Linden Lab plans sweeping improvements to the Second Life platform this quarter, designed to improve stability and usability, and to make it easier to connect Second Life with the rest of the Internet.

Linden Lab is upgrading the Havok "physics engine," software that is a fundamental part of the foundation of Second Life. The physics engine controls the way Second Life objects interact with each other and react to gravity.

The company also is deploying Mono, an open source implementation of the Microsoft .Net Framework, to improve performance of scripts. And it's continuing ongoing development of a Web browser that will function inside Second Life, and a lightweight Second Life client that will support text chat and voice.

The bulk of these changes are planned for this quarter, although some of them will stretch out for the full year, said Joe Miller, VP of platform and technology development at Linden Lab. We met with Miller (whose Second Life name is Joe Linden) at Linden Lab's San Francisco offices recently.

Most of the changes are directed at making Second Life more stable, Miller said. "You shouldn't notice any difference except the service will be more stable and the performance will be more constant," he said.

Linden Lab is upgrading the Second Life service to Havok version 4.6, the latest version of the Havok physics engine. Havok is fundamental to the software foundation of Second Life, which now runs the 8-year-old Havok 1 engine.

The upgrade will be extremely significant in two areas, said Miller. Second Life will be more stable -- Second Life servers, known in the Second Life community as "sims," will crash accidentally much less frequently, and will be much more resistant to griefers' attempts to intentionally bring down the servers. Linden Lab is confident that it will be able to close every known means of crashing a server by the time the Havok 4.6 deployment is complete.

The software is being deployed on production Second Life servers -- known in the Second Life community as the "main grid" -- with the permission of server owners, Miller said.

The other visible effect of going to Havok 4.6 is that the performance of Second Life servers will be more predictable, Miller said. Servers become slower and less responsive -- a condition known in the Second Life community as "lagginess" -- when they fill up. And they fill up quickly -- most servers have a capacity of 40 avatars, although that can be customized by owners of some servers, which can support more than 100 users in rare cases. With the Havok 4 deployment, Linden Lab hopes that server responsiveness and performance won't slow down as the occupancy nears capacity.

In another architecture change, Linden Lab is deploying Mono as a foundation for running the Linden Scripting Language. LSL is the language used to control behavior of objects in-world. Mono is being deployed this quarter, starting on the beta grid. Mono will allow scripts to run up to 700 times faster than they now do, theoretically, although in practice performance has been 100 to 200 times faster than current rates, Miller said. The goal of the Mono deployment, as with the Havok 4.6 rollout, is to make Second Life more predictable and stable.