An idea for major Second life improvement
closed
Roy Ghostraven
Dear Linden Lab,
I am a longtime resident of Second Life and I want to begin by saying how much I appreciate what you have built. Second Life remains one of the most unique and meaningful virtual worlds available. It allows people from around the world to connect, build communities, explore environments, and even maintain long-distance relationships in ways that very few platforms enable.
Because I value the platform so much, I wanted to share a few ideas that I believe could help Second Life continue to evolve and remain the leading social virtual world for many years to come. Technology and platforms naturally evolve over time, and innovation is often what allows great platforms to remain strong and relevant. Continued improvements to immersion and environmental systems could help Second Life feel even more alive and modern while still preserving the creativity that makes it special.
One area that could greatly improve the experience is ambient environmental simulation. Many modern virtual environments include built-in soundscapes and environmental effects that automatically respond to the surroundings. In Second Life today, most ambient sound must be manually added by creators, which can cause many regions to feel quiet or empty if those sounds are not present.
It would be wonderful if Second Life offered optional environmental sound packages that could be enabled at the system level. For example:
• coastal regions could include ocean surf, wind, and seagulls
• forests could include birds, insects, and rustling leaves
• deserts could include wind and atmospheric ambience
• city environments could include distant traffic and urban sounds
Ideally, residents could control this through viewer settings with options such as:
• system ambient sounds
• region/creator sounds
• a hybrid mode that combines both
This would preserve the creativity of region designers while ensuring that environments always feel immersive.
Another improvement that could make the world feel more vibrant would be the introduction of cohesive pre-designed environments with built-in infrastructure. While Second Life already allows residents to build incredible regions, many areas begin as empty terrain. Linden Lab could offer optional environments where the foundational world elements already exist, such as:
• roads and pathways designed for exploration
• natural coastlines and beaches
• forests, hills, and natural landscapes
• moving vegetation that responds to wind
• environmental lighting and atmosphere
• integrated ambient sound appropriate to the environment
Residents could then customize these areas with their own homes, apartments, gardens, boats, and personal builds. This approach would allow regions to feel like complete living environments while still preserving the creative freedom that Second Life is known for.
Water and ocean environments are another area where immersion could be expanded. Oceans and coastlines are a major part of Second Life’s landscape, yet underwater spaces are often largely empty and the water surface is mostly static. Within these rebuilds, enhancing wave motion, shoreline interaction, underwater lighting, and marine life could make beaches and oceans far more engaging. Underwater areas in particular could become places residents actually want to explore rather than simply empty spaces beneath the surface.
Improving environmental immersion would also benefit activities such as sailing, boating, driving, and exploration. Many residents enjoy relaxing experiences like walking along the beach, taking a boat out on the water, exploring scenic regions, or simply spending time together in a shared environment. Enhancing these aspects of the world could strengthen the social and exploratory side of Second Life.
Second Life already has an incredible foundation and community. With continued innovation in environmental systems, sound design, and immersive world infrastructure, it could feel even more alive and welcoming for both longtime residents and new users discovering the platform.
Thank you for continuing to develop and support such a unique and important virtual world.
Sincerely,
A longtime Second Life resident
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Spidey Linden
marked this post as
closed
Hello, and thank you for your feature request.
Unfortunately, we are unable to address tickets that contain several requests. We may be interested in one or more of them, but accepting this request communicates that we are accepting all of them, which we may not want to do. You are welcome to submit each of your feature requests as separate tickets and we will review them then.
We are grateful for the time you took to submit this feature request. We hope that you are not discouraged from submitting others in the future. Many excellent ideas to improve Second Life come from you, our residents. We can’t do it alone.
Thank you for your continued commitment to Second Life.
JuniperDawn Resident
I would want the option to blacklist the sound like sound systems have at the moment. Nothing worse than ambient sounds like you're sat listening to lovely music and bird chirping or water running messing it up. As someone who suffers with auditory processing issues I firmly believe making this a land setting rather than an object you can find and blacklist is a terrible idea
Zalificent Corvinus
Obvious "Artificial Idiocy" generated slop is obvious...
