"Force Daylight" and a better way to change the sun

Posted on: October 30, 2005

You can already see why I adore beautiful sunsets in Second Life so much… and they've gotten even more beautiful in 1.7!

This piccie was taken from the aquafloor with water hidden through Debug menu (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-7). What's also to be found in Debug are the very handy options under World to change local time of day. What that means is, if it's dark and you wanna see in the light and build, you can go ahead and choose the "Force Sunset" option, and then Mr. Sunshine will come out (and it'll still be dark for others?it only affects your compy).

However, this does lead to a problem. What's that? Well, the wording is focusing. The picture above depicts a sunset. As defined in the dictionary as being, "The event or time of the daily disappearance of the sun below the western horizon." So that means the sun is GOING, not COMING!



Simply put, "Force Sunset" should be rechristened "Force Daylight".

Also, here's the other confuzzling thing: the Mouse Moves Sun right under it is great if you want to go into Mouselook and make the time of day anything you want?thanxies to cat sis Fleabite Beach for teaching me this!?but it's so darn JIGGLY. As I posted in the SL Forums:

For example, say you're taking a photo shoot with golden tinges just at sundown, and you crash. You wanna relog and maintain that consistency, but it takes a lot of tweaking. Timewaster! Should be a way to specify a time of SL day, perhaps, and the sun will lock to that.


I thot about this more. Infact, there is a current way, but it's limited to Region/Estate owners. What a sweet, cute little graphic!



Consider the possibilities: what if this were open to each and every Resident on a locally-defined basis?

Summing up, two things for FFS (Future Feature Suggestion):

  1. "Force Sunset" changed to "Force Daylight"
  2. Sunphase slider for all!

14 Responses to “"Force Daylight" and a better way to change the sun”

  1. tiare kanno Says:
    November 12th, 2006 at 10:00 AM PST

    i enjoy you website but am having trouble reading some of it because your left column comes over too far across middle column covering up some of the text…i can't seem to move it over. Its the Comments column doing this.
    Thanks for all your information.

  2. Torley Says:
    November 12th, 2006 at 12:10 PM PST

    tiare, thanx for letting me know. I notice long URLs in the comments overlapping, like Elix's recent comment:

    # Elix: Also! http://www.denso-wave.com/en/adcd/product/gt10qbus/index.html A BLUETOOTH QR CODE SCANNER GUN! :D I WANT…

    Is that what you see? I'm inquiring for the knowledge of the maker of the "Freepress Recent Comments" plugin.

    It also occurs to me this might not happen if comments were in the right sidebar, but I prefer this layout so I hope there's a way!

  3. Torley Says:
    November 12th, 2006 at 2:11 PM PST

    Followup: I changed a setting so long words get trimmed automatically.

  4. Nanaki Akula Says:
    November 14th, 2006 at 1:54 AM PST

    Worked fine in opera, maybe its an IE/Firefox thing?

    Torley, the "sim sun override" and "mouse moves sun" have been two of my favourite things when it comes to the photography that I pretend I can do in SL.

    I find that the 'mouse moves sun" option can be a bit tricky to master, but sometimes a violent shake of the mouse sometimes brings out the most random of effects - such as a black sun on a red sky. Plus, it also gives you the ability to position the sun anywhere you want. Especially great for those awesome "staring off into the sun" shots, or even placing the sun over your shoulder, etc.

    I'm not too sure what the "sim sun override" does, but I found it makes the transition slower once you set up a manual sun position - well, at least it does on my pc anyways. This gives me enough time to get the sky looking right, and then I can find the best angle from my pose to get a good shot.

    As far as the "force sunset" option - I dont seem to have that option. However, in the same submenu as those two, I have more options which YOU dont have, as shown here:

    (hope that works, the lack of a 'preview comment' feature scares me =/)

    I still havent found what the dump scripted camera option does yet. I'm assuming that it gets rid of the control that an object may take over your camera at any specified time. For example, a friend dragged me into the brainiac arena, and we had a war of the bots. As soon as I sat on the players bench, my camera reverted to a position above the arena, which was the most advantageous to see the whole battlestage. Maybe dumping it would allow my camera to return to normal? Dunno..

    And "Fixed Weather". O_o Unless there is an option either now or upcoming to actually allow inclement weather as part of the sim options? I have seen plenty of particle and scripted snow and rain per parcel, but Torley, is it an upcoming feature (or one that I've never encountered currently) that allows the sim to randomly select a crappy and foggy/rainy day occasionally, and a wonderful beach-going sunny day the next?

    So why is it that you have different options to me? I run XP on an AMD, and I know you mentioned something about running SL on a Mac notebook, plus I know that the options and functions on Linux machines are completely different in some instances - but to have different functions altogether just seems a bit strange to me..

    Or maybe I have too much access to the matrix? I know once that (on my newly made alt account), I opened up my IM list, and had the names of 3 of my friends ready to select and spam with my nonsense IM converse, followed immediately after the one single thing that scared yet excited me the most in my time on sL - "All Users - All Grids". O_O

    Naturally, it had a calling like a button with an accompanying "Never ever push this button ever ever EVER" sign directly above it, but I resisted the temptation in case it worked (barely though, I clicked on it, and it opened up a window, I typed text in, but chickened out last minute for fear of a public tar and feathering).

    I was able to replicate this effect a few times, and even have a couple of screen grabs to prove it, should you be interested to see. =)

  5. Nanaki Akula Says:
    November 14th, 2006 at 2:03 AM PST

    Ack - the image didnt work, st00pid tags..

    Find the Debug menu image here:

    http://i126.photobucket.com/albums/p112/NanakiAkula/mousemovessun.png

    And some of my photo gallery here, showing how I am teaching myself to use the sun and objects with lights to my advantage in SL photography:

    http://s126.photobucket.com/albums/p112/NanakiAkula/

    ^ and now you all know what I look like (I'm the white kitty) ;)

  6. Torley Says:
    November 15th, 2006 at 6:21 PM PST

    Hey Nanaki, this blog entry is, like, old. Things have changed a lot — e.g., it's no longer "Debug", but "Client" menu!

    "Fixed Weather" isn't as interesting as it sounds… basically it retains the tone of the skyline between logins. You'll notice each "day" of Second Life is different.

  7. Nanaki Akula Says:
    November 16th, 2006 at 12:16 AM PST

    *looks at date*

    *feels dumb*

    and i went to soo much effort on this one too..

    but thanks for clearing up the fixed weather thing. Id still like to see the occasiional random showers or bad weather across sims though - that would add to the realism, and dispell somewhat the "sunny every day" routine.

Make a Reply