Ebbe Altberg sure doesn’t shy away from the Second Life forums and I thought it might be interesting for you to read his comments without having to read the entire discussion.
Thank you Carl Metropolitan for telling me about these posts and lining them up in your blog.
In this thread Ebbe said the following things;
I pretty much only said these things:
We are embarking on a huge project to build a better virtual world from the ground up.
We are not going to constrain how good it can be by forcing some levels of backwards compatability (Sine then I’ve added some detail that identity and social connections and Lindens$ will come across and quite a bit of content as well, but with content we need more time to figure out exactly what will be backwards compatible, people will have plenty of time to see how this plays out and get a chance to try the new while still also hanging out in SL)
We will continue to invest in SL and keep improving and have no plans for any shutdown.
The rest is all speculation that has since then popped up.
You asked:
1 – What type of assets are more likelly to be transferable to SL2 and what probably not? (meshes, animations, sculpts, scripts, textures, builds made of normal prims, system clothing ?)
We don’t have all the answers to this one yet, but several areas will have radical improvements and thus not possible to be fully backwards compatible.
Mesh is ok (but with better lighting and other tech you may want to make tweaks)
Animations will change (major mprovements as we don’t currently do it the way it should be done)
Sculpts (TBD, but not as is, but maybe converted to Mesh?)
Scripts (major improvement, so will change)
Textures ok
Prims (TBD, but probably not as is)
Avatars will be radically improved as well so a lot TBD
Again, we will have years to sort this all out together…
2 – Is SL2 to be considerd “another grid” in which case the TOS of most full permission creators would prohibit the transfer to that grid? If that is the case, could LL speak a word of power and decide that for full permission items that CAN be transfered, the new SL should be considered as the “same grid” ?
ToS will not be an issue.
3 – Will at least the L$ currency remain the same and will available balances be usable in both worlds?
Yes
4 – Will the 2 worlds be connected in any way and will an avatar be able to move from one to another with the same name and profile and groups and friends? And .. some of its inventory..
Identity and friends will be preserved. Inventory depends on above decisions under #1 but we clearly want as much of existing work to be possible to leverage as long as it will not impact how good the new platform can be.
There is so much wrong here, speculation, suggesting things I said that I never said, or somehow suggesting that I, or the great people here are responsible for what happened five or ten years ago….but here we go, I’ll respond to some of this stuff, but I’ll skip all the stuff about problems in the past…that was the past…and by the way, all that “crazy” stuff has given us the best virtual world there has even been and still is. So somehow people here managed to do something right over the years…
Then you say:
Now, How could SL 1.0 be future-proofed?
Get the Lindens back inworld – I remember the Linden Village area, inworld meetings, Lindens just hanging around just talking to passers by. I haven’t seen a Linden since M was CEO and their inworld presence got cut back. It was reassuring to have staff inworld…proof they used the product they created.
Ebbe says: I removed the restriction that was in place for Lindens to be inworld. I’m not going to force people in there, but nothing is stopping them now. I go in as much as I can to hang out and chat with people.
Ditch the TPV’s – Figure out the best features of the various TPV’s and implement them in YOUR client and OPTIMIZE, OPTIMIZE, OPTIMIZE. There is no reason residents shound need a TPV to get MORE features, higher FPS AND less crashes than the official client. Third party software should not hold back releases so they can implement features. If you really feel you need TPV’s, release new code even if it breaks their browsers and let them catch up. I use firestorm, but losing it would be a small price to pay for faster releases (not that we have to worry about that, SL1.0 being in maintenance mode and all).
Ebbe says: I don’t think doing that would be a meaningful difference in the success of SL.
Incremental Graphics and Infrastructure Upgrades – To use MMO’s for an example as they are the closest thing to SL, you could redo the graphics and optimize to fix the dated looks.. You could optimize the back end for current standards on a regular basis. Instead you decided to build a product to compete with your flagship product. This did NOT fill me with any degree of confidence or any great desire to remain a premium or use the Lindex.
Ebbe says: We have. SL is a lot better today than it was a couple of years ago. But there is a limit to how much better we can make it…and how much effort it takes to move forward incrementally.
