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 2025.06 7.2.1.17108480561 – August 29.
- 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.
Viewer 2025.07
- This is now in development.
- Will likely include (although the list is subject to possible change as the viewer develops):
- “Proper Discord support” for those with a Discord account – further clarification to follow as the viewer is developed.
- Native Apple Silicon support, which should see a performance boost for those running Apple Silicon.
- A Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF) update (used to power the in-viewer browser, media on a prim (MOAP), etc.), which should bring some performance and security improvements – although the former will not necessarily be observed in regions / parcels making heavy use of MOAP (e.g. in arcades, and similar).
- This also might include a code contribution which enables PRIM_MEDIA_FIRST_CLICK_INTERACT within the viewer, allowing the user to interact with a media without an initial “focus” click, as well as passes hover to the media.
- As a side note: a code contribution included in 2025.05 7.2.0.16729091892 (current release at the time of writing) allows media Autoplay turned off, whilst still allowing it to work on HUDs using MOAP.
- New performance metrics which should allow the Lab to gather data on the likely performance impact new features might have on the viewer. This should benefit updates such as the improvements to screen space reflections (SSR), which have been parked in a viewer branch pending the ability to better assess how these updates might impact the average user’s experience in terms of frame rate (speed, smoothness, etc.).
- It was indicated that 2025.07 could act as a baseline for updates to SLua support in the viewer.
General Discussion – In Brief
- Alpha / Gamma issues (linear alpha blending):
- In order for PBR lighting to render anywhere close to correctly, alpha blending had to be switched from SRGB to linear colour space. This can cause some older content using Blinn-Phong, to look either more opaque or more transparent than in did pre-PBR.
- A suggested fix for this would be to give people the ability to adjust the alpha/gamma on per texture entry for the object (including no mod items), and this had been scheduled in 2024 for release “after the ExtraFPS viewer”.
- However, as this was essentially a “permission hack”, the update got held-up. It has now been decided to default all old content to gamma space blending, to bring back some of the “old” alpha blending functionality
- Extracting Sky and Water Settings assets from a Day Cycle was filed a year ago and noted as tracked (also: https://github.com/secondlife/viewer/issues/2887), but progress may have stalled. As such, a effort will be make to raise its priority, although it still likely will not surface in a viewer until at least the 2025.09 release.
- Issues with updating alphas on PBR materials was raised (currently, it is not possible to change the alpha without also changing the colour/tint. llSetLinkGLTFOverrides can be of some help with certain issues, and Brad Linden indicated that a Canny on the matter is working through the system, which should also help.
- Custom Skeleton support: Geenz noted that the move to glTF mesh import was primarily to address the fact that COLLADA .DAE is increasingly unsupported by content creation apps, and thus SL needed to update to a “newer” format.
- However, the manner in which the work has been done could support the use of custom skeletons in the future.
- But, in order for this to be possible, several other hurdles would have to be cleared first (such as updating the internal SL mesh file format to support custom skeletons and without breaking existing content).
- As such, any such support would need further consideration and prioritisation against other updates / projects before getting on the roadmap.
- Vulkan support: this was referred to as still being “some way off” and requiring some extensive work, including cleaning-up how the view handles OpenGL.
General Questions
- Questions were asked about both segmenting regions / parcels into vertical zones; the status of further work on Combat 2. and on Land impact calculations. These were questions more specific to Rider Linden (who was unfortunately unable to attend the meeting) / the Simulator User Group, and as such were redirected to the latter.
- The question was raised if the developing Lobby capability for SL Mobile (which will eventually allow people to use some aspects of the Mobile app such as chat without them appearing as on-line to others) could be implemented within the viewer. It was indicated that this might be possible in the future, although there is no current work in this direction at present.
- This above encompassed a conversation on where conversation logs are currently stored (on the local device, be it computer or Mobile) vs. being stored in a manner that makes it accessible to all devices a user might employ to access Second Life. This is something the Lab is looking at, allowing for the privacy / data protection concerns of storing logs on third-party services, and would likely be an opt-in service
- Additional questions on cashing-out, lifetime memberships, etc., were similarly pointed towards the relevant user group meetings, as no-one from the Lab at the CCUG in involved in these areas.
Next Meeting
- 13:00 SLT, Thursday, September 18th, 2025, at the Hippotropolis Campsite.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 