Second Life 2.0

Second Life 2.0 is a conceptual future version of the current virtual environment, one which will have had a number of architectural changes and improvements to improve performance, scalability, and usability. Currently it is only an ideal and not an actual service.

SL 1.0 Implementation Issues

Second Life version 1.x has a number of design and implementation errors that cannot now be corrected, and has become a legacy system similar to an old mainframe harboring the year-2000 bug.

For something as complex as an open-access full 3D virtual environment, there are many different systems and specifications that need very careful planning and design. In many cases it is not known what the effect will be of a design decision made early in the development process.

A small overlooked problem in the beginning can become uncorrectable, one users of the system have started to notice the problem and are adapting and compensating to deal with it. With these adaptations in place, the original problem now cannot be "fixed" because that will break everything that was built to internally compensate for it.

At some point in the future a decision will have to be made regarding "Second Life 2.0". Will it continue to provide legacy support for these known design flaws, or will it start over fresh with all problems corrected, and therefore incompatible with nearly everything currently built in Second Life 1.x?

List of known SL 1.0 design flaws

Avatar is bigger than a normal human

The standard avatar height does not match the size of average humans, in the measurement units used by the virtual world. The default avatars are about 25% larger than a normal human. This seems a very small problem but it affects the design of everything else in the virtual space.

The in-world measurement system cannot be used to accurately duplicate real-life objects at the same size and scale, because the resulting object is too small compared to the typical avatar. A house built using actual real-world measurements would be too small compared to the avatar.

Due to this minor design flaw of the avatar being the wrong default height, everything else in the entire environment is now slightly bigger than normal to match the avatar, and the inworld definition of "meters" is meaningless and incorrect compared to the avatar and real-world measurements. It would be better to stop calling them meters and use another SL-specific term (such as the "munge"), so that people don't confuse it with correct real-world measurements.

Visual object size doesn't match physical size

When two physical objects are stacked in Second Life 1.x, they do not stack edge-to-edge as in the real world. Instead there is a wide empty gap between them of about 0.010 munges. This is a result of the physical size of an object (its "collision volume") being larger than its actual visual appearance.

The avatar is also a physical object and consequently does not actually stand on the ground but stands about 0.010 munges above it. A number of hacks have been implemented in the client so that the avatar's feet will seem to be firmly on the ground even if they really are not.