Firestorm

Second Life® Technology Report – April 2026

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Tech-focused summary for April 1–30, 2026
Here is the update on last months activity in Second Life.

Official SL Platform Updates

  • April 1, 2026: Voice service disruption reported (connection issues and audio drops). Incident tied to ongoing WebRTC transition testing; highlighted need for full rollout improvements.
  • April 25, 2026: Unscheduled inventory maintenance affected login, rezzing, avatar display, and inventory access. Issue resolved same day; users advised to clear cache. – NOTE: If you are not having issues, don’t. I went through the outage and recovered without clearing my cache.
  • Throughout April: Continued WebRTC Voice testing on RC channels with maintenance sessions (e.g., April 22). Full grid rollout announced for May 5.
New Second Life Tech
My New Home Computer… NOT

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Second Life® New Tech Summary – February 2026

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Reporting Period: February 1–28, 2026

I only quickly read through what the AI generated. I’ll add some info and context here and there from what I’ve seen. I think the AI did a pretty good job this time.

The Stone Computer
I am encouraging my friend to upgrade their computer…

Official SL Platform Updates

  • No new major platform feature announcements, scripting enhancements, rendering overhauls (e.g., glTF/PBR expansions beyond prior), LUA integrations, or avatar rigging updates were reported in official channels for February 2026.
  • The most recent simulator release referenced is from late January 2026 (2026-01-28.21455867889), with no new deploys noted in February.

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Second Life: Avatar Shape Files

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Keep Your Shape When You Switch Heads and Bodies

How to avoid shape disasters and simplify your Second Life® avatar customization.

This problem shows up in the Second Life (SL) forums all the time: someone buys a new mesh head, wears the shape that comes with it, and instantly destroys the body shape they spent hours dialing in.

Their perfect peach butt goes flat, or their tight athletic shape inflates into something like two blimps colliding..

Second Life Shapes

Whatever your style, having to rebuild your look after buying a new head or body is annoying and tedious, so let us simplify that.

To get you there quickly, this guide contains the simple, one-time “do this and you are done” approach and deeper technical detail if you enjoy tweaking under the hood.

I use the Firestorm Viewer, as most SL residents do (~75%), and this tutorial assumes you are using Firestorm too.

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Second Life Technology Updates: December 2025

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I’ve explained, I use A.I. to gather and summarize Second Life™ (SL) news for the month. I am interested in the tech updates and other news affecting SL. I’ve been using Grok. It is failing worse and worse each month. Researching and querying Grok to find out why…

It seems A.I. is more forgetful than I am. Grok gave me a ~300 word explanation of what is happening. Of course, since I am a skeptic and have my own ideas about what it is saying. Basically, my take is A.I., specifically Grok, is prioritizing efficiency and memory conservancy on its side. Accuracy and thoroughness are much lower priorities. For me and this report, that SUCKS.

I’ve spent some time today getting around Grok’s bad habits and poor logic. That gives us the information below. I am now looking at other A.I.s to try the task.

Report

December 2025 featured ongoing advancements in mobile performance and reliability, a major new scripting language beta, project viewer releases for specialized features, and a third-party beta incorporating upstream maintenance fixes. Routine grid maintenance ensured stability, with no widespread disruptions reported.

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Second Life™ Technology & Community Report – November 2025

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Another month… almost the end of 2025. We got a new Firestorm Viewer release this month. I’ve been too busy with RL work to have played much with it. Nor have been flying. So, I am not sure if there is a difference in region crossings… I hope.

Official SL Platform Updates

  • November 6: Main channel promotion of server version 2025-10-24.858241 – includes fixes for group chat delays, simulator crash fixes related to script memory, and improved region crossing stability.
  • November 13: RC channels (RC=Release Candidates for BlueSteel, LeTigre, Magnum) received server package 2025-11-08.860122 – adds initial support for upcoming glTF PBR material overrides on legacy prims and several memory leak mitigations.
  • November 20: All main channel regions updated to 2025-11-15.861005 – introduces experimental HTTP/3 support for asset fetching (opt-in via debug setting) and fixes several avatar baking failures.
  • November 26: Emergency hotfix deployed grid-wide to correct a regression causing occasional region restarts when large numbers of PBR materials were in draw distance.

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Second Life Technology Updates: September 2025 – Revised

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A reader, rhet0rica, noted that much of the previous September report was fake. Seems fake news is everywhere. But rhet0rica caught it. I went looking to see what happened. An interesting conversation followed with Grok about why it gave me a load of BS. I may write about that later.

Old Comuter
Created with Adobe Firefly…

Below is an actual comprehensive summary of Second Life™ technology updates, new features, and releases for September 2025, covering official Second Life (SL) platform changes, viewer updates (both official and third-party), and related tech announcements. The summary is based on verified information from the specified sources, filtered strictly to the period of September 1–30, 2025, and excludes non-tech topics like events or community news. The report is organized by major update categories. Notice the references: [web:1] and similar. These now actually do point to the subject discussed.

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