Category: Musings

Official Second Life Viewer for Apple Silicon offers 20-200% FPS Improvement

During the Zoom call last Thursday (25th September) something was mentioned that seems to have slipped under the radar, everyone focussed on the new “Premium Plus no stipend” news.

What didn’t make so much news was the mention of a new official Second Life viewer for Mac, written to run on the “M” series of chips, or “Apple Silicon” as it’s known.

This viewer has been mostly created by third-party open-source developers who did most of the work coding a viewer to utilise the technical capabilities of these chips. Philip Rosedale admitted during the call that there’s no way the Lab could have dedicated enough time or resources to do this work and they are very grateful to the community.

Linden Lab then used this code as a base for a new Official Viewer which is integrated into Viewer 7.2.2.17774206511 Beta and according to Brett Linden  “will soon be advanced to the default Mac Viewer”.

What got my attention was Philip Rosedale’s excitement as he commented that the difference they have seen in FPS (Frames per Second) is “between 20% and 200% improvements”, even on his old M1 generation MacBook.

However, I was at the WebRTC voice stress-test last night and it was Phillip that kept disconnecting. To be fair though, there were well over 100 avatars present, which would strain most systems. He was reporting 30fps in that crowded space though, which he sounded very happy about and is pretty impressive.

So I thought I’d try it for myself and asked a friend very nicely if they’d lend me their MacBook for a couple of days. It was a MacBook Air 15, 2023 M2 with 8GB RAM, I was pleasantly surprised.

I did some very unscientific tests noting the FPS at a few places with the current Release viewer then cleared the cache and updated to the current Beta. I then went back to each place to note any differences.

Current Release Viewer

LocationFPS on arrivalLowest FPSApproximateaverage once all RezzedAvatars Present
FaMeshed61282750
Warehouse 214311.427 (but laggy and crashed)51
Muddy’s452120’s45
Totally 80’s453430’s(didn’t count)

Beta Viewer

LocationFPS on arrivalLowest FPSApproximateaverage once all RezzedAvatars Present
FaMeshed3424.6mid 30’s44
Warehouse 21431527 (stable not laggy)44
Muddy’s44243562
Totally 80’s402640’s to 5239

I left the graphics settings at the installed defaults which were in the Low range, but increased the Draw Distance to 240m. The Beta viewer was noticably smoother and seemed to lag less where the previous viewer had, but maybe just a complex avatar had left between my visits. If you have a Mac though, I’d definitely download the Beta, you’ll notice a marked improvement.

Information from the release notes:

Known Issues:

  • Apple Silicon does not support convex decomposition for physics meshes
    • We are looking to have a new convex decomposition solution for generating physics meshes in a subsequent release for all platforms
  • Apple Silicon does not support pathfinding tools
  • Navigation buttons in the in-viewer browser are no longer present for marketplace and search
    • We will be restoring these in a future update
  • Subtle rendering differences might be noticed on certain configurations and EEP environments
    • We are working to improve these.

You can find more details and download it from the Release Notes page.

Being a Windows user, this really won’t affect me, but I know there’s a lot of Mac users out there and I feel this should have got a bit more of a fanfare for their sake. Maybe that’ll come when it’s promoted to being the default.

The header image is a screenshot from the WebRTC test session.

A Cheaper Premium Plus, but who’s it for and who wants it?

So here’s my take on the news that’s appeared on several blogs already; Linden Lab announce a new subscription plan . “Premium Plus – no stipend” quite simply a subscription with exactly the same benefits as Premium Plus, just without the signup bonus and monthly payment of 650L$, at a cheaper price. You can expect this to become available mid October.

Table showing different Second Life subscription plans, with Premium Plus highlighted that has a check box labelled “Save $105.12 US without Stipend & Bonus”.

Targeted particularly at creators or store owners that want the other benefits like free uploads, but don’t need the stipend payments because their business provides a Linden dollar income. The Lab believe it will also suit enthusiastic residents that want the benefits like the extra groups, but prefer to buy Lindens as they need them. Apparently the majority of current Premium Plus members buy extra Lindens anyway, so reducing the monthly/annual subscription outlay might be appealing.

Brad said in a Zoom call on Thursday “It’s the best option for SL”(people taking a no-stipend subscription). This is because paying Residents stipends puts extra lindens into circulation in the virtual economy, which is a pool that’s already flooded, which affects the exchange rate negatively.

