Question for todays town meeting (left over from previously)

Hi Robin,

Any chance I can try to get my previous question which got missed at the last town meeting answered. It didn't get answered in the follow-up and it was potentially going to be asked in the secondcast interview with Phillip however it was already packed with other great questions (secondcast team did a great job). References are:

http://forums.secondlife.com/showpo...73&postcount=40
/139/de/94374/1.html
/139/53/94569/1.html

For convenience the question again is basically: From a SL developers point of view (LSL etc):

[1] What is the longer term LL strategic goal regarding the SL development platform? Some potential subpoints/talking points:
- is the provision of a rich development environment which is on par with other game development platforms (Halo) seen as key to ensure SL's future (against competition etc). I'm interested in understanding how to technically compare the rich features in some of these other development platforms with the only very basic features of LSL. From a developers point of view where we are in 2006 LSL seems very old/limited. You can't even really have the basic concept of maintaining code in one location only as it needs to be copied/pasted around. Fundamental stuff like the communications layer is do it yourself largely and there's not even a way to do a sychronous function call across scripts. So I'm guessing the difference technically is due to the manner in which LSL is plugged immedidately into the one overall system, whereas game development via Halo etc is a different whereby you compile your own game application? I'm interested in understanding this as I guess I'm concerned about SL/LSL being able to compete over the coming years with these other game development platforms. I think there should be a LSL development platform vision/strategic direction even if it takes years to get there.

(Drop part 2 below if you have to Robin)

[2] Can you provide any target milestones dates for moving forward with advancement of the developer platform? (i.e. question 1 was strategic/long term goal related, this one is what are the next steps along the path to the goal)
- how & when will Mono/C# fit into this
- are there any major developer environment improvements which are planned for upcoming releases (say in the next 6 months to 2 years) that you can share?


Cheers
Greg

Hi Greg, I'll let Robin and Philip know you wrote in about this.

Hi Greg,

We definitely intend to make SL on par with anything you can do with a gaming platform. Regarding scripting of objects, you will see a new type of fast HTTP support in the next release, which should be in preview within a few days. Also we are close to being able to greatly speed up the scripting engine by switching to mono, which will allow things like more complex AI for objects. We have also done work to enable a shared memory space for multiple objects, which will be great - though there isn't a release target on that work yet.

To make SL totally competitive with the different gaming platforms will also require better rendering, better avatar physics, and hierarchical modeling of linked objects - which are all things we are doing design or implementation work on right now. There is a nice improvement coming in the next release - occlusion culling - which will let you get very high frame rates within an enclosed space (like a small building). This should be better for gaming as well.

Beyond gaming, we'd like to more generally see SL be able to do anything with the simulator CPU you imagine being able to do with conventional languages/servers.