TL;DR — The future of Second Life is looking Brighter than ever.

Recently, Ebbe Altberg and the Second Life team declared that millions of dollars would be going into investments into Second Life’s infrastructure, development, and resources, as they had stated earlier in 2017, as part of Second Life’s 14th, and now 15th Anniversary. As much as I’d love to sit back and reminisce about my time on Agni, it’s best we get down to the topic at hand:

What improvements are there, and what improvements are coming?

Second Life, for as long as I have known it, hasn’t really gotten much for improvements. Yes, Fitmesh was big, but that was just it. Not much else actually was developed that was groundbreaking like Project EEP or Project Animesh, or Project Bento, that year. The Lindens were putting Second Life on the backburner whilst focusing on Sansar, and that only hurt both platforms. Old Secundo Vitae (Second Life in latin), as much as possibly a small minority of their staff may disagree, is the lifeblood of Linden Lab — it is what keeps it afloat and relevant, and is what is to an extent, funding their other projects, such as Sansar and the now defunct Desura.

When Linden Lab shifted a majority of their focus onto Sansar back in 2016 and onwards, they left Second Life’s development to go to a crawl, and given the plummeting population from earlier this decade, which thankfully returned into mere stagnation (which is good, given a stable population is better than a declining one.). This left SL in a precarious situation — When its’ VR counterpart is recieving the attention, and SL has glaring problems that need to be tended to or at least mitigated — Doesn’t this mean that we should focus more on resolving the problems with Second Life at this point, and let Sansar’s development slow down?

At this point, even with my last post regarding my opinion on Sansar’s fate, considering it is being operated for the sake of the long run, Winding down development in Sansar seems to be a good idea, since they now have a somewhat feature-complete product, So does Second Life, yes, for the past 15 years, but that doesn’t take into account the problems with the platform.

This aside — The following Sections go into detail regarding the upcoming projects at Linden Lab and my opinions on their impact and how it will help shape Second Life as it marches on into the 2020s.

The Second Life Cloud Migration Project — and why it’s so important

CERN Server Farm, Switzerland (Courtesy of Florian Hirzinger, Wikimedia Commons)

For the past decade and a half, Second Life has been plagued with a lot of issues regarding infrastructure and its’ effect on the economy. This is mainly because of one major factor: Second Life’s Backend.

For those not in the know, the backend is essentially another term for the array of servers that handle the vital parts of a service on the internet, such as Second Life, Facebook, Google, so on and so forth. Just like the server farm at CERN as seen above, Linden Lab relies on actual hardware in a warehouse to operate Second Life.

Somewhere in Arizona (If I recall correctly, There is a warehouse with Linden Lab’s name on it — Mainly because it is the central server farm for Second Life, and has been for quite some time, if not the near-entirity of Second Life’s existance. Now, running a server farm is VERY expensive. We’re talking about an electric bill in the thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars every month, not to mention other expenses. Second Life relies on this backend for everything. Asset Servers, IM relay servers, Authentication Servers, Simulators, and the Grid’s main server itself — All run from this facility.

And in this day and age — this is not suitable for Second Life. Yes, Linden Lab having their own warehouse to run a server farm in may be all fine and Belldandy, but with Cloud computing, Second Life can operate better than ever, and with less cost, if done right. This is because of three major factors:

Instant Scale-ability — Cloud Servers too are stored in server farms, but what sets them apart is the fact that they are designed to run in Virtual machines and be able to be set up and operational within less than 10 minutes. This is perfect for Linden Lab in regards to simulators — as Simulators on private estates that have no one in them for a certain amount of time, can be ‘spun down’ and stored to disk, and the server shut down. When they will be needed again, the VM is initialized by the Grid server and the simulator(s) are spun up and ready to go at a minute’s notice.

Redundancy and Reliability— Due to Cloud servers running on Virtual Machines, which are essentially emulations of a machine running through software on a server such as KVM or Xen, their entire ‘hard drive’ is stored in a single file per cloud server on the physical server’s drives. This means that the contents of the servers can be backed up to a storage server (for instance, every night or whenever at the hours with lowest user concurrency) to be easily pulled from said server to a new server instance if the physical server running it fails.

Cost Efficiency — Cloud Servers are, in cases like Linden Lab’s — billed based on how much is being used. This means that simulators and other servers that aren’t being used as much as say, high traffic simulators like Kuula in Sansara, or one of the many Welcome Islands, for instance — will be billed less.

Some have made complaints that this will hike up prices. Possibly, it will, however, let’s take into consideration the following:

Linden Lab will no longer have to pay rent/land taxes on the warehouse the server farm is stored in.

Linden Lab can sell their hardware for a profit as to help smooth along things financially if it is rough at the start.

Linden Lab will no longer need to pay a large electric bill every month to operate the servers, as well as no longer needing to pay for Internet or other utilities they may need at the server farm.

