Search the Community

Happy Spring! It’s time to catch you all up on recent product developments! Continue reading for mobile updates, scripting news, new feedback portal (and end-of-life for JIRA), and Viewer releases. 📱 Mobile Private Alpha Update Big and small updates! This is a reminder that Premium Plus members can apply to participate in our Mobile Private Alpha. If you are a Premium Plus subscriber, and you’re ready to try the app and help us make it better, find out more. We recently updated the Second Life Mobile Alpha to support streaming audio! You can enjoy music in Second Life on your mobile device while hanging out with friends inworld. Streaming audio is off by default. To turn it on, go to Settings > Developer tools > Enable Streaming Audio. We have brought you a couple of new Chat UI features: Start a new chat from any chat screen On the Nearby Chat screen, see how many people are nearby. Next up - teleport and avatar display improvements. We think we’ve got avatar shapes figured out…and the real challenge - skeleton deformers - are also in the works! 🐛 JIRA end-of-life Yes, the king is dead, long live the king! While we have said goodbye to Jira as the platform for collaboration with our residents as well as for internal issue tracking, we believe this has allowed us to improve visibility and collaboration. The new Second Life Feedback Portal is a great place for any new bug reports or feature requests, while the public Second Life Viewer project on GitHub is where we continue our open-source work. Speaking of the Second Life Feedback Portal, it has already received 672 posts, 2635 comments, and 6426 votes! We thank you for your enthusiastic participation. We have made many updates since we first introduced it in January including a whole new UI and dark mode (based on your system settings). We will continue to improve the feedback portal and, most importantly, review all the incoming reports and requests! Although Jira is dead, the archive remains. As mentioned in our Pt. 2 blog post, the Jira archive of the Second Life BUG project on GitHub is now available. You can find the public BUG archive at https://github.com/secondlife/jira-archive/issues. The archive currently contains most of the previously public Jira tickets from the original BUG project. However, there are a few that we are still moving over. It does NOT include tickets that previously had restricted access. 👩‍💻 Scripting changes Out now: Increased sensor result limit We've increased the maximum number of results returned by llSensor and llSensorRepeat from 16 to 32. This will reduce the need for workarounds such as repeatedly scanning small slices of space. Coming soon: llSetLinkSitFlags, llGetLinkSitFlags, SIT_FLAG_NO_COLLIDE In an upcoming server release we will be allowing scripts to set and get the sit flags of linkset sit targets via llSetLinkSitFlags and llGetLinkSitFlags. In addition, scripts will be able to set the SIT_FLAG_NO_COLLIDE flag to disable the avatar's collision volume when they are seated. This will be useful for clown cars and other creations. Scripting roadmap Status of these upcoming changes and more are visible on Second Life's new public roadmap at feedback.secondlife.com. If you have ideas or feedback on the scripting system check out the Scripting Features and Scripting Bugs boards. 🪀 Creator news Coming soon: 15% reduction to mesh download impact Download weight is one parameter used as part of calculating an object’s Land Impact (LI). We will be reducing this by 15%, decreasing the land impact of many mesh assets. LI for mesh-based objects is either download weight, physics or server cost, whichever is greatest. This change will not impact animesh or mesh upload fees. Coming soon: Scheduling automatic daily region restarts This feature has been on people's wish lists for many years. Estate managers will soon be able to schedule automatic region restarts via the region console: > help region_schedule region_schedule Display or modify scheduled region events. An empty parameter list will display the current schedule. unset <event>: Removes the scheduled event. set <event> daily HH::MM::SS will set the event to occur daily at the scheduled time. set <event> weekly days HH::MM::SS will set the event to occur on the indicated days at the scheduled time. S=Sun, M=Mon, T=Tue, W=Wed, R=Thurs, F=Fri, A=Sat Note: Times are in GMT While most regions do not need to be restarted more frequently than weekly, which is automatically scheduled, some regions with high traffic may benefit from more frequent restarts. When you restart a region, keep in mind that everyone on the region will be kicked out. 💻 Viewers Maintenance Viewer GLTF PBR Maint 2 contains another round of fixes and refinements to PBR rendering, including a preview of Materials from Inventory while editing objects. Download version 7.1.3.7821226606 and check out the release notes. Default Viewer 😀 Emoji This viewer was finally promoted to default release and is based on a contribution by Kitty Barnett, adding emoji support to text chat. Featurettes sneak peek! Our Post Materials Featurette Package is sharing early access to: Mirrors PBR Terrain 2k textures Initially this will only be available on our Beta Grid (Aditi). Please keep your eye on our blog as we will post more details in the coming days. Catch more Second Life news on Thursday, March 14th at 12pm PT at the VWBPE Above the Book interview with Grumpity, Signal, and Kali Linden! Follow our Featured News Blog and connect with us on Social Media for future Second Life News!

