SL 2022 ROADMAP

[Coffee Pancake]

 

From 

2022 Roadmap

We are already hard at work on several new features and improvements for the coming year. Here’s a sneak peek at what’s underway:

• Avatar “expressiveness” that brings camera-based gestures and movement to your avatar for a whole new level of interaction and connectedness
• Premium Plus - a new upgrade option with added features and extras
• A new mobile viewer to enhance and improve your Second Life experience
• Improved group chat reliability
• Viewer and script performance improvements 
• New user avatar customization and improvements
• Updated mesh optimizer
• Search engine improvements
• Improved materials and terrain
• Adding web marketplace variants
• …and much more!

 

I would be very interested in how they plan to do the avatar expressions from a camera, will it be done server side, privacy, etc

Edited December 24, 2021 by Coffee Pancake
removed quote .. as it was makin a mess ... carry on ..

[Sammy Huntsman]

New user avatar customization and improvements 

The cool thing and Ebbe were talking about this before he passed. I was like, hey Ebbe, we need an improved Character Customization thingy, and he promptly answered. It was in the works. So I kinda knew this was coming, for a while now. 

[June Starlight]

Looking at it, performance and reliability improvements (well, promises of) excite me more than possibility of new avatar customization shines.

Avatars are great already. Honestly, way too complex - helping a friend to figure them out for the first time, and it's "a bit much".

[bigmoe Whitfield]

so premium plus is back on the table,  well then.  I'm all ears.

[Candide LeMay]

Given the pace of development in the past isn't this more like a 2022-2032 roadmap?

[Mr Amore]

@Candide LeMay Many of these features were under development for years already, they may finally come to fruition in 2022. According to the article we may see the script performance improvements as early as January.

 

Whilst it may only cause me to frown, I can see the 'avatar expressions' being a fun and popular addition for many.

Premium Plus - Are we finally getting 30 second audio files? A second Bellisserian house would be nice too.

Improved materials - If height maps are coming I'm prepared to forgive LL.

 

 

Edited December 24, 2021 by Mr Amore

[Alwin Alcott]

7 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

so premium plus is back on the table,  well then.  I'm all ears.

depends where.... Linden tables are normally very long

[LittleMe Jewell]

28 minutes ago, Alwin Alcott said:

7 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

so premium plus is back on the table,  well then.  I'm all ears.

depends where.... Linden tables are normally very long

 

Definitely - because it comes from the same Metaverse as Soon©™®

 Now<----Kaplan Very Soon----Soonerino----Very Soon----Soon----Very Soon-ish----Soon-ish----Soonish...er---->End of Time

[Alwin Alcott]

10 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

Now<----Kaplan Very Soon----Soonerino----Very Soon----Soon----Very Soon-ish----Soon-ish----Soonish...er---->End of Time

 

Now<----Kaplan Very Soon----Soonerino----Very Soon----Soon----Very Soon-ish----Soon-ish----Soonish...er---->End of Table

[Echelon Alcott]

11 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

 

• A new mobile viewer to enhance and improve your Second Life experience

If LL gets the mobile viewer right, I see it as a positive in terms of reaching younger audiences and hopefully user base expansion.

[Sammy Huntsman]

Just now, Echelon Alcott said:

If LL gets the mobile viewer right, I see it as a positive in terms of reaching younger audiences and hopefully user base expansion.

When you say Younger audience, what do you mean exactly? 

 

[Echelon Alcott]

11 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

• Search engine improvements

That will be really nice. Please do it right this time! :-P

[Echelon Alcott]

22 minutes ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

When you say Younger audience, what do you mean exactly? 

I do not have actual data to back it up, but my perception is that the age distribution bell curve of SL users leans towards a more mature age group. 

Younger people these days heavily use mobile channels. If SL is to remain relevant and avoid a slow death, it needs to expand and attract an audience that will guarantee its longevity. I'll leave it up to the LL product development and marketing departments to determine what exactly that age group should be.

