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 QA and making its way towards release candidate status (or “beta” as RC viewers seem to now be referenced).
- The added native Apple Silicon support is said to deliver “pretty impressive” performance improvements for those running on that OS.
- A caveat here is that for this release only, it may not be possible to upload meshes on Apple Silicon. This is due to some Havok issues and “some licensing limitations”.
- These issues will likely be resolved when the open source replacement for Havok for convex hull decomposition is integrated into the viewer. This update is anticipated as being available in the upcoming 2025.08 viewer.
- The above limitation is only for Apple Silicon, it should not apply to Windows or Mac systems running x86 chipsets.
- For other updates likely to be included in this release, please refer to my summary of the previous CCUG meeting.
Viewers 2025.08 and 2025.09
- These are liable to be the last two viewer updates from the Lab for 2025, and both are in the planning stage.
- Updates under consideration for either of them include potential updates to screen space reflections (SSR), building on work carried out earlier in 2025 but which have yet to reach the viewer.
- However, precise details as to what will be in either / both viewers is still subject to internal discussions and decisions within the Lab.
General Discussion – In Brief
- Mesh import support – general direction:
- COLLADA.DAE support will always remain and be available, even if only for legacy content that may never be updated to glTF.
- .gltf /.glb is now an officially supported mesh format or both static and rigged mesh, but with some limitations (e.g. no blend shapes) – with a request that an bugs that may be discovered are reported.
- It is acknowledged that currently, importing .gltf meshes is a two step process ( .gltf materials and the .gltf mesh) which have to be imported separately to one another.
- There have been discussion on supporting other mesh formats – but these are only discussions at this point in time, with absolutely no guarantee or time frame that/when other formats will be supported, as the work would require further and extensive modification to the mesh import workflow and internal SL mesh support.
- A request was made for Inventory Thumbnails to support aspect ratios other than just 1:1, or to include a means for images to be cropped within the viewer post-upload.
- This came hand-in-hand with a reference to Unpacker scripts; Assign image thumbnail UUID to an unpacked folder – which is currently being tracked, but has no specific implementation time frame.
- Making changes to the the image aspect ratio for Inventory thumbnails was seen as “unlikely” in the near-term, but it was suggested the idea be raised at the next Open Source User Group meeting to see if a code contribution might be made.
- A general discussion on the new Inventory Favourites capability in the official viewer, including comparisons with using the Favourite Wearables option seen in some TPVs.
- Whilst the latter is not necessarily as flexible in its use as the Lab’s implementation, it was seen as scoring over the latter due to a) having a dedicated floater; and b) having that floater accessible from a toolbar button.
- A request was made for some form of Inventory “cold storage”, where items can be archived without having to be boxed, and which is excluded from Inventory searches.
- It was suggested that the easiest way to solve for this would be to a system folder to Inventory which is pre-set so that anything placed within it does not show up during searches.
- Another suggestion was to strengthen Inventory filters to allow certain exclusions or to allow filtering by new inventory capabilities (e.g. to directly filter for all folders / items tagged as a Favourite).
- The above could be combined with some UX redesign to better surface filters and make their functionality clearer, and potentially allowing filters to be set as easy-to-access inventory presets to quickly allow different views of a person’s Inventory to be accessed.
- This broader discussion on inventory wound through a good portion of the meeting in terms of comments from users.
- The subject of allowing region-wide reflection probes was raised – and was responded to as unlikely to happen, with a not that regions already have a “void probe” which – whilst primitive in nature – already does much of what a region-wide probe would do, using some of the data from the region. This can be visualised by going to Preferences → Graphics, locating Max Reflection Probes and setting it to None.
- A question was asked as to whether LL staff and contractor work full-time on their specific areas, or if some work shorter hours / get moved around projects, thus limiting the amount of time they can spend working on certain things, leading to a lengthening of time frames, etc.
- The broad response was that the (approx. 30-strong) dev staff work a standard working week, and some do get moved between projects, depending on priorities.
- Further, planning, complexity and prioritisation do play a role in determining what gets worked on and how resources are used, all in accordance with management, etc., focus on platform direction and development.
- Also, given the overall complexity and age of SL, the need for backward compatibility, etc., a large amount of effort has to go into simply “keeping the lights on” (to use Philip Rosedale’s term), and this also impacts available resources and determining what projects and taken up and worked on at any given time.
- A general discussion on versioned sky assets, weather, the old 768-metre system clouds, etc. In terms of versioning EEP assets, this is something still under discussion at the Lab, but is not something currently being targeted for implementation.
Next Meeting
- 13:00 SLT, Thursday, October 2nd, 2025, at the Hippotropolis Campsite.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 