Happy New Year! We’re off to a great start to the year at the Lab and happy to share more Second Life updates with you. You’ll find news on scripting additions, PBR Materials, Project Viewers, and an update on the Second Life Mobile Private Alpha program. Enjoy! 👩‍💻 Scripting changes coming soon A handful of new, useful scripting features will be getting released in the coming weeks: llComputeHash LSL's old llMD5 function has a significant flaw: it always adds a ":" character to the input string. This makes it useless for most hashing purposes. Enter: llComputeHash! This new function can generate a hash of an input string using any of the following hashing algorithms: md5, md5_sha1, sha1, sha224, sha256, sha384, and sha512. Scripting roadmap Status of these upcoming changes and more are visible on Second Life's new public road visible at feedback.secondlife.com. If you have ideas or feedback on the scripting system check out the Scripting Features and Scripting Bugs boards. 🧪 Project Viewers 😀 Emoji This viewer is also in RC and is based on a contribution by Kitty Barnett, and adds the ability to insert emojis in text chat. Maintenance W This Viewer brings many fixes (see list here), including a fix to a long standing issue with voice failing after quickly restarting your viewer Maintenance X This Viewer brings many usability improvements (see list here), including: Saving you some clicks by allowing the deletion of folders containing worn items. In case you only wish to detach, Alt+Shift+R will now detach selected attachments so you can remove those less fashionable items at rapid speed. The time format has been changed to show the more superior SLT instead of PDT. The group join fee will be shown when leaving a group so you can be extra sure you want to leave it. Shift+Alt+N will now open the Notifications floater Group notices can now be accessed directly from the People floaters Groups tab. Hover that mouse cursor over the group name for access. Group notices will now default as being sorted by date with the newest first Maintenance Y With this Viewer, you can now preview your outfit photos when hovering your cursor over outfits in the Outfit floater. You can also now remove locations from history via the context menu located in the Places floaters Visited tab. See the list of additional fixes here. Default Viewer 🎨 GLTF PBR Materials At the end of November, we announced in this blog post that PBR became available grid wide! The PBR Materials project brings increased realism and enables bringing GLTF content into Second Life with expected results. Now you can create scenes with real reflections which mimic how our eyes have learned to identify that a surface is metal, plastic, or some other material. Whether you create objects in Second Life or simply enjoy seeing and wearing them, PBR Materials will provide a big step up in the appearance of the Second Life world. Individually faceted disco ball reflections As of January 8th, 2024, the PBR Materials Maintenance 1 viewer became the default viewer for Second Life. See Release Notes here. There are 17 new Materials available in the Library so you can start building with PBR today! 📱 Mobile Update On December 12th, we announced our Mobile Private Alpha, bringing the richness of the Second Life virtual world to your Android or iOS mobile device. Qualifying Premium Plus members can apply now for the Private Alpha. If you are Premium Plus, you can learn more at this link. Check out this video if you haven’t already! We’ve had an incredible amount of interest, so if you've applied but haven’t been added yet, you’re still on our list. Future testers will be added and notified as the Private Alpha continues to expand. Thanks again for your patience as we process the ongoing demand and we look forward to your participation! Follow our Featured News Blog and connect with us on Social Media for future Second Life News!

