Category Archives: Server

Second Life™ Technology Update Summary: September 2025

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This month’s summary covers “Second Life™ (SL)” technology updates, new features, and releases from September 1, 2025, to September 30, 2025, focusing on official platform changes, viewer updates (official and third-party), and grid/performance improvements. Information is synthesized from official Second Life sources, third-party blogs, and relevant X posts, prioritizing factual details on announcements, rollouts, bug fixes, and integrations.

I am using Grok to collect and organize the information. Then I tweak and add to the text. Hopefully making it a bit more understandable.

Official SL Platform Updates

“September 3, 2025: PBR Materials Enhancements” – Linden Lab rolled out updates to their “Physically Based Rendering (PBR)” system, improving texture rendering for reflective surfaces and dynamic lighting. This update enhances visual fidelity in regions supporting PBR, addressing user feedback on performance lag [web:1](https://community.secondlife.com/news/tools-and-technology/).

There is an SL oddity apparently in all viewers. When capturing images, we residents call it photography, reflections are lost in the captured images unless the image and screen resolution are the same. I have not yet updated my monitor. So, I run at 1920x1080px. If I capture a higher rez image, usually 3000x1576px, the reflections are gone. ☹

Continue reading →

Second Life Update 2020-10

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I am not keeping up with SL tech like I used to. I play more these days. But, today I made it to a Server-Scripting meeting. BIG changes.

UPLIFT

The Lindens tell us the UPLIFT is the biggest change to the service ever made in the history of Second Life™. Expect problems and odd glitches. They even posted a request in the SL Tools & Tech section of the SL Forum, A Light in the Cloud. Patience. As they move to eliminate the one foot in data center and one in the cloud, things are likely to get bumpy. Expect odd problems. Lots of people are working hard to make this change as smooth as possible. The optimistic completion is before the holidays.

Leonorah Beverly @ Flicker

The UPLIFT of region simulators to the cloud is in high gear. You can tell if the region you are in is running in the cloud in Help->About… Look for the “You are at…” part. You have to know how to read server names and URI values to tell. But, simply said cloud addresses are amazon.com and Linden Data Center servers have the address linden.com. This simple distinction will go away as more regions move to the cloud. The Lindens will use what they call a synthetic name, which gives the Lindens more useful information about the server and its regions.

Knowing which region is located where is not going to matter for long. Soon it will all be cloud based. Then only the Lindens will need to know which server is carrying which region.

We are told that last Tuesday night at minimum use time about 1,000 regions were Uplifted to the cloud. Mazidox Linden tells us those regions have been running with only minor problems.

They anticipate moving may be 2,500 regions Wednesday (10/28) to the cloud. Which means problems are very minor. This will also mean more than half of all regions will be in the cloud.

Today we got our first set of server Release Notes for the cloud versions. See an example: Release Notes.

More pages… links below.

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Catching Up in Second Life

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I have survived CoVid-19. It took me down for about 15 days. Still recovering, I easily tire. My four-mile hiking is down to a half-mile.

What I learned about CoVid-19 is there is more confusion, contradictory information, and horrible reporting. The worst information and often deliberately injurious information is coming from California and New York. Even my doctors had little information and kept saying they would have to talk to experts and get back to me when I asked questions.

Being in California I was dealing with the state’s and country’s requirements and quarantine instructions. Most annoying was the followup contact tracing. It was obvious there is a political bias in the contact tracking. They only collect information related to those facilities the state wants to close down. Information for those facilities the state wants open is not collected.

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Second Life News Week #40 & 41

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Flickr

There are new changes over at Flickr.

Ebbe

Ebbe Altberg, the Linden Lab CEO, talks about what investors should consider and ignore when investing in virtual reality. See Three Things to Focus On, Three Things to Ignore (Podcast).

Third-Party Dev UG Meeting

There are 4 viewers out. Plus, the main viewer. The Ordered Shout Down RC is looking good. From that I would gather it is the current likely bet for the next promotion. The Maintenance RC is doing OK. The project viewer for EEP has a couple of bugs yet to fix. New employees specializing in graphics now available to work on those. So, hopefully… A Voice RC viewer should be out next week, maybe.

Voodoo Moon

Voodoo Moon

From the Firestorm peeps, the Firestorm release is going fine. No real problems found yet. Adoption is good.

There was a discussion about BoM adoption and use. The opinion seems to be things in the fashion community are still way disorganized.

Blogger Awards

If you are looking for people that blog, vlog, or photograph Second Life then you just hit found the pot at the end of the rainbow, Ballot for the 2019 Bloggie Awards. The ballot is 38 pages of categorized URLs.

Voting is open until Oct 19, 2019. But, you have to vote in every category… tedious… before you can submit any vote.

