We imagine a future where Second Life is able grow beyond the borders of Linden Lab. We see regions running on open source, alternative simulators. We see web services that allow people to build mash-ups of Second Life and the Web. We see organizations being able to integrate their members and their members’ avatars. This is the vision of future Second Life Grid that we want to develop.

Last week we hosted the first Architecture Working Group meeting. Our aim is to build the technology and standards for such a vision by developing them through the direct involvement of Linden Lab, external developers, and the community. The initial group included Residents and organizations active in the technical development of Second Life, as well as virtual worlds in general. We hope it will be the first of an ever expanding process.

What’s this mean for most Residents now? You should know that while Linden Lab is focusing most of its development energy on stability and performance, we are also taking the time lay the foundation for what is to come. And we are doing so in the open, with community participation.

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The day of liberation is almost upon us. In the next release, 1.18, we’ll be shipping a project called “Message Liberation”. This project lets us make almost all viewer updates be optional, so you can download them if and when you want.
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Just a short post to announce my office hours:

• Grasmere 165,109
• Tuesdays, 1pm
• Thursdays, 7:30am

Come talk about the technology that runs Second Life.

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Transcripts of office hours can be found from my home page.

The next release will contain a major piece of new functionality that, if we’ve done it right, you won’t even notice. I can hear you all exclaiming “What?!?!”, and warming up those comment forms… But hear me out.

We’ve just completed and passed the first phase of the “sim-caps” project. As Cory alluded to in his Town Hall, this project enables the simulator and viewer to communicate using a collection of standard technologies: TCP, HTTP, SSL/TLS and XML. These offer a better match of performance characteristics for much of the viewer communications, and benefit from the many years of development these technologies have had.

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We’ll be doing a tiny presence update that cleanly clears up the issues with group IM that we had after Wednesday’s agent presence update. Today’s update will require about 2 min. max of the grid going gods only. I expect to do this within the hour. I’ll announce in world just before I do it. This whole update will not require anyone to log out of SL during the update, or re-login afterward.

Sorry about the Friday afternoon update here, but we wanted this in before the weekend.

We’ll be trying to update the presence server again today. We figured out what went wrong with yesterday’s attempt, and are ready to try again.

[12:15] Well, that was a bit longer than 10 minutes. But, it worked! WOOT! This has reduced load on the database by a significant margin and will give us more head-room as we grow. Now go sign-up your friends…

[11:44] About to do this now - turning off log-in for 5 to 10 minutes.

We expect to attempt this between 9am and 10am this morning (SLT). Of course, we’ll shout in-world before and after we do.
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I want to give you an update about “presence issues”. Talking about “presence” a lot like talking about “lag”: it means many different things, all bad, but hard to pin down.
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We’ve just pushed out a fix to land purchasing that allows residents with basic accounts to purchase land on estates. Buying land on estates doesn’t incur land tier fees with Linden Lab, and so there is no reason that residents with basic accounts shouldn’t be allowed to buy such land.

The really good news is that this change didn’t require changes to viewer, or any simulator down time. It is up and running now!

- Zero