Wanted: Your Questions for the SL Town Hall with Karen and Chris Linden

In order to better organize the Linden Town Hall format, we're now taking a group of questions before hand here in the forums, for those who may not be able to attend the in-world events.

On Wed. December 7th from 3:00 - 4:00 PM PST/SL-Time, Karen and Chris Linden will discuss questions about Second Life Production and Project Management (per this thread).


This thread will be closed Monday morning (Dec. 5), so please post your questions soon. Please note that it is not always possible for us to answer all questions during the Town Hall

Thanks!

(more info on the Town Hall here )

Just two quickies. Pick either:

Is there a particular science to how new features are assigned and prioritized? I ask this because there's been much speculation on just "how important" areas like Feature Suggestions, voting, and the General forum are in terms of getting new features "on the ticket."


Furthermore, how do changes happen in terms of the Preview Grid/Patching process? When talking with Andrew over a collision problem, he had mentioned "he had put in a request, but it didn't get into the main dev trunk." I'm curious what he meant by this.

I'm not sure if this falls under the topic or not, but it seems like it might.

Some of us feel that downloading and reinstalling the client in its entirety every time is wasteful. 20 megs isn't a lot these days, but when you have to do it two or three times in quick succession, it begins to add up. When the actual change is only a fraction of that amount, it's a lot of wasted bandwidth that coul be used for people trying to log in. Also users in places such as Australia apparently don't have the sort of unlimited bandwidth that we have in the US, even on broadband, so the less they have to download, the better. Finally, when users make changes (such as altering keys.ini because there's no UI for control configuration) every single update overwrites them, even when the file in question hasn't been updated.

In the face of the increased frequency of updates you mentioned, would it be possible to change the SL client update system to a true patcher, one that only downloads what it needs to alter in situ, and only for the files that have actually changed?

Mainland land parcel tools are long overdue for update/enhancement. Can we expect some attention there sometime in the 1.7x track?

(Andrew mentioned that this would be best brought up at the Town Hall...)

If there is no technical reason why p2p cannot be implemented tied exclusively to the Find Menu and Landmarks, would you consider this option until such time as there is a solution for parcel owners who do not wish p2p enabled on their land? If the primary reason for implementing p2p is to make travel more "newbie friendly", then being able to just click on the map and go is probably not going to be anywhere near as useful. Most people travel with a particular destination in mind, usually one that they have landmarked or chosen via the Find Menu.

Are you willing to provide us with a rough timeline of what features are planned in store for upcoming releases?

My last attempt at getting this question publicly answered: /13/eb/35932/1.html

I'm fully aware that the timeline must be a flexible approach due to the nature of change of SL — it's always more a "guideline" than a "commitment". And I also understand the need to change the timeline for "priority" projects like LindeX or point-to-point teleporting (sighs).

Still, some of us are doing presentations on SL routinely, and for some RL projects to ever get started, it means knowing a bit more on when some of the long-promised features will ever be implemented — even if just on a very rough, overall idea (ie. "later this year" or "only after Havok 2 is implemented" or "when LL is bought by Google" ).

Thanks for hosting this TH!

Recently we have been seeing more feature change ideas as a result from public outcry. most notably point to point and the mention of looking into permissions that protect freebie items gifted to the community. /108/8a/74022/15.html#post769512 My question is, as seems to be happening with P2P and possible permission changes, will future feature changes be driven by how loudly people demand the change, or is there an overall plan which balances enacting changes with positive/negative impact on useability?

Would it be possible to have LL post a 'project status' page available to Residents, at minimum for the higher visibility ones like Havok 2 or HTML? There is no need to be specific in dates or some such, just giving out even some details of what's holding the project would be useful.

An example of this actually is Babbage's weblog posts on Mono. Finding that quite useful, and making me feel hopeful for that project as well.

Thanks,

I have a new home in Blumfield. Im still fairly new and when I shop I sometimes forget to count the prims. Not yet knowing how to make great furniture, I choose to buy it for now. How can we set up a nice home when our prim usage is so limted? Will this ever change?

Prim limits have been raised once, for version 1.2. It will gradually raise as processors become cheaper, and the physics engine gets upgraded.

I strongly second this idea/question/request.

Thanks for the questions everyone - see you in-world on Wed!