SL Development Roadmap

I note that Linden Lab is endeavoring to hire precisely the sort of staff that would allow them to raise their level of professionalism to a degree that posters in this thread seem desirous of. This is certainly not uncommon for firms that started out as a very clever skunkwork that quickly outgrew expectations.

That they have been unable to secure such talent in the SF Bay is indeed puzzling.

What has languished is the platform. Yes, users continue to create- but they are being held back by a platform that is definitely showing its age. What new developments and tools are you amazed by? Since 1.4, which was a significant update, we have not gotten that much that is new. Video? Whee. Inventory search was good, but the inventory UI is still horrific. No raise in prim limits, a single new prim, no improvement in physics, graphics, UI, animations, permissions, etc. My point is not to complain about it , it is to ask for a map of where we are going.

There is a lot of stuff on deck that is coming out at some point, it would just be nice to have a clearer idea of when. The first year of SL it was very clear and rather exciting - nearly every major updated significantly added to SL. As I said, something happened after the disastrous 1.5 update. This year has been all over the map, so to speak. Feature voting seemed like a good idea in theory, but in practice, it has done nothing to help provide that focus.

I agree with Pen that thanks to the content creators in SL, there is always reason to keep checking in and see what's now, but as one of those content creators, I have to say that the slow progress in developing the platform itself is stifling creativity.

Performance still leaves a lot to be desired. Supposedly Havok2 was going to help with a lot of those issues as well as open up opportunities for better visualizations and more accurate collission detection.

The vehicle physics still blow chunks. It's hard to see this ever getting to the point where vehicles will ever be used as a mode of transportation given the lack of progress in improving this.

Requests for new APIs are seemingly ignored. Some really smart people have suggested some new LSL APIs that would make in-game development easier and open the door to all sorts of new things using less prims.

Limits that are now being pushed do not seem to be on LL's radar for increasing in future versions -- prim size limits, number of linked objects in a physical object, distance between linked objects, etc. These are all limits that if increased, could open new development oppportunities and also help improve performance because there would be less need for "hacks" to get around these limitations.

The UI extensibility is still ridiculously limited. As a developer, I have access to 1 function that allows me to pop-up a dialog with a bunch of buttons on it, and that's pretty much it. Think of all that could be accomplished if we were allowed to add text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, images and other things to dialogs.

I'm glad Cristiano posted this. It is seriously disturbing that we have sat here for so long, clamoring for these additions, and all we've been promised is a replacement for GOM.

LL really needs to start paying better attention to their developers or they will find themselves in the same position There.com does today.

Cristiano et al, with all due respect, you're getting exactly what you wished for.
"OMG LINDENS IT CRASHES FIX BUGS NO NEW FEATURES"

Eggy, with all due respect, a professionally handled, planned out development plan includes both. I have never said to fix bugs completely at the expense of features - there does need to be a balance. The time spent adding streaming videoThere were however some showstopping bugs for awhile (teleporting being completely broken, for example), and some major damage done to the stability of the system that needed to be fixed before the entire system came crashing down. I am not an OMG LINDENS kind of person anyway. Prioritizing bug fixes over new features still does not mean a timeline cannot be shared for future development, or that all development has to slow to a snails pace.

I could totally see LL holding back features until the 2.0 release for marketing reasons...

That doesn't make much sense to me, AJ. We don't even know how far in the future that is. The earliest date we have for 2.0 is around Christmas.

But it's encouraging to know (like Eggy found out) that parts of the new renderer have been incorporated into drawing the map

As to the rest of the comments here... well, we all know that Second Life is a mid- to long-term project, and we can't expect in these days that a company makes a huge profit in a few months/years like in the old "new economy" days. The charts for the "rise and fall" of MMORPGs that have been posted around here are very interesting. The long runners are the ones that will be around for years to come, and LL is certainly striving for that, and not for "the quick buck", as sadly so many think to be true.

The "bugs vs. features" thing is a hard one. Speaking strictly for myself, I'm all for features but since this is a politically incorrect thing to defend publicly, I won't My reasoning is simple: I can live with bugs. A billion human beings or close to that use Windows every day. They all live with bugs, bugs, bugs. However, I cannot live with a SL that is dragging so much behind all the current state-of-the-art that people think LL has lost the spark and are trying other things instead (take a look at what There's roadmap is...).

The alternative is, of course, making SL a "special something" where both features and bugs are second place to that. That, at least, is something I can contribute with Simply put, SL is special because so many special people are around - and our job is to make them stay, despite the lack of features and the excess of bugs.

(Still, 1.7 is the stablest Preview I have ever seen, so I have some hopes on that )

Well, I only said I could see it being the case, but off the top of my head; people who are interested in SL but don't like it enough to use much or at all (including magazine writers and bloggers) are more likely to look in on a major revision than a minor one (numerically speaking). Releasing many new features at this time would give SL a good image because residents are more vocal in their praise when there's new features to play with, there'd be more activity for newbies to see as people do said playing and there'd be a glut of new and emerging content as everyone starts playing with the new toys.
Plus a big shiny "2" on advertising stuff can be good.

I can't see what it has with anyone but LL knowing when it'll be released has to do with anything, but to me Christmas would seem a reasonable time for it to hit.

I seriously doubt 2.0 will come out around Christmas. SL used to be on a fairly regular update cycle, but it has slowed in the past year. 1.7 doesn't look likely to be out for at least a few weeks or more yet, so I doubt there will be another major point release in 2005.

Cristiano, I asked about this in the RAC meetup and here was the reply I got...



