Day: July 22, 2025

2025 week #30: SL SUG meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey
Lavender Springs, May 2025 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, July 15th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting (“off week”). 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 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.
  • The term “off week” is used to describe meetings held by Leviathan Linden on those weeks when a “full” Simulator User Group meeting is not scheduled to be held.

Simulator Deployments

  • There are no planned deployments to any channels this week, only restarts. Although the Main channel apparently had some issues on Tuesday July 22nd, leading to multi restarts for some regions.

In Brief.

  • Rider Linden is working on a few new script features that the moles need for an upcoming project. These mostly deal with land and being able to transfer or sell land using a script.
  • Pepper Linden has been working on a re-write of LL’s Conductor service, and is currently wrapping this up as it goes through QA. The Conductor service is responsible for placing regions onto servers, and the re-write is designed to allow the team responsible to more optimally place regions and prevent things like ‘hot-spots’ (e.g. one region on a host using more resources than it should and starving other regions of CPU time).
  •  Signal Linden is working on number of projects:
    • Making “shovel-ready” tasks for open source contributors. This includes: bringing back legacy search; implementing drag-and-drop uploads; resizing large textures before uploading; etc.
    • Looking at bounty/reward platforms for compensating people for working on initiatives LL hasn’t got much traction on.
    • Getting budget approval for taking SLua to production and merging some “nice small fix-up PRs” on the LSL-definitions repo.
  • The idea in having a series of defined tasks for contributors is to have more people contributing upstream to the viewer and providing “ready to go” code and thus free the Lab’s core viewer team to focus on larger viewer projects.
  • Having the ability to replace mesh / prim HUDs with something more suitable was discussed. One suggestion has been the development of an HTML5/CSS/JS solution of some sort. However, this would require quite a bit of both viewer and server work; as such, a proof of concept from the community would go a long way towards getting some server attention on it.
    • Some concerns were raised about this leading to people having to connect to unknown external websites.
    • Another suggestion was for a  small mobile subset of SVG within SL, although this is a potential awkward solution as it doesn’t allow thing like buttons lighting up on HUDS when moused-over.
    • This led to a discussion on options (HYML5, SVG, some form of modal system built-into the viewer, using MOAP / CSS, with various opinions being expressed.
  • glTF mech import:
    • As reported in my CCUG meeting notes, this is to go to “beta” with the next viewer update.
    • Full glTF scene import is regarded as “seriously deprioritised”, with Signal Linden expressing a preference for keeping it so until it can be implemented server-side.
    • There s a report that a change in the glTF uploader broke the glTF scene rendering. no further details available.
  • The plan to replace the SL Wiki (powered by Media Wiki) with a new documentation platform was discussed (see:  Modern Documentation Platform: docs.secondlife.com).
  • As of the next official meeting, the Simulator User Group will be at a new location (still TBC at the time of writing). What this should look like was a source of extended discussion, as was whether or not Simon Linden’s home (the meeting place until now) should be left intact or destroyed (“destroyed” won that part of the discussion).

Date of Next Meeting

† 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.

Seeing without Seeing in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Kondor Art Centre, July 2025: Angelika Corral – Seeing Without Seeing

In Japanese culture, names often convey profound meanings through kanji characters. One such concept conveyed by kanji is that of ‘hidden’, signifying mystery and secrecy, adding depth to a name. While I am no expert and am open to correction, I believe one such kanji is Inoru (“hidden”), which lends itself to a number of potential meanings in combination with other kanji, such that it might be used to form ideas such as hidden one, hidden village, hidden flower, and so on.

Another kanji is 祕, which can be taken as ‘secret’, ‘hidden’ and / or ‘conceal’, and at the Kondor Art Centre, Angelika Corral uses this Kanji as the focal point for what is a simply marvellous exhibition of black and white photography with a strong lean towards chiaroscuro, entitled Seeing Without Seeing.

Kondor Art Centre, July 2025: Angelika Corral – Seeing Without Seeing

Angelika has deep roots within the Second Life arts community as both as a curator of art and as a photographer. In the former role, she was a co-creator and operator of DaphneArts, in its time one of the foremost Second Life galleries in presenting exhibitions both ensemble and singular, which explored complex and rich themes.

As a photographer, Angelika works primarily in black-and-white, focusing on avatar studies noted for their depth and introspection, whilst carrying a richness of artistic technique and classic photography. Such is her skill, in 2022, she won Flickr/SmugMug’s World Photography Day award in the virtual photography category for I’m not just what you see, an award highlighting both her ability to craft compelling visual narratives within virtual environments and the validity of such environments as a vehicle for artistic expression.

Kondor Art Centre, July 2025: Angelika Corral – Seeing Without Seeing

The title of that winning piece actually resonates with the theme for Seeing Without Seeing, which Angelika describes thus:

This series is an invitation into the quiet … These images do not shout. They whisper. They leave space. They suggest rather than explain.
Inspired by traditional Japanese principles, these images aim to slow the act of looking. They are meant to be lingered [upon]. The subtle textures, partial forms, and quiet moments ask: what might lie just beyond the visible?

– Angelika Corral

Thus, within the images on offer, we are asked to look beyond the partial (and in places fragmented) nature of individual photographs and consider the nuances of framing, cropping, lighting and pose, and allow each piece and see what lies beyond, not what is presented in an of itself. To allow each each picture to talk to us in its own voice and listen to whatever narrative – or narratives – it might suggest.

Kondor Art Centre, July 2025: Angelika Corral – Seeing Without Seeing

Given the above, I am not going to offer my own interpretations here, but simply recommend Seeing Without Seeing to your own eyes. Just be sure to look closely and listen to what each piece might decide to whisper.

SLurl Details