We've been busy since our last update a month ago, and we're eager to showcase the latest enhancements to Second Life. This update includes steps forward for the Destination Guide, scripting additions, Project Viewer news, and update on the Second Life Mobile app. 🎛️ User Interface Destination Guide Improvements One of the most-requested features for the web-based Destination Guide – real-time population counts! You can now see how many people are at the location displayed near the group icon (highlighted below): See it for yourself at https://secondlife.com/destinations! We hope the population count helps you find locations you like -- depending on how social you are feeling! This feature addition also works with Destination Guide search: Keybindings in RC Maintenance Viewer V With the addition of keybinding options for the viewer, you can now choose which keys map to various actions within the viewer. This is cool, but makes it more challenging to create documentation and real-time instructional prompts for vehicles and HUDs which take control inputs. We’re happy to introduce this requested feature for displaying user-customized keybindings in chat. Using “secondlife:///app/keybinding/push_forward” for example, will provide you with whatever imaginative controls may have been chosen for moving forward. Syntax for this feature can be found here: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Viewer_URI_Name_Space Example: 🧪 Project Viewers Default Viewer This month, our Inventory Extensions Viewer version 6.6.15.581961 got promoted from Release Candidate status and is now the official viewer available from the main download page. Some of you have noticed that some inventory items are unexpectedly appearing in your Lost and Found folder. On occasion, an item in your inventory becomes ‘parented’ to a folder that no longer exists -- they are, effectively, ‘orphaned’ items. Previously these items did not appear in your inventory at all. We have fixed this issue and now they appear in Lost and Found. You can then delete the item or move it into your main inventory, as usual. Thanks again for your feedback and bug reports. Go here for the complete list of resolved issues. 🎨 GLTF PBR Materials The GLTF PBR Materials viewer continues to be available as a Release Candidate available from Version 7.0.0.582103. This update required a simultaneous simulator and viewer update. Reminder, PBR Materials content has limited availability on our Main grid (Agni) as a Beta Project and can be previewed on specific regions: Rumpus Room, Rumpus Room 2, 3, 4, 5 Preflight0 through 8 (Limited access) 🎮 Game Control Beta We are working on providing a way for scripts in vehicles and attachments to use input from devices such as game controllers and other hardware. This feature will allow users to create things like vehicles that behave more realistically by using analog input values from a gamepad in addition to discrete key-press events. For example, a helicopter could more delicately maneuver, using input from the analog stick rather than WASD on a keyboard. This functionality is not limited to vehicles and could be used for many more applications. LSL game control support is in early development and is only available to test on our Beta grid (Aditi.) If you would like to experiment, please follow these instructions: LSL Game Control Beta. 😀 Emoji We are still working on resolving the complexity of Unicode characters appearing in chat logs. The Emoji Viewer is still in RC and we remain 😃 about this evolution of the Viewer based on a contribution by Kitty Barnett. 📱 Mobile Update We aren’t resting on our laurels: We continue our development of Second Life on mobile -- even though Bridie Linden is lounging in this screenshot! Now the app supports some interactions with inworld objects. We will be adding more over time. Follow our Featured News Blog and connect with us on Social Media for future Second Life News! Happy Halloween from all of us at Linden Lab! 🎃 We are loving the Halloween spirit in the community and we hope you are enjoying all of the events we have planned for you this season, including Trick or Treat at Bellisseria, Shop & Hop, Premium Gifts, Last Names, and a video contest with a chance to win up to L$100K!

