On March 18, Ebbe Altberg, the CEO of Linden Lab, gave the keynote address at the VWBPE 2015 Conference.
This is
Ebbe's Keynote address. It's about one hour on youtube.
This is a summary on
Daniel Voyager's blog.
I'm sure there will be more summaries and analysis coming out in the days to come.
There is a current discussion thread on
the SLU forum.
He talks a lot about Second Life now and in the future.
Thanks. My girl mentioned this, but I hadn't seem it yet. Going to listen to the Youtube now.
The first outside creators are being invited. Some third-party programmers who are very familiar with the viewer code have been inside for some months, but this seems like a more public invite.
Linden Lab: Build Worlds with Us
Kitties Ho? Kitties Ho!
Surely yes?
I'm not going if I can't take my kitties with me... double for the permas!
(08-19-2015 10:18 AM)MsMagick Resident Wrote: [ -> ]I'm not going if I can't take my kitties with me... double for the permas!
Same with me, MsMagick. I could never give up my kitties and permas. They are too important to me.
keep your hopes up, LL has spent some time developing a way for avatars and their inventory to jump between worlds.
If you check some of the links above you will find more information specific information.
To summarize a few bits though:
1) Absolutely avatar names (and almost certainly Linden balances) will transfer. The Lindens want people to be able to find their friends in the new world and we do that via our avatar names. I have heard it suggested that people will have a master account to which alts can also be tied.
2) Sculpties were a sort of an SL hack to get a form of meshes to work something like prims within SL. Once meshes were introduced, the sculptie coding - a kind of an odd SL-specific thing - becomes a whole mess of code that they do not want to have to deal with going forward. Sculpted content (including Kittycats) will NOT be supported in Project Sansar (which is what they seem to be calling the new world). It falls to content creators to re-make their content in mesh via maya or blender in a manner which is compatible with the new world. The details of the hows and the whys and the compatible is being worked out now. LL have been very clear that they are working to make a clean start and they are not promising any kind of backwards compatibility.
3) The permissions system (copy, mod, trans) is being completely reworked. To what I have no idea. People keep talking about "experiences". Perhaps somebody who knows something about that can post here. My own poor uninformed guess is that it means that KittyCats would own the Experience of the cats, kind of like "no mod".
Regarding KittyCats, specifically, HQ has all our database records of our cats through Cattery. I am hoping that they will be able to create new mesh versions of our cats that will work in the new world via new docks there and that we will be able to port our cats in that way. (Not through our inventories.)
Breedables, which depend upon scupties, will need to see what the pemission changes bring before they can consider moving over.
At present, Mesh is a non-starter for breedables since the permissions won't allow changing mesh on-the-fly under program control.
Consider: to use mesh, every kittycat would need to have every tail, since the tail trait is a sculpt map and changes under program control.
In addition, each cat would need to have each leg position as a separate prim.
And, to make it work, every owner would need to grant every cat permission to modify the linkset, so the legs, tails, bodies, etc, can be switched. And that permission would need to be re-granted after changing prim mode; after pulling in-world from the Cattery, etc. And permission would need to be granted to allow the correct tail to appear on each cat.
Could LL design the permissions system to allow a true mesh breedable? Sure. The question is not can they, but are they willing to discuss the requirements and implement the more-complex design which would support them.
Lets be honest though.
Kittycats WILL find a way to make the kittycats breedable work in whatever LL's next project is, because... lets face it, Kittycats is a BUSINESS.
And if too many of Kittycats customers migrate to the new system, they lose money. They MUST adjust the kittycats breedables system, or come up with an alternative, for implimenting in LL's new platform, or the BUSINESS of kittycats will start to lose profit.
What this means for our current cats, i cant say.
I suspect they'll do something like Imaginmals did, allowing users of the old versions of their pets, to bring over/upgrade a small number of their old cats to the new version/database.
Again, what this would mean for current users, i dont know.
But if Kittycats wants to succeed as a company, they'll come up with something.
As I said, I really don't understand the whole "Experience" thing, but my understanding is that one of the benefits of using Experience is that permissions only need to be requested of the owner once when they join the experience. I can understand that there would need to be a large reworking of the system. I'm not minimizing the work involved. But for an animated cat, what we need is animated mesh, yes? Maybe with bones for the legs, yes? The legs move, but the legs are the same from cat to cat. Of course the tails move too...
I know that there are specific problems that have to do with the kitties having the potential for so many different parts as breedables.
Pulling the cat in and out of different prim modes seems like a lesser priority.