Virtual World News

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 “Revised” Report: October 2025

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As I work with AI in RL design projects (coding websites), I am learning how to get more from it. This is a ‘revised’ report where I have AI digging for news in more places. Following is what it found.

I am also curious about what is happening in the gaming and virtual world fields in general as I think it will affect Second Life™. So, I have added a section on that. I also have AI analyzing how these developments are likely to impact Second Life. It will take some time to see how well it predicts.

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Linden Lab pours MILLIONS into Second Life

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Ebbe Linden has posted in the SL Forum. The post is titled Celebrating 14 Years of SL with Investments in Its Future. In it, he says they have budgeted US$ Millions for the coming year, which is awesome.

Cerridwens Cauldron_007
Cerridwens Cauldron_007 (URL)

He tells us about some of the coming changes to Second Life. Some we know about, others are new news.

One change is moving SL to the cloud. I have heard no details. So, exactly what this means is currently speculation. My speculation is this should significantly drop the cost of running the system. I imagine an empty region could be spun down and then only spun up as needed. Would this reduce land cost? It might. 

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Second Life and Sansar in the News

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The Irish Times has an article by Marie Boran, Virtual reality is giving Second Life a second lease of life. (4/13) Marie was a participant in Second Life™ in 2010. In the first few words she reports the Trump-Swastikas at a Bernie Sanders meetup. That mention should clue people to the possibility of the reporting being shallow. I’ll try to push the Sansar news deeper and provide some perspective on Second Life..

The Blarneystone in Dublin, SL – 2017

Marie moves on to point out that while there is an ‘underbelly’ to SL, that is often reported on, there is also a surprising number of ‘ordinary’ folks in SL. The real world is pretty much that way… so…

Next Marie says her 2010 outfit and skin had expired… I went back and tried some of my 2008 outfits, well, we didn’t have “Outfits” in 2008. So, I had to find some stuff from then and make an outfit to see if things still worked. They did. I looked horrible. We can’t be sure what happened to Marie. I’ll take this as being another nail in ‘shallow’. But…

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VR Latency

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I suspect we have all heard about simulator sickness, akin to motion sickness, caused by latency/lag in providing images to VR headsets. Now NVIDIA is showing an experimental zero latency display. The site Road to VR has the story in an article: NVIDIA Demonstrates Experimental “Zero Latency” Display Running at 1,700Hz.

NVIDIA debuted their experimental display at GTC 2016. The current 90hz displays render an image every 11ms. NVIDIA gets an image on screen in 0.58ms. Wow. 

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