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.
There’s also an interesting question regarding whether Linden Lab staff actually use Second Life :
Oz Linden: Well, most of the take the time! I don’t know whether I give them the time or not, but they all spend it!
No, we do encourage people to be active users. It’s important to understanding perspectives – I should say perspectives – on how users see Second Life, as I think there are as many different ways to see Second Life as there are users.
Troy Linden: I would also add there’s this funny term that we all coin as “drinking from the fire hose” for all the new hires. We encourage them to come it, because there’s so much to learn and so much to take in. So part of the thing is we have a boot camp, where you get set-up with an avatar and some money, and you can go in there and you can play around and dress yourself up, and just go around and have fun and check out what Second Life is all about.
I think a lot of people, when that’s done and that’s over with, they get drawn back in. so that sort-of starts the off, and from there they do it on their own.
Oz Linden : And in fact the last few times I’ve hired people, I’ve deliberately looked hard to try to find people who were already Second Life users. I mean, that’s a big plus, obviously.
So there you go, Lindens do go inworld, they do use the product and Oz Linden likes to hire people who are already Second Life users.
Lab Chat is of course not all about Second Life and there’s an interesting section on Project Sansar too. Here we see some explanations as to why a new platform is a better place to start from than an existing platform, for example Qie Niangao raises a question regarding how many user sessions an instance in Project Sansar can support. Ebbe’s reply is interesting :
So the goal is obviously, ultimately over time, for Sansar to be able to have higher concurrency than Second Life is able to do today. Having the opportunity to build a platform from the ground up, we can do some things that Second Life maybe wished it could have, or can’t do for other reasons.
We won’t necessarily be there on Day 1, so when we open the doors – our current target for that is the end of the year – [we] might not reach that level of concurrency, but over time we believe we can get into the multiple hundreds of concurrency in a single scene.
And then over time, even further out, I don’t even know how much further out, but we’re building the architecture so that ultimately we can have multiple instances view a shared instance. So for us here on stage, for example, could be on one instance, and everybody in the audience could be in multiple instances viewing us in this one shared instance. And then you can start stacking up many, many instances, each potentially having hundreds of people viewing a shared instance. And then you can get into conferences or concerts or Lab Chats of the future with thousands of concurrent users.
But that’s a ways out; right now we haven’t even gone past thirty or so in lab tests here with Sansar, because it’s still so early and so much functionality and performance improvements to put into it.
But the goal is to get into the hundreds for a single instance.
There’s more, a lot more. including discussion of graphics requirements. This makes for a very interesting read, listen and then of course, much further discussion.