The Second Life Environmental Enhancement Project (aka EEP) has taken way longer than anyone at Linden Lab thought. I suspect the reason for that is the old render engine. It is an ancient (in computer time) engine and the original programmers long ago moved on.

Some problems encountered in the project lead the Lindens to bring in some specialists. They have been working on resolving some complex problems. About a month ago, I’m not following viewer development as closely as I used to and my sense of time frames is shaky, the number of problems fixed exceeded the number being reported. So, we are likely to see EEP release soon, probably in April. I’ve missed my guesses a few times now… Lindens are more optimistic.

I am more optimistic because Whirly Fizzle hasn’t found any EEP bugs recently.

EEP is out in a release candidate version, download here. The link leads to the release notes page. Scroll down and check out the list of things fixed.

Alternative

Not everyone likes the User Interface (UI) the Lindens designed. One of those is NiranV, the author of the Black Dragon Viewer. NiranV likes to make ‘better’ UIs for various parts of the SL Viewer. Better is subjective. Yet, NiranV does some nice work.

If you are one of those that is not a fan of the Linden panel then check out NiranV’s plans. See Environmental Enhancement Project (EEP) – The Plan (4m/3d/20y).