this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Second Life

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This Community is not endorsed in any way by Linden Labs and no infringement on their trademarks is intended.

This Community will accept all reasonable posts on Second Life, please follow the server-wide rules and mark NSFW posts as such. Do not post content that is illegal in your jurisdiction or might get the instance owner in legal trouble in some other major jurisdiction. Promotion of SL businesses, blogs, Discord servers and similar SL related commercial content is acceptable as long as you do not overdo it with frequency.

Second Life is a 3D virtual world where almost all the content is user generated. It has been around since 2002 and publicly since 2003 and has developed significantly since then.

Unlike games Second Life and other virtual worlds do not have built-in goals, levels or similar mechanisms. You can think of it more like a place or a platform. Individual locations and groups in Second Life might offer some or all the features a game might have but Second Life (SL) as a whole does not.

Second Life has a wide range of ages, countries of origin, languages, interests and professions among its residents and is not limited to the typical gamer.

It offers many activities from building, landscaping and decoration over taking pictures and visiting art galleries, attending parties and live concerts, roleplay, travel by and racing a wide variety of vehicles in addition to the built-in teleports, combat both in vehicles and on foot as well as a number of adult activities. And of course you can make great friends and do all of those together.

The Second Life servers are often referred to as "The Grid" of if you want to distinguish the production and preview grids as Agni and Aditi. The OpenSim project is essentially an open source implementation of the server side of SL. There is a Lemmy Community for OpenSim

The Second Life client is called a viewer and apart from the official one there is a number of popular third party options.

Second Life Website

Second Life Marketplace

Second Life Maps

Second Life Grid Status

Second Life Wiki

Second Life Knowledge Base

Linden Lab Wiki Page about Official and Third Party Viewers

Official SL Flickr Group

Grid Survey

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Since a lot of people here don't seem to know about Second Life I figure some introductory materials can't hurt in case anyone decides to try it.

Second Life is made up of so called regions, each of them is a square 256m to a side and 4096m high as far as building is concerned. In theory the water level can be set to different values in each region but the most common is 20m, especially for the connected mainland regions where it has to match for the water to look connected between adjacent regions.

Inside a region there are coordinates x (low=west, high=east), y (low=south, high=north) and z (low=down, high=up).

Each region runs on a separate simulator (modern servers might host more than one simulator but it is separate processes) so crossing or teleporting into another region requires a handover. If regions are crossed in quick succession, especially with high latency connections, this can lead to crashes or falling off a vehicle.

The regions themselves are placed on a grid with x (again, low=west, high=east) and y (low=south, high=north) coordinates. The first region Da Boom around which the mainland grew has coordinates 1000, 1000. The coordinates can be shown in the viewer but the regions are more commonly addressed by their region name.

Spots on that coordinate grid that do not have a region show as an endless ocean (even if there are regions behind it you can not see them) and you can not enter them.

This coordinate grid has lead to Second Life expressions like "on the grid" for things happening on SL.

There are different types of regions with different performance characteristics, agent (avatar) limits and land impact (LI) limits for building and other objects. LI is often also referred to as prims by old time SL users since it used to be a limit in the primitives (cubes, spheres,...) that used to be the only way to build but since mesh objects were added the more general term land impact is used.

The Second Life mainland has a number of continents, almost all of them are part of a continuous area of connected regions. The major exception is Zindra, the adult continent.

Since this post is already quite long I will perhaps introduce the continents in a future post in detail. Hopefully this information will be helpful to some people.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I didn't know Second Life still existed! I don't think I've heard of it in years and years.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@clay_pidgin @taladar It's getting pretty amazing. Check out my fox puppy jumping around in Oak Grove.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm sorry, is there supposed to be a link? I don't know what oak Grove is.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@clay_pidgin Oak Grove is a region in Second Life. The point is the fox, not the stage. It’s by Rand Lupindo and Bowno Scarbridge who make the most amazing animal avatars.