The State of EEP

A new thread over on the forums has garnered almost 250 comments in record time. The original post was about how bad everything looked in the  Firestorm EEP viewer.  Now in some ways this is certainly a personal issue and the OP's problems are not general problems.  

As threads do, this one wandered and there were a few folks that walked away with hands high in the air and most likely whispering obscenities over their keyboards.    But, that thread had me thinking again about EEP and the eventual forced acceptance some of us will have to succumb to -- that or make some radical choices which most of us will not. 

So I decided to take another look at EEP in the Linden viewer. It has been awhile.  And for those of you very much on the fence still with fingers crossed hoping for a reprieve -- there is some possible good news. 

Here's the story and some of the tests I did today.

This is a comparison with the BOM Firestorm viewer (the last viewer before EEP was included in the build) and the current version of the Linden viewer.   The screenshots are unedited and represent in the closest way that I can what I see on my screen.  Click to enlarge I hope. Blogger is tricky sometimes. 

My first impression was that EEP was "better" than the last time I had tested. It seemed fairly close to the regular look of my sim with region sky and water defaults.   

The first thing that I noticed was that the "mist" layer where water meets sky was very different. Next, that the ground was more saturated which was odd since the other colors seemed very similar to each other no matter what viewer was used.  The shadows also take on the underlying color of the ground to a greater degree.  Nothing major. 

There was however a very big "oops" in that the tail light texture  was very very flat, no look of bumpy glass or any shine at all. If I cammed into the glass for a close up I could BARELY see a shadow of the indents in the glass but I really did have to look closely.   

 

Still there seemed to be quite a few improvements over a couple of months ago. These of course are most likely not in the current Firestorm viewer; (I have not installed that).   

I was going to play around more with EEP in hopes of bonding but I had some strange issues with the Linden viewer which do not appear to be EEP related.  I had textures cycling in and out and blurry and sharp over and over and never stopping. I had very slow texture rezzing and some textures appeared then completely disappeared and then the object was back again.  So I decided today was not the day :D.

 

The chair texture -- both wood and fabric kept reloading as well as the table texture. The big circle in the background is a large grassy plant (the same as the one  seen in the top photo) that took forever to load, then completely disappeared and then eventually appeared again only to disappear. This never stopped happening.

Now this isn't my old sickly computer. This is a top of the line Alienware -- the most expensive computer I have ever purchased and I typically buy pretty high on the food chain.   So it shouldn't be a computer issue per se. Since I don't plan to use the Linden viewer I am not going to worry about it.

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Another bit of interesting news for those that are on an EEP viewer or plan to be soon (eventually :D) is that my tests showed that EEP works WAAAAAAY better with ALM turned on.  You do not need to be running in Ultra to turn on ALM. So for those of you having issues with the new FS viewer, things might look much better if you enable Advanced Lighting Model.

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THE GOOD NEWS ---- MAYBE

While I was reading that thread and commenting and trying to be logical rather than emotional  --- I had a lightbulb moment.  I am thinking that we DO have another alternative -- those of us that don't want to give up Windlight.  We could use the Opensim version of Firestorm.   It has most of the features that we need (and some that are only useful in Opensim and would need to be ignored) BUT I can't see it having EEP.    So keep that in mind if you are dreading that "last call" announcement and the blocking of the BOM viewer.

And with that I leave you with some thoughts of your own.

From the Firestorm Download Page