2025 week #36: SUG meeting summary

Silent Melody, June 2025 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 2nd, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. They were taken from my chat log of the meeting and the video recording by Pantera, embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks to Pantera 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 is held every other Tuesday at 12:00 noon, SLT (holidays, etc., allowing), per the Second Life Public Calendar.
  • The “SUG Leviathan Hour” meetings are held on the Tuesdays which do not have a formal SUG meeting, and are chaired by Leviathan Linden. They are more brainstorming / general discussion sessions.
  • Meetings are held in text in-world, at this location.

Simulator Deployments

  • There are no planned deployment for the week, only restarts.
    • The restarts include upgrading some of the hardware to better classes of machines in the background, which is being carried out in stages on each restart.
    • Monty Linden noted the Main SLS Main channel restart saw an increase in the mix of more modern AWS hosts, but there were some glitches which led to some regions being off-line for a bit longer than expected.
  • It is hoped a new simulator update  – Grapejuice – will be ready for deployment to one or more RC channels in week #37.

In Brief

  • Rider Linden is working on an official native VSCode plugin for LSL and SLua. This is proceeding smoothly so far, and the hope is to open the repo opened to public viewing as soon as possible.
    • Right now, this is just for communicating compile errors from the viewer to the plugin.
    • However, he is planning on pushing a lot more through it in the future (e.g. DAP when LUA debugging becomes available).
    • He will most likely put in a LSP interface so that it can communicate with Selene for syntax colouring, etc.
    • There is a viewer branch with the initial code (PR: https://github.com/secondlife/viewer/pull/4599).
  • Leviathan Linden is working on getting the webRTC voice router to automatically submit crash reports in a similar manner to the viewer.
  • Pepper Linden noted that:
    • Working is continuing on turning on the new dynamic packing, noting there has been a “small road bump” due some issues seen with reported region stats. However, it should be turned on for some RC channel regions this week. Things to look for: better performance/less lag, and less restarts.
    • Pepper is currently working on the outfit project for SL Mobile.
  • Monty Linden is “thinking about the eventqueueget and other problems” as he re-visits protocol failures again with a view to updating an improving on his previous work in this area.
  • User Suzanna (SuzannaLinn) is producing a website with a SLua guide, including examples and a LSL to SLua transpiler.
  • A general discussion on SLua event handling, and on state switching (LSL -> SLua) which led to a wider discussion on coding practices and options which ran through the second half of the meeting.

Date of Next Meetings

  • Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, September 9th, 2025.
  • Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, September 16th, 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.

The art of FionaFei’s ShuiMo in Second Life

FionaFei: ShuiMo Ink Brush Installation

I first became familiar with the work of FionaFei in 2019, and instantly fell in love with her unique and immersive art within Second Life, and have covered her in-world exhibitions on numerous occasions in these pages.

A Chinese-American who immigrated to the United States with her family at a young age, Fiona gained traditional training in fine art, gaining a BFA from Cornell University and a MS in visualisation from Texas A&M University. All of this has combined with her involvement in Second Life to celebrate artistic expression – particularly that of shuǐmò, which has been at the heart of a number of her exhibitions and installations in SL over the years.

FionaFei: ShuiMo Ink Brush Installation

For those unfamiliar with the term, shuǐmò (also called shuǐmòhuà or suiboku-ga in Japanese), is a technique of ink brush painting generally using different dilutions and thicknesses of black ink to produce monochrome pieces (although very subtle colour washes might be used as well). It first emerged in Tang dynasty China (618–907), spreading to Japan (14th century) and also reaching Korea and India. Beside the use of black ink dilutions (ranging from deep black to light gray, shuǐmò is also marked by the emphasis of the brushwork being on the perceived spirit or essence of the subject rather than directly imitating its appearance.  

Within Second Life, Fiona has offered a new perspective on this traditional art by producing exhibitions offering art in the style and tradition of shuǐmò, but which have the added dimension of physical depth through the use of 3D modelling. This has resulted in finished pieces which can gently shift as our viewpoint changes, and allows the art to become an immersive 3D space we can not only view, but experience by passing through it – including witnessing Fiona’s 2D artwork.

FionaFei: ShuiMo Ink Brush Installation – Fiona’s China Adventures

In her latest exhibition, ShuiMo Ink Brush Installation, Fiona again offers a 3D environment presented in the traditional shuǐmò style within which can be found further 3D shuǐmò paintings framed as scrolls, together with two gallery spaces devoted to 2D art neatly contained within it.

The first – and larger – of these gallery spaces offers a portfolio of Fiona’s photography from the physical world entitled Fiona’s China Adventures. This is a visually engaging collection of 11 images capturing aspects of China which are quite possibly far removed from the common perceptions of that country, helping to further bring it to life. The second presents eight ink paintings again produced as traditional Chinese landscape scroll art. I’ll leave you to discover these gallery spaces – but that shouldn’t be too hard 🙂 .

FionaFei: ShuiMo Ink Brush Installation

As always from Fiona, and expressive and engaging art space.

SLurl Details