We’re always working to improve Second Life, so we wanted to share with you a more detailed look at the additions and improvements we’ve been making recently. In this first edition, we’re sharing several updates from the last few months. We think there’s something for everyone, whether you are a creator, landowner, or you just use Second Life for your second life! 🎛️ User Interface New Translations With Version 6.6.12.57998, say Hola or Bonjour or Hallo or Ciao or Olá or Kon'nichiwa to updated UI translations for the following languages: 🇪🇸 Español (Spanish) 🇫🇷 Français (French) 🇩🇪 Deutsch (German) 🇮🇹 Italiano (Italian) 🇵🇹 Português (Portuguese) 🇯🇵 日本語 (Japanese) Transparency Bug Fixes We made the following transparency-related bug fixes in Version 6.6.13.580918: The ‘Highlight Transparent’ function (accessed via Advanced->Highlighting and Visibility), was making highlighting textures opaque. We have fixed this problem. Transparent objects were hiding when turning on highlights in the Beacons window. This is no longer the case so playing ‘transparent-object hide and seek’ will now be much easier. Improvements to Estates Options In Version 6.6.14.581101, we made improvements to the Estate options: We increased the number of Estate Managers to 20 and Ban list entries to 750. That’s a big increase, and we hope these new limits will give you all the capacity you need. We added a new option ‘Show Ban Lines On Collision’ so you can see your neighbor’s ban lines but only when you get very close to the parcel boundary. 👩‍💻 Scripting A handful of new scripting enhancements are available on RC regions and will be rolled out to the entire grid in the coming weeks. Coming soon: easier experience KVP data use Experience KVP functions (llCreateKeyValue, llDeleteKeyValue, et al.) allow scripts associated with an Experience to store and retrieve arbitrary string key/value pairs. In the past, scripts using these functions needed to run on parcels or regions that had opted into the same Experience. Soon, scripts will be able to use KVP data regardless of whether or not the land they are on has enabled the Experience they are compiled with. Coming soon: Prim click action can be set by llSetLinkPrimitiveParams Users who wish to control click actions using llSetPrimitiveParams family of functions can now do so using the PRIM_CLICK_ACTION parameter. 🖥️ Miscellaneous Simulator channel name is coming back The channel name your region belongs to has been added back to the About Second Life window. This will make it easier to understand what features your region has as we release new functionality. Here you can see that the simulator channel name is ‘Second Life RC BlueSteel’. 🧪 Project viewer news GLTF PBR Materials Viewer Expanding material support with the ability to import and edit GLTF Physically Based Rendering (PBR) Materials will be a big step in the next wave of content creation in Second Life. The GLTF PBR Materials viewer is now available as a Release Candidate, offered to a small group of Residents, but anyone may install it. Visit Version 7.0.0.581684.html At this time PBR Materials has limited availability on our Main grid (Agni) as a Beta Project and may be previewed on specific regions: Rumpus Room (and Rumpus Room 2, 3, 4 and 5) Preflight0 through 8 (Limited access) Inventory Item Preview Also available in RC is a Viewer with Inventory Item Previews. You will now be able to add preview images to your inventory items to help you find your favorite items more quickly. The option menu for inventory items, including folders, now has the option “Image.” The image window offers a number of ways for choosing an image to attach to an inventory item of your choice. Best of all, there is no L$ charge for uploading an image as an item preview. Merchants and creators can add previews to their delivery folders and items, and you will see those previews in your inventory with no extra effort on your part. For textures and snapshots, you do not need to add previews yourself -- the Viewer will show previews automatically. You’ll see your texture packs and photo albums as you’ve never seen them before! Single Folder View The other new feature is what we call Single Folder View. This allows you to see the contents of a single inventory folder in its own window. Let’s say you want to put all of your shoes in a new folder “All Shoes” and another new folder “All Boots.” You can create those folders, open a single-folder view on each of them, and drag items from your main inventory into those folders. No more scrolling and carefully aiming your cursor to drag into the intended folder! Single folder view works well alongside the traditional scrolling view. You can use either of the views, or switch between them on a window-by-window basis. Single folder view is entirely optional for the traditionalists among you. Single folder view also makes it easy to see item previews. By default, the single folder view will show you any previews attached to items inside that folder. 😀 Emoji Viewer This viewer is also in RC and is based on a contribution by Kitty Barnett, and adds the ability to insert emojis in text chat. 📱 Mobile Update We are making great progress on Second Life on mobile -- our latest round of work includes some major improvements to avatar movement -- walking and running are so smooth now! Stay tuned for our plans for a private beta! In the meantime, enjoy these screenshots: 🏡A Whole New Game of Homes Coming very soon, the new Linden Home Store will make selecting your new home much easier. With this upgrade, we're putting the power of choice and control right at your fingertips. The new Linden Home Store looks and works great on your mobile device’s browser. Whether you're on your computer, tablet, or smartphone, you can now view and select from all Linden Homes. By popular demand, you can browse all the Linden Homes even if you already own one, you are not logged in, you do not yet have a Premium subscription, or the Linden Home model you want is not currently available. Follow our Featured News Blog and connect with us on Social Media for future Second Life News!

