EEP) has taken way longer than anyone at Linden Lab thought. I suspect the reason for that is the old render engine. It is an ancient (in computer time) engine and the original programmers long ago moved on.

Linden Made Panel v6.4.0

Some problems encountered in the project lead the Lindens to bring in some specialists. They have been working on resolving some complex problems. About a month ago, I’m not following viewer development as closely as I used to and my sense of time frames is shaky, the number of problems fixed exceeded the number being reported. So, we are likely to see EEP release soon, probably in April. I’ve missed my guesses a few times now… Lindens are more optimistic.

I am more optimistic because Whirly Fizzle hasn’t found any EEP bugs recently.

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Second Life News 2019 w14

There was lots of detailed information in the third-party dev UG meeting last week. We got a bunch of information on what is happening with a couple of problems. Currently, disconnects and detachments are front lines.

Servers

From ‘How Does Your Avatar Look Today?’ 4/2019 – Click

The main channel rolls to #19.03.15.525315. This is the OS upgrade. It includes the EEP support.

The RC channels Blue Steel, Le Tigre, and Magnum will be the first version with UDP asset fetching disabled or removed. See the Tools & Tech section of the SL blog Obsolete Asset Fetch Disabled for more details.

The UDP change will mean older viewers using UDP asset fetching will stop working correctly. Avatars are likely to not render or render as Ruth/Roth. Sooner or later you will have to update…

Disconnects

The RC channels will have a change that is hoped will help with the disconnect problems people are experiencing, which seems to have started in December or January. Some think EEP is causing the disconnects. EEP is coincidental with the disconnects. The current analysis of the problem suggests it is in the TCP communication between the viewers and servers.

In the March 29, Third-Party Dev UG meeting Oz talks about the problem and why it took the Lindens so long to notice. Video Basically, the problem is not showing in the performance stats the Lindens watch.

The disconnects seem to fall into groups, those occurring during a teleport and those that are periodic (disconnect every so many minutes). People trying to chase the problem down are having problems reproducing the disconnect. They have the problem rated as #1 & #2 and have lots of people on it full time plus a QA team of remote users, meaning far from the Lab distance-wise.

There are rumors about different things one can do to stop the disconnects, change the WL/EEP sky, cancel a TP mid-teleport (cancel, open World Map – find destination region – wait for it to come up and you pop in), and others. For others the key is location, Blake Sea is a problem and Heterocera is not a problem.

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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. 

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