Day: April 8, 2025

2025 week #15: SL SUG meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey
Zaanse Schans, January 2025 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 8th, 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 and Pantera’s video, embedded at the end of this piece.

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):
  • 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

  • This week will see all channel restarted without and deployments.

Upcoming Deployment

This next simulator update will be called Elderberry. Among other things, this should include:

  • A new option to llDerezObject – DEREZ_TO_INVENTORY, which returns the targeted object to inventory and saves its current state (e.g. has the same behaviour as Build → Object → Save Back to Object Contents.
  • llIsLinkGLTFMaterial  – which can can determine if a face on a linked prim is PBR.
  • REZFLAG_DIE_ON_NO_REZZER – which will cause a rezzed prim to die if its rezzer is no longer present in the region.
  • Updates to llSetColor and llSetAlpha to work with PBR.
    • llSetAlpha will have a caveat: if alpha  is set to >0.85, it will switch the overrides to opaque; setting under that value sets them to blend.
    • This is because there seem to be some serious rendering issues with blend mode and an alpha near 1, per this image. Rider Linden added:
Also. It bears repeating… since I forgot. BP colours (what you set with llSetColor) are in sRGB space. PBR is linear. I’m doing the conversion internally so it should be the same colour in both cases.

SL Viewer Updates

  • Default viewer: 7.1.12.13550888671, formerly the ForeverFPS, dated March 1, 2025, promoted March 5th – No change – crash and performance fixes; Water exclusion surfaces and water improvements.
  • Second Life Release Candidate viewer 2025.03 version 7.1.13.14174767759, April 2nd.
    • 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 7.1.12.13907344519, April 2nd.

In Brief

Please refer to the the video for details on the following.

  • A request was made to have changes to releases on the SLua test regions on Aditi added to the release notes mechanism so that those using the regions can see when / why things are going to change or are going to change.
    • This is going to be looked into. In the interim, Rider Linden is going to try to to provide notification of updates to the Second Life Discord server.
  • World → Show → Land Owners has been broken since the release of PBR such that all owners, regardless of type are only shown as red, rather than in different colours based on ownership (see Land owners colour).
    • No update in fix status.
  • Add flag to llSetLinkSitFlags, SIT_FLAG_INVISIBLE is described as on the to-do list, and will likely be a viewer-side change so the flag is respected.
  • A status update was requested for work on providing a means to ease issues of ban line collisions and vehicle loss, and having the simulator provide more timely information on parcel access permissions before a vehicle is on top of a parcel in which access is denied for the avatars riding it.
    • This is something Rider Linden is hoping to get to in the simulator release after Elderberry).
    • The discussion broadened through the when and how the simulator should provide parcel information to the viewer – e.g. in general or on demand, and what information could be provided, having a mandated delay on security systems on the Mainland to prevent the enter parcel / immediate teleport / ejection situation.
  • Still no news on when the Mainland legacy EEP setting (now seen as dim and murky post PBR deployment), although it is believed the Moles are working on Mainland region settings.

† 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.