Day: April 12, 2025

2025 week #14: SL TPVD meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Island of Kalokairi, February 2025 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from my chat transcript + the video recording by Pantera (embedded at the end of this summary) of the Third-Party Developer meeting (TPVD) held on Friday, April 11th, 2025. My thanks to Pantera as always for providing it.

Meeting Purpose

  • The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors to discuss general viewer development. This meeting is held once a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
  • Dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they are generally conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.
  • The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.

Official Viewers

  • Default viewer: 7.1.12.13550888671, formerly the ForeverFPS, dated March 1, 2025, promoted March 5th.
    • Numerous crash and performance fixes.
    • Water exclusion surfaces.
    • Water improvements.
  • Second Life Release Candidate: 2025.03 7.1.13.14343205944, April 9th, 2025.
    • Will only work on Aditi, within the following regions: [Luau Yardang], [Luau Tombolo], [Luau Mesa] and [Luau Tideland].
    • See below for more.
  • Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha, version 7.1.12.13907344519, April 2nd.

Upcoming Viewers

  • The 2025.03 RC is now in “crash fixes only” mode, and LL are still hoping to get it promoted to de facto release status “soon”.
  • Due to the focus on 2025.03, the 2025.04 viewer update is still in development, but its appearance as an RC viewer is likely to be delayed. As a re-cap: this viewer will include:
    • Hover height improvements.
    • The ability to have sub-folders within the Outfits system folder.
    • The introduction of the glTF mesh importer.
  • As a reminder, as as per recent CCUG meetings the glTF mesh importer:
    • Is purely for glTF format mesh models – it is not the full glTF scene importer that had been in development.
    • Will initially operate pretty much as per the current COLLADA .DAE importer (e.g. anything that can be done with that importer can be done with glTF mesh imports).
    • Is only a first cut with glTF imports, and will be enhanced over time.
    • Is not a replacement for COLLADA .DAE support – LL hope to continue to support COLLADA alongside glTF for as long as is realistically feasible.
  • 2024.03 might additionally include Inventory Favourites and foundational work on RLVa inclusion. However, both of these might simple to the 2025.05 viewer.

In Brief

  • This meeting was held entirely in text as an experiment as decisions are made on the future of both the TPV Developer meeting (generally held in Voice) and the Open Source Development meeting (held in text), and potentially combining them.
  • The official Second Life Discord Channel now has a TPV role / channel to go alongside the opensource role / channel.
    • In order for someone to be eligible for the TPV role, they must be a part of a viewer team that is in the TPV programme and gain confirmation from LL to access the channel.
  • There is to be a “renewed push” to get the Voice service switched over to WebRTC across all simulators – although there are remaining bugs to be resolved before that happens, together with a back-end update required to allow for better service scaling.
    • The switch-over will follow the simulator update schedule: remaining updates will be deployed to RC channels first (with the switch from Vivox to WebRTC), then to the Main SLS channel.
  • The SLua alpha testing on Aditi has progressed well, and LL are now working towards a follow-up beta test.
  • The work on Linux support has been intentionally removed from the viewer repositories for the time being, while LL reviews Linux and determine its overall maintainability.

Next Meeting

† 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 gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.