After the Zoom call, I took the above image and posted it into the Fantasy Faire Backstage Discord server with a brief explanation to see what the merchants thought. Here’s some of the responses;

“They vastly overestimate how much I actually make lol. I spend more on stuff to make stuff with than I earn back lol I like the stipend but i could see it (non stipend plan) being handy for some”

“yeah i’ll keep my stipened some weeks it’s all i have coming in […] but certainly a good deal if you are only going to cash out”

“The stipend is the reason i have premium plus…they gonna give us one thats just free uploads with a stipend? lol i dont need the group space, or the land bonus, just the uploads and the stipend…actually i could do without stipend if theres just free uploads”

“As someone who is neither a creator nor a DJ, I always have more outgo than income in SL. My stipend goes right to the tipjars of the couple of events I attend each week, and the rest out of pocket. I wish there was a level between Premium and Premium Plus Minus Stipend. Maybe something with 110 groups and 450 L$ stipend but leave all the upload fees at Premium level since I don’t mind paying 10 L$ for the occasional texture a couple times a month.”

In contrast a larger brand creator I shared the news with said:

“Wow”

They seemed keen on the idea, despite having just renewed their annual Premium Plus subscription. However since there was talk of being able to switch plans quickly, that might not be an issue.

What I take from this is that the no-stipend plan is much more suited for large-scale businesses. Smaller businesses still appreciate it, but also raised above are the things people don’t need but are paying for. Some don’t need the land bonus (they possibly have a full region for their store), others don’t need masses of groups. I think this should be the first step in creating a custom subscription system, allowing you tick boxes for the benefits you want or don’t want and have the price adjusted accordingly.

Draxtor Retires from Video creation but not Second Life

For approximately 18 years Bernard Drax,aka Draxtor Depres, has been making videos about Second Life. Yesterday he did a live stream announcing he wouldn’t be doing any more. He may upload more unreleased videos he still has, but he doesn’t plan to make any more.

I’m not overly surprised to hear this, after his monologue last month, regarding the closure of the Second Life Book Club islands.

Drax says he’s not “burnt-out” he just wants to change his focus in life, some self-care after many busy years. He intends to focus more on his family and himself doing such things as producing for his son’s band, since his background is in music. To me it’s sad news, but a totally understandable decision that I totally respect. Especially since Linden Lab withdrew their sponsorship in March 2024, which I think was a big mistake on their part.

However Drax isn’t leaving SL, he’ll be logging in to reply to messages and may well turn up if you invite him to any events you may be having.

Watch the Announcement Video for more details.

The channel will remain as a curated archive of videos documenting Second Life, along with the documentaries he produced, going back as far as the 17th May 2007.

Here’s the link to the channel: https://youtube.com/@draxtor

Related links:

Someone’s gotta write about it…The LindeX and more.

Yesterday there was another Linden Lab Zoom call. I’m not sure what subject to write about frankly, because several topics were covered,but as a fellow blogger said to me; “Someone’s got to, or what was the point?”

I was a bit confused at the start as to the purpose of the call,  because they were talking about the Lindex (Linden Dollar currency exchange). I don’t use Facebook or regularly read the SL Forums so I was unaware some creators have been worrying (complaining maybe?) about the market fluctuating. It’s a financial market, this stuff happens. The problem is (as I understand it) the market is stagnating, as in it’s been stable for too long. The physical world, with tangible currencies has had 20 years of inflation, Second Life hasn’t, apparently the exchange would realistically be nearer 400 than the 250 that it’s been at for decades. As a result the money creators make in Linden Dollars, is worth a lot less than it used to be when cashed out. This isn’t a new problem, the Lab have been struggling with it for some time. In  Brad’s words; “Covid saved us”. Meaning that when the COVID-19 Pandemic came along, there was a sudden influx of new and returning residents, who all needed to buy virtual cash, giving the economy a massive boost. Those residents now seem to have left again.

What’s the solution? It’s a bit tricky to say the least. If creators raise prices, customers are less inclined to spend and it won’t solve anything. If Linden Lab intervenes and sets the value of the Linden Dollar, residents will say they’re interfering. Customers don’t want prices to go up, neither does the Lab, it’d make the situation worse.

I’m no financial expert,so I can’t really speculate on solutions, but one thing that wouldn’t hurt is more people spending money,as in new residents.

One barrier to new residents actually buying anything however is store owners setting their security systems to kick out residents under 30 days old. How can you expand your customer base if you do that? I understand it’s a common practice to reduce spammers and griefers, but the situation the SL economy is in right now, those new residents are the most important ones. Don’t put your prices up, let more customers into your stores.

