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.

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

Second Life New Stuff 4/2020

Monday 4/20 the Lab released Environmental Enhancement Project (EEP). (Ref)

The Monday before (4/13) the Lab released Name Changes. (Ref)

In 2010 the Lab took away user selected last names. Now they are bringing them back for Premium members willing to pay US$39.99 (or L$10,140). All the details can be found by clicking Ref above. There is a FAQ linked to from the article. It will answer most of the questions about names and what you can change and how often.

EEP

Inara has prepared a tutorial on EEP. You’ll find it here, EEP Tutorial.

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.

Continue reading

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. Continue reading

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.  Continue reading

Second Life Content Creation UG #08

Interesting meeting.

Simon Linden is busy investigating the problems causing a disruption in service last Saturday. So, no new news on Animash. We do have news on EEP.

CCUG Meeting

All the news is in the first few minutes. The rest is discussion.

You may notice the difference in panning between this video and the previous video. I’m not totally sure it is just this version of Firestorm. For now I suspect the viewer update is the reason for the improvement.

Using the EEP Viewer – Second Life

The Enhanced Environment Project is progressing and nearing completion. Thursday Feb 14, 2019 Rider Linden updated us on where they were in development. (Ref) He is expecting the project to move to RC status very soon™. It is now available to test in its ‘project status’ in the Blue Steel and Le Tigre channels of the main Second Life™ grid. So, it may be time to start playing with the feature.

Also, with this feature comes a new item, EEP-Windlight settings, that can be sold on the market place and traded among users. If you have a talent for making sunsets, this may be your niche.

EEP and Non-EEP Viewers Feb 2019

You can get a copy of the Enhanced Environment Project viewer in the Second Life™ Alternate Viewers. As I write we are on version 6.0.2.524123 of this project viewer. It installs in its own directory. So, it won’t break or affect any of your other installed viewers. Updates to this viewer are mandatory. Meaning when a new version of the Project or RC viewer is released you have to install the update to continue using it.

NOTICE: If you click SLURLs to open your viewer and login into the SLURL’s region, installing any viewer will change which viewer Windows uses. Windows uses the last viewer installed. There are tools and tutorials that will help you tell Windows which viewer you prefer for those clicks. See SLURL Proxy.

Continue reading