The Call…to Mobile and a note on Unity

On Friday night I was in a Zoom conference call between a collection of bloggers and Linden Lab Executives.

If you’d told me that 5 years ago when I started my little blog, I wouldn’t have believed you. So thank you Linden Lab for the opportunity. Brad Oberwager (CEO of Linden Lab) did say that they wanted our honest opinions, so here it is.

The focus was on the Second Life Mobile App and what’s on the horizon. There’s a lot to go through, so please bear with me.

I’ve addressed these not in the chronological order that they’re going to arrive, but roughly the order I think they should have, with their ETAs.

  • Address Bar – Q1 2025
  • Notecards – Not on the slides but Grumpity Linden said “Three Months Plus”
  • New account creation – December 2024
  • Persistent chat logs & Group Notice Push notifications – December 2024
  • Item level avatar editing – Early Q2 2025
  • Lobby – Q1 2025

Franky I think the app shouldn’t have gone to Public Beta until the first three were added, but they’re finally coming. Simply because if you told someone about the App, they’d go try it and find they couldn’t do much and delete it. Maybe a New Year big splash release with these features might have been better.

Address Bar: One of the major missing features in the mobile app is getting around. Currently in both the Alpha & Beta versions, you can only go to the Mobile Showcase locations and your Favourites (the ones stuck at the top of your desktop viewer). Fortunately this feature coming soon that will allow you to enter SLURL location addresses and also Share them using your device’s native Sharing system.

Notecards: One of the bloggers raised a question about notecards, particularly for CSRs (Customer Support Representatives) for creators. If a customer has a problem, they may send a notecard detailing the issue.

However on the mobile app there’s currently no way to open them,so the CSRs are tied to a PC in order to read the notes and respond. Grumpity Linden revealed that they are working on a way to read them. However it’s likely to be in a different way. Since there’s no access to avatars Inventory on mobile, the in-progress solution is to have the notecards read out in a chat dialog. This will be a great step forward for this group of Residents, but sadly they’ll have to wait a little longer. The timescale for this ability is estimated at three months or more.

Note: this was right at the end of the call, past the official end time, so several attendees had left and not many people will have heard the above.

New Accounts: Pretty self explanatory, despite the app not being targeted at new signups, this needed to be here at Beta Release. If people see screenshots or hear about there being this cool new app and they weren’t an existing Resident, they’d have been stuck.

Persistent chat logs: Peviously on the mobile app, if you log out and back in your conversation history will be lost. In an update this month, the chat history will be stored locally on your device.

Item level  avatar editing: Something that wasn’t mentioned much, but is featured on the presentation slides is individually worn items adjustment.

Lobby: Basically a holding screen showing you stuff while the world loads. They probably spent ages on it (speculation) but I don’t see it as a big deal. The only tempting point on the slide image is “Reach mid-tier and lower end devices”, perhaps this needs a little more emphasis, if the intention is to attract users with older tech.

Comment on Unity

A last point made by Philip Linden regarding a pre-submitted question. Paraphrased: “Now that Linden Lab have a working visual rendering engine on the Unity platform, will the desktop client move to Unity?” In short, no.

The reason for this is fairly simple, according to Philip: “The Unity engine can’t render as many avatars in close proximity.”

I know for a long time people have been harping on about this at Meet the Lindens events, now they have an answer and a reason.

Summary:

Well done Linden Lab, your mobile feature set is nearly level with the Lumiya Viewer (2012-2017 RIP), except with additions of Mesh & BoM but minus Inventory. I’m sure they’re sick of that comparison, but it was ahead of its time and is an unavoidable benchmark.

The Zoom call on Friday is likely to be the first of several to come. Perhaps this process of reaching out and connecting with Bloggers & Vloggers, allowing early previews, should have started before the Beta public release. That way the Lab may have been dissuaded from releasing an under-developed product.

So as I said in my previous post on this subject, do give it a go, but don’t expect too much yet. Then come back in a month and try again, it is after all still a Beta version.

Second Life Mobile for All

Last year I signed up for the Alpha Testing programme for a Second Life mobile app, restricted to Premium Plus subscribers. It was pretty flakey back then. But fast forward to Thursday 14th November and it’s now been made available as an open Beta for every Second Life resident and works pretty well.

So should you download it? I’d say Yes, but limit your expectations. This is not a desktop equivalent or replacement, more a companion app. You can walk about, change between saved Outfits and Teleport to your set Favourite locations and a few specific places. Chatting in groups and nearby chat works well enough and you can pay items such as rent boxes or shop vendor boards(making a use-case). Streaming music as you may find playing in a club is a feature too, but I’ve not tried visiting such a location on the app yet.

I have been giving the latest version of the Android app a go and it’s a great improvement on the early Alpha builds. One thing I’d definitely recommend when first trying it out is make sure you have a lot of space! It can take a while to get used to the controls and you don’t want to be stuck in the corner of a sky box while you experiment.

I used my homestead Bloodrose Bay simply because that’s where I happened to have been last. It turned out to be quite a good choice. The buildings I have set out are spacious inside and there are some with and without doors to enter. There’s also what’s often the bane of SL exploring..spiral stairs, indoor and out.

While this all looks pretty good for a mobile viewer, nothing apart from the trees have PBR (Physically Based Rendering) textures. Hopefully Linden Lab will get their shiny new texture system to work in their shiny new app.

The unrezzed white things down there are trees with PBR textures.

Screenshots taken on a Google Pixel 7 using default app settings.

The aim of the app is to try and bring back old residents that have left SL, because “It’s not on mobile” is apparently a reason many no longer log in. I wasn’t amongst the bloggers invited to a Zoom call with Linden Lab executives (Edit: turns out they sent the invite to a different email address, so I’ll be watching out for the next one!) to discuss/announce all this, so I’m going on quotes from a couple of people that were:

I’m impressed with what Linden Lab have created and would have been great all round, if it weren’t lacking PBR support. However the target audience (old users that haven’t logged in for ages) are unlikely to have any PBR clothing in their inventory anyway.

PBR clothing is just blank without any fallback textures. Which is the way many creators are going.

Link: Official App Promotion Page with Downloads

What’s PBR: Second Life Wiki