Fascinating conversation in response to Luther Weymann's somber analysis of Second Life's prospects under new ownership, featuring many comments by readers who seem to be longtime veterans of the game/tech industry, or at least write with that level of expertise.
Among them is Russell Skyther, who wrote this really sharp breakdown of what it would take to upgrade Second Life. It's partly a response to an earlier comment arguing that "Updating SL isn't really all that hard cause they have done it is how we got mesh and rigged mesh and now animesh. They can continue to keep layering new content and it'll work just fine."
Skyther argues otherwise:
The issue isn't that you can't update Second Life's code. or even rewrite it from scratch. BOTH have been done, see: OpenSimulator, an Open-Source clone of SL functionality that's close enough [that] most 3rd party clients support it out of the box.
But ability isn't the same thing as willingness. And far from being 'not all that hard' as the above comment states, each one of the examples features: Mesh, Rigged, animesh, and now Bakes on Mesh are all hacks onto an engine that wasn't designed for it. Now you can do that, and they did. But that incurs a serious performance penalty unless you redo the entire graphics pipeline (which they didn't). That's what this guy's talking about. It's not that you can't update or rewrite SL, it's that it's not cost effective to do so on a level that would give you acceptable performance.
To better explain SL's codebase issues. This is what I would consider a minimum for a true SL-like game in 2020 (VR Chat isn't really SL-like, but more of a Sansar that worked):
– Graphics pipeline efficient enough to give 50 FPS *minimum* regardless of how much content is on screen. This can be done.
– True 'client side' code in its scripting language: Pathfinding shouldn't be the server's job. Collisions shouldn't be, either.
– Modern procedural animation engine: Because multi-character animations of all sorts show just how bad SL deals with animations. Short guy hugging taller girl aught to show just how bad that is for the curious.
– Official world scale: On the above, SL isn't 1:1 with the real world on most servers. and it's not consistent what scale folks use, usually 1.25:1 I do believe. but it means you've got to mess with half the stuff you buy to get it looking as it should.
– Modern shard-based Servers/64 bit worldspace/way more mainland: The big thing SL has, even over it's Marketplace, is the ability to, at least in theory, virtually travel the virtual world from one end to the other. The Marketplace is great, but actually damaged the viability of this unique trait just by it's existence.
– There's also not enough mainland, the roads and airways aren't contiguous on said mainland anyway. Even when they are, going between servers is incredibly janky at times. You could ditch the overworld for a list of servers like VRChat uses and nobody would notice. That's a shame.
Modern content-streaming pipeline that means 9GB of cache is actually enough. This is where most of the lost frames go to die, and nothing that I've just said above would work unless this whole cache system where overhauled as well.
Is all of this doable? Yes. Will it happen? Probably not, unless it's OpenSim deciding to make it's own from-scratch Viewer.
Someone, at some point, will come along and make an actual SL competitor with Unreal, Unity, or some other recent game engine. In that way, SL's legacy would live on, but at 60 FPS with reasonable lag this time. I really hope that competitor is SL 2.0, but I'm not terribly optimistic.
There's arguably multiple virtual worlds that could be seen as potential competitors to SL — just to name two, built on the Unreal engine, there's Core, and built on Unity, there's Sinespace. Then again, because they are built on modern next gen graphics engines, it's not quite accurate to say either really competes with SL — anymore than it'd be accurate to say Elder Scrolls Online is competing with Ultima Online.
Pictured: The Black Dragon viewer, basically a user-driven update to Second Life graphics.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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