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.
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.
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. ☹
This summary organizes key technological updates, new features in Second Life™ (SL), and enhancements to SL and third-party viewers based on announcements and releases during August 2025.
There is some stuff for the every day not so technical user.
Second Life Core Platform Updates
Second Life Viewer Release: 2025.06 (Version 7.2.1.17108480561) – Released August 28, 2025
Inventory Favorites System: Users can now mark items (e.g., outfits, objects) as favorites for quick access, improving inventory management. This community-requested feature streamlines organization and reduces clutter.
Avatar System Improvements: Enhanced skeleton reset as a networked ViewerEffect for better synchronization; fixed hand size settings not saving; restored full 90-degree upward pitch in mouselook camera mode; resolved anti-flipping regression in mouselook.
Camera and Movement Enhancements: Improved arrow key movement description; fixed teleport history landing height issues; added “Disable Camera Constraints” and “Disable Minimum Camera Zoom Distance” options for greater flexibility.
Chat and Voice Fixes: Fixed empty conversation logs; enhanced emoji picker for correct insertion; resolved voice echo across regions (Vivox to WebRTC transitions); improved voice reconnection after tuning; fixed slider text truncation in voice settings.
Content Creation Tools: Mesh uploader now allows reducing material counts; detailed LOD (Level of Detail) information in Build Tools; better error messages for texture uploads.
UI and Text Polish: Automatic placeholder text selection in fields; fixed blurry thumbnails; resolved issues deleting links to worn objects; improved “Away” status handling.
Environment and Rendering Fixes: Fixed shadow FPS drops on Mac vs. PC; resolved stream toggle greying out; corrected viewer URI links for parcel maps.
Stability and Crashes: Numerous crash fixes, including those related to notifications, voice connections, and SD (Serialized Data) handling.
System Improvements: Enhanced performance for inventory finder floater; memory allocation fixes; OpenJPG and PBR texture panel improvements.
Impact: This release incorporates community feedback via GitHub and the SL Feedback Portal, focusing on quality-of-life enhancements. It builds on prior updates like glTF mesh import (from July) and supports ongoing WebRTC voice rollout. Download available via official SL site; full notes at releasenotes.secondlife.com.
I thought I would try some AI scanning to gather SL news on a monthly basis. This is what I found for June.
SL Mobile: Grumpity and Philip point out that work continues on the rendering capability of mobile devices. There has been a 10x increase in people signing up and onboarding via mobile and Project Zero. Nice.
Homes: A new neighborhood, Ridgewood Enclave, is planned for Premium+ members. The availability of commercial regions tied to the new homes is mentioned. Also, some refurbishing of existing home themes is planned. Some PBR updates to existing themes is mentioned.
Gacha: OK, most of us know Gatcha is back. Some of use think that is a good thing. I have my doubts.
October 22, 2024 the Firestorm Team released a new version of their viewer: 7.1.11.
I am running 7.1.9, their initial PBR release. I’ve had a few minor problems and it is a little slow. But not so slow as to be frustrating. If I were still playing in SL’s combat games, I would probably be complaining. The FPS numbers and comparison to a previous version is here: Firestorm Viewer 7.1.9.74745 PBR.
I skipped the version 7.1.10. I wasn’t excited about it and… I have been playing with Alchemy Viewer.
The Firestorm blog is Announcing Firestorm 7.1.11. You can read more details there. And Inara has her review of the viewer up: Firestorm 7.1.11: DeltaFPS. So, I am only providing some empirical performance numbers.
Location
FPS v.11 Desk
FPS v.9
Porch 512m
30*
51
Porch 128m
45*
46
Green Room @ 2200m DD=128m
112
119
Nelsonia 4peps @ DD= 128m
64
Arapaima 9peps @ 128m
55
Exhale Club 68peps @ 128m
30
*Weird. Making measurements this time I noticed a difference. FPS numbers start low and S L O W L Y build to a max. Getting to the max value took several minutes more than a couple of times. Also, when I switch away to another app the viewer gives up CPU cycles to the other app. A good thing… but coming back to the viewer I experience another slow build to the max FPS.
Also, one time I would get one set of numbers and another time a much different set of numbers. So, I got horrible numbers, OK numbers, good numbers, and better numbers. Also, switching away from the viewer app to another app had its oddities. Mostly the FPS would start recovering from the CPU conserving mode and return to something better. But on occasion I could not get the numbers to recover.
I was scratching my head on this oddity. I tried restarting the computer and running only the viewer. While I have a load of Windows background apps running that has always been the case. So, I think the change is in the viewer. Or… PBR sucks up all the performance… but that doesn’t explain the oddities I am seeing.
Over the coming weeks I’ll be experimenting as I play in SL. If I learn what is going on, I plan to update this article. And… there is an interesting new feature coming in FS. Scroll to the end. Look for the page 2 link…
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.
In 2013 Strawberry Singh posted a couple of articles (here & here) about positioning and moving avatars when setting up snapshots. This was needed for those areas where you do NOT have rez rights. Over time viewer upgrades broke those processes.
Avatar Positioning with Black Dragon
Every so often I would check to see if the problems with those processes had been fixed. With Firestorm 6.3.9 (May 2020 release date) I can move the avatar again sort of with her process.
Strawberry explained the process for moving your avatar. (Ref)
Open the Develop menu. Top menu, press Ctrl-Alt-Q to reveal it.
Then enable Develop->Avatar->Character Tests->Allow select avatar.
Press Ctrl-3 to open the Build Panel.
Right-click the avatar. Move arrows appear. Move.
Here is a video showing how it used to work. If you have a mesh avatar, right-clicking the avatar likely is not going to work. Instead, you have to right-click on your name tag. Then it works.
The Linens have released Second Life Release 6.4.2.541639 – Camera Presets. See the Release Notes for all the details.
It took me a second to figure out which camera they were talking about. Well, there is only one camera in the viewer. There are a number of ways to look at it. So…
Graphics Settings – these controls in Preferences->Graphics do control the camera. I suspect most of us think of these settings as controlling the render engine, which they do. But the render engine is the camera. So, most of the labels tend toward describing what we are doing with it.
This isn’t what changed.
Snapshot Panel – I tend to think of this as more the camera than Graphics Settings. This, also, is not what changed.
SL Viewer’s Improved Camera Controls
Camera Controls – This is the thing they changed. I almost never use it. I consider it the newbie thing. I use and Alt-LM-click-drag and Ctrl-ALT-LM-click-drag to control my “camera”. My last guess as to what changed was this.
