Clouds in Neualtenburg

I was at the Town Hall repeater event yesterday in Neualtenburg, (we had a good turnout and Catherine Linden promised to come visit us again soon ) and something happened that made me remember I had wanted to ask about this issue ages ago.

Basically, as soon as I port into Neualt, the *very* first thing I do is turn off clouds (it would be nice if the setting would stay even after relogging but that is another issue). At any rate, I often forget they exist after a while. Just about everyone new visiting asked questions about the "fog", "do you have a spotlight. This is weird lighting", "what is this mist", etc. I explained about the clouds being there and told them all how to turn them off if they wanted. Everyone did and stated how much "nicer" it was. Some even said their lag seemed to improve. Someone else mentioned they had not realized Neualtenburg was at such a high altitude.

At any rate, I'm curious why we have the clouds? Is this something most in the project do want? I know personally I never leave them on and it seems that at least these visitors did enjoy the setting more with them off as well. So this is just me bringing this issue up to see what you all say about it.

Well, since (IIRC) Neualtenburg was originally on a mainland mountain sim, and the private island sim was cloned directly from the original, that's WHY it's so high.

I don't know how easy it would be to lower things down, but I kind of like the "fog" myself... even if I do turn if off often.

Well, firstly, my apologies for not being able to appear at an event I did set up myself Sadly, after a moderately pacific last year in terms of my RL job, this year has been a complete and utter nightmare - I can't even predict accurately when I'll be at home before midnight, my time. Ah well, enough complaining I'm glad to know that there was enough attendance at the Neualtenburger repeater for the Town Hall meeting.

The issue of clouds in high places is something that happens all over the SL world. Most people rarely find such a cloudy region as Neualtenburg, because few regions are above 150 m on an average (I think that's the "cloud level". All the city centre is above that value, so, naturally, we get the clouds quite often.

According to LL, there is a "weather system simulation" somewhere. This means that we don't have always cloudy days, but we get them quite often - most people never "see" the clouds even if they're there, unless they fly up.

What is more annoying is not the clouds per se, but rather the time they take to load. After all, they're textures like anything else (or textured particles, I'm not sure) and they wait on the queue for being downloaded by our SL client, like any other texture. Thus, before they load, you get those very strange "lighting effects" ("solid" bands of light permeating everything) which annoy people most. Because when the cloud textures fully load, they're pretty transparent, and just give it all a "foggy" appearance without seriously disturbing the view.

Sadly, there is no way to "prioritize" textures to load that I know of - this means that, if the Lindens could achieve a way to get the cloud textures loaded before anything else, I guess most people wouldn't notice the difference. They would only see a "foggish" behaviour, like you see when flying over 150 m - it almost never disturbs yor flying around, because at that height on other regions, you usually don't have anything else to load (few textures around), specially if your drawing range in Preferences is set to 128 m - so you just load the cloud textures quite fast and never really notice them much.

It's just in texture-intensive Neualtenburg that this effect is quite visible.

Clouds cannot be set with the Estate tool, so the only choice would be to lower the whole of Neualtenburg - which, unfortunately, is very hard to do, due to the current layout of the terrain.

Ah well. Like Aliasi, I like them a lot, and I also think that the clouds add to the mystery and uniqueness of Neualtenburg. You can't have a change in sunlight (I mean, the sun's colour is always the same in the whole of SL), and a medieval city looks too clean and tidy when rebuilt in SL, so, the clouds and its foggyness - when the textures fully load - at least achieve a bit of realism in making details smudgy. I always loved that, although, of course, I also get annoyed at the strange "light effects" before they load properly...

Wow! Thank you for explaining all of that to me Gwyneth! I never knew how it worked. And you know, if I am turning my clouds off the moment I land, it is no wonder I didn't realize it could be different if I waited for textures to load. As a matter of fact, now that I think about it, when I went to visit Sudane in the garden outside the city walls, there were no clouds. I didn't even think about it then, and I don't remember turning off clouds before we went into the city either, but cannot remember it being bad at all.

hmmm. So all this time a little patience might have helped me see a side of Neualt that you do. That'll teach me! Next time I'm there, I'll leave clouds on and see what happens after a time. I'll also be sure to pass this information along when others are asking about the "odd light effects".

Thank you again!

I for one would love to see the clouds go away at least temporarily.

I say we lower the sim in Spring, Summer, and Fall so that there are no clouds and we raise the sim in Winter so there are clouds.


Note, however, that we'll have to make a decision on what altitude we want Neualtenburg to eventually rest at. Once we add another sim, if it is to touch Neualtenburg, it will have to be at the same altitude. Its theme might not go well with clouds.

Is there a way to shut of clouds in the island tools?

~Ulrika~

Well, I sort of like the "uniqueness" of a sim perpetually in clouds... reminds me of a village near my home

How can we do that, without destroying all the buildings?

This is a good point! However, you can have the next sim rise to touch on the lowest part of Neualtenburg (what we call "the valley". It will look pretty impressive on that other sim - a big mountain on of the sides, that has a village very high up...

And of course we can grow further sims from there on, and leave Neualtenburg at one of the "tips" of our new subcontinent

I've had access to the Estate tools on another private island and I didn't see that option there...

Sorry for not thinking of this before.

Here are the Estate Control Screens are are visible only to the technical "Estate Owner", who in the case of Neualtenburg is currently Rudeen Edo.

As you'll see, there's no way to control the clouds.

Sudane

Well, I'm back to thinking about this issue again. I went to the Thinkers meeting in Neualt the other day, and I tried waiting for over half an hour for the cloud textures to load. I have to assume that they did at some point, but it never changed the view on my screen. I finally resorted to turning them off again. I'll try to get in world and take some snapshots of what I'm seeing. I'm thinking it could just be a case of how different computers render the cloud texture.

Also again before the meeting, I had a lot of people again asking how to turn them off. So it does seem like at least some of our visitors prefer not to have the clouds. This is not an easy choice to make I'm sure. As there are valid thoughts on both sides of the issue.

I'll try to post those pictures tonight!

Hmm, good point, Pendari. That day, in my case, it took the whole of an hour for me for the clouds to appear properly (they just did at the end...). But some days it only takes a few minutes...

Groovy! I've been dying to see what those looked like.

~Ulrika~