Originally published on my Patreon
Last week's Second Life platform updates were mainly focused on the new Firestorm streaming option, but a long-awaited update to its scripting language might be even more important:
SLua stands for Second Life Lua, a language based on Luau (originally developed by Roblox), extended to harness the full power of Second Life’s existing functions. Think of it as LSL’s more powerful, versatile new cousin—offering you more flexibility, cleaner syntax, and features that make coding dramatically simpler.
Emphasis mine, because it's not only relevant to the thousands of SL creators who use LSL, but the hundreds of thousands of Roblox creators versed in Luau.
Signal Linden (Bennett Goble), head Software Engineer at the company, tells me Roblox's Luau and Second Life's SLua are pretty close:
"It is the Luau virtual machine extended to work with Second Life," he tells me. "We've had to make changes to support the requirements of mobile agents (AKA moving between regions) which means changes to support serializing/deserializing the runtime state. To users, it is the same language, just with LSL functionality. So: the same events residents know from LSL, same functions, with subtle interoperability changes to the language."
This also opens up a new opportunity for scripters working in Roblox:
"It should certainly be easier for Roblox creators experienced with Lua to work with the language, but they'll still have to learn 1) about second life 2) the library of functions specific to Second Life."
But why would creators working in Roblox, the most popular metaverse platform now by far, with over 350 million active users, want to develop for Second Life, with some half a million members?
Well, for one thing: Second Life the company pays out far more generously to more creators by proportion than Roblox the company:
About 30% of Second Life creators earn over $1,000 annually, compared to 0.2% for Roblox. And 7.4% of Second Life creators earn over $10,000 annually (compared to Roblox’s 0.07%).
By Oberwager’s calculations, this means creators in Second Life are 100 times more likely to earn over $10,000 than on Roblox. And they are 27 times more likely to become a millionaire. [VentureBeat]
Interestingly, Roblox later disputed some of the numbers in that recent VentureBeat post, but even going by the company's IPO filing in 2020, some 1600 SL community creators made $10,000+ per year, while only 1050 Roblox creators made that amount or more.
In any case, the core, indisputable takeaway is this: A creator in Second Life has a much better chance of earning substantial revenue than they would in Roblox.
And now, it's much easier for a Roblox developer to learn how to script in Second Life.
For those who are interested, Signal points to the company's SLua wiki page for getting started.
"At this point it's an alpha, our documentation is going to get a lot better during the beta, and then even better for final release," he allows. "This is rather early, and we can't rule out the API changing -- we also have debugging information integrated into the language which causes performance to not be as fast as it will ultimately be."
But the wiki page itself will be updated: "In the future we want to move LSL documentation to a more modern format, one that will allow everyone to contribute back to it again (We have registration turned off on the mediawiki to prevent spam). These new docs will have both LSL and SLua documentation woven together in a way that makes it clear how to use different languages with the same platform."
And here's another signal form Signal on why SLua is important to follow:
"We will be making the language VM open source -- it's important to contribute back to the commons, as we are building this on open source software." (No specific timeline on going open source, but, adds Signal, "The plan is as soon as reasonable.)
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