Second Life User Groups

Nyx Linden is going to fold his UG meeting into the Server/Scripting UG. So, the Content & Mesh UG closes with today being its last meeting.

Nyx Linden told us today, “This will be the last regular meeting for this user group. I’m moving on to other projects and haven’t been able to keep up with the details of content creation tasks as well as I used to be able to.”

World of Particles - 2014

World of Particles – 2014

Whirly Fizzle and others asked the obvious question, “Are you being reassigned to the new world stuff Nyx?” I found the answer a bit ambiguous when Nyx answered, “I’ll still be in world from time to time, and will be helping Oz whenever any avatar issues come up or with any other pieces where I can assist of course.” So, I find that a bit fuzzy. But, I’ll take that as a yes.

Oz Linden told us, “Topics that otherwise would have come here can be brought to either the simulator UG or one of my open development meetings.” And continued by saying, “I don’t know what the new platform team will be doing to engage with users, or when.” I take this to mean no one knows for sure what they will be doing or when they will be doing it. Things are changing for the Lindens and while Ebbe can make off-hand comments I suspect the Lindens (staff) are still limited in what they can talk about. 

Unfounded Speculation

I am seeing lots of uninformed speculation and numerous people jumping to conclusions without any basis for what they are saying. An example of that came up in the UG meeting today when someone said, “Now that the cat is out of the bag, no need for the charade of user groups, really. Nobody cares. maintenance mode…”

Oz responded, “No, it’s certainly not maintenance mode, actually.”

The come back, “… Out of the mouth of Ebbe, it’s just Oz and the rest of us left, the others are re-assigned to the New Linden Shiny.”

Oz said, “Actually, he said nothing of the kind.”

Coming back again, “Ok then, not just Oz… but a skeleton crew.”

If you have not listened to Ebbe talking at the TPV Dev Meeting, you have missed hearing the full paragraph of what he said. The key words used are ‘fairly small compared to the past couple of years’. See my Second Life 2.0 Coming article for a link to the full video/audio where Ebbe is talking to the TPV Dev’s. The pertinent part for team size is here: Fairly Small. See: Not Backing Away.

At about 1:09:30 in the recording Ebbe is talking about heavily investing in a new virtual world and that they will hire a large number of people. So, while the new team will be larger than the SL team. But the use of the word ‘fairly’ suggests the team is still of a significant size.

Another speculated, “So, I guess this means that SL’s build tools have reached their final form….”

Oz answered, “I don’t think that you should assume that they will not evolve.”

There is a trend in the answers. I think we can assume the Lindens are not going to tell us how they have reallocated personnel in any detailed way. Nor are they going to tell us what their plans are before they become pretty well set. But, that has been true of Oz for some time. Since he has pretty much become the deputy commander in charge of SL (Technical Director of Second Life – 1:44:20), I expect we can expect communication and development within SL to take on Oz’s styles with a strong Ebbe influence.

But, Oz seems to be giving all the signals that he has plans for developing Second Life. He has said a couple of times they are currently in the midst of deciding which items from the ‘feature requests’ they will be targeting for implementation. I also suspect they are considering what they can come up with to improve Second Life.

Monty’s work on the communication protocol and updating of libraries is continuing. I expect that work is going to be important for SL 2.0 also. I think the Lab will experiment with improvements in SL and use the knowledge gained to improve SL2.0.

So, I do not see them looting too many people from the SL1.0 team. They need SL1.0 to be attracting and holding people that will be interested in SL2.0 while 2.0 is being built.

I think the closing of the Content & Mesh UG as more a matter of how we users have been using it than the coming SL2.0. Oz pointed out, “Most of the current meetings have more time than topics lately,…” I agree that is true. We have all the features figured out, to some degree, and we are not asking questions at the rate we previously did. The result is there are fewer questions being asked in the groups.

Also, the number of problems people have has been going down, which speaks well of what the Lindens have been doing. People do have problems. But, for the most part I haven’t had an annoying problem in some time. I know Mac users may disagree. But, their problems  are unique in SL.

When I asked, “Any chance we will get to hear about which items from your list of feature [request]s gets selected for implementation?”

Oz Linden, “Right now, we’re deep in the process of deciding what to do for the next several months. I’d say there’s a very good chance, yes Nal.”

So, soon we hopefully will have some idea of what they are planning for the next year or so.

Groups

The Groups we have now are:

Open Development – Oz Linden’s UG meeting on Mondays at 7AM PDT in Hippotropolis.

Server/Sim/Scripting – Simon Linden’s UG meeting on Tuesdays at 12 noon PDT in Denby.

Server Beta – Maestro Linden’s UG meeting on Thursdays in Morris, ADITI. (You need to log into ADITI then paste the SLURL into the address bar.)

Third Party Developers Meetings – Oz Linden’s semi weekly meetings with developers. This is not a well publicized meeting. The knowledgeable people will know how to find the meeting. If you can’t find it, you probably should not be participating in the meeting.

You can however follow me for a summary of the TP Dev Meetings, Inara Pey for transcripts and summaries, and Chakat Northspring on YouTube for videos of the meetings.

Future

There will likely be a UG for the Closed NDA Beta for the new SL2.0 (that’s my name for it, as an official name has not been announced). Then as 2.0 winds up more user groups will form there.

I doubt there will be new Linden UG’s in SL1.0 this or next year. Unless we see more people at the UG meetings and more topics of discussion, the groups we have now will likely continue to consolidate. That is not an indication SL1.0 is closing. That is the Lab conserving resources the users are not using.

If the attendance steps up or there are more things they Lindens can help with then we may see the UG’s expand. But, I just don’t see there being a demand from users in general for more Linden UG’s.

For now most of the UG’s are user owned and run. Most of the things we have questions about now are things which users know more about than the Lindens do. So, while I find it a bit sad that Nyx is closing the group, there has been little new news coming from those meetings. I was considering whether to continue covering them. That decision has been made for me.

Now I have another hour for play.

4 thoughts on “Second Life User Groups

  1. One thing I have not seen considered is that in all likelihood there will be features ported from the SL2 development team to SL1. There is every reason to believe that mesh avatars are an example.

    • I agree with Shug. I am hoping that whatever scripting language they are considering for SL 2.0 can be brought into SL 1.0, existing alongside LSL, (but not replacing it, so old content is not broken). I am hoping it will be C# or Javascript. If that is brought into SL 1.0, then scripters can begin to learn to use it and develop scripts that could migrate over to the new SL 2.0 with few to no changes. This could help us prepare to hit the ground running in the new world, and have good content ready to import into it, which will help to attract more users to it and retain them.

      • Unfortunately a couple of Lindens have said that is not in the cards for SL 1.0, with one of them being Oz. However, they do plan to have a better scripting language for SL 2.0.

  2. \Third Party Developers Meetings – Oz Linden’s semi weekly meetings with developers. This is not a well publicized meeting. The knowledgeable people will know how to find the meeting. If you can’t find it, you probably should not be participating in the meeting.\

    Or if you don’t speak English in a way that others can understand, or if you are not able to understand what an American English speaker is saying in real time (I defy an American having learnt French at school to understand French as spoken by a southern French native), then forget altogether about coming at Oz’ meetings…
    Nyx, Monty & Co, at least, did use the text chat and not voice for their meetings, which made it possible for non-English *speakers* (speaking/understanding spoken English is *very* different from writing/reading it) to participate actively and understand perfectly.

    I’d love to see some more effort from the part of Oz to communicate with *everyone* and not just a little clique of fan boys and girls… But I’m day-dreaming, here !

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