News and Commentary: Linden Lab Changing From Open Beta to Open Alpha Release

When Linden Labs first gave an estimate in September 2016 of when their next-generation virtual world Sansar would be in open beta, the date given was January 2017. In early Janurary, the date was described as "after March." Later in January, the date given was sometime in "the first half of 2017," meaning as late as June 2017. But when the Irish Times wrote about an interview they did of CEO Ebbe Altberg, they reported that Sansar would be in an "open alpha" release sometime this summer 2017. At what point it would go into beta was unexplained.

What this suggests is not only is Sansar currently at "an early stage of development," as Hamlet Au commented, but that they are having more difficulties and delays than anticipated. When Linden Lab placed an ad for Linkedin for a software engineer to help them develop a voxel-based terrain editor, Hamlet was initially quite impressed. But with these delays, he feels they should "have hired someone to build that maybe two years ago." This is on top of existing doubts about Sansar, it beginning to remind him of the old "Blue Mars" virtual world of several years ago, which was fading into obscurity after less than two.

So when will Sansat be complete? Hamlet was thinking that might not be until sometime in 2018. How will users react to an unstable open alpha Sansar that crashes more than Second Life? Probably not very well.

Source: New World Notes , The Irish Times

Bixyl Shuftan

Newser Beach Party This July

About twice a year, sometimes more, the Newser crew holds a beach party, to both have a little fun and get to know our readers. Usually we have one close to our anniversary on June 6. But this time, there have been a lot of things going on. Second Life is a busy time anyway in June with the Second Life Birthday celebrations, of which the Newser has been a participant as well as covering it, and the Relay events, which include our neighbors the Sunweavers / Sunbeamer Team. And lately there's been some other things going on, including in real life for some of the staff. So we will be postponing the party until a weekend between the SLB and the Relay Weekend, which means sometime in July. No one event caused this decision. We've simply had to deal with a lot on top of what we usually do, and something had to give.

Sorry to those whom were looking for a little fun in the sun with us. If anyone wants to invite the team to their own beach party, by all means those of us who can make it will drop by. In the meantime, keep the sunscreen and swimwear handy for next month.

Bixyl Shuftan