Day: August 30, 2025

2025 week #35: SL TPVD meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Dutch Pavilion, June 2025 – blog post †

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 29th, 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 2025.06 7.2.1.17108480561 – August 29 – NEW.
    • Inventory Favourites System, plus assorted new features.
    • Improvements to avatar system; camera and movement; chat; voice; content creation tools.
    • Mesh uploader updates.
    • Text & UI polish.
    • Fixes for Environment and Rendering; stability and crashes; UI.
    • System improvements.
  • Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

Viewer 2025.07

  • Currently in development.
  • Will include “proper Discord support” for those with a Discord account  – further clarification to follow as the viewer is developed; and possibly Apple Silicon support.

In Brief

  • Meeting update: the TPVD and Open-Source Developer meeting will be merging. The combined meeting will be held once every two weeks, and utilise the TPVD meeting time slot and location. This merge comes into effect on Friday, September 12th, 2025.
  • Code merge policy update:
    • This is intended to better align merging release branches into develop with git flow.
    • LL should now merge code in a given release branch on a fairly regular basis moving forward – so no more waiting for things to go into main before merging up into develop, and moving forward, the Develop branch should always have the latest code LL intends to release in the near future.
    • The latest release code will always be in the main branch.
    • Project branches are still TBD on how they will be handled, as there are often things that need a lot more work before they’re ready for general consumption.
  • The latest version of Autobuild defaults to 64 bit, allowing viewer compilers to remove AUTOBUILD_ADDRSIZE from their build environments.
  • User Joe Magarac (animats) has been working on viewer-side “infinite draw distance” using mesh / sculpt imposters for surrounding region (e.g. one region, 4 region, 16 region, 64 region, etc., – currently only terrain), with each imposter having its own UUID and an a Land Impact of 1 LI.
    • This work is in test within his own Sharpview viewer (not on general release), and will be made available to other viewers.
    • Geenz Linden has been following the work, and has an alternate view on achieving the same result (e.g. having the simulator specify a UUID message to an imposter object which any viewer can then just load and display as required, rather than having everything driven from the viewer), and has suggested the work could benefit for a more collaborative approach.
    • This resulted in a general discussion on project status, possible direction, options for imposter creation, possible issues of content protection if imposters include content information (e.g. buildings), etc, which ran through most of the meeting. Please refer to the video for details.

Next Meeting

  • Friday, September 12th, 2025 at the Hippotropolis Theatre (combining with the Open-Source Developer meeting, per the above notes).

† 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.