Project Zero is a significant step towards making Second Life accessible directly through web browsers. Following your feedback, we’ve made substantial progress in enhancing the platform’s performance and usability. During the upcoming Community Roundtable, Philip Rosedale will share some news about these developments and the project roadmap. The Product and Engineering teams will also talk about the overall Roadmap and strategic vision for Second Life in 2025.
Question from user are invited on the subject, and those wishing to submit a question in advance can still do so via this anonymous form. As usual, I will endeavour to provide a written summary† of the event as soon as I’ve collated notes and quotes following the event.
via Linden Lab
†While they are not officially representative of the Lab or these meetings, please note that I attempt to provide summaries of meeting such as this, and for a number of user group session within these pages.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, March 11th, 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.
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, March 11th, 2025, the SLS Main channel was updated with the Carrot Cake update should be deployed to all RC channels. This includes:
A patch for issues found with the version of Carrot Cake already deployed to BlueSteel, together with a fixed for issues in trying to deploy some of the new benefits announced as a part of the “March Membership Madness” month.
Monty Linden’s work on EventQueueGet (a simulator Capability that delivers messages from a simulator to viewers over HTTP using a long-poll scheme. It is core functionality without which viewer/simulator coordination is impossible).
In addition, an update combining Carrot Cake and the WebRTC back-end was deployed to the Preflight RC channel.
On Wednesday, March 12th, 2025, the remaining RC channels will be restarted without update.
SL Viewer Updates
Default viewer: 7.1.12.13550888671, formerly the ForeverFPS, dated March 1, 2025, promoted March 5th – NEW.
Numerous crash and performance fixes.
Water exclusion surfaces.
Water improvements.
Project viewer: Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha, version 7.1.12.13526902562, March 3rd, 2025 – NEW.
Will only work on Aditi, within the following regions: [Luau Yardang], [Luau Tombolo], [Luau Mesa] and [Luau Tideland].
Lua(u): Initial Aditi Deployment – Recap and Update
An initial deployment of Luau support (which will eventually replace Mono as the back-end scripting language) is opening on Aditi (the beta grid) for user testing.
The regions running Luau support are: [Luau Yardang], [Luau Tombolo], [Luau Mesa] and [Luau Tideland].
These support both native Lua scripting and compiling LSL to Luau VM.
It was noted that the server support has some “sharp edges”. In addition:
Error reporting when compiling scripts from LSL to Luau is “quite spartan at the moment”, but will be improved “in the next update or two”.
If objects with compiled Luau script assets are rezzed in a non-Luau region, they won’t work.
On the initial launch, LL constants hadn’t been exposed. Those should be available now.
Constants are in the global namespace now, with constant folding in the future to improve performance. Currently, there are no plans on moving them into a namespace.
Rider Linden indicated that there has been a high volume of testing of the past week on the Luau regions on Aditi, generating high quality feedback from scripters.
Signal Linden added that over the course of the last week, there has been some rapid development with bug fixes and features, with a new build nearly every day. Both he and Rider Linden passed on thanks to everyone who has been putting early work into testing the Lua work.
Please refer to the the video for details on the following.
The Durian Scone simulator update contains the new server certificate anchored by DigiCert. Monty Linden has a detailed post on the Technical forum. The Certificate supporting regions are Cloud Sandbox 1- on Aditi, and are open for testing.
There was a general round of potential naming for the SL implementation of Lua/Luau. Ideas including: SLuau; SLua (“slew-ah”); Linden Lua(u) Language (LLL / L³).
RegEx string functions: Rider Linden noted that he has most of the code written for some of the other RegEx things, and believes it would be mostly a matter of hooking the correct pieces together. However, work is currently focused on internal tooling, so he’s not at this point sure when he’ll be able to get back to the RegEx work. Some RegEx support can be found here.
Leviathan Linden is hoping to port game_control back into the main SL Viewer and also to submit some patches for Cool VL Viewer when he has an opportunity to get back to that work. He also noted that for the official SL Viewer it depends on the Linux-build support getting back in place because game_control was using SDL2 for input acquisition, which was supplied by the Linux build work.