If you did all the above, ESPECIALLY the Incremental upgrade of graphics and infrastructure, with gradual depreciation of things that just cannot be carried forward, I see no need for a 2.0 SL. We could get there by evolution rather than revolution.
Ebbe says: That is your opinion. But I know that the more distant future will have to go way beyond what incrementally can be done to SL. And it’s either us or someone else…
> We are going to do our best to make it smooth, but if we have to make a crappy product with crazy complexity and poor user experience to preserve some very specific content compatability we don’t want to cause those problems.
Make it smooth, I really doubt you can, based on past rollouts of new features. If you need to depreciate various pieces of older content, do it and explain why. Don’t depreciate the entire world, which is what you are doing. Rewrite what you have to current standards. I’d rather lose a fraction of my inventory rather than 9+ years of collecting, outfits, and memories…and possibly my AV name.
Ebbe says: Again, your speculating a lot. You won’t lose your name. A lot of content will work fine. Some won’t. And that would be true regardless if we improved SL incrementally or started from scratch to get modern tech and capabiliteis done right.
> A lot of what you have will be possible to move across and more specifics will come through over time.
You should not have announced this until you have specifics. First it was no compatibility, maybe, now its a lot of compatibility. Make up your minds. It appears you announced early, shooting for some kind of PR boost, but all the vagueness and ‘we can’t answer that now’ has just destabilized things for many.
Ebbe says: I never said “no compatability”. Where did you get that from? I said that we will not sacrifice how good a next generation virtual world can be due to backwards compatability (something you say is ok to do).
Quite frankly, and this is strictly me speaking for me, I will be staying with SL 1.0 until you pull the plug, then I will find another home that does not involve giving money to LL. I have NO desire to have to rebuild my VR life and possessions in a ‘like SL, only better’ SL 2.0, not with LL’s track record.”
Ebbe says: Let’s see what you think when you see it. And sticking
with SL is fine, it will be around for a very long time ;P
You will be able to use your L$ in both SL and the next platform as you wish.
And SL will be around for a very long time.
You will certainly be able keep your identity, social network and L$ and you can hop back and forth and decide for yourself where it makes sense to spend your time and energy.
Again, I have not said there’s any end coming. We have made no plans for any SL shutdown. None.
We are simply working to make an even better product from the ground up. You will have plenty of time to evaluate it and decide.
Your identity and L$ will be the same for both so it will be easy to hop back and forth.
We have no plans to disallow anything that’s going on in SL and is legal. We’re proud of the freedom we offer.
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Jo Yardley's Second Life 
Thank you Jo for maintaining this ongoing “keep the record straight” series of posts.
re. Transferring stuff from SL to SL2, my biggest concern is getting into the trap of being dependent on the content creator as opposed to the resident owner to make the transfer. Experience with other grids shows that many creators will be slow to make the jump, waiting for there to be an economically viable customer base. Residents will wait for their favorite content to be available in SL2 — a doomed spiral.
I am especially concerned about landscaping and decorating items. A great many of them are scripted in some way, a nice mesh house has scripted doors, virtually all furniture has scripted pose managers, texture change is everywhere. It does little good to be able to transfer these things only to find the scripts don’t work.
(Hoping Ebbe sees this comment and provides some enlightenment)
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my main concern about Sl2 as a part owner in a region is will there be a mechanism to transfer a region to sl2 without incurring a massive cost
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The problem I see is not so much the built objects as it is with identity. Identity is not just a name and bank balance, it is much more about look and style. And that cannot be maintained properly if skins and shapes cannot be translated into the new version of the grid.
In my case, the skins I use are no longer sold or maintained and are extremely uncommon and not at all likely to remade for SL2. I have exported the shapes that I made myself and already use them in various OpenSim grids so I know for a fact that skins make a tremendous difference.
It is always good to return “home” to sl where my avatars look the way they should and if SL2 does not do that there is a lot less incentive to put up with the high expense of SL.
If on the other hand the SL2 avatars can be made to look at least as good as the current SL just by using the built in avatar appearance controls and built in skin tones and stuff and not look “noobish” (perhaps with something like an improved Makehuman system with the surface set to modify the skin tones properly instead of being flat) and decent clothing making tools that do not require expensive and difficult to learn and use third party software then I would not mind loosing even a majority of my inventory when on the “new” side of the grid.
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