More than two decades after its launch, Second Life is attempting to make its persistent virtual world considerably more approachable to contemporary game developers. With around 700,000 monthly active users, Linden Lab is introducing modern scripting through SLua, a system based on Roblox’s high-performance Luau language, alongside Visual Studio Code integration and a workflow that allows creators to test changes directly inside its live multiplayer environment.

The update is not intended to replace the long-standing Linden Scripting Language or transform Second Life into a conventional game engine. Instead, Linden Lab wants to give creators a more familiar foundation for constructing and maintaining ambitious interconnected experiences. 

In our interview, Linden Lab Senior Vice President of Product Anya Kanevsky discussed why Luau prevailed over alternatives such as C#, JavaScript, and WebAssembly; the challenges of safely running thousands of persistent scripts; and the opportunity for developers arriving from Roblox and other Lua-based environments. 

Check out more details on the new platform tools here and read our full interview below.

Second Life has always been creator-driven, but full Lua scripting support feels like a major step toward positioning it more clearly as a modern game development platform. Why was Lua the right language to bring into Second Life now?

Linden Lab Senior Vice President of Product, Anya Kanevsky: Lua gives us an opportunity to modernize scripting in Second Life while preserving what makes Second Life unique as a creator platform. Interestingly, we didn’t start this project by saying, “We need Lua.” We evaluated a wide range of options (including C#, JavaScript and WebAssembly) against some very unusual technical requirements that come with Second Life. Scripts need to run securely alongside thousands of other scripts, pause and resume, preserve their state, and even move between servers as objects travel across regions or into inventory. Luau ultimately provided the best fit across those requirements.

The added benefit is that Lua is already familiar to a very large community of game developers. So we ended up with a technical solution that improves the experience for our existing creators while also lowering the barrier for developers who have never built in Second Life before.

Lua and Luau are already familiar to many developers across games, including Roblox creators. How much of this update is aimed at making Second Life more approachable for developers coming from Roblox or other Lua-based environments?

Anya Kanevsky: It’s really two things at once. First, Lua dramatically lowers the learning curve for developers coming from other environments. Someone who already understands Lua or Luau can arrive in Second Life and right away they can start experimenting. That certainly includes Roblox developers, but it’s broader than Roblox. Lua has a long history across game development, so there’s a substantial developer community for whom the language and programming concepts will already feel familiar.

Secondly, this is an investment in the creators who are already building in Second Life. We want to give them a more modern, efficient scripting environment while continuing to support our own Linden Scripting Language (LSL), and while Lua offers more functionality, Lua and LSL scripts can coexist - even within the same object.  In our earliest tests with creators, we heard positive feedback about the increased memory limits and the ability to now do more overall with Lua in Second Life using fewer scripts compared to LSL.

Most importantly both of these things are actually an investment in the overall diversity of experiences of all residents in Second Life. By giving creators more powerful tools, we make sure that everyone has more fun.

For developers who have never built in Second Life before, what kinds of interactive experiences or games does Lua unlock that were harder to create with the existing toolset?

Anya Kanevsky: What Lua changes is how developers can build and evolve them. It provides modern language features and programming patterns that make larger systems easier to structure, maintain and extend. Things like tables, dynamic event handling, coroutines, JSON support and optional type annotations give developers tools that are much more familiar from contemporary development environments.

The important distinction is that Lua doesn’t suddenly make games possible in Second Life. Residents have been creating remarkably sophisticated games and interactive experiences with LSL for many years.
So we think the opportunity is both about saying, “Here is a game you could never build before,” and even more about making ambitious projects easier to develop and maintain - and making Second Life much more approachable to developers who already know modern scripting languages.

The pitch here is not just that developers can script content, but that they can launch and update scripts live in-world. How does that workflow change the way creators can prototype, test, and iterate on game systems?

Anya Kanevsky: Live iteration has actually been part of Second Life development for a long time. Creators have always been able to modify scripts and immediately see the results in-world, and collaborative building has been a cornerstone of Second Life creativity as a result. Lua and the development workflow we’re rolling out is making it easy for the creativity to flow.

Our integration with Visual Studio Code lets developers work in a professional development environment while connecting that work directly to objects in Second Life. That means creators can benefit from familiar development tools for navigating and managing code and working with objects and linksets, while still seeing their changes reflected in the live virtual world. Our recent work on the client specifically improves communication between Second Life and the VS Code extension, including live exploration of objects and linksets.

That creates a very fast creative loop: write, test in the actual multiplayer environment, adjust, and test again.

Second Life has a smaller user base than platforms like Roblox, but the creator monetization numbers are compelling. How do you explain the economic opportunity for developers who are used to building on much larger platforms?

Anya Kanevsky: Scale is only one side of the creator opportunity. The other is economics: if you build something people value, how much of that value can you actually capture?

Second Life has had a functioning user-to-user economy for more than two decades. Creators can sell directly to residents in-world and through the Second Life Marketplace. Linden Dollars can be exchanged for real-world currency, and creators retain control over their intellectual property. Our current creator economics are structured around creators keeping approximately 85% of their sales revenue before applicable cash-out fees (which compares quite favorably to what Roblox pays).

So our pitch isn't that Second Life has a larger audience than Roblox - it doesn't. Second Life offers a mature audience with an established culture of spending money on user-created content and an economic model designed to let creators retain a substantial share of the value they create. We think Second Life offers an opportunity for established creators to extend their reach and audiences from other platforms to augment their existing income streams and also to expand their creative reach in ways not possible on other more restrictive platforms. In particular, we think there is a new opportunity for creators to bring over their established followers into an entirely new space to not only extend their income, but also their creative reach with deeper and more engaging experiences.

How healthy is the user base? How many people are building in SL each month and how many are there just to play? Are builders actually making money from this platform?