Linden Lab can relocate or discharge the employees at the server farm, cutting employment costs.

All in all, the transition to the cloud is a good thing in general. In this day and age, it is no longer necessary for Linden Lab to own the physical servers and land needed to run Second Life, as it can all be outsourced to Amazon Web Services, who will maintain keeping the lights on and servers running, all on their own.

Project EEP! — Or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Look at the Clouds

Hanging Lot Parking Lot (Courtesy of Patchouli “Camilla Fidelis” Woollahra)

Project EEP, also known as the Windlight Enhancement Project (WEP) is one of Linden Lab’s other project that will be hitting the grid sometime this year. Not much has been released about what it will be, but we know the following:

It will allow Windlight data to be a exchangable item in the inventory, which can also be sold on the marketplace.

Textures can be uploaded to supplant textures in use by the asset server for all environments on a parcel.

Estate and region owners, as well as parcel owners can set and enforce (for region override) the look and feel of a parcel or region in terms of the environment through Windlight.

The length of a in-world day can be as short as 4 hours or as long as a whole week.

Although so far what we have is somewhat lackluster on the surface, I would like to see more features, such clouds being at a certain altitude, rather than being part of the “skybox”. I’d also like to see weather be implemented. It would be nice to have the Lindens be able to create a Gridwide weather system. It would make driving, flying and boating a even more fun experience. Of course, this could be overwritten by the client if they choose not to have rain fall on their parade, or if they want specific weather conditions for a photo.

Project Animesh — NPCs, anyone?

Animesh Is HERE!!!!! IN Second Life — From Medhue

For the past 15 years of Second Life’s existance, the only way to have a object “dance” was through sluggish, rudimentary ‘animations’ done through a script that ran slower than 56k dialup half the time. Given that Activeworlds, Second Life’s predecessor in terms of popularity, has had this feature for years on end, possibly long before Linden Lab even existed, says something about both the issues we’ve encountered with lack of features, as well as the possibilities for improvements to the platform beyond just Animesh.

I’m not too keen on the indepth details, but what I know is this:

Mesh objects rigged to the Second Life standard avatar skeleton will be able to use animations.

These animations can be switched out in much the same way you can change what animations an avatar can play, by dropping new animations into the object and then running them using a script. (WE: Edit suggested by viewer, thank you for the correction.)

This is good news for content creators who want to create NPCs, chatbots, or just want to create items that don’t rely on scripts moving a certain prim along an axis, but rather using an animation. I am genuinely looking forward to products that use this technology.

Last Names Making a comeback

No picture for this section aside, This is big more for social reasons more than anything else. There has been statements made time and time again that newer users, even if their avatar is 4 years old (like me) and have been in SL for quite some time, have been discriminated against because they don’t have a proper last name, but rather the placeholder name of “Resident”. Although I have never fallen victim to this, I can understand why it would be a thing. The removal of last names was done by Linden Lab around the turn of the Decade because it led to confusion from new users. Now that it is returning, the following has been made known:

Second Life will no longer rely on a basic username search for identifying a user through scripts in world, but will rather emphasize their GUID which is tied permanently to their Second Life Account.

Current Users will most likely be able to get one free username change as a result of the return of last names.

Resident may likely be locked off from being chosen, but this is unknown, and is more an assumption from me.

Users will likely have to choose from predefined last names. (Psst — Ebbe, Oz, anyone from LL — Put Hanamura on the list for me, yeah? I don’t mind sharing :3c)

It may be made clearer in registration that this name is for your avatar and can be anything you wish (withing the given parameters), preventing the confusion from when it was last implemented.

Users can change their name as many times as they like, but after the initial username change, they will have to pay a fee, which I’m estimating to possibly be around 4,000 L$ if not more. (Writer’s edit: Adjustment made to more properly reflect RL costs)

Project Shake’n’Bake — Also known as: Who needs a Omega Applier?

Remember “System Clothing”? Yeah. Neither do I.

As someone who joined Second Life just before Fitmesh became a reality, System Clothing as it’s called, wasn’t very popular to me or anyone. Mainly as a result of the technology behind becoming so antiquated, that no one in their right mind would be caught dead using it, unless they were either newbies, or for some reason prefered it.

This new project, “Shake’n’Bake”, as I have called it, consists of the following, which is sparse, to say the least:

The viewer, as well as the Avatar Baking service, will now extend system clothing to be baked onto mesh bodies.

This is done through a process of selecting the clothing, declaring to the viewer which body part to place it on, and on which faces it should be visible.

The resolution for system clothing will be doubled from 512 by 512 to 1024 by 1024.

This will lead to concerns for Omega, as this essentially is pretty much making the Omega Applier System redundant. All that is needed is for mesh body makers to sort out how to best implement the new feature into their bodies (if needed at all).

