SL Speculation

Second Life Doom and Gloom

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This Second Life® is dying claim is an ongoing subject of discussion in the Second Life® Forum. See this thread for the current discussion: Doom thread. (July 2026) I want to add some RL reality to the discussion. But, I decided I have too much to say for the forum. So… here.

Closed Shopping Mall - Second Life
Not going to happen…

Consider

I am convinced Second Life is unlikely to explode or vanish in the next five years; it’s far more likely to keep slowly shrinking while Linden Lab tunes the business to a smaller, older, high‑spend audience and lets the grid quietly persist.  [community.secondlife]

So… here’s the thing. Every year the forums light up with another “Second Life is doomed” thread, and this one is no different. Same worries. Same dark jokes. Same fear that one day we’ll log in and find the grid gone, which is very dramatic for a platform that mostly behaves like an aging mall with a few busy clubs still open.

The important question isn’t whether SL is doomed in the theatrical sense. It’s whether the platform is on a controlled glide path or headed for an ugly break. I think the answer is the first one.

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What If This Breakthrough Changed the Second Life World We Travel In?

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I saw this way interesting video. It is about how we are mapping the world into 3D space for computers. It is so good it is being used to train pilots for rescue missions in dangerous terrain. Also for training self-driving vehicles.  So, can we walk our avatars through such a world?

The interesting part of Bilawal Sidhu’s “Craziest Mapping Breakthrough” is not the map UI. It is the idea that this tech could eventually change the 3D world we move through, especially for sailing and flying in spaces that feel bigger and smoother than today’s 256×256 regions.

So… instead of dreaming about a shinier World Map window, think about longer, more continuous routes. Less “box to box,” more “real journey.”

Where SL Is Today

Second Life’s foundation is still the region grid: each standard region is 256×256 meters, with teleports, crossings, land impact budgets, and simulators all tied to that. It works and it is part of why SL has lasted this long.[2][4] Or so some think.

You feel that grid most when you travel. Sailors in Blake Sea, pilots over mainland, and drivers on Bellisseria roads all hit the same issue: region crossings can be smooth or they can be… memorable.[5][6][7] Duh!

LL has been modernizing in other ways — performance, mobile viewer work, better onboarding, and AI helper experiments — but the 256×256 region structure is still the skeleton everything hangs on.[8][9][2] So… can that change?

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Second Life and the Future of Apple Users

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For SL users there is the Apple question, will Second Life™ run on Apple? Or… continue to run on Apple?

In June of this year Apple announced its discontinuing support of OpenGL after macOS 10.14 Mojave (scheduled for release Sept 2018), the core aspect of SL’s render engine. It will take a couple of years for Apple to phase it out. But, updates and support officially stop now. For some time support has been really bad.

● 1325 Colorful Disaster

They explained their reasoning when some game developers declared they would stop making games for Apple.

The reasons;

  • OpenGL was designed 25 years ago.
  • Core architecture is from the beginning days of 3D graphics.
  • Designed is based on outdated thinking.
  • OpenGL is a legacy tool with updates ‘tacked’ on.
  • Hardware GPU work flow has changed.
  • Never designed for multi-threading.
  • Today’s rendering is asynchronous.

On the PC side of things OpenGL is still supported. We can’t know for how long. Khronos, OpenGL’s developer, has introduced Vulkan. (See: State of Graphics: DirectX 12 & Vulkan – 4/2016) Development is exciting and popular. The group is on the forefront of some interesting tech. But, I don’t know that it will be helpful for SL.

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Ebbe Altberg & Third-Party Dev Meeting

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I wanted to sit in on this week’s Third-Party Developers’ meeting. I wanted some footage of the meeting to use as an opening for my summary of the meeting. I was late. Seems to be a pattern. But, I was planning to use Pantera Północy’s video of the meeting. It comes out Saturday morning.

I was surprised to find Ebbe Altberg talking! Whoa! So, I brought up OBS and recorded the rest of the meeting. The first 15 minutes are missing. Those minutes are in Pantera’s Video, which came out before I got finished.

I’ve been having audio problems with the SL recordings. I got some of that cleaned up. I still had problems but the audio is intelligible and better.

I thought about indexing the video. I usually do. But, Thursday is an RL busy day and I already have a work-related video rendering in the background. My completer is WAY sluggish and all 4 cores are pegged at 100% heating up to 57. This one of the few times I hear the fans pick up speed. So, I’ll do the index later when I don’t have to deal with pauses.

The video is jerky in places. I was recording and had the rendering paused. But, I was still seeing a hit in the viewer. My i5-6600 did pretty well considering the load on the system.

See the thread in the SL Forum, Ebbe Altberg talking at the Third-Party Dev Meeting.

Second Life and the CLOUD

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Inara Pey has apparently sat through a dry video of Tara Hernandez’s, Senior Director of Systems and Build Engineering at Linden Lab, presentation at Amazon’s Las Vegas promotion for their services. She has written about it here: SANSAR AND SECOND LIFE IN THE CLOUD: LL SPEAKS AT AWS RE:INVENT. The video is here:

That is a 34-minute video on YouTube. There are some gems in the video that interest Second Life™ people.

I had not realized the first iteration of SL used a graphics engine designed to circumvent the Windows graphics and go directly to hardware. This go-to-hardware was the early game-graphics optimization used by most of the industry. That is long gone. Now OpenGL is the optimization that interfaces with all the various graphics systems in use with SL.

Inara covers the main parts SL’ers will find interesting. But, the video is loaded with tidbits about Second Life and how they are changing away from the problems with ideas for Sansar. So, some seldom talked about SL things are described in the video.

There is about 10+ minutes of tech description on Sansar and how it works. And toward the end some words on how they plan to adapt Second Life for life in the cloud.