A few other points that were mentioned before I cease my rambling;

  • Creators that were having their products copy-botted will be pleased to hear that the most prolific offenders (that Linden Lab could prove) are in Brad’s words “gone and won’t be coming back. They got more than a stern letter.”
  • On the subject of the real-time transactions experiment that went tragically wrong; The more secure an account, the more likely those payments in real-time will be. I interpret that as maybe they might introduce them for accounts that have MFA enabled, but that’s just speculation on my part.
  • On new signups; The number of new accounts has gone up x10 more than previously. Of those residents, twice the number are staying around, but it still needs to improve. It just takes one bad experience, like being booted by a stores security system, to leave and not come back. Grumpity Linden gave an example based on metrics of new users arriving at a stores landing point then not going in.
  • Random stat revealed by Philip: The average avatar age of regular logins is 14 years old.

Basically we’re all old, getting older, and don’t have a clue how to keep the next generations from leaving after a few minutes on the mobile app.

Flickr Terms update for Everyone and especially UK residents.

This morning I received an email from Flickr saying there was a Terms of Service update that came into effect yesterday (24th July). My first thought was “what new restrictions are they going to implement now that’ll push SL folks out even more?”

Well the first major thing is a minimum age limit for account holders of 18.

What’s Changing For Everyone

The primary update is that Flickr will now require all new users to be 18 years of age or older to create an account. This change helps us align with evolving global online safety standards and ensures a consistent and safe environment for our entire community.

For residents in the UK, it gets worse:

For Users in the United Kingdom: Important Changes to Content Access

Due to new UK regulations designed to protect minors online, we are implementing a specific change for how content is accessed within the UK.

Effective July 24, 2025:

  • Access to content with SafeSearch turned OFF will require a Flickr Pro subscription.
  • This is because a Pro subscription requires credit card verification, which serves as age assurance under UK law.

So if you’re in the UK and want to see stuff that isn’t PG rated appropriate (which lets be honest applies to quite a bit of Second Life content) you’ll have to shell out for a Pro account.

The big flaw in that plan however is: You can open a bank account at 16 in the UK, or as young as 11 with parental involvement.

Further:


What this means for you in the UK

  • Free Users: SafeSearch will be automatically enabled by default. To view all content on Flickr, you will need to upgrade to a Pro account.
  • Pro Users: No action is needed. Your ability to turn SafeSearch off remains unchanged.

This change will definitely have a very detrimental affect a lot of people use of the site. Who I think will suffer most here will be merchants displaying their creations, all of a sudden they’ve lost the majority of their UK audience, and of course their UK customers that can’t see those adverts.

Another attempt by Flickr to try and push out Second Life and other virtual world content? Maybe, but that’s where we are now.

Farewell Second Life Book Club Islands

A couple of days ago I got a YouTube notification about a video from Draxtor:

ATTENTION BOOKSTERS: SL Book Club Archipelago is closing = we do a last walkthrough

Linden Lab are closing the islands that hosted the Second Life Book Club shows, that started April 2020 and finished November 2024, tomorrow (Friday 11th July 2025).

In Draxtors words:

“The Second Life Book Club Islands, which were a gift from Linden Lab. The agreement was that I would get these islands to conduct a weekly event. Author interviews, celebrations of the art of writing, and the joy of reading. And it was really awesome. We started in April 2020. And we concluded November last year. And now is the time to take these down because there really is no event anymore.”

Transcribed from this video.

I got up early this morning to try and follow Drax around as he did the last possible walkthrough of Island #4.

You can watch the different island walkthrough videos on his YouTube channel and all the episodes of the Second Life Book club in this playlist.

I attended many of the bookclub shows between 2021 and 2022 and watching some of the walkthroughs brought back fond memories. I have a large collection of snapshots I took at the shows, some you can see in this Flickr Album, but I will try to sort through the rest adding appropriate author and show details and make them available somewhere.

The Second Life Book Club should never be forgotten.  It was a prime example of the use case for virtual worlds. Of course you can have a book club anywhere, but only in a virtual world can you create a discussion space that resembles a setting from or inspired by the book and avatars that resemble the characters…every WEEK!

If you don’t watch any of the videos linked above,(some are quite long and everyones busy) just watch the clip embedded below; It’s the last 15 minutes of this mornings walkthrough in which Drax shares a few pearls of wisdom and a suggestion about reading that I think everyone should consider.

(Apologies to Draxtor for my avatar being a background distraction for a few minutes, before I realised I was in his camera shot.)

