Ebbe Linden has posted in the SL Forum. The post is titled Celebrating 14 Years of SL with Investments in Its Future. In it, he says they have budgeted US$ Millions for the coming year, which is awesome.
He tells us about some of the coming changes to Second Life. Some we know about, others are new news.
One change is moving SL to the cloud. I have heard no details. So, exactly what this means is currently speculation. My speculation is this should significantly drop the cost of running the system. I imagine an empty region could be spun down and then only spun up as needed. Would this reduce land cost? It might.
Premium Members will get something new… It is hard for me to get too excited by this. Much of what Premium Members get has been way lame. However… the recently added extended access feature is great. I love it. This may indicate they will be seriously doing more to get people subscribing.
It is also worth noting, the Linden community manager is meeting daily with Sansar participants (M-F). Many Sansar peeps are SL residents. So, I imagine Jenn is getting a better sense of who the Lab’s customers are and what they want.
Ebbe mentions the coming changes to Windlight. I’ve heard a bit about that. I did not know they code named it EEP!
He also mentions Animesh. He uses the name Animesh, which users pretty much dubbed the new feature. I’ll have to watch the videos of the earlier CC UG meetings to see who came up with that name. Obviously, they should get a virtual cigar.
Ebbe says there are more creator and animator things coming later in the year. He’s teasing it…
A grid wide game is coming. He says it will be announced in the next few days. There are to be new experiences and events. No clues as to what those may be.
Users have been asking for grid wide experiences ever since Experiences came out. So, is this new ‘game’ a test of those features? Are all those server updates for ‘internal changes’ just camouflage? Probably not… but…
And there will be a 2017 Halloween Haunted Tour… Halloween is always fun.
See what others are saying in the SL Forum.
Cloud Party had a setup where they could spin up/down builds (or regions) as needed. I suppose this allowed them to let you subscribe to your own build (or region) sizes without the hefty costs involved.