Not the kind of answer you were probably looking for but that is what was said. I suppose I could have asked the question a little differently.

Thank you for asking - I believe in that case, Robin is referring to the advanced notification of patches, which was implemented after people complained they did not know SL was going to be down because they had not checked the forums. Baby steps, I suppose

That's a pity. It's totally possible that they could jump from 1.7 to 2.0 though.

Hmm... I might have to consider my motives behind these postings, I feel I might be subconciously trying to start conspiracies in my tired state. ^^

Yes. I believe that is what she was refering to as well.

There is a new "SL Community Team Roundtable" mailing list and monthly meeting that was set up by Pathfinder Linden, and which includes other Linden attendance.

You can sign up for the list by these instructions:



The original announcement can be found here:
/3/e5/60600/1.html


Path has already sent out a chat log to the mailing list of the first meeting. Anyone who ends up signing up, if you need a copy of that first chat log, feel free to IM or PM me.

But maybe being a part of this would allow you a better way to get this idea into the minds of others as well as the Lindens, Cris?

Yea pretty much. Although we discussed about the ability to have in-world presentation of news/updates/motd's and such. Like how typical games (not saying SL is a game) have news/info areas centralized in their user interfaces. Philip discussed how they could create a data centralized site of info and then the game pulls up that info to the user interface. This was of course ideas just being thrown out. Also how the HTLM text to prims could really help out in this area.

You are probably asking what this has to do with a development roadmap though. Well, when this stuff gets implemented in it may lead to some kind of a centralized updates and future outlook info channel/section being implemented into the interface for people to ponder on.

Robin said if you feel like following up IM or e-mail your feedback. Philip and Robin were very open to hearing peoples ideas. They love the community getting involved to improve SL in whatever way possible. Every little bit helps.

Let's say you are right. Then it is either poorly managed development or pure mismanagement. As others have pointed out, there are development teams out there with the same headcount doing much better at keeping things rolling smoothly and dealing with bugs, etc.

With that said, I doubt seriously that LL is going to be any more transparent to their customerbase than any other MMO offering. Outside of advising us when they plan to patch, there isn't a lot of justification or motivation to provide a rolling project schedule.

On the other hand, if they intend to market and present Second Life as a 'platform' for development by the masses, then providing that type of information would be precisely what one would expect.

So it looks like we're back to the whole 'what is this?' thing... once more, LL tells us it isn't a game, but continues to act as if it is.

Sure wish they'd get their party line straight. (grin)

Far be it from me to be critical of Linden Lab, but I've just noticed a few things that speak volumes about the competence therein.

Last night the forums were down, at first they were reporting "database errors", then came a hastily scrawled page saying something to the effect that "there was a problem and they were working on it". All of this happened prior to 00:00 PDT. Today I found the following announcement posted 5 days ago:Now I'm not a professional web administrator, but in my experience, when taking down a website, standard practice is to put a "Sorry, down for maintenence" message in place and then down the service. Could the left hand not even know that there is such a thing as a right hand? And despite the stated "improvements" at present with a whopping 162 users online, 62ms ping times, it is still dog slow. Comparisons with other forum sites would just be silly as their userbases are three or more orders of magnitude higher.

Now, we've heard a lot of excuses from LL about the bleeding edge technology of SL (true) and the attendant need to accept glaring bugs (which may also be true), but if LL is not capable of operating forum software that they purchased - not wrote - for a miniscule user load what does that say about the firm? This is forum software, not some cutting edge, novel technical marvel, and they can't seem to get that right. The excuses about the myriad, unfixed bugs in two year old code that would not pass most software services beta criteria are begining to ring really hollow.

Is this all simply a cruel joke or could they actually be that amateur?

Not a simple problem. 170K members will make doing simple selects slow; there's some serious database iron behind this, I dont imagine it's just a case of maintaining off the shelf software.

-Adam

Is vBulletin really that bad? Maybe I'm too old school but aren't there ways of keeping MRU data more readily accessible? Have there truly been 170,000 unique members given less than 50,000 registered players, most of whom have never even heard of the forums especially in light of the great forum lossage of 2004?

Sure there may be 468,000 posts, but the typical case is reading threads under a week old. I can certainly see that doing a full search across the whole textbase should take some time, but if I've got a thread in hand, shouldn't that be a list of indicies into the post table which is presumably an O(log n) access in the worst case and far better if the indicies were optimized? Not to mention that the MRU post data should likely be in RAM already?

A response of RTF-vBulletin-M would certainly be fair. I guess I'm just amazed that someone could write a commercial product which largely ignores 40+ years of database design and optimization experience. Yeah, I know that there one can write a wretched schema out of ignorance, but geez...

Well, I thinks vBulletin is used for the Something Awful boards... last I recall anyhoo... oh, source!

http://www.big-boards.com/

^ list of really big Internet forums.

Microsoft did this a couple of years back with .NET and Avalon technologies; Mozilla did the same thing with Mozilla as well. The only thing I can say regarding roadmaps, and I say this mosty in a "chee whiz" kind of tone, is that they're often forgotten. I'd argue, however, that SL has a very plain roadmap:

entice developers -> entice community -> entice blintards -> nerf the interface for blingtards.

I dont know.. I think Philip Linden stated clearly his intentions for second life in his blog on competing with residents no? keep improving.. keep competitive.. who needs a 5 page essay when it can be as simple as that?

I want a five-page essay explaining why "give us an API" doesn't answer his question.

And I would like one on why it has taken 2+ years, and 7 major client releases to get multi-item drag and drop.

I posted a 1/2 page essay explaining this on the first page of this thread. Is that enough?