2025 week #11: SL SUG meeting

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.
• 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, 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.
• A Luau-capable viewer is required.
  • This viewer will work on any region in SL, but will only compile scripts to Luau on the Aditi regions noted above.
• Discussion on Lua(u) is available through the scripting channel on the SL Discord server, for those with access.
• 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.

Luau Resources

• Lua FAQ – SL Wiki
• Second Life Luau Alpha – SL Wiki.
• Luau Example Scripts – SL Wiki.
• Luau Library – Luau.org
• Luau scripting demo – Luau.org
• Lua Gotchas, Footguns and Other Hazards – Roblox.

In Brief

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.