In addition, I'm one of the many people in SL who have the "ambient" sound effects turned OFF, permanently, because they are repetitive, and bloody annoying.
Further, since regions do NOT have a setting for being officially "forest/desert/urban/coastal", to set this ambient system up, an actual human being with Estate Manager powers would need to visit EVERY SINGLE ONE of the 8000? or so mainland regions. That will NEVER happen.
Adding marine live to the hundreds of maritime regions would also require manual intervention by an actual PAID human, so, that will also NEVER HAPPEN.
LL don't have enough people to fix the REAL problems, without "Immersion Fascist Fake Problems (tm)" wasting resources.
And, the I-Word... The dreaded "Immersion".
99 Times out of 100, when people start spamming the I-word into their ideas, you know you are listening to a fool who is POSITIV that "everyone wants MORE I-word", even if it's disruptive, annoying, and expensive.
RP that this happened and play repetitive bird song loops on your own PC if you really want to listen to that all day.
On the basis of a stupid idea, total lack of understanding, Immersion Fascism, and AI generated slop, I rate this suggestion at -999 out of a possible 10
Let's NOT and say we did...
Holocluck Henly
Re the environmental sounds... I despise that popular birdsong audio most people use. After much research got a system that allowed me to customize and have a more realistic & subtle ambience.
There's no guarantee most people will appreciate these as default, esp if they drown out what others want to hear. For places like certain communities and SLB it would be annoying.
Beatrice Voxel
I sort of see the appeal here, but having been a tenant on private regions for, oh, years, I can say that these regions get terraformed by the land owners as a regular thing. Most of Anshe and Lorena Chung's region holdings are terraformed as a matter of aesthetics, prior to the region or parcels being leased out. It'd be -nice- if LL offered these services, but ultimately it's on the land owners and tenants to decorate as they see fit.
The 'sound' idea does have merit, as right now it's pretty much a matter of dropping sound generators in strategic spots. But again, there's a problem if the global region/parcel 'soundlight' suite conflicts with a build. Should you hear the ocean inside a cave? Should you hear traffic in a skybox? so these things would need to be reconciled.
AlettaMondragon Resident
I might upvote this later but I feel like in this form this suggestion has serious weaknesses and it's too much of a blanket instead of focusing on one specific improvement at the time. If you only went for the wildlife in a standalone suggestion for example, it'd be an instant upvote from me. However even with the upvote, I'd debate how, what, where, when should be placed, as in, what would be theme appropriate animals for certain areas, how exactly to place them, what brands and technology would be used, etc. For example should we put wandering elephants somewhere on Mainland or Bellisseria, and if so, where exactly? How many? Who would manage them? For example who would reset them when they get stuck? The LDPW has been struggling to keep up with minor road and railroad maintenance for some time now, could they take on fish and wildlife duties too? So there are all these questions to consider. Otherwise wildlife = YES, but only if implemented thoughtfully.
Yman Juran
a supreme positive concept....
Rinaldo Debevec
Your first suggestion is an interesting idea, we have windlight now for atmospheric conditions and water, with many defaults to choose from, but also the ability to customize. What you are suggesting is similar to windlight, except it will be for sound.
The second suggestion is also interesting. To have some presets for the terrain along with objects on it (if that's what you are suggesting?) That might be a lot trickier to implement though.
Wicked Nightfall
Sooo we have the mainland that fits your 2nd part. What we need is a complete upgrade away from the very old un-optimized garbage that SL runs on now.
Spiffy Voxel
To be fair, there are a lot of options available in-world and on the Marketplace for those looking to create ambient sound environments. If Linden Lab were to add such sound environments to existing regions, that would cause several issues. Firstly, it would eat into the existing land allowance of anyone looking to build on that land. Second, it could potentially conflict with what the region or parcel owner wants in terms of ambience for their builds.
The only places where this _might_ be appropriate would be on land owned and operated by Linden Lab and/or the LDPW (Linden Department of Public Works, aka the Moles.) But otherwise, I'd suggest letting region/parcel owners handle this for themselves. By all means, promote the concept via the official Second Life blogs and other channels, and highlight those who've created the tools and systems to do this.
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