I spent most of yesterday's Second Life update meeting from Linden Lab preparing to blog about the mobile launch, but I also took some rough notes on current progress/upcoming features announced by the dev team, including Signal Linden (Bennett Goble) a head Software Engineer at the company:
PBR graphics improvements: The Lindens acknowledged user complaints about the launch in recent weeks, and said that bug fixes and optimization work is actively going on: "So we have a lot of concerted effort on PBR now. "
As for upcoming features, they include several that gamers and game developers in particular will dig:
Combat 2.0: Shields, poison damage, and more — "no more one bullet and you're dead… it's going to be much more immersive."
Official gamepad control compatibility: Signal mentioned Xbox in particular, but I imagine other controllers could come soon too. (Wonder if a launch of Second Life right on actual consoles is also in the works, but no word there.)
Native Lua scripting to Second Life using the full LSL library: Will replace Mono scripts. "Content creators will have more memory to play with in their scripts — and just run simply faster." Still very early in the launch process though.
VR in Second Life coming back: Not soon and not all at once: "Maybe the first release will be wearing a VR headset and being able to look around." The Linden team didn't go into details, but seeing how the Meta Quest line is basically a headset strapped to an Android phone, and there's now an SL app for Android… well, you get the idea.
Accessibility features: Text to speech/speech to text translation coming with the WebRTC launch — "we may even use AI for that". Profoundly, it was a vision impaired Second Life user in the audience who posed this question. Until then, Lone Wolf has a solution.
Like I said, these were rough notes; so I'm checking now to see if I missed anything!
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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