Technical Problems with Second Life
Second Life started at a time when Personal Computers, servers, and the Internet were not yet powerful enough to be able to effectively provide a quality virtual world experience. As a result, Second Life was optimized for these low resource computers. The most critical element needed to run a virtual world on a Personal Computer is a high quality video card with a large amount of video memory and a fast video processor. The personal computers that most commonly have these high quality video cards are used for video games that are played in real time. Examples of games that require the fastest video graphics are high speed driving games and first person shooter games.
At the time that Second Life was created, only the fastest home computers with high end video cards and a high speed Internet connection provided enough computational power to approximate a real time virtual world experience. However, since the majority of users of Second Life were adults, not teenagers who might already own computer game optimized computers, the solution in most cases was to purchase dedicated computers optimized for real time game playing.
In order to use Second Life, I had to have a special computer built. Because I have autism, I am very sensitive to sound. Even the quiet whirring a computer fan becomes almost unbearable for me to listen to after a while. To solve this, I needed a computer that was entirely silent using a fanless power supply, a fanless CPU heat sink, and a fanless video card. What made my computer even more challenging to build was that in addition to being silent it needed to be powerful enough to be able to run Second Life. It took a local computer store two months to research all the custom parts that I needed and build my computer. Mine was an expensive computer and took me more than a year to pay for. When it was done, the name I chose for my computer on my home network was called Second Life.
Now, with the increasing power of personal computers and the increasing availability of high speed Internet connections, users do not have the same problems using Second Life that they once did. The problem is that while both personal computers and servers have become more powerful, Second Life has advanced very little. Simply put, Linden Lab has failed to reinvest enough money into continued Research and Development to keep Second Life a current and viable virtual world, and as a result Second Life is dying.
Two examples of virtual worlds that utilize the power of current computers to provide a vastly superior experience to Second Life are Utherverse.com and RedLightCenter.com. Both of these alternate virtual worlds demonstrate avatars that move so fluidly, and environments that are so detailed, that they make Second Life look like a jerky cartoon by comparison.