Where are my self-made Windlight presets?!

I've created several Windlight presets of my own, including Caliah Lyon's one for optimising avatars for photographs. I want to send the .xml file of that to my partner so he can use it, instead of having to go through the hassle of creating a new one for himself.

I'm running Vista Home Premium, so I dutifully followed the usual filepath for self-made Windlight presets for that OS, which is:

C:/Users/$username/AppData/Local/VirtualStore/SecondLife/

I get as far as the VirtualStore folder, only to be informed that "This folder is empty" (and yes, I always have 'View hidden files and folders' checked in my folder options).

I've even searched my entire system for 'Caliah' and it's not showing up. I've looked in the various Program Files folders for the clients I have installed, and nothing.

Where the heck are my self-made presets?!

In my version of that nannyware the Windlight settings are all in C:\Program Files\SecondLife\app_settings\windlight\skies

I suppose the water ones would be in \water but I haven't made any of those.

They MUST be backed up in another location because new viewer versions empty the folder and fill it with the presets - which I think are pretty awful, I'm afraid.

I checked in there, Weston, and all I have in that location are the Torley presets I put in there manually I can't find the ones I made anywhere at all, yet I know they're *somewhere* because I'm using one of them right now.

I did find two in there that I created using an older viewer (1.21, if I remember rightly) but I can't find the two that I created using 1.22, which I'm still using now.

(Incidentally, the first thing I did when I got Vista was to disable User Account Control. It's much less nannyish with that switched off.)

Finally found them! Why in hell didn't search turn them up?

For anyone hunting this down in future, the location was:

C:/Users/$username/AppData/Roaming/SecondLife/user_settings/windlight/

Ahh, thanks Talarus. That explains it.

Here's another glitch I discovered too....that might save ya headaches in the future....

In the regular viewer there seems to be a ceiling with how many presets one can create.....a while back I discovered I was unable to save any more sky and water settings of my own.....I could make them.......but the changes never actually saved.

Frustraated....I then decided to go in and delete some of the older settings that I never used.......I have all of Torley's but mostly I use them as bases to create my own. This solved the problem.....I was able to create and save more of my own settings.....but then, as I was gathering them from my files to email to a friend.....I could not FIND a bunch of my most recent sky settings. I KNEW they existed cause I use them often.....but damned if they weren't in the sky settings folder.

Then......it hit me......at some point..... for whatever reason.......the new skies were NOT showing in my file folder with names I had given them. In-world, they are named correctly.....but in the files ......they show up as the original sky setting name with a 'modified' date.

Anotherwords....lets say I recently used to Torley's "That Spells Moon" setting as a starting point to create my own sky....and then I renamed and saved my sky as "Sister Moon". Well.....it will show as Sister Moon in-world.....but in my files it shows as "That Spells Moon" with a modified date. Talk about frustrating! But I went bonkers trying to find my settings until I figured this out. Only my recent settings show that way.......the fist few dozen I created all show correctly (and yes, I did use some of Torley's skies as base settings to begin with) Very odd.....but it may come in handy to know about this glitch if you're trying to sort thru your windlight files and find settings!

How many roughly? I moved most of the defaults to a backup folder because I never use them and didn't want to scroll through them. I wonder if this freed up room for the 20 or so user presets I like.

Gee, whatever happened to being able to set these for your sim or parcel so EVERYONE saw them automatically (unless overridden like we can do now).

A massiive 18 month long project basically gone to complete waste because they couldn't finish up a tiny bit of "not fun" code to build the new settings into the sim/parcel settings.

You travel from sim to sim to sim and the weather is exactly the same every where, always. BORING!!!!

I'd like to know the answer to that. Regional weather settings would be the deciding factor in getting my own private sim without a shadow of a doubt. Otherwise I don't see much value beyond photography when others can't see the same weather effects at the same time.

For the time being I do find it useful for balancing gamma and cooling the default settings, which are far too heavy. SL must look really bad to all those residents who just go with the vanilla settings and I worry about the look of some textures I have created because of that.

Mind you, it has occured to me that some residents will do their sims more harm than good with the option if they are not careful. The Windlight settings need to be finely balanced in certain respects, especially where gamma brightness is concerned. I'm thinking about one French sim in particular, which is very nicely built, but the lighting is atrocious: it's as if the builder got a job lot of crap facelights and dropped them around the place at regular intervals. I don't like to think what he has done with the Windlight settings to make that look ok.