Looking forward to Second Life 2.0

While it has been called Viewer 2009 once or twice, almost every Linden Lab staffer who mentions it calls it Second Life 2. Once on the drawing-board as a major overhaul of Second Life both at the server and at the viewer (client), the idea of a huge developmental jump was abandoned some years ago, and all of the features slated for Second Life 2 were added to Second Life 1, incrementally.

Well, except for the last item on the list, the user-interface. Essentially Second Life seems to now everything SL2 was originally planned to be, sans the new interface.

We got an early look at that part a few months ago, and what we saw was quite promising in many ways. The perceptive reader will note, though, that 2009 is already moving towards a close, and many observers are anticipating the new viewer anytime from today at the earliest, to the next couple or three weeks at the latest.

It's no secret that visible viewer development has largely dropped into the background. Aside from a quick bug-fix to the 1.23 viewer the other day and background activity on the Snowglobe viewer, not a whole heck of a lot has been heard on the viewer front for nearly five months.

Those same developers though are certainly acting like folks on a tight production deadline, especially in the last two weeks.

Changing the user-interface in the official viewer is no small task. Before the viewer sees official release, pretty much all of the official documentation that refers to any aspect of the user-interface is going to have to be reviewed, and probably rewritten. A release coupled with conflicting or outdated documentation would be something of a poison pill, and could stand to do more harm than good.

That doesn't mean that we can't expect to see a softer launch of the 2.0 viewer, and indeed we're expecting a release candidate to drop... well, pretty much any time now. A First Look is possible, but given the time-frames between First Look viewers and official viewers (6-18 months), that wouldn't see 'Viewer 2009' released until 2010 or 2011.

No, what we're expecting is a first release candidate by the end of the month, then a race down to the wire to get documentation reworked before an official release. It would be foolish to release after the first week of December, and that doesn't leave a lot of time left to bring the new viewer to an official fruition.

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