2025 week #39: SL Open Source User Group meeting summary

The following notes were taken from my chat transcript + the video recording by Pantera (embedded at the end of this summary) of the Open Source User Group (OSUG) held on Friday, September 26th, 2025. My thanks to Pantera as always for providing it.

Meeting Purpose

• The OSUG meeting is a combining of the former Third Party Viewer Developer meeting and the Open Source Development meetings. It is open discussion of Second Life development, including but not limited to open source contributions, third-party viewer development and policy, and current open source programs.
• This meeting is generally held twice 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 – No Change.
  • 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 Beta viewer 2025.07 7.2.2.17774206511 – Apple Silicon Support – September 26 –  NEW.
  • This viewer now ships as a “Universal Binary” that contains both the Intel and Apple Silicon versions of the viewer. It should give performance gains on the Apple Silicon version in particular.
  • Also includes various WebRTC improvements and bug and crash fixes.
  • Known issues:
    • This version does not support convex decomposition for physics meshes with Apple Silicon. This will be hopefully be corrected in a future update or release, possibly with the help of a code contribution.
    • Navigation buttons in the in-viewer browser are no longer present for marketplace and search – these will be restored in a future update.
    • Apple Silicon does not support pathfinding tools.
    • Subtle rendering differences might be noticed on certain configurations and EEP environments.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

Viewer 2025.07

• At the time of the meeting, the 2025.07 viewer was pending release.
• The first part of the meeting involved discussions on potential routes to provide convex decomposition for physics meshes for this viewer version via open-source options, on both a short-term temporary basis and long-term solution.

In Brief

Please refer to the video for the following:

• Appearance fixes: this is being considered for the 2025.08 viewer update, and Geenz has requested feedback / discussion on via Discord.
• [Video: 13:12-19:52] A request was made to change the LOD default as a part of the work to provide convex decomposition on this viewer. This was denied, the focus being on providing a “feature complete” version of the viewer for Apple Silicon.
  • However, this led to a discussion on how best to handle LODs and auto LODs.
• [Video: 20:20-End] A broad discussion on dressing avatars, including:
  • Baking clothing meshes (sort-of a-la BOM) / using mesh proxies fore clothing / layering clothing, and potential for improvement performance as a result.
  • Providing a scripted means to dress avatars according to the requirements of an Experience (e.g. if someone just a mech combat experience, scripts in the experience dress their avatar accordingly).
  • “Discouraging” overly-complex avatars.
  • This discussion encapsulated general ideas, feedback, etc., and also touched on things like VRAM use, etc.
  • The latter part of the discussion strayed into texture resolution + texture compression, licensing and libraries, etc.

Next Meeting

• Friday, October 10th, 2025 at the Hippotropolis Theatre.

† 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.