PS: a search tells me that LL has been working on a mobile viewer since at least 2019; it is way past due

Edited December 24, 2021 by Echelon Alcott

[Coffee Pancake]

5 minutes ago, Echelon Alcott said:

I do not have actual data to back it up, but my perception is that the age distribution bell curve of SL users leans towards a more mature age group. 

This is my impression too ..

5 minutes ago, Echelon Alcott said:

Younger people these days heavily use mobile channels. If SL is to remain relevant and avoid a slow death, it needs to expand and attract an audience that will guarantee its longevity. I'll leave it up to the LL product development and marketing departments to determine what exactly that age group should be.

SL is going to find it hard to compete with VR based offerings which provide far more fluid avatar movements and engaging experience, is very stilted by comparison.

Just rolling up with a mobile app a decade too late without advancing the platform and it's capabilities is .. well ...

Edited December 24, 2021 by Coffee Pancake

[Lucia Nightfire]

19 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Avatar “expressiveness” that brings camera-based gestures and movement to your avatar for a whole new level of interaction and connectedness

This putting the cart before the horse like when they implemented pathfinding years before implementing animesh.

It is also niche like 360 snapshot.

We desperately need animation reform before we even begin messing with facial expressions.

19 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Improved group chat reliability

We need something like discord, not just for group, but user2user, channels, transcripts maintained server-side, etc.

19 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Improved materials and terrain

IMO, there are far more important things that need improvement than terrain, such as sound and scripted camera control.

Edited December 25, 2021 by Lucia Nightfire

[Sammy Huntsman]

Can we have subparcels, so we can have parcels within parcels. So we can have apartments in SL.

[Coffee Pancake]

3 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

This putting the cart before the horse like when they implemented pathfinding years before implementing animesh.

I got so infuriated with pathfinding when it was released, it was a great feature .. that just didn't work right. What we have is a proof of concept.

3 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

It is also niche like 360 snapshot.

Yeah. I can see why it's important to LL to get this one out .. helps people see SL without coming to SL and all that .. but lets be real, it's not a feature for the majority of people who are in SL.

3 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

We desperately need animation reform before we even begin messing with facial expressions.

We need something like discord, not just for group, but user2user, channels, transcripts maintained server-side, etc.

Tron bit : yes yes yes yes yes yes

3 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

IMO, there are far more important things that need improvement than terrain, such as sound and scripted camera control.

Everything should be on the list for getting an overhaul and some love. Terrain being one of the very oldest would be quite high on such a list .. but please let it be more than "materials for the ground" .. We need significantly more more than shiny bump mapped dirt and perhaps a slightly higher resolution terrain heightmap.

Something like blenders geometry nodes. Give us a dozen per parcel slots we can put objects in (grass, rocks, trees, whatever we like), a few sliders or a heat map to replicate that object around and then render it all as an instance so it's basically free and we only spend the Li for one item.

Let us designate "feature" textures and then paint paths or whatever directly onto the ground.

Give us a way to cut holes in water so our boats and basements aren't flooded.

Let us cut holes in the terrain itself and call us idiots if we end up falling into the void and end up standing on the bottom of the world with our thumbs up our .. 

Go all in and let us opt out of terrain entirely, let us specify the strength of gravity so we can have moon bases and space ships .. let us figure out how the hell people will move about.

Let us put a water eep on the face of a prim, so we can have water in things and don't have to mess about with layered alpha BS. Oh no.. some idiot made a hall of mirrors and it's really bad for performance .. laugh at them.

In short, give us the kind of power tools we could expect to find in a game engine editor. Stupid is going to happen, and if we're paying LL a small fortune to host stupid, well .. that's on us. Roll your eyes and give us more power tools.

[Anna Nova]

Soon(tm).  Heard it all before...

Fix lag first please.

[Maryanne Solo]

13 hours ago, Echelon Alcott said:

Younger people these days heavily use mobile channels. 