What am I trying to Achieve?

Earlier today I saw a post on Bluesky from a longtime Second Life resident and very empty club owner. I responded with a genuine query about what might encourage them to return more to SL, because non-returning residents and lack of new ones is a real problem for the platform. It was an interesting and enlightening conversation, until I messed up and mentioned something Brad had said (and the Lindens have been saying for years) about land prices vs fees. I just want to try to do my little bit to help, but here I was spouting a mantra that has annoyed myself and others for years, even decades.

As the exchange came to a close, they wished me luck in “whatever you’re trying to achieve”, which made me think.

This blog is meant to be about the fun stuff I do and find in Second Life. I look at my previous three posts and they’re related to what Linden Lab has been up to. While these things do and will have an effect on everyone’s Second Lives, it feels maybe I’ve become too “Linden-adjacent”, whatever that may mean.

The fact that two bloggers have actually said they wouldn’t bother joining the Zoom calls and would wait for my summary writeups instead, supports that.

A final note on the conversation that made me almost laugh at the unlikelihood (but validity) of it was “LL should be paying you and others in the program handsomely to do outreach”. (“program” being a reference to the SL Blogger Network that I mentioned being part of.)

Time to play now.

Ava Bloodrose,MA Education in Virtual Worlds

Thunes Buys Tillia – Don’t Panic

Last night there was a meeting with a collection of bloggers,creators and Linden Lab employees to discuss the transition of Second Life payment processing from Tillia to Thunes.

The acquisition of Tillia was announced last year. Strawberry Linden put some of the most common questions back then to Brad Oberwager in an episode of Lab Gab, that you can watch HERE. It’s worth watching because it outlines most of what has now happened,as well as conveying Brad’s excitement and enthusiasm for the venture.

Last night’s Zoom call was to bring people up to date and share the latest, so we could pass that onto our audiences/readers.

What happened?

Tillia got sold and a company much more suited to operating it acquired it. Thunes is a global financial services provider, Tillia was simply created to allow Linden Lab to legally operate it’s own currency (Linden Dollars) and process credit cards.

What’s going to change?

Immediately for most residents, not a lot. On Wednesday (or the next time you visit after that) you will be asked to check a box on the website, acknowledging the change of the company name from Tillia to “Thunes Financial services LLC”. In the future it should lead to more options for buying Linden Dollars and cashing-out to your bank or other accounts.

An analogy Brad used was a local coffee shop, that I’m going to paraphrase.

If you pay with your card the receipt may have a reference to “Square” (a common card processing company in the US), if the coffee shop changes their card processing company to for example “SumUp” (a card handler common in the UK) your receipt may have a reference to that company, but the price of your coffee doesn’t change.

So the change to Thunes is like that. Tillia is being renamed but all your details and transactions are exactly where they always were, like the name on the coffee shop changing, it’s still in the same place. (If they’d tried moving any of it, that would have been the risky part for everyone, so they didn’t.)

It’s possible you may have to re-enter your credit card details, or check some boxes to reconfirm payment or payout methods and that’s it.

The LindeX exchange remains under the control of Linden Lab, Thunes cannot change the price you pay for Lindens.

Right now you may be thinking “what about fees?”, and rightly so. Linden Lab intends to make fees more transparent, by showing you the fee breakdown. Showing how much of that fee they have to pay to provide you that particular payout option. This then allows you to better choose what method you want to use.

What happened in the call?

I’ve now taken part in several of these calls, but this one was different. I’ve seen Brad excited, enthusiastic,angry and range in-between. This time,as someone pointed out in the call text chat, he looked a little scared. Don’t be mistaken though, this was not fear of things going wrong with the switch over to Thunes; they’ve been working hard for months to make sure it goes smoothly. What he’s worried about are the emails he receives.  Every time he puts himself on the line to change something for the better in Second Life he usually receives at least 50 “You’ve ruined SL!” type emails, some of which get very personal.

Given the internal and regulatory scale of this change (think lawyers in 48 US States all having to agree to it), I can understand his emotions.

The example of the “Potato1” support case was mentioned, which Bloggers heard about last week during the call about account security.

So if your password is something like “potato1” please change it, for everyone’s sake. We don’t really want a forced grid-wide password reset on account of you folks.

A final point that came up around fees that charities have to pay (just like everyone else) when cashing out the donations residents have made. Those fees can’t be waived, someone has to pay them somewhere, and Brad said he may well do that, out of his own personal pocket, not Linden Labs. With a slight caveat of “maybe not if it was a Million Dollar donation”.

