
The majority of the following notes are taken from the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting, held on Thursday, September 27th, 2018 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are usually available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.
SL Viewer Update
The Rakomelo Maintenance RC, version 5.1.9.519298, dated September 5th, was promoted to de facto release status on Wednesday, September 26th. This means all other viewers currently in the pipelines will be merged with this code and updated in the coming days.
Environment Enhancement Project (EEP)
Project Summary
A set of environmental enhancements, including:
- The ability for region / parcel owners to define the environment (sky, sun, moon, clouds, water settings) at the parcel level.
- New environment asset types (Sky, Water, Day that can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others.
- Day assets can include four Sky “tracks” defined by height: ground level (which includes altitudes up to 1,000m) and (optionally) 1,000m and above; 2,000m and above and 3,000m and above, plus a Water “track”.
- Experience-based environment functions
- An extended day cycle (e.g a 24/7 cycle) and extended environmental parameters.
- There are no EEP parameters for manipulating the SL wind.
- EPP will also include some rendering enhancements and new shaders as well (being developed by Graham Linden), which will allow for effects such as crepuscular rays (“God rays”)
- These will be an atmospheric effect, not any kind of object or asset or XML handler.
- The new LSL functions for finding the time of day according to the position of the windlight Sun or Moon have been completed, and are more accurate than the current options.
- EEP will not include things like rain or snow.
- It will still be possible to set windlight local to your own viewer.
Resources
Current Status
There will be a formal LL blog post on EEP testing at the start of week #40, which will include links to the current versions of the test viewer and also the SLurl for Aditi testing. I’ll be updating this summary with the details once officially made public. These will include the latest iteration of the viewer
Those who have been fortunate enough to attend the CCUG meetings have been able to get some advanced testing done, and there have been a number of additional bug reports and feature requests raised – use the EEP Jira filter to review all raised issues / ideas.
The latest version of the test viewer (made available at the meeting) will result in visible changes to cloud speeds. This will cause clouds in settings created using the initial version of the test viewer to travel much faster and to the north-east.

Cliff Notes on EEP
- Graham Linden’s shader work has yet to be added to the viewer (so no crepuscular (God) rays, etc., as yet).
- Firestorm uses a broader range of setting for atmospheric / water effects (haze, density, etc.) than the official viewer. This has led to windlights imported into EEP settings not displaying correctly (see BUG-225537) Rider had increased the settings range in EEP to match Firestorm.
- Rider and Graham are discussing how procedural texturing might work in EEP(!)
- EEP does not support the ability for anyone to create a new EEP settings object simply by saving the one they are viewing ( as can currently be done with legacy windlight settings). However, existing windlight settings stored locally in the viewer can be imported to EEP and converted.
- EEP will break RLV controls on windlight.
- The EEP test viewer can be used as an ordinary viewer on Agni (the main grid), but EEP settings cannot as yet be applied, and it may lead to a duplication of the EEP Settings folder when switching back to the test region on Aditi.
Cloud Perturbation
Rider hopes to be able to add a means to provide a degree of perturbation when non-seamless cloud textures are used, so that they don’t appear so tiled when viewed in-world.