Day: August 9, 2025

2025 week #32: SL CCUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Hippotropolis Campsite: venue for CCUG meetings
The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, August 7th, 2025. Please note that this is not a full transcript, but a summary of key topics.
Table of Contents

Meeting Purpose

  • The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with related viewer development work.
  • This meeting is generally held on alternate Thursdays at Hippotropolis.
  • Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they are conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.

Official Viewer Status

  • Default viewer 7.2.0.16729091892, issued August 5, promoted August 8 – New.
    • glTF mesh import (should have similar constraints to COLLADA upload, but does not support a unified material upload solution).
    • Media changes including support for PRIM_MEDIA_FIRST_CLICK_INTERACT and HUD autoplay (see https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlGetPrimMediaParams).
    • Fixes related to memory allocation, inventory floater, world map and Picks performance.
    • Fixes for OpenJPG, PBR Texture Panel Repeats per meter improvements and sky ambient colour not blending during day cycle among others.
    • Fixes for image rendering.
  • Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

2025  glTF Mesh Uploader

  • There were multiple requests for the behaviours within the glTF mesh uploader that do not much the COLLADA .DAE uploader to be revised so that they do conform with the latter.
  • These had to be shut down, largely due to technically limitations within SL’s internal mesh formats.
  • The hope is that over time, these limitations can be “peeled” back, and mesh import as a whole improved, most likely by using a new internal mesh format.
  • No details on what the new internal format will be, as this is still subject to internal discussions at the Lab, but the aim is to make things easier for both content creators and content consumers.

2025.06 Viewer

  • The next viewer in development is 2025.06, which is described as “not very ground breaking”.
  • It contains a lot of work and bug fixes original intended for the Maintenance C viewer from 2024, and prior to the viewer release process being revised.
  • The key feature in this viewer will be Inventory Favourites.
  • Currently, the viewer is going through a stabilisation process with the aim of releasing an RC Beta as soon as possible.
  • The aim of the 2025.06 release is to raise the cadence of official viewer releases. This is seen as beneficial on a number of counts:
    • It allows individual releases to become more iterative in nature, building capabilities and allowing better response to feedback from users.
    • It breaks the cycle of long delays between viewer releases while the Lab tries to deliver an entire project in a single viewer drop.
    • It will hopefully allow the Lab to be more nimble with releases, allowing them to come back to major updates and adjust them / add to them based on longer-term feedback, rather than appearing to simply drop a project into a viewer release and then never come back to it with significant updates / improvements.

In Brief

  • Removing Scale From LI Calculations (Recap/Update):
    • Signal Linden highlighted a Feedback Ticket he has raised, proposing the removal of scale from Land Impact calculations, which has been touched upon at the last couple of SUG meetings.
    • However, numerous caveats / issues with the proposal arose as it was further investigated, including potential impacts on physics, issues for streaming calculations, etc., all of which caused a slow-down in the idea.
    • Rider Linden provided an update, noting that scale land impact is so closely tied into an object’s triangle count that there is no easy way to extricate the two, leading to the risk of small items with a high tri count suddenly exploring in their LI is scale was removed from the equation.
  • Support for Vertex Animation Textures (VAT) – a means to create complex and non-traditional animations in real time using textures and shaders to achieve the visuals on the GPU, thus having a much lighter performance impact on the CPU when compared to traditional skeletal mesh animations.
    • Allowing for the complexities of SL, concern was raised over use of VAT “overloading other systems”, with the view that providing support for blend shapes could actually be preferable.
    • However, given the age and complexity of the SL internal mesh format, adding things like blend shape support (and / or) vertex support, is seen as a “pretty involved effort” with a number of potential complications.
  • The above led to a more general discussions on animations for things like plants, the LI cost of Animesh and how it precludes it from widespread use; the balance between having lots of animated elements in-world versus potential performance cost; options for baking animations into meshes, etc.
  • Make Scale/Offset/Rotation PERSIST when switching PBR Materials (e.g. not having any scale, offset and / or rotation set for a surface cleared why swapping one material on that surface for another, as is currently the case):
    • The reason this happens is that (unlike Blinn-Phong, where the offset, scale and rotation are set against the object surface) with glTF materials, that are set against the material itself (as per the relevant glTF specification extension); ergo, changing the material reset them.
    • This behaviour could potentially be changed through the addition of an override to give more consistency in behaviour between PBR materials and Blinn-Phong; however, any such update comes down to a matter of prioritisation. This prompted an invitation to any interested open source developer to submit a suitable update.
    • One concern over a possible solution is the need for additional UI elements in what is already regarded as a complicated Build / Edit floater.
  • Support 16-bit grayscale terrain import: this has been acknowledged by the Lab as a problem that needs to be addressed, but as yet, there has not been the opportunity to take a deep look into possible causes of issues with the RAW terrain file import, and what the correct solution(s) might be.
  • Nothing on the cards for further .glTF extensions at this time, however, with the glTF importer now in the release viewer “the door is open to a lot more possibilities for what we could do” (e.g. removing the “old” .glTF importer used purely for materials and allowing the “new” importer to handle them, making it much easier to add further .glTF extensions in the future).
  • A general discussion on scripted animation, inverse kinematics (IK), puppetry, and similar. In short:
    • Puppetry remains frozen.
    • It is recognised the proper IK would allow for a range of capabilities (e.g. animation retargeting)
  • A general discussion on controls and the game_control work. As the latter is Leviathan Linden’s project, and he was not at this meeting, I’ll leave updates on this to the Server User Group summaries.

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