Those of us who have installed Second Life viewer updates recently have all had a moment when we said “Gack! Where’s my windlight? What have they done!!!” Actually, I am sure most of us had more profane things to say as we struggled to understand this new interface. My first reaction was totally negative. I have found a couple silver linings, though, to the grey cloud that is the new interface and struggled through. I am sure that other folks who are also exploring the new interface has even more ideas of how to use it more easily and hope everyone can share their tips, because the new interface has confounded some folks. As I get more comfortable with it, there are some things I value.

The Environment Editor is in the same place as ever, though we have faster access to the different components of the editor than before. They have also given us some additional day presets so we can choose our Second Life environment and still have it cycle through day and night. This will be a great benefit to role-playing sims and other sims that want a day and night cycle, but want a different environment than the default we are all used to.

Ambitious people can create their own Day Cycle or Fixed Sky settings and make them the default for their region, giving people a much stronger level of control over how people experience their sims. We used to get notecards at a sim with a suggested windlight setting we could replicate if we weren’t too lazy. Then we could get notecards in some viewers that we could click on to import a setting or get a link to a preset we could download and install, if we weren’t too lazy. Now, all we have to do is got there and unless we override the region’s lighting with our own, we will see what they want us to see. That’s a bonus.

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