Also included is ‘best’ at photo-friendly. So, if you are looking for places that provide interesting backgrounds and gorgeous scenery this is a handy list. Continue reading →

Second Life News Week #39

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General News

Blender 2.80 released a few weeks back. I am waiting for AvaStar to update before seriously trying to use it. And now I see a version 2.81 is planned for release in November 2019.

Blender Nation is doing a series of articles and videos that show the planned new features in 2.81. Look for the Blender development watch.

Bea's Portrait

Bea’s Portrait

Photoshop  updated and added new features recently. See What New? There is nothing that will be earthshattering for Second Life™ designers. There are features that will make those into SL Photography happy.

What’s Next – The Lab has a blog post up on what is coming for Second Life. See What’s Next for Linden Lab? There are notable changes to Sansar. The Lab says they are ‘reimagining’ Sansar. See Your World Is Waiting: The Makers Of Second Life Reimagine Sansar As An Immersive Destination For Gaming, Commerce & Live Events. I didn’t get how this ‘reimaging’ is different from the initial ‘imagining’. Whatever… If you haven’t been in Sansar for a while, it may be time to look again.

Move to Cloud – The What Next article (above) touches on what is happening with the move to the cloud. Inventory and the maps-website have already been moved to the cloud. Continue reading →

Second Life News Week #38

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General News

What’s with BoM and Heads?

My experience point is with GA.EG’s Jennifer head. The rest is hearsay. So, you’ve been warned.

Every Time I Breathe I Take You In

Every Time I Breathe I Take You In

There is a significant problem, IMO, taking the current Bento Mesh Heads into BoM compatibility. As the pre-BoM Bento Heads provide considerable control over makeup, at least GA.EG does, and I see no simple way to provide that control to the system layer style of makeup, I expect little change as BoM capability is added to Bento Mesh Heads.

Thus, the simple change is to add the ability to add BoM skin to a Bento-Head. GA.EG does that with an applier. A new head could be made that has BoM built-in. But, would it still provide a choice of applier or BoM skin? The applier does. A new head would have to add scripting to provide the choice. I find script weight already a problem.

I love the Slink Redux body because it reduces my script load by about 2MB. A BoM-Head that increases script load seems counterproductive. Continue reading →

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Second Life News Week #37

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Destinations Video

Experiences

Many of you will know Experiences have been borked. The Lindens have a fix, sort of… See their SL Blog post on their fix. See Experience Scripts Experiencing Trouble.

The bug is BUG-227526 – Issue with compiled experiences being lost when a script is copied in-world.

The Shrek Ears Thing

If you used Places Pages in 2017 then you noticed a problem back then. They were suddenly gone. Seems a developer ran a clear & reset script on the live database of Place Pages. Then they found out the database’s backups (plural) were scrambled.

The result was the database could not be restored. That data was gone. So, Place Pages had to be rebuilt by the page owner. It also meant ALL the SL backups were tested to make sure they would work if needed.

It was purely human error. A bummer. But, I bring it up now because from it we learned about Shrek Ears in the Linden offices. You’ve likely seen the movie or at least the trailer so you know what Shrek’s ears look like. But what they mean in Linden circles is unique and SL lore now. The full story is here, “Re-experience the fun of customizing your Place Page!” A Tale of Oops from Ops. Check it out to learn what the Shrek Ears thing is about. Then you’ll understand why some Lindens were recently wearing Shrek Ears… the recent problem with Experience scripts. Continue reading →

Second Life News Week #36

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General News

SL Travel

Ever wonder how the SL travel and places blogs find those awesome places?

It seems the Blogger & Vlogger Network has a list of them. (here) They also have a form one can fill out to add to the list. So, they find these places when people stumble-on or otherwise find them and add them to the list.

Only those who dream learn to fly

Only those who dream learn to fly

The list is titled Photogenic, Rezzable Sims. Rezzable? My first thought was griefers will LOVE this list. However, many of the locations require membership in a group to get rez-rights and a number of those groups have a Join Fee. About 20 of the 37 locations are listed as free. If there is a cost it is referenced in the listing. They also have the region’s maturity rating, PG, Moderate, and Adult. Nine are rated Adult, but not all 9 are hook-up places. And even those that are, look good.

The list apparently has some age. Several of the links landed me at places other than the obvious intended landing point but the correct region. However, a couple of regions were gone or repurposed.

I found Backdrop Cove (Map URL) in the list. Got some pictures. This place is not as crowded as Backdrop City. So, posing and setup was nicer. Also, you can rez stuff without having to join a group. They use a 60-minute return. It is a moderate region and the pose and animation stuff I saw was PG. Donations are appreciated. Please help out. Continue reading →