2025 week #6: SL SUG meeting – 2K Bakes on Mesh is live

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, February 4th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from Pantera’s video of the meeting, which is embedded at the end – my thanks to her for providing it.

Meeting Overview

• The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
• These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Every Tuesday at 12:00 noon SLT.
  • In text (no Voice).
  • At this location.
• Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
• Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Simulator Deployments

• On Tuesday, February 4th, 2025, the simulators on the Main SLS channel were restarted with no update.
• On Wednesday, February 5th, 2025:
  • The Banana Bread update will be deployed to the BlueSteel channel. This include expansions to llGetObjectPermMask that let you get an object’s permission mask taking into account the permissions on its inventory, and that ability has been added to llGOD.
  • The remaining RC channels will be restarted, most likely without any deployment.

SL Viewer Updates

• Default viewer: version 7.1.11.12363455226, formerly the ExtraFPS RC (multiple performance fixes, aesthetic improvements and UI optimisations), dated December 17, promoted December 20 – No Change.
• Release Candidate: Forever FPS, version 7.1.12.12999043440, February 4, 2025.
  • Numerous crash and performance fixes.
• SL Mobile (Beta) version 2025.1.542 / 0.5.533 – Create / Delete accounts, fixes – February 4,  2025.

2K Bakes on Mesh is Live

2k BoM is now live! As of yesterday, we’ve switched over to the new bake service, and we’ll be posting a blog post soon!

– Pepper Linden

This deployment does not require a viewer update, and is grid-wide – more in the Lab’s official blog post (published February 6th). The update should also see faster bake times.

In Brief

Please refer to the video below for the following:

• There are reports of an uptick in packet loss in simulator – viewer exchanges (reportedly 20% on average), and some are reporting associated lag with local chat.
• Rider Linden is working on updates to llSetGroundTexture:
  • This will allow a region owner/EM to set and adjust ground textures on a region, including some of the PBR features like rotation, offset and scale.
  • This work should be surfacing in the next simulator update after Banana Bed – called Carrot Cake.
• Those who have tested ForeverFPS are reporting it offers an improve Linden Water appearance (fresnel reflection/refraction).
• A request for increased terrain resolution led to a discussion on overhauling the terrain system in various ways, during which Leviathan Linden offered some history about Second Life and Linden World:

The terrain layer currently uses lossy DCT compression … The reason it uses DCT is ancient history: in the beginning SL (or Linden World as we called it back then) was expected to be sending dynamic layer data (terrain, water, wind, clouds, moisture, and ???). For dynamic layers we thought we should be using more compact compression. So terrain was a “layer” and grouped with the others. Eventually all the other layers were dropped and we ended up with a single mostly static layer that is using the wrong compression scheme.

• The above was interwoven with a discussion on KVP data.
• Various discussion on Luau and scripting.
• A general discussion on region crossings.
• Questions were asked on the Havoc physics engine. Currently, the viewer-side sub-library is being updated to Havok 2022, the simulator is running 2012.1, with Leviathan Linden noting that Havok has tried to “encourage” LL to update on the server-side; however, no physics update is likely to occur in the next year.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.