Tag: SLua

Lab officially announces Lua Alpha testing

Posted on by Inara Pey
via Linden Lab

On Friday, March 14th, Linden Lab officially announced the Second Life Lua Alpha, with testing now available on Aditi, the Beta grid.

Now officially referred to as SLua (SL Lua), this is a project to replace Mono as the back-end scripting language, utilising a version of the Roblox-derived Luau scripting language, which Linden Lab has been working on developing for some time now (as noted within updates in this blog, such as my Simulator User Group summaries), and this Alpha project is to allow early testing of the capability.

Note: this is the server-side scripting implementation of Luau, not the in-viewer support for Lua. This latter work is still in development, and will be subject to future updates from the Lab.

General Notes on Testing

  • The Aditi regions running Luau support are: [Luau Yardang], [Luau Tombolo], [Luau Mesa] and [Luau Tideland].
    • These support both native Lua scripting and compiling LSL to Luau VM.
    • Make sure your Viewer shows the Beta Grid in your login options. To do this:
      • Go to Preferences → Advanced and select Show Grid Selection at Login.
      • Then re-log, selecting Second Life Beta Test Grid from the drop-down under Last Location in the splash screen. Note you might need to log in twice the first time so your inventory can properly sync.
  • A Luau-capable viewer is required – download the latest from the Second Life Alternate Viewers page.
    • This viewer will work on any region in SL, but will only compile scripts to Luau on the Aditi regions noted above.
  • Additional general notes:
    • SLua scripting is in early development. Memory and performance characteristics, and API specifics may change! Regions will crash and it’s possible you may lose content if you don’t save often into inventory when working on the beta grid. Error reporting when compiling scripts from LSL to Luau is “quite spartan at the moment”, but will be improved “in the next update or two”.
    • If objects with compiled Luau script assets are rezzed in a non-Luau region, they won’t work.

Luau Resources

SLua Contest

To help promote SLua testing, Linden Lab is, from Monday, March 17th, 2025, running a creator contest to demonstrate the potential and capabilities of the language. with L$170,000 in prizes. For details, please refer to the official blog post for full details. Awards will be determined by committee in April, and winners as well as runners up will be highlighted on official Second Life news sites and social media.