Day: December 5, 2025

2025 week #49: 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, December 4th, 2025 and my chat log of that meeting.
Table of Contents

Please note that this is not a full transcript of the 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.
  • Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.

Official Viewer Status

  • Default viewer 2025.08 – 7.2.3.19375695301 – maintenance update with bug fixes and quality of life improvements – December 2 – New.
  • Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

General Viewer Update

  • 2025.08 is largely a maintenance release. However:
    • For Apple Silicon it includes a new VHACD-based convex decomposition library for mesh uploads, so creators on Apple Silicon should be able to upload meshes using it. If this library proves useful on Apple, then it will be implemented for Linux and Windows viewers, allowing the current Havok sub-library to be deprecated.
  • The first planned viewer for 2026 (2026.01) is being referred to as First Impressions. As the name suggests, the focus will be on refining the user experience for those who are coming into Second Life for the first time. Details to follow in the new year.

SLua Update

  • As per the official blog post, the SLua beta on Agni (the Main grid) has been officially announced.
  • The viewer is still a beta RC version, and an updated version is due out “soon”.
  • Official VSCode Plug-in (Recommended).
  • Official scripting documentation.
  • Third-party transpiler (LSL to SLua). Note that whilst viewed as workable, the use of this transpiler might not be as efficient as writing SLua code.
  • The nine beta test regions are centred on SLua Beta Void (mind the water or just search “slua” in the viewer’s World Map)..

WebRTC Voice Update: Speech to Text

  • There has been an LL-internal demonstration of Voice-to-text using WebRTC (transcribing Roxie Linden’s speaking into local chat in the viewer).
  • When used, the generated text is shown in local chat using a different colour to typed text.
  • Transcriptions are currently to English only (although Philip Linden indicated this will be from multiple languages).
  • The demonstration was described by Kyle Linden as “a little rough around the edges, but working.”
  • The process is direct – from voice to text, currently without any need for user intervention.
    • However, given the need for voice to be passed to the WebRTC server, then passed for transcription into text and then passed to the chat service for injection into local chat, there might be a degree of latency between someone speaking and seeing their words appear as text (around 1 second).
    • Going via the WebRTC server rather than using any form of plug-in with the viewer means that anyone using voice will have their words transcribed to text only once, rather than multiple plug-ins receiving the voice and then pushing it to a transcription service before receiving it back (which would be a non-trivial cost – e.g. 100+ plug-ins requesting the transcription of someone speaking at a Linden Community Round Table as opposed to the WebRTC server requesting the transcription once and broadcasting it to local chat).
  • One of the things LL are cognizant of is the tension between providing a fully automated service, which may tread on exiting solutions which meet specific needs, and potentially working to open the capability to allow it to work alongside of existing solutions / assist them.
  • As the transcribed text is pushed to local chat, then it is likely than worn translations tools will pick-up on the text and translate it as well; this many be both beneficial and annoying (beneficial, a non-English speaker can read the translated text just like anything else typed into local chat; annoying as it could result in someone using a worn translation tool constantly receiving walls of text (the spoken word transcribed to English text and then the translated text). As such, it was acknowledged some additional controls might be required.
  • A key point with this functionality is that it is a work-in-progress and not yet ready for formally release (WebRTC has yet to be fully deployed anyway), and once it is available, it will continue to be refined and enhanced (e.g. one enhancement might be to translate voice rather than just transcribe to English) .

In Brief

  • Default viewer chat bar. The independent chat bar was removed with the implementation of the the CHUI (communication hub user interface – the integrated chat and IMs floater) in around 2013 for the official viewer, although some TPVs re-implemented it not long after.
    • Requests have long been made for LL to return the chat bar functionality to the official viewer – and this is now being done, starting with Project Zero (the viewer in a browser).
    • However, if a TPV with the chat bar functionality were to submit a pull request to LL, then consideration would be given to taking the code as-is and implementing it into the 2026.01 viewer.
  • The bug relating to scale / offsets, etc., not being persistent on PBR when switching materials has now been addressed.

Next Meeting