Day: January 20, 2026

2026 week #4: SUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Reality Escape, January 2026 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 20th, 2026 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. They were taken from the video recording by Pantera, embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks to Pantera for providing it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas is held every other Tuesday at 12:00 noon, SLT (holidays, etc., allowing), per the Second Life Public Calendar.
  • The “SUG Leviathan Hour” meetings are held on the Tuesdays which do not have a formal SUG meeting, and are chaired by Leviathan Linden. They are more brainstorming / general discussion sessions.
  • Meetings are held in text in-world, at this location.

Simulator Deployments

  • All simhosts are undergoing restarts this week, with no deployments.
  • The next simulator release  – 2026.01 (Kiwi) is currently with QA.
  • The simulator release to follow that – 2026.02 – has been given the code-name of Loganberry, but it’s too early in development for details to be provided.

Game Control

  • Leviathan Linden had planned to try to get a project viewer branch put together for his game_control work, but has been sidetracked in dealing with issues with the Kiwi simulator code.
  • He still hopes to be able to cut that branch “on the side” and see if he can create an installable that can be used to check to see if the game_control code actually works with the port to the current viewer code branch.

Grid-Wide WebRTC Deployment Announcement

  • As per the most recent OSD meeting, LL is hoping to deploy WebRTC grid-wide in March 2026.
    • This is not a set-in-stone target, and further updates will be made.
    • This means that Vivox, whilst still being held in reserve, will no longer be available as a Voice service – so those using Voice and using a non-PBR  / WebRTC viewer will need to update.
    • The Lab is currently looking at a March deployment of WebRTC voice across the grid.
  • The public beta for WebRTC has expanded – see this official blog post for details –  and Roxie Linden and her team hope the beta expansion will provide more feedback from users on voice quality, voice stability, etc.
  • Transcription using WebRTC is being poked at by the Lab, but will not be a part of the initial deployment.

SLua Work

  • Harold Linden has a rough draft on how `require()` has to behave to make sense both in VSCode and in-viewer. This is very much a work-in-progress.
    • In short: if you’ve ever had to edit someone’s preprocessed LSL script without all the #includes they had on their disk, and had to wade into the generated code + //#line comment soup, this should be a more readable way to bundle together all the code so editing is nicer.
    • This prompted a series of question on the documentation – please refer to the video.
    • Having the include/require path include object inventory for scripts in objects was noted as future work.
  • A new SLua editor will be available with upcoming viewers which should have much faster script editing.
  • Rider Linden indicated he would like to add something to the VSCode plugin that would provide access to scripts in inventory – and noting a concern in giving anything automated access of any kind to agent inventory.

SLua Resources

  • The nine beta test regions are centred on SLua Beta Void (mind the water!).
  • Official scripting portal (this is a work in progress and open to contributions – Github for the latter here).
  • The Second Life official Discord server / channels.
  •  Suzanna’s SLua Guide (Suzanna  Linn).
  • Official VScode plugin notes:
    • It is not yet available on the VScode marketplace.
    • Issues and PRs for code submissions can be made here, and the plugin downloaded.
  • VSCode plugin + documentation (Wolfgang Senizen – likely be discontinued and contributions shifted to support the official documentation).

In Brief

Please also refer to the video, below.

  • Monty Linden indicated the annual simhost certification work is now in progress. Overall, very little is changing, so no problems are anticipated.
    • The new certifications are being used by the 2026.01 code running on the release test regions on Aditi (the beta grid).
    • Monty plans to automate the recertification later in 2026, and the certification will change slightly at that time.
  • A request was made to allow scripts to exchange messages (or streams of messages) with the viewer using by using llOwnerSay (sending towards viewer), and listen on certain channel (receiving from viewer) but directly without a listen.
    • Apparently a feature request for this is in development for submission to Firestorm.
    • Rider Liden expressed an interest in seeing that request once written.
    • This also sparked a discussion on how llOwnerSay works across region boundaries (e.g. with the help of child agents).
  • A general discussion on Drawer Distance and how to extend it beyond 1024 metres (e.g. via anchoring the camera in a region and flycamming to another and anchoring there – or by using a 3D Mouse such as SpaceNavigator  – my preferred choice).
  • Further requests for the Mainland default EEP setting to be adjusted and  on the status of llSetLinkGLTFOverrides fails to clear alpha override. The former will be referred back to the LDPW and Patch Linden (again), no answer was provided on the latter (it may have been missed in the chat).