Anya Kanevsky: Second Life is unusual because the line between “payer” and “creator” is much less rigid than it is on many game platforms. Someone might socialize or roleplay one day, customize an avatar or home the next, and eventually begin making and selling their own content while still remaining part of a tight-knit community inworld. As far as numbers go, we have had a fairly stable number of highly-engaged Monthly Active Users (MAUs) for several years.

We average just under 700,000 monthly active users consistently with just over 11% of users actively scripting and creating content either for fun or profit. So, yes, creators make real money. Second Life has supported a functioning creator economy for more than two decades, with Linden Dollars convertible to real-world currency. So far this year, we have had over 13,000 unique creators cashing out with real money from their creations. In this difficult economy, Second Life can offer a vital "side hustle" that is both profitable and creatively fulfilling.

What kinds of lessons do you think Roblox developers could bring into Second Life, and where do you think they would need to think differently because of Second Life’s culture, audience, economy, and virtual-world structure?

Anya Kanevsky: There is a lot of knowledge that transfers directly: designing compelling gameplay loops, progression systems, multiplayer interactions, live content updates and experiences that encourage people to return.

Where Second Life becomes very different is that you're not necessarily building an isolated game session. You're building inside a persistent virtual world with its own communities, economy, identities and existing content ecosystem.

That presents an exciting opportunity and challenge for creators. Creators can immediately immerse themselves in an established community of like-minded people who can both consume and create experiences both inside and outside of your virtual environments. It’s like living in a virtual society, really.

Second Life also doesn't rely on instancing in the same way many contemporary game platforms do. Creators need to think about concurrency and how an experience operates within regions, although experiences can be distributed across multiple regions or designed vertically to increase usable space.

That constraint can also become a creative opportunity. Instead of simply asking, “How do I get players into my game?” creators in Second Life might instead ask, “How does my game become part of a larger living world?” and “How does my content also build community?”.

Can you talk about Resona as an early example of what Lua-supported Second Life experiences can become? What makes it a useful showcase for game developers who may not currently think of Second Life as a place to build an RPG?

Anya Kanevsky: Arcback built Resona as an RPG-style experience using Lua extensively across interconnected gameplay systems, and we believe that Resona provides a showcase example of the kind of experience creators are already starting to build.

Resona shows that a Lua supported SL experience can move well beyond individual scripted interactions and become a persistent, interconnected RPG, with progression, combat, crafting, inventory, quests, world building, HUDs, attachments and world objects all working together.

Arcback has been helping us to push the limits of what is possible with larger game design architecture in Second Life by using Lua to develop a shared state across many scripts, scaling object to object messaging, connecting HUDs, attachments and world objects, managing persistent data, and finding where simulator, messaging and scripting limits begin to shape the design.

In partnering with developers like Arcback, we learn and gain important feedback from experienced Lua developers as they apply their development skills in Second Life at a meaningful scale. These early collaborations have helped us to understand where the language and APIs are working well, where developers encounter friction, and what we should improve next.

From a technical standpoint, what were the biggest challenges in adding Lua support to a platform as long-running and creator-driven as Second Life?

Anya Kanevsky: The biggest challenge was that Second Life has more than 20 years of creator-built content that has to continue working. We weren't designing a scripting system for a new platform where we could simply start over.

Second Life also asks unusual things about scripts. Thousands can be running within a region. They have to share resources fairly and securely. A script may need to pause in the middle of execution, travel with an object across a region boundary or even go into someone's inventory and later resume while preserving its state.

Those requirements eliminated a surprising number of otherwise attractive technologies. In fact, we initially investigated bringing modern C# into Second Life before concluding that sandboxing, memory management, micro-threading and state serialization made it a poor fit for our architecture.
Luau gave us a much better foundation for solving those problems while maintaining the behavior Second Life creators expect.

How is Linden Lab thinking about safety, moderation, performance, and stability as more creators begin building richer scripted experiences inside shared live spaces?

Anya Kanevsky: Those considerations are fundamental because Second Life is a shared, persistent environment. A creator isn't necessarily deploying code into an isolated game instance - their scripts can be running alongside scripts belonging to many other people.

That's one reason the architecture matters so much. Scripts remain sandboxed and run server-side on Second Life regions rather than executing arbitrary code on another resident's viewer. We've also deliberately excluded capabilities such as loadstring() where they create unacceptable performance implications, and the scripting architecture is designed around resource limits and fair scheduling so that one script doesn't monopolize execution.

The goal isn't simply to give creators more powerful tools. It's to do that while maintaining the stability and trust required in a live world where thousands of independently created systems coexist.

Looking ahead, what is the larger vision for Second Life as a game development platform? Should developers think of Lua support as a standalone feature, or as part of a broader push to modernize how games and interactive experiences are made in Second Life?

Anya Kanevsky: Lua is absolutely part of a broader modernization effort.

Second Life has always been a platform where people can build games, businesses, social spaces, entertainment and things we never anticipated. What we're doing now is modernizing the tools underneath that creativity so the development experience feels much more familiar to today's creators.
Lua is a major piece of that because it gives us a modern scripting foundation.

VS Code integration improves the development workflow. And over time, this foundation gives us more room to improve APIs, debugging, performance and the overall creator experience.

We don't want to turn Second Life into a conventional game engine or make it a copy of another creator platform. The opportunity is to combine modern development tools with something Second Life already has that is much harder to create from scratch: a persistent, interconnected virtual world, an established creator economy, and more than two decades of user-created content and communities.

That is what makes Lua bigger than a scripting-language update.

Anya Kanevsky, SVP of Product at Linden Lab

80 Level readers interested in testing Second Life’s Lua development tools can email [email protected] with “80 Lvl beta” in the subject line. Additional resources for creators are available through Second Life’s creation portal.