How About Adding User-programmed Moon Phases and Season Changes to EEP?

[Mona Eberhardt]

Let's face it, people: having a truly seasonal sim or parcel in Second Life has always been a pain. By "truly seasonal", I mean a sim or parcel with different environment settings for each season and with a daytime duration that's season-appropriate. Until the advent of EEP, we were stuck with that nondescript blob that tried (not particularly hard) to pass off as a "sun" and failed miserably. As for the moon, we were stuck with a full moon and that was it. Now, we can use our own textures for these celestial bodies, we have significantly more powerful tools to customise our skies and waters, and we can set our day cycles as well.

However, having a seasonal sim or parcel still remains a very laborious task: you still need to change sky and water settings yourself. Moon phases? You still need to do it manually by changing the texture yourself every so often. Daytime duration? Same. As for making your sim or parcel fully RL-compliant, with moon phases and a daytime duration that change every day as the seasons roll on, you need to take care of this every day - perhaps even making separate EEPs for each day (thereby bloating your inventory). This could even necessitate hosting a bot to take care of this automatically.

I thought to myself "why can't we have an enhanced UI in the viewer to schedule and automate these changes?"

So, to cut a long story short, I filed two JIRAs: BUG-230857 and BUG-230859. Feel free to add them to your watch list. I truly believe sim owners and designers will benefit from such an enhancement. I also made a blog post to explain things a bit further.

 

[Romana]

Let's face it, people: having a truly seasonal sim or parcel in Second Life has always been a pain. By "truly seasonal", I mean a sim or parcel with different environment settings for each season and with a daytime duration that's season-appropriate. Until the advent of EEP, we were stuck with that nondescript blob that tried (not particularly hard) to pass off as a "sun" and failed miserably. As for the moon, we were stuck with a full moon and that was it. Now, we can use our own textures for these celestial bodies, we have significantly more powerful tools to customise our skies and waters, and we can set our day cycles as well.

However, having a seasonal sim or parcel still remains a very laborious task: you still need to change sky and water settings yourself. Moon phases? You still need to do it manually by changing the texture yourself every so often. Daytime duration? Same. As for making your sim or parcel fully RL-compliant, with moon phases and a daytime duration that change every day as the seasons roll on, you need to take care of this every day - perhaps even making separate EEPs for each day (thereby bloating your inventory). This could even necessitate hosting a bot to take care of this automatically.

I thought to myself "why can't we have an enhanced UI in the viewer to schedule and automate these changes?"

So, to cut a long story short, I filed two JIRAs: BUG-230857 and BUG-230859. Feel free to add them to your watch list. I truly believe sim owners and designers will benefit from such an enhancement. I also made a blog post to explain things a bit further.

We can change the texture of the sun and moon? And have normal day length days instead of two hour ones?
Moon passes and seasonal environment world be great, but I'm still working on getting a set environment for my parcel (which I do own) to stick. It always seems to revert to default (currently "Starley settings", whatever that means) even if I follow the instructions for overriding region.

 

[Sid]

I'm all for stopping with all the shiny bandages.
I would love to see LL concentrating on really important stuff like lag reduction, sim crossing, a major building tools upgrade and stuff like that.

 

[Mona Eberhardt]

I'm all for stopping with all the shiny bandages.
I would love to see LL concentrating on really important stuff like lag reduction, sim crossing, a major building tools upgrade and stuff like that.

Sim crossings have been greatly improved over the past few months. As for lag, you should talk to SL content creators, who can't be arsed to do even the most basic of mesh optimisation - plus, they fill their wares with hundreds of 1024x1024 textures, eating up your GPU's memory in nanoseconds.

 

[Madi Perth]

I'm all for stopping with all the shiny bandages.
I would love to see LL concentrating on really important stuff like lag reduction, sim crossing, a major building tools upgrade and stuff like that.

I love the shiny stuff but I agree. I would like to see LL pause rolling out new features for a year and get all the bugs out of what we have. Fix the TP issues that have been plaguing myself and my friends. Work on SIM hands off so sailing doesn't become a crap shoot when crossing SIMs. Fix a few of the minor bugs that just make life annoying. There is one more thing... I can't recall what it is... I's something that has been plaguing us for 10 years...

Oh yes. Fix the Gods Damn Group Chat!

 

[Romana]

I love the shiny stuff but I agree. I would like to see LL pause rolling out new features for a year and get all the bugs out of what we have. Fix the TP issues that have been plaguing myself and my friends. Work on SIM hands off so sailing doesn't become a crap shoot when crossing SIMs. Fix a few of the minor bugs that just make life annoying. There is one more thing... I can't recall what it is... I's something that has been plaguing us for 10 years...

Oh yes. Fix the Gods Damn Group Chat!

I got stuck in mid -TP yesterday. The progress bar just got stuck in the middle and stayed there for ages. I had to use Task Manager to close the app. If they're not going to fix TPs ,they should at least give us a persistent close app option (I'm looking at you too, Firestorm).

 

[Madi Perth]

I got stuck in mid -TP yesterday. The progress bar just got stuck in the middle and stayed there for ages. I had to use Task Manager to close the app. If they're not going to fix TPs ,they should at least give us a persistent close app option (I'm looking at you too, Firestorm).