Hello, and Happy Wednesday! Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve updated our Name Change service in a major way. We’ve told you that we were going to keep working on adding new features to the Premium and Premium Plus offerings, and we’re delivering on that once again today. From here on, Premium and Premium Plus subscribers will benefit from a reduced price for the Name Change service. But that’s not all! Not only are we discounting the service across the board, but we’ve decided to democratize the service to everyone. That’s right, as of today, everyone can change their avatar name regardless of their subscription level. Not just the Premium subscribers that have always been able to do so, but all of our Basic accounts as well! This is something we’ve been trying to offer for a long time, and something that we get requests for on a consistent basis, so we couldn’t be more pleased to finally be able to announce it. As an exciting new option for Basic accounts, here’s what it looks like today. Not only do you have the option to change your avatar’s first name to anything you can imagine, but we also offer a rotating list of last names to give your avatar (even if you don’t already have one) that are updated on a regular basis. We will continue to make updates to the available last name pool, so if these options aren’t for you, stay tuned for future updates. You can also suggest your favorite name on our suggestion form, new names are chosen from there! For more information about the costs and how-tos involved in name changes, read the Changing your username FAQ. Click to change your name now!

We are going to be introducing an additional way for you to keep your account safe! When we detect that your viewer is being accessed from a new device, we’ll send you an email that looks like this: SUBJECT: Important: [FIRSTNAME LASTNAME] accessed Second Life from a new machine. Your Second Life account has been accessed from a new machine. If you recently logged in to Second Life from a new device you may ignore this mail. Account: [FIRSTNAME LASTNAME] Time: [TIME IN SLT, example 2022-02-11 09:09.00 SLT] Originating IP Address: [IP ADDRESS OF NEW COMPUTER] If this was you, you don’t need to do anything. If not, we will help you secure your account: What To Do If Your Account Has Been Compromised We are pleased to bring you this industry standard to help protect your SL account. Make sure to verify your email address to receive these notifications. We recently introduced Multi-Factor Authentication, another industry standard, as another layer of account protection. Read about it at https://second.life/mfa UPDATE: This feature is available as of 2/28 for accounts with a verified email address.

Hello, and Happy Monday! Today we’re excited to announce that we’ve updated the look of our inworld and web-side Search feature to bring it more in line with the look and feel of our viewer and the direction that that rest of our web properties will be going (see the new Join page, and the new secondlife.com landing page - they’re excellent). New Search home page in the viewer. Our goal was to clean up the interface and provide a more streamlined and user friendly Search feature that maintained all the functionality that we’ve all come to expect and rely upon. Helpful tool tips will guide you in getting the most functionality out of your searches, and will update as we add more options for more sophisticated searches. Search options are detailed in the search bar tool tip. Once you’ve begun your search, you’ll find that all the familiar options are still available so that you can refine your search for Places, People, Events, Groups, Land to Buy or Rent, Classifieds, etc. We have not changed the algorithm that our Search feature uses in any way. We have simply tried to present the information in a more pleasing and useful manner. All your favorite functions are easy to find. All searches can be filtered by the convenient maturity dropdowns. We’re extremely excited to be rolling this out today in time for all of our Holiday searching. We hope that you’ll enjoy the new look and feel just as much as we do, and we look forward to unveiling a host of new features for Search to go along with this facelift in the new year! Happy Searching!

