Day: November 7, 2025

2025 week #45: SL CCUG and Open Source (TPVD) meetings 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, November 6th, 2025 and my chat log of that meeting, together with Pantera’s video (embedded at the end of this article) and my chat log of the Open-Source Developer meeting on Friday, November 7th, 2025.
Table of Contents

Please note that this is not a full transcript of either meeting but a summary of key topics.

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 and is held in a mix of Voice and text chat.
  • 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 and is generally text chat only.
  • Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.

Official Viewer Status

General Viewer Updates

  • 2025.08 is liable to be the last viewer release for the year, with development work as a whole (including server-side) liable to slowing down due to end-of-year holidays and company breaks.
    • That said, Geenz Linden is hoping to get the go-ahead to try and get “a few things” out for the door before year-end. These include fixes/improvements to PBR water , and also clearing some technical debt.
    • The fixes/improvements to PBR water sparked a brief conversation on the PBR water issues and solutions (e.g. tweaks to SSR and whether or not these will “fix” things – although it was made clear that the “old” water reflections code will not be coming back to the official viewer codebase).
  • Work is progressing on getting a Linux flavour of the official viewer back into shape. Those interested in the work can find it in this viewer repository, and the Lab is actively looking for feedback.
    • Note that this build is WebRTC only, Vivox Voice is not supported.
    • Depending on progress / feedback there is a potential for this viewer to surface as a Release Candidate / beta viewer before the end of the year – Geenz is hoping to achieve this as a part of the technical debt clean-up work.
  • Open Source meeting: Geenz is attempting to move forward with replacing the viewer Contributor License Agreement with digital certificates of origin for code contributions to the official viewer.
    • In short, instead of contributors having to read through and accept LL’s code license, and assign rights accordingly, when a code contribution is made, the originator  just adds a sign-off as a part of the code contribution commit.
    • There will be new documentation on this revised process that will be made available ahead of it being implemented.

You Tube Embedding Issue

  • You Tube recently updated elements of their video embedding code such that non i-frame youtube.com/embed/NNNNN style links will not work within Second Life (whilst youtube.com/watch/NNNNN style links will still function correctly – although this latter format does expose all the You Tube on-screen video controls, etc).
  • This is an issue liable to impact a variety of in-world television and similar systems utilising You Tube.
  • The is very much a You Tube issue, so while the Lab could investigate options for workarounds there is no guarantee they would remain valid / useful for any length of time.
  • Note that (obviously) Vemeo (and other services) video embedding is unaffected by this issue, as does hosting from a personal server.

CCUG Discussion – In Brief

  • Brief discussion on the following PBR bugs:
  • A request was made for an official viewer specific user group “to discuss the UI”.
    • As pointed out at other meetings where this has been raised, there are already two user groups wherein the official viewer and TPVs are discussed: the Content Creation User Group, and the Open-Source Development User Group (formerly the TPV Developer UG). Adding a third really doesn’t add anything significant.
    • In terms of UI “discussions”, it was suggested these are rarely fruitful with in a large group, as opinions tend to be subjective / biased according to which viewer people prefer to use, and which UI style (viewer 1.2X style or viewer 2.0+ style or variations thereof) they like. Ergo, a meeting specifically focused on the viewer UI isn’t potentially going to be that beneficial in terms of generating actual UI improvements.
  • A discussion on SL enhancements and prioritisations: A general note on the complexities of making enhancements to SL and determining what should / can be done and when.
    • In terms of graphical enhancements, it was noted that often, these tend to work best with dedicated / more recent GPU cards, with the problem being that stats show the majority of SL users tend to run medium or lower specification hardware, often with more limited GPUs and / or integrated graphics which may or may not be able to adequately run newer rendering options. Thus, the implementation of such capabilities can become a complex balancing act of determining what the “average” SL system can manage, how well it can do so without dramatically changing how SL appears to the user (changes to SL’s in-world appearance often causing widespread backlash when changes are made), determining what the general defaults for new capabilities should be in order to best address end-user hardware capabilities, etc.
    • Then there are enhancements to the platform which may not have a performance impact, but which do have questions around them in terms of overall benefit to users (e.g. quality of life improvements for the majority of users, content creation improvements, etc.), and also around resources required to bring them to fruition, etc., all of which need to be balanced against one another and with things like graphics improvements, et al, in order for the Lab to determine prioritisations.
  • The above extended to offering hardware cut-off points for SL, with the Lab preferring to keep this more towards operating systems (and associated hardware drivers, etc.) reached a manufacturer’s end-of-life, rather than arbitrarily setting cut-off points.
    • An example of this could be taken with older versions of the Mac OS (e.g. OS 12 or older). LL would like to cease support for these versions of the OS and focus on more recent releases offering support for more up-to-date libraries, etc., offering better functionality, but the number of Mac users still running systems only capable of running older versions of the OS currently prevents LL from setting a cut-off for Mac support.
    • The flipside to this is when OS vendors present an end-of-life for a given operating system, it can actually benefit SL and users who do upgrade (e.g. the ending of official support for Windows 10 bringing many older versions of Intel’s integrated HD graphics to an end of life state).
  • The above expanded into a conversation on communications, keeping users informed of SL’s capabilities and changes, what can be done within SL with the right viewer settings, informing users of the potential impact on their systems of enabling  / increasing various settings (based on stats, etc., the viewer is dynamically gathering on in-world scenes and the hardware running the viewer), etc
  • Geenz indicated that a longer-term hope is that more work can be done in making the viewer more multi-threaded in CPU use and cutting down on the reliance on co-routines within the viewer code as a result. However, no time frames on this.

OSUG Discussion – In Brief

  • It is likely that the current alpha-blend Blinn-Phong issues are likely to be fixed prior to year-end, as these require server-side work as well, and the server team is already very busy with WebRTC and SLua.
  • The first part of the meeting involved a discussion on Linden water reflection, Screen Space Reflections, lighting probes (all as summarised above) and a potted history of invisiprims and their “return” as water exclusion surfaces.
    • Elements of work Geenz is looking to try to get moved forward with the viewer include:
    • Re-introducing legacy search.
    • Discord integration with the viewer.
    • Making the viewer updater “more open source friendly”.
    • “Killing” Autobuild in the viewer build process.
  • Geenz offered a PSA to TPVs:
 If you are receiving increased reports about the latest AMD drivers causing problems with shadows enabled, I can confirm that a rollback to the previous version fixes that. I’m already digging around to see who I can report a driver bug to.
  • A request was put forward to have TPV stats (usage per OS, crash rates and crash types) on a more frequent basis once more (they were at one time monthly, then switched to weekly before becoming more sporadic once more). This will be looked into.

Next Meetings