A general conversation on the AI character tools, LSL, and opportunities.
Linden Lab is attending the 2025 Game Developer Conference (March 17th-21st, 2025) in San Francisco to promote Second Life.
† 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.
Nitroglobus Roof Gallery, March 2025: Bamboo Barnes – The Shape of the Whirlwind
Art exhibitions at Nitroglobus Roof Gallery, operated and curated by Dido Haas, are – as I’ve frequently mentioned in these pages – among the best in Second Life in terms of visual content, theme, richness of expression and the challenges Dido tends to offer the artists invited to exhibit at her gallery. However, there are times when the artist appearing at the gallery has a reputation for offering thematic art intended to to provoke the grey matter into cogitation without any prompting from Dido.
One such artist is Bamboo Barnes. To me, she is one of the most vibrant and emotive artists in Second Life. She is also one of the most unique in terms of content and in the manner in which she mixes digital techniques, blending images captured in SL wand via digital means, her use of vibrant colours and abstracted overlays. In doing so, her art is always marvellously expressive, reflecting her inner thoughts, feeling and perceptions, whilst also being strongly assertive in its own right. This latter aspect additionally allows individual pieces speak directly to the observer, both in terms of the over-arching theme of an exhibition, and as pieces standing in their own right.
Nitroglobus Roof Gallery, March 2025: Bamboo Barnes – The Shape of the Whirlwind
Such is the case with The Shape of the Whirlwind, Bamboo’s latest exhibition (at the time of writing!) to be hosted by Dido at Nitroglobus. However, there is a further unique twist (or two) about this exhibition. The first is that it is – if my memory is not failing me (which is entirely possible!) – this is the first exhibition to span both halls of the gallery, both the main hall and the Annex.
The other element of uniqueness with this exhibition is that I’m not going to wibble on about it here, as is usually my wont. This is because Bamboo has provided an excellent introduction to both The Shape of the Whirlwind and the thought processes that brought her to create the pieces displayed and which are reflected through the pieces. I think her own words introduce the exhibition in such a way that any exposition / interpretation on my part would be little more than a distraction. So, I’ll let Bamboo speak for herself.
Nitroglobus Roof Gallery, March 2025: Bamboo Barnes – The Shape of the Whirlwind
I have never been inside a vortex, but I wonder what the distortion of the world would look like when being able to see from the inside.
The concept of a vortex—something that twists and distorts the flow of reality—becomes a metaphor for the hidden, often imperceptible forces that shape our lives and selves. Inside a vortex, the world would bend and stretch, the familiar becoming strange, as if time itself were folding in on itself. The distortion of sight would be overwhelming, pulling you into a realm where what you think you know, what you think you see, slips away from your grasp, much like memories that fade or shift when you try to grasp them.
– Bamboo Barnes on The Shape of the Whirlwind
Nitroglobus Roof Gallery, March 2025: Bamboo Barnes – The Shape of the Whirlwind
Rising just a little against gravity, you might glimpse what is hidden—perhaps the edges of your own consciousness, which you usually only sense in fragments. And yes, memories, while they seem solid, can distort the truth, shaping how we see the world around us. The tension between the unseen forces and our struggle to maintain our sense of self would feel like a constant, gentle pull, drawing us into something greater than our understanding, yet more familiar than we’d like to admit.
At least remembering something, someone—however fleeting—might be a tether to a time before the vortex, a trace of what we were, or what we might still become. What do you think? What is it that you’re trying to remember or hold onto through this?
– Bamboo Barnes on The Shape of the Whirlwind
Nitroglobus Roof Gallery, March 2025: Bamboo Barnes – The Shape of the Whirlwind
A genuinely rich and engaging exhibition given added depth through the use of animated elements (sometimes directly, sometimes as additional overlays) which mirror the twisting tumbling nature of thoughts and emotions are they surround us, and further supported as well as 3D elements by Bamboo and pieces by other artists placed within the gallery space by Dido, The Shape of the Whirlwind should seen and appreciated.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 