Day: May 13, 2025

2025 week #20: SL SUG meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Forest of Hours, March 2025 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, May 13th, 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. Pantera also recorded the meeting, and that recording is embedded at the end of this piece – my thanks to Pantera, as always, for providing it.

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

  • On Tuesday, May 13th, the Main SLS channel was updated with the Elderberry simulator release.
  • Om Wednesday, May 14th, the RC channels should be restarted without update.

Upcoming Deployment – Fig Newton (2025.06)

  • Yes, the name changed in the passage of a week.
  • This is still being put together, and is unlikely to surface before June, as the simulator team has been focusing on some necessary internal work which has drawn attention away from feature work on the simulators.

SL Viewer Updates

In Brief

  • Rider Linden requested if people preferred code-names for simulator updates or their official initial version numbers (e.g. 2025.05, 2025.06).
    • Given that version umbers actually relate to minor things like RELEASE NOTES – they actually serve a use.
    • As noted by Fig Pudding Newtons, code names can change on a whim and seem pretty pointless.
    • However, it appears an attempt to use both will be used going forward 🙄(yes, I’m a carbon-based unit and I have no sense of fun‡).
  • PBR Colour data is lost when setting PBR overrides was raised some time ago, but has yet to be fixed. Responding to a question on why it had not been fixed when implementing llSetLinkGLTFOverrides, Rider Linden stated:
Because when PBR was implemented they did not separate the colour value from the alpha. The two are stored internally as a single number. Since the simulator does not have the actual value from the material (it does not read materials) there is no way to change one without impacting the other. Doing so would have required a protocol change in the way overrides are sent and protocol changes are big deals since they break the viewer.
    • He went on to note that overrides are among a number of things he would like to revamp and improve upon.
  • The above led to a request for creators refreshing older products with PBR to be able to supplement llSetLinkAlpha to some sort of llSetLinkPBRAlpha, without having to “dual stack” materials.
    • Rider Linden indicated that this would require adding a new function, and as such perhaps best done when overrides are being revamped, per the above comment.
    • Leviathan Linden further noted that Geenz Linden is currently thinking about how to overhaul GLTF override system, as fallout of planning on how to support object hierarchy.
  • A portion of the chat was around When an object is paid the object name being recorded should be controlled by the Server and not the Viewer, seen as a particular concern among providers of Skill Games. This topic was also raised extensively at the Skill Gaming meeting.
  • Most of the meeting revolved around Blinn-Phong, glTF, alpha and colour overrides, most of which I, frankly, am not qualified to talk about in a meaningful way. Please refer to the video.
  • The latter half of the meeting involved the potential for physical region crossings between regions that are non-contiguous (e.g. your are on “Region A” and can “see” and “cross into” (walking, via vehicle) “Region B” directly (no actual manual teleport trigger), even though “Region B” is on the 2other side” of the grid. See: “Wormhole Regions” (Non-Cartesian region crossing).
    • This is something that has apparently been raised a lot within LL and seen and a “neat idea” and potentially possible. But it would be “way down on a list, below all sorts of important stuff to fix.”
  • Leviathan Linden is still trying to work out the “sometimes objects don’t show up on login” problem. He now has a reliable repro for this issue and is using it to try to understand why and where things are going wrong.
  • Off-lines not appearing on log in until relogging his become an increasing issue of late.  Commenting on the report, Leviathan Linden stated:
The fact that the off-lines show up in a second session suggests that they were never successfully requested by the viewer in the earlier session, since otherwise they would have been cleared (considered delivered) at the server. So we’re wondering: why isn’t the viewer correctly invoking some cap? 

† 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.

‡That’s a Hitch Hiker’s Guide Reference, in case you read this far.