Looking forward to Second Life 2.0
by Tateru Nino 
Oct 19th 2009 at 9:00AM
Filed under: Opinion, Second Life, Virtual worlds
While it has been called Viewer 2009 once or twice, almost every Linden Lab staffer who mentions it calls it Second Life 2. Once on the drawing-board as a major overhaul of Second Life both at the server and at the viewer (client), the idea of a huge developmental jump was abandoned some years ago, and all of the features slated for Second Life 2 were added to Second Life 1, incrementally.
Well, except for the last item on the list, the user-interface. Essentially Second Life seems to now everything SL2 was originally planned to be, sans the new interface.
We got an early look at that part a few months ago, and what we saw was quite promising in many ways. The perceptive reader will note, though, that 2009 is already moving towards a close, and many observers are anticipating the new viewer anytime from today at the earliest, to the next couple or three weeks at the latest.
It's no secret that visible viewer development has largely dropped into the background. Aside from a quick bug-fix to the 1.23 viewer the other day and background activity on the Snowglobe viewer, not a whole heck of a lot has been heard on the viewer front for nearly five months.
Those same developers though are certainly acting like folks on a tight production deadline, especially in the last two weeks.
Changing the user-interface in the official viewer is no small task. Before the viewer sees official release, pretty much all of the official documentation that refers to any aspect of the user-interface is going to have to be reviewed, and probably rewritten. A release coupled with conflicting or outdated documentation would be something of a poison pill, and could stand to do more harm than good.
That doesn't mean that we can't expect to see a softer launch of the 2.0 viewer, and indeed we're expecting a release candidate to drop... well, pretty much any time now. A First Look is possible, but given the time-frames between First Look viewers and official viewers (6-18 months), that wouldn't see 'Viewer 2009' released until 2010 or 2011.
No, what we're expecting is a first release candidate by the end of the month, then a race down to the wire to get documentation reworked before an official release. It would be foolish to release after the first week of December, and that doesn't leave a lot of time left to bring the new viewer to an official fruition.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Loki said on 9:14AM 10-19-2009
Im feeling sick already from nerves,
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Ann Otoole said on 9:41AM 10-19-2009
Documentation can be crowd sourced into the wiki in a matter of days. It is worth our while as content creators to help and get it done fast. Release it. Fear of ship mentality is the app killer.
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Maggie Darwin said on 11:32AM 10-19-2009
The only thing worse than "fear of ship" would be getting hypnotized by the prodict name "2009" and shipping before the product was ready.
I'm not thrillled by the idea of crowdsourcing end-user docs either. Are we expecting people to infer how it works because Big Spaceship will deliver a Vullcan mind-meld intuitive UI?
Nock Forager said on 11:11AM 10-19-2009
This week, Community translator group will have a meeting about NDA of this SL2 client. The meeting as itself is not a secret of course.
I hope the client stable enough to do translation works and smoothly move to first look stage. But hmm in 2009? I personally doubt it...
office hour memo was talking about SL2 translation. (Sorry written in Japanese..).
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Rika_Linden/Office_Hours/2009_10_16_Transcript
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Nalates said on 11:44AM 10-19-2009
While the 'official' viewer and Snowglobe, the experimental viewer, have been quite the alternate viewers have been exploding with new features and a fast series of updates.
KirstenLee's viewers, targeted at SL and Open Life, have been increasing frame rates and adding dynamic shadows. Hippo, Imprudence, Meerkat and others have been adding new features. Greenlife Emerald seems to have collected most features and added a number of its own.
Things like a better chat box and easy to use IRC, breast physics, client side animation overriders, avatar lists (radar), inventory features ... and much more are common in the alternate viewers.
For probably a quarter to a third of the SL population a user interface change is not all that exciting.
See: Greenlife Emerald Viewer Breasts Review - http://nalates.wordpress.com/
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radar said on 12:25PM 10-19-2009
You're using as an example of superiority the very things the third party viewers have failed at - doing anything new. They've brought bouncy boobs and even more cluttered interfaces, which benefit very few people at best, while allowing more content theft simply because anyone can now write a client that can connect to the grid, and that's what's being done with some of them. The tradeoff hasn't been worth it.
I was expecting people to come up with something new and useful in the UI, and show LL what should have been done.
As for the number of people that won't care about the UI, people will appreciate a UI that gets out of the way and stops being such a large part of using second life. Far from making SL more immersive and realistic, third party viewers have done nothing but bring the man behind the curtain even more to the forefront. The only thing they've done in terms of UI changes besides adding visual clutter is throw some ugly colors in the mix and call them skins. This is not progress.
They get a D- at best from me.
Ann Otoole said on 11:57AM 10-19-2009
Well Maggie I was able to figure out the new blog forum interface quickly. I have been involved in UI design for decades and have documented plenty as well as developing impossible to decipher UIs myself. (The self writing program was cool but only made sense to people that understood what an acyclical graph was) I'm pretty sure I can figure out most of it pretty quick. So if that makes me a Vulcan then so be it. Live long and prosper.
As for the code? well you can worry about it all year long but you are not going to discover the real breaking points till it is released. yea. I even spent time working at Microsoft so I know exactly wtf I am talking about. LL has been working on this long enough. Worrying about all the rough edges is not going to polish anything. No matter what LL does it will not be mind blowingly perfect upon release and something is going to break. The sooner LL puts it to the real test the sooner LL will know what is going to break.
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TigroSpottystripes Katsu said on 6:21PM 10-19-2009
if the changes are only on the interface, this should not be called 2.0, and there should be no rush in releasing it to avoid releasing half-baked crap
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Tateru Nino said on 9:29PM 10-19-2009
Essentially, once the UI is overhauled, SL will have everything that was originally intended for SL2. The difference is that we got the features one at a time, rather than all at once.
TigroSpottystripes Katsu said on 8:44AM 10-20-2009
I understand that, but if with all the other changes we are still in 1.2* new GUI shouldn't be enough to bump the version all the way to 2.0
Jay said on 7:46PM 10-19-2009
I think the best clip i found on SecondLife 2.0 is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxoUwdJQbrw
I somehow think that this is a little overambitious and the reality in viewer 2009 will be at best meh and at worst reminiscent of the silver UI outcry.
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Braclo said on 11:16AM 10-20-2009
Jay your right about the movie you linked being overambitious cause its a fake. As far as i know that movie is a show off for the AMD Fusion Render Cloud Engine.
A link is given in that movie at 10 seconds, if you dont speak german just translate that article in google translater and you can read about it.. Just some article of someone saying that SL is gonna get competition if they dont upgrade their graphics... asif graphics is everything.
Anyhows, Will check SL 2.0 out as soon as it pops up. I use emerald mostly, but have kirstens viewer, cool viewer and snowglobe on my pc as I enjoy testing viewers.
Alicia Stella said on 7:35PM 10-20-2009
So essentially in a few weeks I'll be updating 100 instruction manuals for my own products in Second Life? Like every time it says "Select from the Pie Menu..."
Grrr.
I am looking forward to better friend filtering, I can't anyone in my 300+ list of friends.
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