Time for sl to start again?

Well blizzard (makers of WoW) have licenced the Havok 4 engine now for future titles, and reading on another forum about some peoples experience of second life (with all the media buzz floating about), experiences which left them far from impressed, it got me thinking somehow that LL is missing the boat.

People generally speaking, are shallow to some extent. IF you going to try a new internet experience (game or otherwise) you expect atleast contemporary graphics, not something that is based on at this stage well aged technology. I think the time has come for SL to wipe and start over with a better graphics & physics engine. I know a lot of people would have issues with this, i myself am a content creator (granted not as big a back catalogue as some others) but, if uv maps etc were kept similar, most textures could be re-uploaded with a bit of tweaking.

As other online games/applications/whatever advance in their features, the gap between these and second life is becomming more noticeable. Surely it won't be long until someone re-invents a secondlife type experience using these newer technologies, so I wonder, do Linden Labs have some new engine under development in their offices somewhere, or would they, like the content creators have to start over also? If its the latter maybe its too late, maybe they'll have to sell to a competitor with such a system in development, or maybe they'll never sell, and slowly but surely sl users will migrate to something more shiny.

My 2c

Well apparently what I understand is not a matter of they "can't" but a matter of "don't want to". I am sure it would be a BIG project and take a lot of time, and again, apparently LL lets the programmers code whatever they want (and again, no one wants to). So we get features that are not requested but are fairly easy to impliment (not always but quite often). But first they NEED to get SL working in the first place before they try to add a new graphics engine.

Sadly there are bugs that have langushed on the known list for quite some time and don't get fixed. Again probably becuase they are very difficult to find and fix. I understand the difficulties they face, however I also believe they need to do a better job of testing and LISTENING to their testers on the test grid. I have been reading of several bugs that were reported or it worked find on the test grid in some area and here it is broken (I myself had a issue that was also tranfered here but fixed after the last update "patch". I do realize it is hard to predict what will happen exactly as you can't test for everything on the preview grid but still something obviously NEEDS to be done/changed with regard to testing.

I am sure that most of the old content creators would just leave and go somewhere else if SL was wiped and started over again. I don't know if I would stay myself if I lost everything Sundi and I created as well as everything we baought.

-DB

It's a matter of 'they did it once, but it took so long that changes in the mainline platform forced them to start over'.

What they've said is that they're making changes in SL to make conversion to havok2 easier. One of the things they're doing, for example, is killing joints (in stages) so they can pull that code out.

See my message /142/27/137683/1.html for some ideas on how they could manage a big transition without wiping the slate.