Second Life Technology Updates: September 2025 – Revised

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.

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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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Second Life™ Technology Update Summary: September 2025

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. ☹

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Windows 11 Coming This Year

Microsoft announced the coming release of Windows 11 June 24, 2021. So…. Will Second Life run on Win11? Yes. There are very few changes in Win11 that would effect how applications like Second Life work. So, we expect the change over to be a non-event for SL users.

Windows 11

So… then what changes?

There are lots of articles out written by the beta and early adopter users. A change is the opening menu. One of the changes in the menu is Live Tiles. If you use them, this change will SUCK. They are gone. But, in return, we get Windows Vista-like widgets… Oh Great!

We get a new Microsoft Apps Store… I never thought of the store as part of the Windows Operating System. But, that is in the update news. The main talking point is they are making it easier for you to find apps. I’ll take that to mean, we have changed our advertising strategy.

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Second Life is in the Cloud

An article appeared on SL’s Featured News page: An Update on the Second Life Destination Guide.

We know all the region servers are now running in Amazon Web Services aka THE CLOUD. A number of backend services were moved before the region servers. The uplifting of all the services needed to run Second Life™ and render it was announced January 5, 2021, in a featured article: 2021 Update: Life in the Cloud. They were announcing the completion of the move to the cloud.

The idea of SL being completely moved to the cloud depends on who is speaking and what they are thinking of as the Second Life SYSTEM and what they mean by ‘moved’. On a general and practical level, Second Life is in the cloud. In Strawberry’s article of January 22, we are told the Destination Guide is in the cloud and running too.

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