2025 week #23: SL SUG meeting

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, June 3rd, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. The notes were taken from my chat log of the meeting. No video this week.

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):
  • Every Tuesday at 12:00 noon SLT.
  • In text (no Voice).
  • At this location.
• 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

• There are no planned deployments to any channels this week, only restarts.

SL Viewer Updates

• Official Viewer: 2025.04 – 7.1.14.15192634334, issued May 25, promoted May 28 – NEW.
• Second Life Project glTF Mesh Import, version 7.1.14.15361077240 June 2 – NEW.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

In Brief

• As noted in the previous update, the WebRTC “switch on” has been on hold, in part due bugs, performance optimisations, and infrastructure updates.
  • A new version of the code is due to be deployed, aimed at addressing some of the first two of these requirements.
  • There is also the issue of around 21% of Firestorm users not running a WebRTC capable version of that viewer, which is also a potential impact on the switch-over.).
  • In the WebRTC prototype the audio mixing/relaying happens on the same host as the region; there is a project to move that compute onto dedicated server stacks.
• Given the on-going issues with the SL wiki (the latest being a sustained DDOS-type impact, thought to be caused by “aggressive and improper crawler bots”), it was indicated that LL are planning to move away from using the mediawiki platform to a new service. No details were given on what service this might be,  and the statement was followed by numerous appeals for all existing SL wiki data to be ported and/or not lost.
• SLua:
  • There is something of a performance bottleneck with SLua in that SLua scripts run so much faster = people want to make content that thrashes prim params quickly = the server struggles to send the updates fast enough, causing the bottleneck.
    • Leviathan Linden had been looking at this and is hoping to get back to it soon, noting that he should be able to offer some gains in the speed with which the server sends the updates.
    • However, he doubts the Lab will “be able to fully unlock the SLua potential for thrashing object properties” without a “major overhaul of the communication protocol”.
  • It has been noted that  some ll.List functions produce SLua run-time errors when working with lists (tables) that contain nil values. This is a known issue at the Lab, and discussion on how to address it are in progress.
• General, user-led discussions on:
  • Bots (e.g. better account verification).
  • The potential to improve / replace Media on a Prim (MOAP) – such as replacing it with SVG rendering on a prim (seen as handy for use in HUDs and well), or reducing the requirement for every object using MOAP to call its own browser instance. LL do not appear to have any work on the roadmap for either of these, although feature requests for SVG support were noted as having been “seen”.

† 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.