Day: July 8, 2025

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, July 8th, 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 and Patera’s video, which is embedded at the end of this article – my thanks to her 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):
  • Every other Tuesday from July 8th, 2025, 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 (RC channels subject to confirmation at the time of the meeting).
• The next simulator release is estimated to be around two weeks from being ready for deployment.

SL Viewer Updates

• Default viewer 7.1.15.15596336374 promoted June 12 – No Change.
• Second Life Project glTF Mesh Import, version 7.1.14.15976006598 July 2 – New.
  • This is an early Alpha release with some of the rough edges and already resolved many bugs and crashes, although more are to be found, together with general feedback from the community. Please read the release notes if you intend to test this viewer.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

Upcoming Changes to the Simulator User Group Meetings

• As from this meeting, the Simulator User group will be moving to every other week, rather than weekly. So the next formal meeting will be on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2025.
• However, for the foreseeable future, Leviathan Linden plans to make himself available to hold informal meetings on the “off” weeks – so he will be available on Tuesday, July 15th.
• In addition:
  • The format of the meeting will also be changing to include a “dev stand-up” in which the members of the engineering team who are present can provide a short “here is what I’m working on” summary.
  • The meeting might also include a mail box so that questions which cannot be addressed at the current meeting can be submitted and answered at the next.
  • The location of the meeting will be changing (and at the time of writing is TBA).
  • The meeting will remain text-only – although this may change when speech-to-text becomes available.

In Brief

Also refer to the video for additional discussions.

• Puppetry:
  • The Puppetry project remains in hibernation, awaiting work on things like getting inverse kinematics (IK) into the viewer.
  • There has been some internal talk of animation streaming (which had been experimented with during the Puppetry work) at the Lab, but this has yet to the thrashed out enough to get close to getting on the development roadmap.
• SLua:
  • Leviathan Linden has been working on an optimisation to address a SLua bottleneck with llSetLinkPrimitiveParams(). This work has resulted in object FullUpdates measurably faster when viewed via debug timings, although the difference is not noticeable is term of user experience.
  • He also noted that he didn’t really drop the number of function calls all that much, but that “they are doing less work, but still about the same number of them”.
  • As such the work needs to progress further, but is once again paused whilst Leviathan addresses some high priority bugs.
• Rider Linden is working on on expanding llRequestInventoryData, allowing it to take advantage of metadata in other assets (e.g. materials, animations, textures, sounds) which could prove useful for scripts.
• Questions were raised on accessing Aditi, the beta grid. Those trying to do so / having issued should refer to this help desk article.
• Map Tiles:
  • Individual Map tiles have a UUID (as well as a URL to allow them to be shown on web pages); however, 4, 16, 64, etc., region tiles only have a web URL.
  • A script function to confess the UUID for a region’s map tile has often been requested. Pepper linden noted that LL have have the mapping of region id to texture tile UUID, so the latter can be exposed via an LSL function, but the work to do so has yet to be prioritised.
  • The process for pruning stale Map tiles from the map, as there is a bug in the mapgen that results in “chunks of the map disappearing.”  As a result map tile removal is back to a manual process.
• The request to “bring back LindenWorld” made at SL22B (and raised at just about every User Group meeting since), prompted Leviathan Linden to note:

It is an interesting idea. Although [the] LindenWorld feature set is very buggy/outdated. It isn’t compatible with modern SL accounts. I wonder how we would do auth? It would probably have to be rewritten for it to actually work. From a developer’s perspective: it would be a lot of work to host a LindenWorld grid. Just to build the ancient LindenWorld client… big long overhaul of legacy C++ code which no longer builds with modern compilers/libraries/APIs.

• A general discussion on terrain, adding more geometry detail to the terrain per metre, the raw terrain export/import.
• A discussion on water, the water plane, exclusion volumes, “physical” water, etc.

Date of Next Meeting

• Tuesday, July 22nd, 2025

† 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.