Second Life 2.0 - what is it?

OK, so I heard rumours about the next gen SL, and I saw some crappy video that I couldn't make head or tail of.

So could someone who keeps up with these things maybe outline for us non-geeks what they are planning for SL 2.0 and how it will affect us?

If you are talking about the youtube video of someone walking around an office building, it was a hoax.

I think that was probably it, yes.

Shame. So there is nothing concrete about anything big and new on the horizon when it comes to SL?

there are loose rumours only so far, there was a promised big announcement due sometime, but that maybe just that someone big in the virtual community we've never heard of giving a talk at Burning Life!!!

There is actually a "SL 2.0" initiative at LL, but all it is really is a new viewer. It's not really worthy of a 2.0 designation, but the marketing hype is trying to spin it as the "next generation of SL".

The next generation is the best drug ever. You will be so addicted you will never go back to that dirty smelly real life where people have to eat and go to the bathroom.

It is like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP8eNye4J_M

it is so good music videos are already being made about it because it is a modern addiction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epkPUDHv76E

When you get fully immersed you will have only one question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urNyg1ftMIU

An absence of facts shouldn't be a barrier to a lively and informed discussion, though. Some wishes off the top of my head, in no particular order...

Keys in outfit folders. One-click customisable graphics settings. Bug-free software. Better avatar meshes. Unnoticeable sim crossings. Subtractable prims. Reflections. Shadows. Chat spelling checker. Responsive management. Etc...

llTeleportAgent, llTreeSystem, llGetLinkPrimitiveParams, llSetSculptAnim, ...

llWriteScript

llFixScript

llFixMyDamnAnimationGlitches

The Governor 2.0 talked about it on SLCC 09. The retired Governor 1.0 talked about it in his actual Burning Man 10.0 diary in the grey blogs (-0.1) and said it will be disruptive 3.0 and painful 4.0 but it will bring millions of new residents in, nearly the whole globe 7.0. But he said also a very motivating 0.0 word at the end of his poetry:

"Onward!"

I don't know what they are talking about. It is maybe only a quarterly test by them to check if their keyboards are still working.

||IJustLearnedKungFu

llIJustlearnedKungFu(integer strength); // eg: llIJustLearnedKungFu(WHOA) or llIJustLearnedKungFu(DUDE)

Features I've heard as possibly likely to be in an "SL 2.0," as outlined at SLCC and elsewhere.

- Improved graphics including shadows, spot lights, projections, reflective light.

- Full mesh uploading, including options for creating lower LOD versions.

- Media on a prim with much more flexibility than current parcel media. Including interactivity with that media, flash support, etc.

- An API framework.

There is a lot of work going into additional tools an abilities for content creation in the next year. This would presumably include the aforementioned mesh uploading as well as other additional content tools.

Beyond that, who knows. Clearly some other stuff going on under the hood that they've not opened up about yet.

meh those are nice features... but really what SL 2.0 needs is better inventory / asset controls and limits to stop the overloads we currently have... if people stopped having 2342 million items in there inventory we wouldn't be constantly in trouble of asset server overloads, new avatar meshes with more layers, and the puppeteer system they purchased ages ago... along with scriptable animations

I suspect that "SL 2.0" will be a new viewer with some slight rearrangement of the floating windows (like Communicate), and maybe some stuff with shadows and HTML-on-a-prim. (But not any new meshes or new kind of building geometry or anything radical like that. Probably no significant bugs fixed in the Viewer or the server. No grid/server improvements, either.)

One other possible technical improvement is the ability to "plug in" extensions to the Viewer without having to compile/build it yourself. Like browser plug-ins (but probably not QUITE that easy to use). Part of this would be for the plug-in to listen to chat channels, so that objects could command new behaviors in the Viewer. For example, you walk into a "classroom" sim and your Viewer automatically changes around the windows, puts up some new buttons to click on, and sets up communication with classroom devices.

I suspect that "2.0" is also about integrating Second Life with Facebook and Twitter or such, which is conceptually about, and a first step towards, integrating your various "virtual" presences on the net.

It's also largely a marketing statement: Second Life is re-launched -- it's new and exciting, and doesn't have porn/gambling/weirdos, so you should bring your "young schoolchildren" (that phrase comes from the TOS/Community Standards about what's allowed on the grid now) here for their learning environment (ie. the government needs to invest in SL "for the children" and it will be good for the economy of the U.S.) and bring your business here (because all the problems have been solved, it's highly reliable, and it will help people in your organization communicate more effectively)!

I am 100% TOTALLY guessing and have ZERO actual knowledge about it.
I have not been tracking anything about SL development nor talked to anybody nor attended any of those RL conferences or events. Maybe someone who saw one of the demos will be able to comment further.

llFixMyDamnedTransparencyOcclusions(float severity)

I was under the impression Snowglobe was to be the SL 2.0...

Nope. I would characterize it more as a new skin with more a user interface not designed by the sort of people that bring you blender but instead designed by people that bring you Adobe products.

As for mesh import and all that? Odds are certainly good it will all be available in the "old style" browser so the capabilities can migrate into third party open source viewers. The big question is will the source for SL09 be open source or not. They are obviously paying a lot of money to have the new viewer developed. Will they simply give the code away?

I have been wondering this as well. Many companies make older versions open source, but keep their newest stuff proprietary.
.

to start making it closed source would be taking a huge step backwards for the company as a whole and all the work on intergrid operation-ability they have been striving for in the background.... but then again We still don't have the open sourced server software we were promised so long ago either so I wouldn't put it past them.

A couple weeks ago I made a point of asking at several office hours whether SL2.0 was to be open sourced, and the responses were, approximately, "I assume so" or "haven't heard otherwise"--in contrast to the "we can't talk about it yet" that I expected. This from Lindens who really ought not to have to guess about such things. I conclude from this that technical direction at the Lab is now on a need-to-know basis within the company itself.

Somewhere there's a video from SLCC floating around (Dusan Writer's blog, maybe?) that had a glimpse of what the presenter said was a version of SL2.0 that had already been superceded by something unrecognizably different. I couldn't make much sense of what was being shown or described, just got a vague sense it might be some more flexible structuring of the Inventory browser, plus something about landmarks that sounded less lame than the old NAV project.

llSpin

2.0 will have lots of new features. But yeah! its the caps that will affect us more.

what caps and from where did this information originate?