2026 week #4: SUG meeting summary

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.