
On April 20th, 2020, Linden Lab announced the official release of the Environment Enhancement Project (EEP). Originally announced in 2017 – see Second Life Windlight environment enhancements – it has taken longer than anticipated to reach a release status, but it brings with a host of new features and capabilities.
What is EEP?
For those who many have missed it, EEP provides an whole new way of creating, modifying and applying environments (sky and water settings and day cycles) in Second Life. in brief, EEP:
- Uses environment objects that you can keep in your inventory and / or share with others – including selling (subject to the SL permissions system) via in-world stores and on the Marketplace.
- Provides parcel-level control of environments.
- Allows up to four different, independently controlled sky layers.
- Allows the Sun, Moon and Cloud textures to be replaced with custom textures. uploaded to the viewer.
- Provides an extended day cycle of up to 168 hours (thus allowing a 7-day, 24-hour day / night cycle to be defined, for example).
- Allows users to override region / parcel settings as seen within their own viewer for the purposes of photography, etc.
- Provides new LSL functions to allow scripts to interact with parcel environments.
Currently, to use EEP, you will require the official Second Life viewer – version 6.4.0.540188, dated April 15th (or later). However, TPVs will be releasing version supporting EEP in due course.
I’m in the processes of polishing a basic EEP Primer and an in-depth EEP tutorial, which will be published shortly. In the meantime, here’s the official video on EEP.