On Tuesday, June 24th, 2025, Linden Lab held the second of the SL22B Meet the Lindens events, featuring personnel from the Product Operations teams. The session was pre-recorded, but included a text-based Q&A session afterwards. The session featured:
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Table of Contents |
This is a summary of the majority of topics discussed at the session, and the official video of the session is embedded at the end of this article.
For ease of reference, timestamps are provided to the relative points within the video where specific topics are discussed, allowing readers who prefer to listen to the comments directly to be able to do so. Note this is not intended to be a full transcript, but rather covers those items discussed which are liable to be of the most interest.
A Little Background
Grumpity Linden
Grumpity Linden: joined SL as a contractor with The Product Engine and helping with the development of (the then) Viewer 2.0 in 2009, and formally joined LL in 2014. As the Senior VP of Product and Engineering she is responsible for coordinating both teams and overseeing their various projects, often in a hands-on capacity (as with SL Mobile).
Personal highlight for the last 12 months at the Lab: working more closely with the creator community and going to the 2025 Game Developers Conference (GDC).
Kali Linden
Kali Linden: has been with Linden Lab for ten years, working on Second Life directly for the last five. She heads-up the teams responsible for the Lab’s web properties, the account management and log-in services, etc. Her current focus is on improving LL’s technology stack, improving the user experience and supporting the overall SL infrastructure.
Her teams directly oversee: the SL Marketplace; Web Search; the Linden Homes web portal; the Destination Guide pages; region purchasing pages; transactional security and accuracy; liaising with AWS for maintenance and cost efficiency; support tooling, asset delivery and storage – managing the databases handling all the inventory of all of SL user’s.
Personal highlight for the last 12 months at the Lab: Agrees with Grumpity on the GDC, and finds the energy and enthusiasm for the platform shown by users to be “really infectious”.
Working Together
- While Grumpity and Kali have different core focuses, they work together on matters of account security.
- Working on developing the Premium Plus and Plus subscriptions and working to try to make all subscription tiers a value proposition for users.
- They noted that not all the work that is carried out is necessarily user-visible (e.g. implementing new back-end tools in support of services, etc.), but often forms the backbone of keeping Second Life operations going.
Web and Tools
Marketplace
- Mobile support:
- Work is going into making the Marketplace more mobile-friendly and to display well on different screen sizes and from within the in-viewer browser without blotting out the entire scene view.
- The hope is to have a fluid experience so, for example, a user can see an item on an external website (Primfeed was the example used) can tap on the Marketplace link and view the item on the Marketplace with ease for any device and, if they want to, purchase it.
- CasperVend:
- LL still plan to integrate CasperVend into the Marketplace.
- Kali’s goal is to have the integration such that merchants can manage their CasperVend inventory and their Marketplace presence from the same place.
- Would like to incorporate CasperVend capabilities such as coupon sales and gift cards into the Marketplace as well, and expand on them.
- Further plans include making it easier for merchants to manage their Marketplace presence – easier inventory management, simpler listing import, and better reporting data.
- Continuing to improve MP Search in response to feedback from shoppers and merchants.
Web Capabilities
- Kali views the web as an extension to users’ in-world experience, and as such is constantly thinking about:
- An ability to view and possibly manage inventory from the web.
- A calendar system for events which also works in-world, and which can include maturity filters.
- Options for managing Groups and Friends from the web.
- Would like to see the web become a means for people to more easily be able to manage their Second Life without necessarily being logged-in to the desktop viewer.
- Is aware of request for people being able to gift subscriptions to friends; for tools for creators and venue owners to promote their spaces; proving shareable Marketplace gift cards – all of these might be seen as making Second Life a more connected environment in which it is easier to share with people you care about.
Second Life Mobile
- Avatars and Performance:
- At the start of the project, there would doubts about being able to get avatars rendering correctly on mobile devices – and it has proven to be hard.
