Inara Pey has posted the transcript and audio from the most recent edition of Lab Chat, held live in Second Life on Friday May 6th. I’m not going to go into all the details, there’s plenty of information in Inara’s post.
Inara’s post is split neatly into sections so that you can listen and read the parts you find most relevant and for a lot of Second Life users, that’s going to mean the parts about Second Life. There’s plenty there and no signs of Linden Lab stopping work on Second Life.
For example they talk about continuing to work on improving inventory robustness. There’s also talk of fixing existing issues and sometimes that means updating technical aspects of Second Life, as Oz Linden explains :
We’re continuing to dig very hard to try to fix existing problems; one of the things that’s going to be coming out over the next few weeks is some changes to the protocols between the viewer and the back-end inventory system. We’ll be removing support, over the next couple of months, for some of the older, more fragile mechanisms, and making sure that everything is beginning to transition to using the newer and more robust methods, so that we can continue to make the whole system more reliable.
These are the sort of non headline grabbing improvements that help everyone to enjoy a better Second Life experience, so on a personal level, I like reading about things like this.
There is also talk of making improvements on the animation and sound file front. In answer to a question about the length of sound files in Second Life, Oz said :
Actually, this is something we’ve recently been talking about. We’re going to have to make some changes to how sound files are delivered to the viewer, which incidentally will make the download faster and more predictably [via the Lab’s CDN services], and once we’ve done that, then we can make them without and adverse impact.
So, yes, we’re definitely looking at this. I can’t pin it down to exactly how big a difference we’ll make, but we’re going to do something.
We’re also going to allow larger animation files to accommodate Bento. We’ve got more bones to animate, so we want to give people a little more room to do that with. But again, that’s part of the same change to how things are delivered to the viewer before we make them any bigger, otherwise we’ll just be adding lag.
So there are two examples of Linden Lab continuing to develop and improve Second Life. There’s a lot more in Inara’s post including discussion of the new Grandfathered tier offer, having more estate managers (generally for large events), group reports of abuse and a hell of a lot more, really, read or listen to this.