Avatar Account Security – Stop Self Hacking

Today there was a Zoom meeting held between the Second Life Blogger Network and Linden Lab, to discuss “account safety and security”.

As you’re probably aware by now, these meetings get arranged when the Lab has something in particular it wants to share with the Community and they know that lots of Residents don’t see or read the announcement blog posts(me included).

When I received the invitation email and read the subject matter my first thought was “they’re going to ask us to push MFA” (Multi Factor Authentication).

Which was correct, but not the main focus as I’d expected. I was hoping that at this meeting they were going to announce the introduction of recovery keys when setting up MFA, but no.

The main cause of account takeovers are people sharing their passwords. So the accounts aren’t so much being hacked, but as Brad Oberwager said in the meeting, they’re “Self-hacking”.

This is because fraudsters have gotten so good at social engineering. Basically becoming your friend and duping you into sharing your login details.

So there’s some simple DO’s & DON’Ts that the Lab would like to reiterate:

DO:

  • STOP sharing your passwords
  • Change your password (Can you remember when you changed it last? No? Change it NOW.)
  • Enable Multi-Factor Authentication in your account Dashboard

DON’T:

  • Buy Linden Dollars outside of the Second Life platform. (It’s always a scam and Linden Lab can’t help you.)
  • Click on links in chats (yes they could disable them, but can you imagine the backlash?)

All seems quite obvious really doesn’t it? Well yes, but people still aren’t doing these things.

Remember that the Lab could force a grid-wide password reset at any time. The reason they don’t (it would make things easier for them) is that there are people that have been logging in for a decade or more with a saved password they may not even know anymore. So change your password and keep it safe.

You may be wondering why you’re hearing about more account takeovers than you used to, as always it comes down to money. Linden Lab wants to make financial transactions as smooth and timely as possible, everyone likes things to be easy, right? Well the downside of doing real-time transactions is that you become a very attractive target to bad people, that are very good at what they do.

There’s a lot of trust in Second Life, which is great for community spirit, but when it comes to your account password, treat it like your bank details; don’t share it.

Linden Lab Official Post

(Yes, I did practice what I preached and changed my password.)

Linden Lab adds Phone Verification to Second Life Discord Server Access – A step too far?

I’ve been in the Second Life Discord server for some time now, since I was granted access as an Alpha tester for the mobile app. I was very pleased when they finally made the server public recently. To be able to post any messages in the server you now have to link your Discord account with a Second Life avatar account. I’d say that’s fair enough, it provides a layer of accountability that is reasonable.

That is of course until yesterday someone posted:

I verified with an alt

Which reveals a big flaw in that idea.

So what was the Labs solution? They added the requirement to “Verify Phone”, which is what I was presented with this morning if I wished to post in any Channel in the Discord mobile app.

While I understand they want to protect the server and themselves from misbehaving members, I think the mobile requirement is a step too far.  I think this step may put people off participating. Including myself.

Of course the Lab knows my real life identity, but I don’t think people should have to hand over a phone number to be able to use a Discord server. A well known blogger has the same requirement on their server and I just didn’t join on the grounds of that.

What makes this more of a joke is that today getting a phone number is almost as easy as creating an alt avatar account. Unfortunately Google Voice that offer free numbers aren’t available in the UK and equivalent services are paid for. Adding another security layer, that’s easily bypassed, seems unnecessarily futile and could negatively impact Resident  engagement.

Addition:

First reader comment received directly minutes after publishing:

they tell how much they value being anonymous and then they did that. Pissed me off big time

Second reader comment via Bluesky:

Great… I just joined the server a couple of days ago and now this happens – and I feel like leaving the server again. I honestly don’t want to add my phone number for verification

Third response received directly:

Just saw this – and just left the server. lol

From Bluesky:

I was able to chat 4 hours ;D – than they activated phone verification…. SOOORRYYYYY

Another comment via Bluesky puts a slightly different spin on the topic:

It’s more of a moderation used in and by big server all over discord.

This is to verify the account holder is human and not a throw away account used for trolling/spamming sure the system is not perfect but stops 97%-99% of unwanted behaviour.

Anyway discord doesn’t share this number with third parties

While this might explain things a little, the Lab should make this detail clear in the server description or rules text.

But the discussion continues some time later:

The official Second Life Discord server is so great that I quickly left it. I have no desire to talk to uneducated people who comment on topics they know nothing about. I don’t usually dehumanize, but what’s there is a zoo.