Date of Next Meetings

  • Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, January 27th, 2026.
  • Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026.

† 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 rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

Jade’s Inis Oírr in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Jade Koltai: Inis Oírr, January 2026 – click any image for full size

Sitting on the mouth of Galway Bay on the west coast of Ireland, are the three Oileáin Árann, the Islands of Aran. Comprising three core isles –  Inishmore, Inishmaan and Inisheer, together with a number of small islets, the Arans are not a large grouping; the three main isles provide just 46 square kilometres of land mass between them. However, they carry a history of human habitation going back to around 1100 BC.

Between them, the islands have seen their fair share of history, including Cromwell’s forces stomping around the islands and building multiple churches (among other things), and in being folded into the Nine Years War (1688-1697), with Irish-born privateer Thomas Vaughan, working for the French, seized the islands for a brief period after a series on initial raids on the settlements there.

Jade Koltai: Inis Oírr, January 2026

Of the three islands, Inis Oírr – to give Innisheer its Irish name – is the southerly. Covering just 1,448 acres, it is actually the island with the second highest population count for the Arans (343 as of 2022). Its small size makes it an ideal inspiration for a region build in Second Life – and that is exactly what Jade Koltai has done in order to create her latest region design at Overland Hills, and which she calls, appropriately enough, Inis Oírr.

Of course, even trying to capture 1,448 acres in a single region is no easy task, so Jade has once again sought to capture the spirit of Innisheer, focusing on offering representations of the island’s more notable landmarks and locations. And in my opinion, she more than succeeds. The design captures much of its namesake whilst offering a unique setting in its own right.

Jade Koltai: Inis Oírr, January 2026

Chief among the latter are the Innisheer Lighthouse, completed in 1857 and located on the southern tip of the island; Teampall Chaomháin, the ruins of a church dedicated to the island’s patron saint, Chaomháin of Innisheer, and a representation of the MV Plassy. Despite being the “most celebrated of all the saints of the Aran islands”, little is actually known about Chaomháin, but the church dedicated to him lies within the cemetery on Innisheer, and which today looks more like an excavation than a church , something Jade has neatly reproduced.

The MV Plassy is very much a part of the island’s more recent history. Originally built as an armed anti-submarine trawler for the Royal Navy, the vessel was originally names Juliet (as in Romeo and Juliet, the ship and her sister vessels all being named for Shakespearian characters).

Jade Koltai: Inis Oírr, January 2026

The ship saw service in World War Two, prior to being sold-off and renamed the Peterjon prior to again being renamed Plassy in 1951, and working as a coastal freighter. In 1960, a storm drove the ship onto Finnis Rock off the coast of the island, with the entire crew rescued by the islanders. A second storm then beached the wreck up on the rocky shore of Innisheer, where it remains to this day (perhaps gaining wider fame via a certain British-Irish sitcom of the mid-to-late 1990s).

Jade’s build wisely steers away from trying to present the island’s local community (although the Landing Point does take the form of a harbour wharf), instead concentrating on the above and other historical details, such as what might be seen as the ruin of one of the churches built by Cromwell – or perhaps a reference to O’Brien’s Castle, built in the 1300s.

Jade Koltai: Inis Oírr, January 2026

There are also dry stone walls snaking across the rugged landscape, just as can be found across Innisheer, whilst a part of the landscaping of the coast might be taken as referencing the island’s limestone pavement. Even the island’s connection to Ireland gets a mention: at the landing point is a sign for the Doolin Ferry, which connects the Aran Islands with the settlement of Doolin, County Clare, to the south-east of the group – and indeed, a ferry is docked at the wharf.

The offshore region surround elements might be a little too mountain-like in places to represent the Galway / Clare coastline or Innismaan (Inis Meáin), the second largest of the three main islands, but this hardly matters; the presence of the elements help to give Jade’s Inis Oírr a further sense of place.

Jade Koltai: Inis Oírr, January 2026

When visiting, do have local sounds enabled for a more immersive feel, and do note also that the shared environment is a little on the gloomy side (well, it is winter and this is the Irish Sea, and nature is hardly sunny a gay this time of year!).

It is because of this, I opted to make some adjustments to lighting when taken my photographs, and then overly this with shots using the actual EEP settings for the region as a part of post-processing. Hopefully, this helps bring out some of the details more clearly.

Jade Koltai: Inis Oírr, January 2026

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