The following notes were taken from my chat transcript + the video recording by Pantera (embedded at the end of this summary) of the Third-Party Developer meeting (TPVD) held on Friday, August 1st, 2025. My thanks to Pantera as always for providing it.
Meeting Purpose
- The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors to discuss general viewer development. This meeting is held once a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
- Dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they are generally conducted in text chat.
- The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.
Official Viewers
- Default viewer 7.1.15.15596336374 promoted June 12 – No Change.
- Second Life Project glTF Mesh Import (2025.05 Beta) 7.2.0.16356654553 July 23 – New.
- Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 – No Change.
Code Contributions “Shovel List”
- Signal Linden has produced a “shovel list” of code contributions the Lab are seeking from open-source developers.
- Two high-value items identified in the list are:
- A RFP for replacing Autobuild in the viewer build process.
- A RFP for replacing the Havok convex hull decomposition mechanism with an open-source equivalent.
- The former RFP is as removing Autobuild as a significant barrier / burden to those trying to learn how to the build the viewer. Suggestions for preplacement include pure Cmake, or using Vcpkg or Conan for dependency management, or vendor dependencies in the repo, etc.
- Related to this, Brad Linden has started an experimental branch simplifying LL development environment. In is not ready for general use, but the idea is that the Build Instructions in the README should “just work” and not require having Autobuild installed or set up properly ahead of time. The is part of on-going work to overhaul the viewer build process.
- The latter RFP above is part of the Lab’s aim to remove the Havok sub-library from the viewer, which also includes a means to still visualise the navmesh.
- The above sparked a short conversation on the viewer build process.
Experimental Rewards / Bounty System
- LL has launched an experiment rewards programme offering monetary rewards against certain Github issues.
- Powered by Opire, the programme is explained here.
- These rewards are not meant to replace regular open source development, but rather to drive contributions on items LL have been unable to get much traction on.
In Brief
- LL has also open sourced the LSL definitions project, the authoritative definition of LSL library functions, types, etc. It is used to perform codegen in the server, building out the bindings for LSL and SLua, and also drives the LSL editor tooltips.
- PR Appearance fixes #3492 is still requiring attention from linden Lab, and is currently stalling the work on getting RLV into the official viewer.
- Camera Constraints Bug (below -0 metre altitude) has been filed. This affects all v7 viewers, and is under investigation.
Next Meeting
- Friday, August 29th, 2025 at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
† 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 gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 