The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, March 25th, 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 my chat log of the meeting – sorry, no video from Pantera this week.
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 25th, the SLS Man Channel was updated with any deployment.
- On Wednesday March 19th the Durian Scones update should be deployed to all remaining RC channels RC – this update incudes the SSL certificate renewal – see below for more.
Production Grid SSL Certificate Renewal
- The SSL certificate for the Second Life Production Grid is set to expire on April 16th, 2025 02:40 GMT.
- A new certificate anchored by DigiCert started deployment via the BlueSteel RC on Wednesday, March 19th, and will progress across the RC channels and to the SLS Main Channel in the normal cadence of simulator releases, to be completed in advance of the old certificates expiring.
- Testing of this certificate can be done either within the nominated simulator channels as it is deployed, or on Aditi (the beta grid), on the following regions:
- Bonifacio.
- Blake Sea (Very nearly the entire set of regions).
- Cloud Sandbox 1 through 4.
- For full details on the re-certification, please read Monty Linden’s forum post and thread, or the Lab’s official summary blog post.
Planned Updates – LI Calculation Change
- Signal Linden highlighted a Feedback Ticket he has raised, proposing the removal of scale from Land Impact calculations.
- This is being possibly earmarked for a simulator update after Durian Scones.
- This essentially means that the LI of object should not dramatically change as a result of resizing (particularly when increased in size). It could also mean that some large objects in world could see LI reductions.
- Understandably, this announcement led to a lot of discussion / debate throughout the meeting.
- Signal also stated that the Lab will like – at some point also take a look at Mesh uploads and use: Incentivize correct use of LODs, which is currently being tracked.
SL Viewer Updates
- Default viewer: 7.1.12.13550888671, formerly the ForeverFPS, dated March 1, 2025, promoted March 5th – No change.
- Numerous crash and performance fixes.
- Water exclusion surfaces.
- Water improvements.
- Second Life Release Candidate viewer 2025.03 version 7.1.13.13906285233, March 20th – NEW.
- New UI element for water exclusion surfaces: Build / Edit floater → Texture Tab → Hide Water checkbox.
- The maximum amount of Reflection Probes can now be adjusted to better accommodate low VRAM scenarios.
- Values will be set automatically depending on your chosen graphics quality. OR
- Use Preferences → Graphics → Advanced Settings → Max. Reflection Probes to manually set.
- An issue with being unable to see Sky Altitude values in the Region/Estate window has now been resolved.
- Preferences → Graphics → Max. # of Non-Imposters has been renamed Max. # of Animated Avatars for clarity.
- Bug and performance fixes and memory optimisations.
- Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha, version 7.1.12.13973830462, March 20th, 2025 – NEW.
- Will only work on Aditi. Blog post: Lab officially announces Luau Alpha testing.
In Brief
Please refer to the the video for details on the following.
- A SLua update was deployed to Aditi during the meeting, containing the requested JSON and the B64 stuff in it.
- Signal indicated that LL’s visit to the 2025 Game Developer Conference (March 17th-21st, 2025) in San Francisco to promote Second Life appears to have been well received, the the stand receiving a lot of visitors and interest.
- There has been some discussion in the Content Creation channel of the Second Life Discord Server about allowing rezzing of prims and meshes larger than the current 64m limit, either for everyone, or as a switch which could be set at the estate/region level. LL are tracking this.
- However, Signal and Leviathan Linden noted that in terms of meshes exceeding 64m in size, some research into potential physics impacts might be required.
- Signal further suggested that if there are physics issues, such large meshes could be made non-physical on rezzing.
- On the subject of physics, there have been reports of objects getting “stuck” with a convex version of their physics mesh until are selected by their owner, and also that sometimes the simulator forgets the mesh physics type and sets it to convex hull.
- Rider Linden noted he spent some time trying to trace down a similar issue some time ago, without success.
- Leviathan Linden would like to look into these issues, so Feedback reports would likely be appreciated, with logs.
- Signal again indicated a preference to get the Havok sub-libraries out of the viewer, replace the decomp. library with an open-source one, and replace Navmesh with a solution “that isn’t janky”. However, decisions on all of this have yet to be taken.
- A discussion on the “energy” effect within llPush – where it has use (e.g. feeding into impact damage calculations for weapons), issues, etc., and whether or not there is a case for it being removed for SLua scripts (but not Lua VM to run LSL, so as to maintain compatibility), if at all possible (possibly not).
- Signal Linden also dropped a request into the meeting:
If you would be seriously interested in contract work to convert the LSL wiki over to readme.com, including a Github action to generate LSL/SLua function documentation from a giant LLSD manifest, drop me a line. One thing I’m thinking about is improving documentation. Readme.com is the same platform VRchat uses for their docs rather effectively, and it would allow us to accept changes from unregistered users once again.
† 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.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 