Hello, and thank you for your feature request regarding swimming in Second Life. This idea has been brought up in the past and is indeed a popular suggestion. We have tracked this issue and will continue to monitor it. While we have no estimate on when it may be implemented, please keep an eye on future updates. We appreciate your input and encourage you to keep sharing your ideas to help improve Second Life. Thank you for your continued commitment to our community.

As a Mer I use a physics based (Tala) AO, which I would humbly suggest that you look at (and contact the creator) to have an understanding of a physics-based implementation of swimming. You might be surprised at the degree of control that is available. If your swimming implementation is physics based, emulating the characteristics of a human in water should, theoretically, be fairly simple. So, as long as any implementation of native swimming ability doesn't interfere with my favourite AO, I'm all for it too. You should consider scuba divers and submariners (I have often seen them "flying underwater"), so the swimmer will need positive, neutral and negative buoyancy as options - better still, infinitely variable - It just occurred to me that one could have life jackets that actually worked. There might be an option for search and rescue training in SL if that were implemented... (just thinking out loud).

Instead of seeing the many random human bodies (bots?) on the sea floor when I'm swimming around - they seem to congregate under Blake's Sea - seeing some floating instead might make a nice change, and a challenge for the yacht racers (lol). For the latter's sake, there should be a sink to the sea floor and get eaten by sharks after a short while option... :)

That sounds like a cool idea! It has often been very hard to find quality swimming huds, this would eliminate that problem completely. :-)

As someone with both a mermaid and a killer whale avatar, I wholeheartedly approve of this request. 😝 Right now, swimming is a headache in SL - even for HUD and script authors.

iwThis would be a good addition combined with "water volumes" - e.g. swimming pools.

Animations will need two sets, one for surface swimming and one for diving:

* dive_hover - float underwater (non-moving underwater animation, similar to hover)

* dive_up - float or swim up underwater (similar to hover_up)

* dive_down - float swim down underwater (similar to hover_down)

* dive_swim - standard speed swim underwater

* dive_swim_fast - fast swim underwater

* dive_swim_slow - slow swim underwater

* dive_turn_left - turn left underwater. This is used in many mermaid animations to give a flowing type of turn.

* dive_turn_right - turn right underwater

* float - non-moving surface animation such as treading water or floating on back

* swim - standard speed swim along surface

* swim_fast - fast swim along surface. (similar to 'run')

* swim_slow - slow swim along surface. (similar to 'crouchwalk' or 'flyslow')

* swim_turn_left - turn left on surface - optional, not sure if we would need this

* swim_turn_right - turn right on surface - optional, not sure if we would need this

Or something to that effect.

I have a few sets of mermaid animations and being able to directly target 'proper' water movement animation overrides/types would be a huge improvement. I suspect the same is true for groups that do a lot of other water activities, such as residents with pools or divers.

There will need to be some way to easily distinguish between floating on the surface and diving. The way I see it working is that you float and swim on the surface by default, but a secondary "Dive" button appears next to the existing "Fly" button when you're on water. If you dive up to the surface, you switch back to floating - similar to how flying works when you reach land, just the opposite.

Building rooms below the water line is far more common than you might think, for a long time it was the only way to get a different environmental effect.

There are Linden roads and tunnels that go under water.

Forced swimming for Linden water breaks content.