Day: April 22, 2025

2025 week #17: SL SUG meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey
Peng Lai, February 2025 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 22nd, 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 – Elderberry

  • It is hoped the at Elderberry update will be deployed the BlueSteel RC channel on Wednesday Apeil 30th, 2025.
  • This release will likely include:
    • Anew 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.
    • 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 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.

In Brief

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

  • Ability to rename a group is marked As Planned, but “is not currently in the queue right now”.
  • A request to make gravity / physics variable on a region basis (or as least when underwater. The response to this was twofold:
    • File a Feature Request outlining the requirement and how it might be used (e.g. through the SL Experiences mechanism) and see what the feedback from the community might be.
    • Whether the work could be undertaken or no would depend on a combination of how feasible it would be; the effort required to implement it (particularly in relation to other requests); how it might be employed.
The physics engine can handle a different acceleration of gravity, no problem. But, we’d have to track down all the places where we have hard-coded the normal value of gravity (server and viewer) and then replace that with a value that is communicated from the server, so we’d have to adjust the data protocol a bit, then get that work in all the important TPVs. Just thinking out loud how hard it would all be.

– Leviathan Linden

  • The above threaded through much of the meeting, in placing crossing over  into discussions:
    • About facilitating natural swimming in SL (i.e. Linden Water shouldn’t exhibit the same gravity as land and causing avatars to drop to the riverbed / sea floor).
    • The idea of the official viewer providing a built-in AO system (e.g. akin to Firestorm’s, but making use of llSetAnimationOverride.
    • On the SL wind and its usefulness (and to the ability to have wind-driven weather).
  • The official Discord channel has seen a conversation about allowing experience scripts to optionally rez objects as the experience land owner, rather than only the owner of the object (e.g. let an experience gun rez bullets under land group instead of needing to set land to open rez). Rider Linden stated he’d like to get something like this added to the roadmap.
  • Although more viewer-side, the camera became a focus of discussion:
    • While no work has been taken on it, New llSetCameraParams() rules: CAMERA_POSITION_KEY and CAMERA_FOCUS_KEY is something that might be a part of providing better camera controls for the likes of machinimatographers.
    • A reminder was given, as well: llSetKeyFramedCamera.
    • Leviathan Linden remided people that he had re-implemented follow-cam in the game-control project, so that the camera could be moved around with the game controller device. However, “there was much work to be done there to make anyone happy”.
  • The viewer-side implementation of Lua (not the server-side SLua project currently being tested on Aditi), is apparently “on hold”.

† 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.