This week the Linden Lab communications team responded back to Second Life user reader questions on Second Life viewer revamping, engine moving, EEP failures, return of last names, max avatars per region and much more. This is a follow-up from the recent interview that Hamlet Au had with the current CEO of Linden Lab Ebbe Altberg.
There are a few things worth pointing out from this latest Q&A follow up. First there are no plans currently for a complete overhaul of the Second Life viewer and there are no plans to move Second Life over to a different engine.
Secondly the lab are aware of the issues with teleports and region crossings. They are working to fix these issues ASAP and there will be blog updates soon. The lab is looking at ways to expand how many avatars can be in each region.
Thirdly on Last Names there are some more back-end changes to Second Life which need to happen before Last Names can make a return. The lab are working on it still and they hope it will be ready later in 2019. Most likely sometime in the Q4 of 2019 if things go according to plan.
It’s always good to see the lab responding to questions from the Second Life community.
See the full Q&A update below…
Will SL be moving to a new engine like Unreal or Unity, and if so, will our scripting etc still work? If not, why not?
There are no current plans to move over Second Life to a different engine. We’d rather focus our engineering efforts on continuing to improve our existing engine to ensure that there is no interruption to ongoing compatibility for our millions of Residents.
EEP has ruined teleports and region crossings for a lot of people. As well as TP crashing, crashing and unseating has increased by many time since EEP was put into the server code in March. When will that be fixed?
We are aware that some Residents have had an increase in disconnects during a teleport. These occur when an avatar attempts to teleport to a new Region (or cross a Region boundary, which is handled similarly internally) and the teleport or Region crossing takes longer than usual. We’re working quickly to fix the issue. Incidentally, while the wide deployment of the bug that we believe is behind the TP disconnects did coincide with EEP server deployment, it’s actually unrelated to the EEP features. Readers can check out our Tools & Technology blog for updates as we continue to roll out any fixes.
Any plans for redoing the Viewer?
We are constantly revising, updating, and fixing the Viewer as with the rest of Second Life. There are no plans currently for a complete overhaul of the Viewer.
Second Life’s limitations when it comes to max avatars per sim were mentioned, which got me thinking about instancing and events. Has Linden Lab ever considered some form of sim instancing?
We are always looking at ways to reliably expand how many avatars can be in each region.
Will we get SL name change options?
There are some more back-end changes to SL which need to be made before Last Names can make a return (actually, it’s really name changes that are the hard part), but we are working on it and hope to have it ready later in 2019.
Daniel Voyager 