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The closing keynote talk at the Second Life Community Convention this past weekend was given more or less in tandem by Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale and Chief Technology Officer Cory Ondrejka. While the pair were their usual charming and amusing selves, their act having been well honed by now, they looked back at the history of Second Life more than they looked forward to its future. More about that past in a post soon to come; for now let’s look ahead with Cory at what the future of the SL codebase may hold.

Cory opened his talk by stressing that the company is still looking to hire developers. The problems they’re trying to address came up recently in a survey taken by James Au of New World Notes: the aspect of Second Life that Au’s readers would most like LL to address is its clunky user interface. Placing second on the list, Au said at the convention, was the amount of downtime SL experiences. “That maps pretty well to what our developers are working on,” Ondrejka said.

Ondrejka said LL now employs 27 developers, 20 of whom are working on improvements to the quality of the product itself, mostly by fixing problems of the UI, some of which have been part of the codebase since 2001. That said, Cory also pointed out that there are fewer employees working at LL than there are at the various virtual-world services companies like Rivers Run Red, the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog), and Millions of Us.

It sounds like LL is now getting around to ironing out kinks that have plagued its product for some time: “The next many releases are going to be very light on new features,” Ondrejka said. Instead, developers will be giving the codebase what sounds like a long-awaited airing out and deep overhaul to take care of vestigial bits of code or features that have been poorly implemented. LL’s open-ended development process seems to have put the burden of quality control on individual programmers, and this is perhaps the result. Hopefully, new code being added to the system in future will go through a more rigorous process.

For all the improvements, there are two new features that will be appearing soon, Ondrejka said. A new group system is almost in place, as well as a nice feature that’s being brought aboard as a result of Linden Lab’s hiring of Jeffrey Ventrella, co-founder of There.com last fall. That feature, known as pupeteering, will give SL users the ability to manipulate their avatars more naturally and create new custom animations for themselves within the world instead of having to use an expensive third-party application like Poser. While Linden Lab apparently showed a demo of the puppeteering functionality at Siggraph recently, that clip was apparently not deemed ready for prime time, as it wasn’t shown at SLCC.

To help deal with downtime, LL plans two changes, one small and one big. Rather than update the SL client every week, as has been the practice, LL will soon move to a biweekly schedule. Residents, many of whom make part or all of their incomes from their activities on the Grid, have been unhappy that LL’s Wednesday updates steal at least a day from their working week.

LL also has a project in the works known as HetGrid, or Heterogeneous Grid, which will move the client to a model that does not force users to download an update each time LL changes or adds a new feature. Instead, users will be able to continue to use an outmoded client without the new features, in a model similar to downloading updates to Firefox or other browsers, if I understand Cory correctly.

All in all, the changes should be welcome ones. LL has a lot of work to do to dig out from under the mess of code that’s built up, perhaps as an inevitable result of building a more or less completely new thing. But the slowdown in new features should be worth the gain in stability and the progress toward more open APIs, which LL also says is coming. How fast these things will happen depends on how much focus LL can bring to the task.