Wonder how the new sky will be?

One question comes to mind about the comment in the new sky blog post about saving presets.

I find that my settings get lost with some frequency; SL gets so screwed up that I feel driven to remove them, along with doing an uninstall and reinstall, or else I remove them on the advice of SL programming staff.

Will there be any provision for saving these settings in a way that will survive the deletion of the settings.xml file?

Might not matter too much to me, I won't know till I get to try out the new sky, but I am certain that having absolutely secure presets will be of value to SL "photographers" and machinima-ists.

Might be nice to have the presets savable in a format that can be distributed to others.

I do hope there is a size control for the sun that will allow it to be about a fifth the size the current one appears to me.

One comment in the sky blog post has me hopeful, the possibility of doing something about the horizon. The old old old horizon looked fine to me, but at some point, I think maybe with the introduction of water ripple, it became impossible to hide the sharp edges of the rectangular sims without turning the fog ratio down real low, like 2, which fogs up the nearby terrain too much. This potential improved horizon fogging isn't scheduled to show up right at first but at least there's hope on the horizon, so to speak.

God yes that would be welcome.

Then again, I'm at the point where I could (and probably have) set the following in my sleep: close-chat-after-return, don't-rotate-minimap, set-draw-distance-to-this, set-fog-to-that, set-nighttime-brightness-to-0, don't-tell-me-when-people-login, etc, etc, ..., ...

Of course, they could store all that server-side, but that'd really foul up folks like me that use secondlife from differently computers, (ie: laptop and desktop)


And you know... I've been looking at your new forum avatar image thingie for a while thinking it was some weird "Ban blank faces" kinda statement.... The real intention only just "dawned" on me. (groan)

It is the symbol of the inter-galactic "Abolish the Sun!®" movement.

"Abolish the Sun!®" is a wholly owned subsidiary of "Destroy the Whole Stinkin' Universe, Inc.®"

I anticipate the new sky will be... blank, featureless, and boring.

I have a low-end video card. They say that low end cards can't even see clouds in this "wonderful" new sky system. Bleah!

Sounds like a major downgrade, for me.

If the Chatterbox doesn't get redesigned then the change in the sky won't make much difference when you have the Chatterbox open because you will hardly be able to see the sky at all.

That thing is big.

BTW- the sun isn't BIG.

Its the grid moving closer to the Sun!!! Within the next few updates, we'll be so close to it that everything will incinerate.

Did I understand correctly that the sky I see is not the same as the sky the person next to me will see? From the announcement I get the impression that it is all client side, and that the client can tweak and change the looks of the sky. Isn't the beauty from SL that we all see the same thing, and can chat/talk about it?

Meni, you could be chatting to 3 people and they not only see different things at the same time of day but they might have chosen to be at different times of day too.

Yes I know that's why I mostly keep the default daylight setting. And always tell the person I am with: "I switched to midnight". But I was wondering, with the new weather system, if the default is the same default as for the person standing next to me.

I saw some new pix over on Sluniverse and the sky was unlike anything I have seen in SL. Is this a new feature that I haven't heard about yet?

New sky ain't here yet. See blog post http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/05/21/windlight-atmospheric-rendering-comes-to-second-life/ for more info.

A couple of weeks or so to wait till new sky gets here, if memory serves.

Roughly on topic... can someone remind me what I have to set to stop seeing that weird band of plain brownish colour between the sea and the sky?

I'm given to believe that that's mainly for the First Look, regions will be later be able to choose a setting which will be the default, and using any presets you have stored you can override it if you wish

We're supposedly going to have extensive ability to customize the sky to our individual tastes, according to the LL blog post.

The idea that we currently all see the same thing is a myth, made possible by the fact that most of us only see what's on our own screen. We just assume it looks the same way to others.

You can change the draw distance, brightness of the scene, the time of day, the amount of terrain detail, determine the number of particles that show, whether fog shows at all and if so how much, whether clouds display, and a number of other things in the system we have currently.

I hope we're going to get sufficient customization to allow me to make the sun smaller and remove the unrealistic nearly opaque oversized white haze shield that nearly blocks the view of the actual disk of the sun and not have the entire scene turned yellow white with haze.

And thus lies my reasoning on why I won't give a hoot if I'm the only one seeing that awesome cloud shape.
Snapshot and upload for the win.

well did I understand it correctly that the saved setting will be a type that is an inventory item that you can share? so when people that come into your sim you can be give out a suggested appearance setting for the feel of you sim

That would be interesting.

That certainly would, and would be excellent if you could choose to save it yourself if you find a particularly nice one (permissions allowing). I know it could probably be easily circumvented, but that's no reason not to, especially if skies can have custom textures and things like clothes

In honor of Torley Linden, I decided to create a custom "Watermelon World" sky. I'm including the params to give an idea of what can be configured. Warning, shades required in this land. Here's a pic at sunset.



Atmosphere:
...Blue Horizon: 0.0/1.0/0.0/1.0
...Haze Horizon: 0.23
...Blue Density: 1.0/0.75/1.0/1.0
...Haze Density: 0.50
...Density Multiplier: 0.0001 (slider between 's' & 'i' since the number doesn't change)
...Distance Multiplie: 14.8
...Max Altitude: 781.2

Lighting:
...Sunlight Color: 0.70/0.15/0.33/0.70
...Time of Day: <anything> (sets Sun elevation)
...Ambient: 0.5/0.0/0.25/0.5
...East Angle: <anything> (sets Sun position on horizon)
...Sun Glow: 0.12/1.8
...Gamme: 0.87
...Star Brightness: <anything>

Clouds:
...Cloud Color: 0.50/0.15/0.25/0.50
...Cloud Density: 1/1/1
...Cloud Coverage: 0.4
...Cloud Scale: 0.4
...Cloud Detail: 1/1/0.12
...Cloud Scroll: <anything> (speed of the clouds)