Emojis Finally Coming to Official Second Life Viewer Thanks to Community Developer

Finally bringing Second Life to the modern age of online communication, emojis are coming to the official Second Life viewer. You can even start playing with them now via this release candidate.

As befitting its status as a metaverse platform, this addition didn't come directly from Second Life publisher Linden Lab, but from a community developer: Kitty Barnett, who co-develops the third party SL viewer Catznip.

Kitty tells me her addition should support most every character from Twitter's open source Twemoji font.

"Aside from the multi-character emojis," she clarifies. "So yellow default smiley, not skintone-tinted emoji, or flags, or some of the job emojis will come in female and male variants, which is actually two characters joined behind the scenes — which wasn't easy to jury rig on top of the existing SL font system – or at least not on an initial go." It will also support shortcodes and non-English languages.

Even better news, Kitty was able to get Linden Lab to incorporate this addition simply by mentioning it and @-ig Second Life's official account on Twitter:

Second Life chat UI improvement step 2 – they're colourful, you can use them to convey literally everything, yet no one truly knows what they mean… (Color font rendering still needs a bit of love but it's good enough!). #SecondLife #Catznip @SecondLife pic.twitter.com/xOJmERLb39

— Kitty Barnett (@Kitty_Barnett) August 22, 2018

"A long while ago I tweeted some thing [above] I'd done for Catznip on Twitter to improve SL chat. Cause it's kinda a sad experience when comparing it to things like Discord / Telegram / Slack etc. And emojis are a big part of that (for better or worse for some people ).

"Eventually I got a poke from a Linden to contribute that to the official viewer, and that kind of got the process started. It was a bit awkward in the beginning because I was also looking for guidance, since there's many ways to do emojis, but then it kind of fizzled out. Then awhile later I got poked again [by a Linden]: 'Hey, what's the status of this, we'd really love it'."

The company assigned a Linden to work with Kitty on the integration.

"I think Callum Linden deserves a shoutout. Thanks for being patient with me when getting everything integrated and chasing me down when RL got a bit overwhelming and things were dragging on, but we got there eventually!"

Here's her advice for other community developers who'd like to suggest their own additions to the client:

"Just to be patient, and obviously it's a lot easier to get something contributed that they're actively interested in than something out of the blue. But hit up the third party viewer meetings, or the open source ones and get a conversation going. And understand that there's a lot of red tape on the other end as well — lawyers had to look at the license for the font for instance, which totally makes sense of course.

"Also it can help to hit up some of the TPVs (particularly Firestorm) because it can be easier to get something into [a popular TPV], which then goes out to a huge audience and then if the feature is popular, it'll catch some Linden's eye anyway and you already have a proven test/use/popularity case."

But do expect some delays since it is an actual corporation. (Kitty's original tweet was in 2018!)

"[It's] super-frustrating to jump through the hoops, but the individual Linden on the other side is also only following whatever policy they're told to follow so…. TPV devs can iterate very quickly and maybe more efficiently, but it's not always bad faith to get told to make a JIRA, or change for coding guidelines (tabs! bah! ). And there have been a lot of things accepted from people over the years."

One possible hitch — Kitty wasn't paid a bounty by Linden Lab for this seriously important addition:

"No

," Kitty tells me when I ask. "I've gotten t-shirts and a laser pointer in the past for contributions (which my cats love

) but no swag for emojis."

I think that's a serious oversight, especially when TPV's like Firestorm are run by volunteers and basically keep Second Life thriving and profitable.

indeed, Linden Lab!

Thank to @0xc0ffea for connecting me to Kitty!