This does make for good news, however — as a gigantic back catalog of clothing, tattoos and skins are now readily available, along with higher definition textures breathing new life into this dead sub-industry of the gigantic fashion industry of Second Life. All I hope for is that Materials support is available for it when it comes out.

Performance Improvements! Also known (possibly) as : ABOUT DAMN TIME

Imagine this (hopefully) at 30 frames per second on your potato of a laptop, stay-at-home mothers of SL! (Image Courtesy of Charisma Jonesford via Wikimedia Commons.)

I have bemoaned time and time again, since time immemorial that Second Life has to be one of the most unoptimized 3D applications in existance. Mainly because of the fact that, as stated by Utilizator Mode:

LL is going to do what LL does best, implement a half assed fix for a symptom instead of fixing the cause of the problem, optimizing the viewer, fixing how it handles video memory, making the viewer use full capabilities of your videocard’s processing power(it uses CPU to calculate and only uses GPU to draw), And maybe even making a D3D version of the client for windows users.

- Utilizator Mode, — Jelly babies will take over SL soon (AKA how linden lab is planing to break second life) –

These are perfect solutions to the problem with performance in Second Life. If it weren’t for the performance issues, we could actually get Second Life looking more like a modern game at runtime rather than in photos edited in GIMP or Adobe Photoshop.

Not much has come from Linden Lab about these improvements, but this is what (little) we know.

Linden Lab is working on faster Rendering times for the viewer, which will mean higher framerates, if all goes well. Here’s hoping this leads to a rendering engine rewrite down the line that results in it being less CPU-bound.

Serverside optimization will result in possible higher land impact allocations, More agents per simulator as well as better script resource allocation.

All in all, I still stand by what Utilizator Mode said, in the fact that for Second Life to stay competitive in the 2020s, the Lindens MUST focus on Reworking parts of the client and server alike. Moving to a more neutrally-bound rendering engine, handling VRAM better, as well as possibly even making SL a multi-Rendering API application, with both Direct3D and OpenGL support. Failing to do so will inevitably have Second Life go down the same route that ActiveWorlds has, falling into obsolescence and nigh-obscurity.

I can’t say for certain that the optimizations Linden Lab has in mind will provide a substantial improvement or not, but I’m optimistic to say the least.

Double the Tier for a low low price of 9.99 plus shipping and handling! (And other Premium features)

For many, Second Life Premium isn’t really worthwhile unless you either desire to own land, have some extra spending money, or want to chat up a linden at all hours of the day about what abandoned parcel you want to buy off of them.

With recent changes that are both coming and are now in effect, this is what we have so far:

Linden Lab has doubled the tier for Premium members from 512m² to 1024m².

Linden Lab has reduced the cost of Tier by 10% permanently.

Second Life Tier Rates as of April 2nd, 2018 at 5:02PM SLT

With this, we might see land become more feasible for people in SL to own, however, this does come with the problems of Land Barons who charge exorbitant prices for land, such as LIFE Properties and the sort. The Lindens will have to sort out how to mitigate these problems (much to the chagrin of people who believe paying 1,200 USD for 1/2 of a region is a economically sound prospect — How’s that parcel in Julianna doing for ya?).

Other than this, we can expect other new features, which I believe will help make Premium more appealing, and maybe with the move to the cloud, we might see further reductions in cost, but that’s just wishful thinking from yours truly.

Anyone up for some shopping?

The Marketplace isn’t often used by me, As I usually go shopping in world at events like SaNaRae and Cosmopolitan to get my fix of clothing. However, this doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it. It provides me easy access to millions of in-world items at the click of a button.

And according to the Lindens, we’re getting new features. However, they have been extremely vague about this:

Many long requested features of the Marketplace are coming, however what those are, I have no idea.

The Marketplace is getting a facelift. Given that it hasn’t changed that much since it came out (if I recall correctly), It’s long overdue for one.

The Marketplace is the heart of the Second Life economy, where, in tandem with the LindEx, Hundreds of thousands of L$ is transacted for goods every single day. Given that it plays such a integral role in its’ economy, it deserves this update, and even though it’s small compared to the other updates on this list, I am looking forward to it nonetheless.

Other Changes

This isn’t all however. We are also seeing other changes coming to the platform which are much smaller, but will help improve things and set a tone for changes to come.

Land Auctions are getting revamped, using the recently added Place Pages feature implemented into Second Life. Users will be able to auction off their land, rather than just having Abandoned Land be auctionable.

Linden Homes are getting revamped and improved, possibly to fit with the new 1024sqm tier allocations.

Gridwide Experiences will allow users to use the Experiences feature throughout the grid unless blocked by the parcel, region or estate owner.

Themed Learning Islands are coming which will integrate itself into the Community Gateway program, allowing for people to seek out interests in Second Life and meet people with those same interests.

More exclusive Games and Experiences are coming, as well as a special surprise for the SL15B Celebrations.

Conclusion