Day: July 3, 2014

On Wednesday July 2nd, 2014, the Firestorm team hosted a special question and answers session to discuss the future of Second Life. The event was held to try to disperse some of the concerns and misinformation circulating about SL’s future in the light of the news that Linden Lab is developing an additional virtual worlds platform which is being planned to run alongside Second Life.

Attending the session from Linden Lab were Oz Linden, in his capacity as Technical Director for Second Life and Pete Linden, the Lab’s Director of Global Communications.

The session took the form of an initial discussion between host Jessica Lyon and Oz and Pete Linden, which sought to address some of the core concerns which have been raised and address some of the broader misconceptions which have resulted (such as Second Life no longer being developed and / or no longer having the staff needed to support it). This was then followed by a Q&A session led by Lette Ponnier, who posed questions which had been left on the Firestorm blog post announcing the meeting or directly to her via IM during the session or relayed to her from the live stream audience.

As always, Chakat Northspring recorded the entire event, and her video is embedded here – my thanks as always to North.

In addition, the audio from the meeting has been broken down into a number of individual topic areas, and placed throughout this transcript to allow people to listen to the audio whilst reading, if preferred, and to save on scrolling up and down between text and video.

When reading / listening, please remember:

• This is not a word-for-word transcript of the entire meeting. While all quotes given are as they are spoken in the recording and the audio files, to assist in readability and maintain the flow of conversation, not all asides, jokes, interruptions, etc., have been included in the text presented here
• If there are any sizeable gaps in comments from a speaker which resulted from asides, repetition, or where a speaker started to make a comment and then re-phrased what they were saying, etc, these are indicated by the use of “…”
• The audio files have been slightly edited to remove lengthy pauses in order to assist the flow of the conversations when also reading the text.

The following links can be used to quickly jump to individual sections of the transcript:

• Introduction and on Second life Not Being Shut Down
• On the Size of the Team Working on SL and Available Resources for SL Development
• On SL and the Next Generation Platform being Separate Products to be Operated in Parallel
• On Current Technical Projects Underway in SL and Future Work
  • Experience Tools
  • Chat Lag
  • Webkit (affects MOAP, in-world TVs, built-in web browser, etc.)
  • HTTP pipelining Improvements – texture and mesh loading speeds
  • The Future
• Open Q&A Session
  • Tier
  • Graphics memory issues
  • Raising the group limit
  • Virtual Landmarks
  • Skill gaming
  • Child avatars
  • In-world search improvements
  • Return of assigned last names
  • Helping to spead the word about SL’s future
  • Griefing and ToS infringements
  • Continued rate of viewer / simulator updates / open-sourcing the simulator code
• Closing remarks

Continue reading “The Future of SL meeting with Oz and Pete Linden: video, audio and transcript” →