Linden Labs new virtual world.

[Tad Carlucci]

I'm sure whatever they're working on is years away and, if and when it becomes public, it will be several more years until Second Life ends.

As I read it, they are in early Alpha development. And, of course, at this phase, it's all "closed source." At this stage, I imagine they only have rough ideas where they want it to end up. The last thing they need is a bunch of people throwing ideas at them.

To be honest, Second Life is old and crufty.

They readily admit that there are vast sections of code they avoid looking into because it's such a mess. Some of the mess stems from the simple fact of the age of the code. But there are sections which were never really intended for public use. The early-on Second Life environment was nothing more than a proof-of-concept. Much of the code was never really "designed" and simply came into being to show something could be done. Unfortunately, once it was put in place, it became entrenched. So we're left with things like the lousy permissions system, inventory initialization errors (aka "the drop bug"), and truely bad ideas, which should never have seen the light of day, like "sculpies".

So, here's to them!

Hurrah! I hope they do a ground-up redesign. All things "how it is in Second Life" are disallowed. Everything should be "what we should have done in Second Life."

Whatever they finally come up with, I'm sure many designers (with the usual belly-aching) will be able to relatively quickly convert. Mesh models for in-world objects (such as housing, signs, furniture, landscaping, etc), which use an industry-standard format, will almost certainly be fairly easy to move over. Avatar mesh, skins, clothing, and such, will probably not be easy to move over because they depend heavily upon Second Life bad choices: avatars will almost certainly be constructed differently, so it will be difficult (if not impossible) to convert those.

KittyCatS, as they exist in Second Life, depend heavily upon sculpted prims. The reason is simple: the stupid permissions system on Second Life make mesh models non-viable. So, KittyCatS won't be easy to move over. Hopefully, Linden Labs will provide a better system, which would allow changing mesh models at run-time. This would allow the "concept" of KittyCatS to be moved over. But, I strongly suspect, the current sculpt-based models will require a complete replacement. Probably, the end result will be vastly better than the current product. (Actually, I expect everyone will be amazed at the improvement.)

When Linden Labs are comfortable with it, I'm sure they'll let us know more. KittyCatS is a huge portion of Linden Lab's current income stream. So I think they will probably learn more before we do; but they'll probably be under a non-disclosure contract and won't be able to tell us about it.

But, then, all this is years in the future and plans have a way of changing (often remarkably) during the Alpha development phase.