2025 week #16: SL CCUG meeting summary

Meeting Purpose

• The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with related viewer development work.
• This meeting is generally held on alternate Thursdays at Hippotropolis.
• Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they are conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.

Official Viewer Status and Updates

Viewer Status

•  Default viewer: 2025.03 7.1.13.14343205944, issued April 9th and promoted April 15th – 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 7.1.12.14175675593, April 2nd.
  • Will only work on Aditi. Blog post: Lab officially announces Luau Alpha testing.

Upcoming Viewers

2025.04

• The 2025.04 viewer is “still progressing”.
• There is an issue described as “not all of the glTF meshes not coming in”, including those with less than 65K vertices. The cause for this is still under investigation and is currently preventing the viewer progressing to an RC release.
• This viewer is provisionally targeting:
  • The glTF mesh uploader (based on the current .DAE mesh uploader and doing pretty much the same). Again, please note that this is not the full glTF scene importer which has been discussed at previous CCUG meetings; that work is being broken down into smaller, more easily managed projects.
  • Possibly – and subject to confirmation – re-enabling subfolders within the My Outfits folder.
  • Hover height improvements.
• The glTF issue coupled with an elevated crash rate issues discovered in 2025.03 and affecting 2024.04 means that this viewer will be running behind the planned schedule for releases.

2025.05

• Internal discussions on what form this should take are in progress.
• One option is to have this release comprise entirely of updates originally planned for inclusion in the 2024 Maintenance C release prior to that being put on hold when the focus shifted to addressing performance issues, etc., in the wake of the initial PBR release.
• One of the updates for this viewer is likely to be Inventory Favourites (presumably somewhat similar to the Firestorm Favourite Wearables).

Removing Scale From LI Calculations (Recap/Update)

• Signal Linden highlighted a Feedback Ticket he has raised, proposing the removal of scale from Land Impact calculations, which has been touched upon at the last couple of SUG meetings.
• However, there are now a few caveats starting to appear possibly impacting “everything from rendering to physics”, which require further internal discussion at LL.
• One of these is the LI goes in both directions – so while removing scale from the calculation may be positive for a net reduction in the LI of objects that have been scaled up in size – it could have a net negative for objects scaled down (e.g. you have a group of objects each with 20 LI, and have scaled them down so each only has 10 LI, removing scale would reset them to 20 LI apiece).
• Further, the Lab needs to re-evaluate LI as a whole and where there could be potentially “bad” impacts on LI changes as a result of scaling – such as with streaming calculations, which are entirely based on scale.
• As such, this work is now in the column of “something we want to do, but we need to do it responsibly”.

In Brief

• Blue tint on reflective surfaces: this is largely the result of one of two things:
  • Outdoors, the fact that automatic  / void probes will be reflecting the ambient lighting and when outdoors there is rather a lot of sky, and so they is going to give reflections a blue tint.
  • Indoors: no internal reflection probe has been placed to override the automatic / void probes, so the sky reflections will be used via the automatic probes. Solution (not always ideal / possible): install a reflection probe indoors.
• PBR metallic “vs.” PBR specular: it was acknowledged that general control of reflectiveness in surface could be – to a degree – better managed through the support of PBR specular rather than relying solely on PBR metallic (as is currently supported), and adding PBR specular is being considered.
• Terrain:
  • Significant updates to SL terrain (e.g.  terrain painting (summarised here), increasing the terrain geometry, potentially implementing better terrain LODs, etc), all all either on-hold (terrain painting) or seen as a much larger undertaking that needs to be focused solely on terrain improvements.
  • As such, they are currently viewed as “down the road projects” while the focus remains on providing content creators with more immediately benefits (such as the taking mesh models, etc., directly from their preferred workflows and dropping them into SL without additional faffing).
• Lighting:
  • Geenz Linden has broken down what he refers to a “super Canny” feature request on lighting into a number of smaller requests. All are tracked – but this does not mean they are currently being worked upon, but rather are things Geenz would like to get to as time allows:
    • Support for more than two shadow casting lights (shadow map impacts allowing – each light requires its own shadow map, impacting local performance).
    • Support for light probes separate from reflection probes.
    • Support for physically based light intensity.
  • Path Traced Global Illumination (PTGI) described as “not any time soon”.
  • Environment versioning: to help track chances to the environment rendering, versioning of assets has been introduced. whereby if the parameter ranges of an asset are changed by LL, then the “old” version of the asset becomes locked and the revised parameters only apply to  new asse version (which requires a new viewer version).
  • Light sources on water (outside of the Sun and Moon: not going to be “coming back” any time soon.
• Some confusion around glow and emissive mask on PBR. The best place for information on PBR, Blinn-Phong (“legacy”) materials + capabilities) is Kirsty Aurelias’ handy (invaluable) guide.
• Changes to Blinn-Phong alpha-gamma (as has been discussed in previous meetings) is currently on hold and subject to on-going discussions within the Lab on how to best proceed.

Next Meetings

• 11:00 SLT, Saturday, April 26th, 2025 at the Hippotropolis Campsite.
• 13:00 SLT, Thursday, May 1st, 2025, at the Hippotropolis Campsite.