Ha! I've just come from our early evening Xmas feast where everyone 'cept my dear mum ❤️ was on their stoopid phones.
(none of the far northern clans are here so there's some hope). I can't believe these peeps are my kin lol. 🙄
But then again, I've always been the most creative I suppose 😔
Which kind of makes me feel a little bit sick that others are so blinded by UTTER C R A P. (utter not otter).
I quizzed one of the youngsters about ludicrous phone addictions and oooh aahh 👉 big bad nasty me.
(guess who pays for the fibre connection lol). 
I'll just go and polish some more precious metal creations then. *shrugs 

[Maitimo]

4 hours ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

Can we have subparcels, so we can have parcels within parcels. So we can have apartments in SL.

Vertical parcels would be awesome. I'd love to have land settings on a skybox (such as audio stream) that are different from the settings at ground level. It can already be done with Environments, suggesting that it can also be possible with other settings too.

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

5 hours ago, Maryanne Solo said:

Ha! I've just come from our early evening Xmas feast where everyone 'cept my dear mum ❤️ was on their stoopid phones.
(none of the far northern clans are here so there's some hope). I can't believe these peeps are my kin lol. 🙄
But then again, I've always been the most creative I suppose 😔
Which kind of makes me feel a little bit sick that others are so blinded by UTTER C R A P. (utter not otter).
I quizzed one of the youngsters about ludicrous phone addictions and oooh aahh 👉 big bad nasty me.
(guess who pays for the fibre connection lol). 
I'll just go and polish some more precious metal creations then. *shrugs 

That's my peeve --- the stupid phone (I know, wrong thread for peeves).  In our house when we do dinners or such we ask for those to leave phones in the other room. Funny watching someone having withdrawals.

I do picture PP (PremiePlus) to maybe have something like the following....

• $139 year.
• More land (maybe like 2048 0r 4096 sqm.
• Bigger Stipend.
• More group space.
• Ultra Premium Help Desk. Now you can talk to a staff person to assist you with your issues while he/she is sitting on the can.  "Excuse the noise, that's the server letting off exhaust."
• Free Name Change Certificate (Transferable).
• Exemption from getting "Sooned!"

Call now, operators are standing by.  Order now, get the 2nd item free, only pay for downloading!

[animats]

I noticed that LL is finally acknowledging that there's a lot of "metaverse" stuff going on, and others are headed for their niche.

Wall Street Journal comment this week in "The Metaverse is already here". "This has been tried before. A virtual space called “Second Life” launched in 2003. You could buy digital property and clothes with real money and hang out with other blocky avatars. It was early days. Naysayers in Silicon Valley liked to say that “Second Life” was for those who didn’t have a first one."

Second Life still has a serious PR problem.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

9 minutes ago, animats said:

"You could buy digital property and clothes with real money and hang out with other blocky avatars."

Putting aside the obligatory past tense which the majority of articles seem to mistakenly use, one has to wonder if the author of this one is confusing Second Life with Minecraft,  because I really don't remember SL avatars ever being "blocky". 🙄

[Coffee Pancake]

2 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

Putting aside the obligatory past tense which the majority of articles seem to mistakenly use, one has to wonder if the author of this one is confusing Second Life with Minecraft,  because I really don't remember SL avatars ever being "blocky". 🙄

Don't discount Minecraft or anything else with blocky avatars though, the social interactions are what make it or break it.

I've spent countless hours in MC with friends and family and had a tremendous amount of fun. It's more than capable of delivering some experiences that SL could only dream of doing, and the chunky creative palette is far more flexible than first impressions might suggest.

Edited December 27, 2021 by Coffee Pancake

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

2 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Don't discount Minecraft or anything else with blocky avatars though, the social interactions are what make it or break it.

I've spent countless hours in MC with friends and family and had a tremendous amount of fun. It's more than capable of delivering some experiences that SL could only dream of doing, and the chunky creative palette is far more flexible than first impressions might suggest.

Oh that certainly wasn't a dig at Minecraft.  I haven't spent a lot of time playing it, but only because after a couple of days messing with it I quickly recognized that it was a rabbit hole that I could happily dive into and not emerge from for months, and I already have more than enough of those to keep me busy.  I was just pointing out how odd I found the authors comment about "blocky avatars" to be, and of course my mind immediately jumped to Minecraft for a comparison because the Minecraft player models are instantly recognisable by their almost iconic blockiness.