Well, it seems to be traditional for people to make predictions for the coming year, as well as examining their predictions for the last year. I made no forward-looking prognostications for 2006, so I can spuriously claim a 100% success rate for 2006. Yay!Now, for 2007. It's going to be an interesting year. Twelve predictions for 2007...
1. The Second Life client will be open-sourced.
- That will take place later than Linden Lab has forecast.
- It will have a tricky or arcane build environment -- some large quantities of assembly required.
- Will be missing certain art or font assets.
- Will be made available under a license that causes general outcry.
3. Open-sourcing the client will lead to a surge of work, leading to the first rudimentary resident-created offline building tool within 2 months that is capable of creating and importing real prims.
4. Linden Lab will drop Havok physics entirely, and replace it with an alternative, either an open-source physics engine, or an end-of-lifed/discontinued physics engine released to the public domain.
5. By the end of 2007, spurred by the open-source client, the first rudimentary simulator simulators will appear, based on top of flat datafiles, or mysql. They will accept a connection from a local client, operating initially as a simple single-avatar grid. Some clever boots will be able to produce a batch-based tool to transfer assets from the simulator-simulator to the regular grid.
6. We'll get new avatar meshes, and probably new default walk animations as well. The new meshes will probably not be 100% compatible with existing clothing and attachments.
7. Voice integration makes it into the client by the fourth anniversary celebration. This causes a slew of primarily social issues (although also a bunch of technical ones) which are -- by and large -- not solved by the end of Decmber. Integration of the voice takes the primary blame for the delays in open-sourcing the client. Education will gain a significant boost from this.
8. At least two fan-foci (major authors and their publishers, television series and their studios, or sports stars or somesuch) will make an effort to reach and energize their fan-bases through Second Life -- and do so successfully. While initial efforts may be rather halting, and more will fail than succeed, at least two will form functional stable communities of fans, where both fans and focus benefit from the relationship. The combined fans of these two successes will probably number at least 20,000 regular users.
9. At least one fully-branded client will appear, bearing few if any Second Life or Linden Lab names and marks, designed to operate on a set of sims segregated from the rest of the grid.
10. Linden Lab will no longer permanently ban accounts, and only issue bans longer than 14 days in the most extreme cases.
11. Herr Doktor Amy Weebler will be mysteriously revealed to be some well-known Second Life personality in a sinister disguise.
12. Tateru will be shown to get at least three of these predictions so embarrassingly wrong that she will say "Oh, bugger." As a side-effect, this means that she can't be 100% right come next year.
1. 1. Maybe
2. Maybe
3. Maybe sooner(before it goes OS)
4. Physics is handled by simulators anyway. They should take their time to make them physics engine independant.
5. Don't say flat files. Someone might take you up on it. I foresee a lot of experimentation in this area.
6. I dunno...
7. Probably
8. The Browncoats will do their duty.
9. Likely
10. This would be a good thing.
11. I have no doubts.
12. Give yourself more credit!
Posted at 4:43PM on Jan 7th 2007 by Baba