Second Life eyeing upload fees, better bandwidth use, Flash/Firefox projects

Linden Lab CTO Chief Technnology Officer Cory Ondrejka says that Second Life is eyeing upload fees for textures.

"I like the idea of differential upload costs for textures, I’m curious what other folks think about that," he said during an SecondLife virtual town hall meeting last night.  The thought is that it would cause people to be more careful about picking appropriate sized textures." Ondrejka said he favors resource quotas based on account type.

Also on the Menu, within the next several months: more efficient bandwidth usage as well as better Firefox integration.

"[W]e’ve been doing a lot of UI testing, security testing, and bandwidth reduction...we’re not going to run on narrow band any time soon, but we do eventually want to send larger chunks of simulator state downstream," Ondrejuka said.

"This would have the advantage of allowing the viewer to be smarter about occlusion and culling, to make fewer state changes, and allow much higher compression on the data," he added. "This isn’t even fully in the design stages, though, so this isn’t going to be worked on until H2 of 2007."

As to Firefox integration, Ondrejuka said Linden is working with an internal contractor working on the issue right now. The hope seems to be that these efforts will go in lockstep with efforts to get Flash working correctly in Firefox-based implementations.