Looking Further Ahead

I've been an active member of Second Life for a little over a year now and find myself one of its biggest fans. However, in the last year I've seen what only appear to be minor changes happening. In the same amount of time, other MMO games/simulations have gone through more serious updates and new hardware has come on leaps and bounds.

Now I appreciate that Second Life is different to gaming in a number of ways, not least that the people in Second Life probably don't spend a lot of money on new PCs or upgrades on a regular basis, whereas their gaming cousins will be spending $1000+ every year on new stuff, however the only advantages I get by having a new PC is that I can turn up a couple of detail levels and see further away.

Some option is better than no option, I'll give you that, but I'm starting to wonder if there's any work being done on Second Life 2. If I'm not too clear by that I should probably explain. As of time of writing we're on Second Life v1.15.0 and if recent previous upgrades are anything to go by we'll be on it for a few weeks at least. For those of you who don't understand version numbering, the standard convention is that the first number is a major revision. The second a minor and the third a bug-fix type. So the any bug fixes would be like v1.15.1 or v1.15.2 and when we see new features we should be seeing v1.16.0 maybe or v1.16.1 if the first draft isn't quite right.

So, Second Life v2.0.0? Is there an ETA on it and what can we expect to see when it gets here? Personally I'd like to see support for features that almost all modern graphics cards support. And by that I mean those that we use, not those that are the sole privilege of the super rich gramer types. Things like Shader Model support. I was to be able to use better lighting effects and be able to define my own shadow, bump, transparency and diffuse maps where possible. I can't see why it should be a problem. Most wouldn't use them but those of us who would like to and probably know what we're doing will be able to use them to striking effect. Those who don't want to wait that bit longer for a texture to fully rez can turn them off.

I also think it's time that we have an option for more prims per square meter. I understand that there's a memory and rendering implication but since servers are being upgraded and the average user's PC is far more powerful since these limits were set out I think we should be able to handle it.

And finally the grid. Will it get upgraded to a better distribution of power? At present I know that many servers sit idle while others are exhaustively pounded by huge numbers of users. That way maybe we can realistically get more than 40 users per region too?

I think this would be a good place to suggest ideas that are probably too far off to be seen in a recent upgrade, see if anyone at LL reads it and thinks it's a good idea. I've lost all faith in the Feature Voting Tool personally!

As a History Major, and military buff in general, you win my award for best name. If only your birthday was June 6th. And interesting post as well. i recall a similar situation with a particular piece of software i was using. Ver 1.0 lasted about 2 days then 1.1, 1.2 a month later, 1.3 soon thereafter and so on. By 1.7b or so the developers realized the entirely new code would be needed to adress a lot of issues and implement the fearures being demanded. They decided that no further updates would come until Ver 2.0 came about, which took over a year. Many howled, some pouted and ran off, but those that stuck it out were rewarded in the end.