Lemme first start off by listing my hardware: I7 3770k OC to 4.5 GHz, GTX 1080 Strix OC to 2100hz with 8gb of video memory, 8gb of 1600hz ram, SL on my SSD, Windows 10, the other stuff not really relevant. Looking at my hardware granted some parts a little outdated you would expect decent frames, but not really the case in most sims, usually average between 20-30 frames with advanced lighting, ambient, shadows (Sun and moon only) turned down to 1 shadow quality. This game while widely known as very poorly optimized, only uses about 30% of my GTX 1080 sometimes even less. A lot of the graphic presets are stuck in the past where GPU's only had a max of 2gb-2.5gb of memory while good for its time, that time has passed becoming obsolete with the newer cards out on the market today, you can pick up a 6gb 1060 for fairly cheap prices. I love the slider bar but for the game's memory buffer but to only use 30% of a beastly card is absurd, to say the least, leaving a lot of possible headroom wasted. I know the code is old and would require a bit of rework but quite honestly with the advancements in technology ever growing at rapid paces I don't see this game lasting another 5 years if that, there are already more sims than players and most sims only house about 2-4 "Actual" people the rest usually bots just to drum up traffic a bit, this game in my opinion has a lot of potential. I know quite a few people that have left just do too the unbearable lag in many situations, be that through poor connection to the game or poor utilization of the hardware available. This game needs an update to support the newer tech that's come to the market. I doubt this will ever happen or see the light of day, it seems devs don't really care about updating the game with things that actually matter toward performance sadly, some of the code may require a major overhaul, but even if it took 6 months or a year or so to do, the results, in the end, would be well worth it. Perhaps as a bridge gap and allow the game to use more of the available memory on the newer cards.

I watched some live LL roundtable that said group limits, (as far as how many you can join would increase). This same webcast talked about land prices dropping & taxes on MP items would be raised in order to encourage more users to have SL land & then decorate it with items from MP. (Made sense to me at the time). This was months ago and I haven't seen or heard anything since. Anyone else know if this has already happened or is incorrect? I haven't seen land pricing drop whether you rent or buy, (although a while back they increased prim count a bit). MP pricing seems the same as well. I even heard they were developing cloud-based storage to increase performance. Maybe it was a dream or maybe the timetable is a bit longer than they made it seem? Either way groups in SL provide vendor discounts, admittance to some of the most beautiful sims ingame & updates on new SL merch. Limiting that to a number like 60 for premium accounts shouldn't be a thing IMO, The community has grown way past the days of groups being used for chatting, making new friends or trolling. Some SL bloggers and photographers like myself are *required* to join several groups just in order to blog for that vendor. I truly hope LL is taking this into consideration, it sure seemed like it was going to happen soon from the webcast I watched.

Hi, I was 6y off. I have lots of stuff buyed previously. How I can get updates? The best way? If I remember correctly, then previously there wasnt mechanism to manually download updates. The only option was just to wait and developer itself sends new version to you and then you accept and save it to inventory. But when I wasnt online, then I miss all those transfers. What I must do now?

So I was wondering if the marketplace sends out updates to your clients when you update the inventory to a newer version? I know long ago there was this thing called "HipppVend" where you could send out updates if you changed the inventory of the item in the old SLX boxes. Does the MP finally do this or are we still in the dark ages?

The discussion of this topic is about linden lab maintenance in the sl, I have observed that this has happened without certain days and without an expected time, without prior notice! SL players have been prevented from logging in at some moments without warning, generating a series of questions ... "I lost my avatar"? "Viw problem"? "Was I overthrown?" "I got some ban tpo?" I come across this topic to open a discussion! Since inside people people invest in the game, they create events with dates and times marked, they spend real money, and they earn real money inside it ... and we have our accounts disconnected at any moment without warning knowing maintenance only after is absurd and disrespectful with players! My opinion is that you lose your credibility! Linden lab should warn players about any maintenance before disconnecting, should have days and times set and respect those times! I leave this topic open so that other players and lovers of the game can also say ... and if there are days ... where to know? When?

I am not receiving updates on my secondlife.com profile. The last update showing on my home page was 6 days ago, and now, it says You have 8 snapshots being processed. None are being processed. Help, how can I fix this?