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Second Life™ Technology Update Summary: September 2025

2025/10/01 by Nalates Urriah

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. ☹

Catching Up in Second Life

2020/09/29 by Nalates Urriah

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.

Second Life News Week #40 & 41

2019/10/11 by Nalates Urriah

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.

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.

Second Life News Week #39

2019/09/26 by Nalates Urriah

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.

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.

Second Life News Week #38

2020/12/302019/09/18 by Nalates Urriah

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.

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.

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