“Second Life, is that still around?” is a comment that appears on an all too frequent basis when Second Life gets discussed beyond Second Life circles. Not only is Second Life still around, this year it officially celebrated its 14th birthday. Second Life is unofficially older than that, Steller Sunshine entered the virtual world on 13th March 2002.
14 years is quite a good run in technology circles but Linden Lab are most definitely not giving up on Second Life, as we can see from a recent blog post by Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg; Celebrating 14 Years of SL with Investments in Its Future.
The blog post informs us that Linden Lab are very much still investing in Second Life, they are still very much sharing the love with residents and they are looking forward to Second Life’s 15th birthday.
The planned improvements include, but are not limited to :
- Upgrading all of the SL infrastructure and moving it to the cloud.
- Working on several features to increase the value of Premium subscriptions.
- Building out a series of great extensions to Windlight (code name: EEP!).
- An extension to the animation system in the works (code name: Animesh).
- An exciting new grid-wide gaming experience is coming soon!
The blog post has more details about these features and they look like interesting developments that are worth keeping an eye on.
A benefit of upgrading SL infrastructure and moving it to the cloud could very well mean more land products and more flexible pricing, that’s more of a long term aim, the shorter term advantage of this change should be an improvement in performance for people all over the world.
Personally I like the sound of the extension to the animation system :
allow non-avatar objects to use more powerful and efficient skeletal animations the way avatars can today
That could be something that could work very well for NPC’s.
The bottom line is that Linden Lab are still very much developing Second Life. The team who work on Second Life are extremely passionate about Second Life and the future looks quite bright, despite Second Life moving onwards towards its 15th birthday :
Long live Second Life and long live the creative process in the amazing worlds that you’ve trail-blazed! Thank you for filling SL with your creations and communities all of these past 14+ years, and here’s to many, many more together.
Best,
Ebbe Linden, CEO & the Second Life Team
I think most of us will welcome those sentiments from Ebbe Altberg and the Second Life team.