Day: October 4, 2025

2025 week #40: SL CCUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Hippotropolis Campsite: venue for CCUG meetings
The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, October 2nd, 2025. Please note that this is not a full transcript, but a summary of key topics.
Table of Contents

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 – No Change.
  • 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

  • LL are working on implementing some bug fixes prior to offering a further beta version of this viewer.
  • One change with the next version will be the return of Havok convex decomposition for Mac Intel systems to enable mesh uploads under emulation Requires the enabling of Rosetta in the universal build for Mac) until such time as a an alternative can be implemented.
  • Work on an alternative solution is in progress via code contributions. This is likely to be included in viewer 2025.08.

General Discussion – In Brief

  • The confusingly-worded Create “System Body Shape v2.0” came up for discussion.
    • In short: LL unlikely to implement any form of new / updated system avatar, preferring to focus on implementing more modern technology and capabilities that allow creators to develop more capable (and less complicated to users?) avatars.
    • This included a brief discussion on “open souring” the avatar system body so creators could take it and modify / improve it for themselves, with the note that technically it is, but as it misses some critical elements which tend to render doing this moot.
  • A potential bug with touching scripted objects was demonstrated with attachments designed to be touched (in short: a object could miss initial touches and thus fail to trigger touch_start() ). This was demonstrated at the meeting, and a Canny report was requested on the problem, together with the demo item.
    • This discussion also encompassed issues with fast clicking on object in-world and cursor positioning, and unexpected results (e.g. rapidly clicking on a touchable object with the mouse moving, so that a subsequent click “misses” the item, causing the server to register that in favour of the the expected return  – like a dialogue box or something – from the initial click).
  • A discussion on setting materials / overrides on PBR vs. Blinn-Phong. In short, with Blinn-Phong, a change in texture / material can be carried out with a reset of overrides; within PBR, changing the material resets overrides. In the case of scripted items, unless the material change and new overrides are sent as a single packet, changing the material can result in the object appearing to “flash” as the material is displayed prior to the new overrides being applied.
    • The prompt for the question arose out of how a scripted bottle held by an avatar could change to a selected texture (to presumably represent the drink in the bottle), and how this might be better coded rather than relaying purely on texture caching, which appeared to be the root of this particular problem.
    • Possible solutions for this became somewhat convoluted (outside of finding a mean by which required textures could be pre-loaded), and frankly zapped right over my head. However, the conversation took up the the last part of the meeting.
  • A question was asked as to why sometimes trying to rez mesh items (or items onto mesh objects)  results in a “Failed to place object at specified location” error message.
    • This can often come down to the physics shape of the surface on which an item is being rezzed, as Beq Janus explained in one of her videos.
    • Another cause can be a mismatch between where the viewer thinks an object is trying to be placed and where the simulator views it as being placed – which has been a long-standing problem.
  • A misunderstanding has apparently led to some concerns that support for sculpties is being deprecated / sculpties are being “eliminated”. Neither of these are correct; there are no plans to either deprecate or eliminate sculpties. 

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