- However, the team has made great strides in this area [Please refer to my April and June and / or watch the video below].
- Currently, work is focused on further performance improvements to further benefit avatar rendering and the app.
- Currently have a platform that allows existing users to do a lot of the things they can do on the desktop, stay in touch with friends / customers, etc.
- At the same time, what is available at present is not really enough for those new to SL to come in to it through the Mobile app and really get what Second Life is about.
- Work is therefore about meeting both sides of the coin: making Mobile a meaningful and useful companion for those already engaged in SL, and on making it a meaningful route for on-boarding those new to Second Life and giving them a clearer understanding of the broader “SL universe”.
- What the Mobile team is not doing is to try to force all of the desktop experience into the app – the aim is to translate what Second Life is into a more compact experience that meets the needs of new and experienced users.
- On the short-to-medium term roadmap are plans to work with the server team to provide this like:
- Persistent chat between Mobile and desktop, without loss of chat history when moving between one and the other
- The ability to use Mobile whilst logged-in to the desktop, so allowing people to leave their desktop (e.g. to get a drink or something) and still continue to chat, see group notifications, etc.
- Direction for development is often the result of taking feedback from users. Such feedback is gathered via the Feedback Portal, including the Mobile Alpha Features section, through the monthly Mobile User Group meetings [Note: summaries of Mobile User Group meetings can be found here].
- Feedback can also be gathered by a physical presence at new user starting locations.
- Data has shown a lot of Mobile users are in fact new to SL, heightening the desire to make it a great experience for them.
Server and Viewer
- The last 6+ months has seen a concerted effort to improve the performance of the viewer.
- This work has seen a number of performance gains, although it is in part to compensate in a loss of performance seen in late 2024.
- These performance improvements have been made across different platforms and for different chipset.
- Work is continuing on performance, looking at crash rates, FPS, as well as having a focus on quality of life improvements in the hope of making the viewer more a tool to allow people to “get to” their second life, rather than being a product in and of itself.
- ;The viewer team has also been working closely with Firestorm to help them get their most recently release out the door, which contains all of the features and improvements LL have released over the last 6+ months, as well as including WebRTC (new Voice service) support.
glTF Importer
- The aim with the glTF importer is to make things like importing meshes and materials as simple and straightforward as possible.
- The initial alpha release of a viewer with the importer can be found on the Alternate Viewers page.
- Mesh content creators and encouraged to try it out and offer feedback and to attend the Content Creation User Group to discuss the importer.
- [Note: summaries of Content Creation User group meetings can be found here]. The more feedback given, the 9potentially) faster the importer can be stabilised and make its way through to a release viewer.
WebRTC
- WebRTC (Real Time Communications) is the new Voice protocol for Second Life, replacing Vivox and the need for a Voice API plug-in in the viewer.
- The WebRTC had been stalled as a result of the focus on performance coupled with a large (but now in substantial decline) number of users using a pre-PBR version of Firestorm (and thus without the necessary WebRTC support).
- The current target is to have the entire grid running WebRTC by the end of summer 2025.
- WebRTC voice quality should be superior to Vivox.
- WebRTC also offers “practically endless” possibilities for feature development.
- One of the first features to be included with WebRTC is that of moderation tools: these will allow land owners to set the rules for using Voice on their land and carry out Voice moderation – when people opt to be stupid in Voice.
- Other options being considered for use with WebRTC included AI tools to allow things like instant translation, voice-to-text, text-to-voice, all aimed at expanding accessibility.
New Subscription Level
- Pending a formal announcement, LL are thinking about how to make Premium Plus benefits accessible to a broader swath of users.
- This includes the idea of offering a version of Premium Plus for creators [only?] without the weekly stipend payout, which would reduce the overall cost of having a Premium Plus account, whilst retaining all the other benefits.
- This subscription might also be payable in Linden Dollars, although this may not be an option when it is initially launched.
- Details will be made available on this once things are finalised / ready to be announced.
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