On Wednesday, April 16th, 2025, Linden Lab announced that Linden Dollar buy fees are reduced to US $0.01 per transaction for all Second Life users in a “limited-time offer”.
When and What
Offer commenced: 12:30 SLT on Wednesday, April 16th, 2025.
Offer ends: 14:30 SLT on Friday, April 18th, 2025.
Offer duration 50 hours.
Any purchase of Linden Dollars made during this period (within the required trading limits), whether through an Instant (Market) or Best Rate (Limited) Buy (https://secondlife.com/my/lindex/buy.php) or through the viewer (Buy L$, top right of the viewer window), will incur a transaction (Buy) fee of just US $0.01.
The limited-time L$ Buy fee offer applies to in-viewer L$ purchased and both Instant and Best Rate buy via your Second Life dashboard
From the official blog post:
Times are tough for a lot of people, so we’ve come up with one way to make things a little easier: Second Life is launching a special LindeX limited-time offer – a chance to make Linden Dollar (L$) Buy fees nearly disappear for a limited time!
While the global economy wrestles with rising tariffs and tense trade talks, we’re responding with a bold, Resident-first promotion: we’re charging just a penny for your LindeX buy fees for the next 2 days. We’re committed to you – our Residents – through these challenging times, and we will continue to stand by you as we have over the past 22 years.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 15th, 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.
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 – Recap
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 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.
llSetGLTFOverrides, rather than changes to llSetColor and llSetAlpha to work with PBR, as changing the latter was “starting to lead down some very scary paths WRT ‘What is the right thing to do'”.
SL Viewer Updates
Default viewer: 2025.03 version 7.1.13.14343205944, dated April 9th, 2025, promoted April 15th, 2025.
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.
Please refer to the the video for details on the following.
A general discussion llDerezObject and whether an object being taken back by an object has been renamed will result in a copy being generated, or the original still replaced (answer: still replaced).
As a result, a DEREZ_TO_INVENTORY_COPY parameter has been requested, and could be suppled in the simulator update after Elderberry.
Rider Linden also noted he may need to disallow a reclaim on coalesced inventory objects, as once in-world, acoalesced object becomes a grouping on independent objects, with not connection between them or any means to re-group them.
Discussion around this functionally and iiDerezObject continued through most of the meeting.
Progress on SLua is described as being “good”, but as per the pervious meetings (SUG and TPVD), there is more back-end work to be done before the SLua project moves to a “beta” on Aditi.
Following the discussion on 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), it was noted that a fix for the issue should be in the next RC viewer update – 2025.04.
† 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 