New updates on the next generation platform from Ebbe Altberg

Ebbe Altberg gave some new updates about the next generation platform that Linden Lab are currently working on during a recent interview with Designing Worlds to celebrate their 250th episode. In recent months the lab has been pretty much quiet about releasing further details until now.

• So far progress is good but it’s far from a world yet. Technologies are starting to come together. 
• Four months ago significant resources and work went into the new platform.
• In three or four weeks time Linden Lab will hit it’s first internal milestone. The first milestone will be the ability to import content, script some stuff and cruise around as an avatar in that world. 
• There’s a tremendous amount of technology that need to go into just doing that; just the networking, the physics, the lighting, the import pipeline, the server technology, client technology, cloud technology – so many things that we’re doing from the ground up.
• The new platform will be in the spirit of Second Life, in that idea of the user-generated content, creating spaces, places, and things within it. Then making it easy to invite people into those spaces and communicate and socialise within those spaces.
• The next milestone will be at the end of the year. 
• The alpha release might be invite-only – somewhere middle of next year.
• The next platform is still so early and the lab are still negotiating on time-frames.
• Linden Lab have goals in mind for making it cross-platform including mobiles, PCs, HMDs and Oculus. 
• Linden Lab are trying to create something that is a very strong evolutionary step forward over a lot of things that have been done before.
• The new platform has a long way to go to even think about naming, branding and specific target audiences.
• “don’t bank on full backwards compatibility for all content”
• “mesh is something that is very likely to be importable, we’re working on that already”
• “Scripts – we’ve said it’s going to be a completely different scripting language.”
• “We would like to make it [so] it’s easy for you to move back and forth using your identity and your Lindens, so that you can hop back and forth, and do what you do here, the place you enjoy and love, and then go over and experiment and play over there.”
• Linden Lab has a code name internally for the next platform but they don’t want that to leak out. 

It’s still early days for the new platform, good progress is being made with milestones coming up before the end of 2014 and there will be official releases in 2015.

Are you excited about the next generation platform ? Please comment below! 🙂