He’s been one of the longest-serving members of the Lab’s team, and actually out-lasted Philip Rosedale for time put in with the company, but after more than eleven years with Linden Lab, Andrew Linden is saying “farewell”.

He broke the news during his regular appearance at the Tuesday Simulator User Group meeting on December 17th, saying, “This is going to be my last User Group meeting as a Linden: I’ve decided to leave LL and pursue other things. I’ve really enjoyed these User Group meetings, which is why I’ve been showing up all these years.”

He confirmed that he will be joining Rosedale at the latter’s latest venture, High Fidelity, saying, “”I’m going to join Philip and his new project. Not because I don’t love SL or am not excited about what LL is working on, but because I’m ready for a change, and I really like working with Philip.”

Andrew’s final day with the Lab will be on Thursday December 19th, after which he’ll be off to join the High Fidelity team.

As a long-serving member of the Lab’s staff, he will be sorely missed. Over the years he’s been exceptionally popular among residents, and he has worked on many of the Lab’s server-side and other projects. Most recently, he has been instrumental in overhauling the platform’s interest list, massively improving the way in which in-world scenes and managed and loaded between the servers and the viewer, and which has also seen an overhaul of the viewer’s object caching capabilities (which are currently available through a release candidate viewer), all of which has significantly improved scene loading and rendering. This work was recently featured in a video narrated by Torley Linden.

The video demonstrating the interest list work: the last large-scale undertaking Andrew worked on

Also of late, Andrew has worked on a number of anti-griefing measures within the platform, and has currently project has involved LSL updates to enable the uniform scaling of objects and linksets (such as uniformly increasing or decreasing a linksets size by a factor of 2). This work should be appearing in an RC release in the New Year.

In the time I’ve been attending the Simulator User Group meeting (formerly the Server/Sim/Scripting group), Andrew has always been polite, inquisitive and helpful to all, and demonstrated a willingness to readily delve into issues and see what he can find and / or put right. In response to the direct enquiries I’ve put to him in the past, he’s always been more than helpful in his replies, willing to provide concise explanations and offer additional information and guidance.

The news of his departure was met with a mix of sadness and best wishes from those at the meeting. For my part, I’d like to again extend my thanks to Andrew for his input to, and work on Second Life over the years, for his support of the Simulator User Group and to wish him all the best for the future.