What looks like excellent news from Linden Lab, put up on the Community Blog, and brought to my attention by Daniel Voyager’s plurk today. LL has released the Environmental Enhancement Project to the main Grid. For users of the Linden viewer, at least, the new abilities will be available to all Residents on all sims. And that includes, as I’m seeing this, sims that you rent, even if you don’t have owner environment privileges. (Third-party viewers don’t have this yet, as it will take a code revision. However, I think we can expect a scramble to integrate the new code into Firestorm and other top TPVs. Firestorm users such as myself should probably expect an update notice at some indeterminate point.)
Some possibilities:
- You don’t need to be an estate owner to change the environmental settings.
- New environmental settings panel
- Custom day cycles
- Changeable textures for the clouds and moon
- Different settings for different altitude settings
- Changeable locations for sun and moon
- Save settings in Inventory instead of an XML file, and import existing XML files to the new settings
- Creators can set permissions for next owners
- Settings can be applied at the parcel level, for everyone to see
Here’s a really nice aspect to enhance your possible revenue stream: the new settings can be saved as Inventory assets — and given, shared or (ka-ching) sold. This could result in a whole fresh category on the Marketplace, or new stores for EEP files. (That’s E-E-P, by the way, not “eep.” Which, of course, means everyone will promptly ignore the Lab, just as they do by calling them “Linden Labs.”)
Watch the five-minute video below, and get a brief overview. You can also find out more on the wiki and community discussions.
Around the Grid 