The following notes were taken from:
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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 OSD 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
- Default viewer 2025.08 – 7.2.3.19375695301 – maintenance update with bug fixes and quality of life improvements – December 2 – No Change.
- Notable addition: new VHACD-based convex decomposition library for mesh uploads.
- Second Life Beta (RC) viewer 26.1.0.21522948608, February 12 – NEW.
- Legacy search; WebRTC improvements; QoL improvements.
- Second Life Project viewers:
- Second Life Lua Editor Alpha version 26.1.0.21525310258, February 3 – No Change.
- Second Life Voice Moderation viewer 26.1.0.20139269477, December 12 – No Change.
- Second Life One Click Install viewer 26.1.0.21295806042, January 26, 2026 – one-click viewer installation.
Upcoming Viewers
Viewer 2026.01
- Remains the current viewer development focus with the release of the beta (RC) version, although this will be shifting more to 2026.02.
- The velopack one click installer / updater is not in the initial beta, but is “off to one side” whilst being allowed to “cook” for longer. This may get folded back into 2026.01, but the Lab is not “super married” to this being the case.
- 2026.01 includes a high priority fix for specific Bluetooth headset configurations which will benefit WebRTC.
- Now available as an alpha viewer (above).
- As the name suggests, triggers a one-click install / viewer update process.
- Also includes improved monitoring / logging of viewer freezes and crashes, etc.
Viewer 2026.02
- 2026.02 remains on track for the “Flat” UI and font updates.
- It now also includes the WebRTC voice moderation capabilities (as seen in the project viewer) to help align viewer-side WebRTC updates more with the hoped-for server-side deployment currently targeting March 2026.
- No Alpha / Beta viewer is available as yet for this release..
Viewer 2026.03
- 2026.03 is described as a “visual polish” for the viewer. This viewer is likely to include:
- The “long baking” SSR improvements that were started last year. This version of the viewer will likely have a long beta soak time to allow feedback on these changes to be gathered.
- PBR specular for residents who are more familiar with the old Blinn-Phong work flow. This will:
- Include another texture slot (tint of the specular reflection).
- Work with metallics.
- Follow the glTF specification, but will likely initially be without glTF overrides, as this requires server-side work.
- HDR controls in EEP so residents can decide how bright or dark things should be. This work does require simulator-side updates. This will likely initially have server-side support on Aditi (the Beta grid).
- The Pull Request for this work can be found here – #5385.
- 2026.03 is looking towards an April release.
General Viewer Notes
- Viewer-side Blinn-Phong alpha-gamma improvements were raised as possible inclusion for 2026.03. The Lab’s viewer is that while these will be coming, it will not be until after supporting server-side updates have been made in order to avoid what the Lab sees as potential content breakage. This matter was viewed as “not up for debate”.
- There is a chance that the server-side work might be undertaken and completed in time for the viewer-side fixes to be included in 2026.03, but currently, Geenz isn’t willing to commit to this due to other on-going work.
- User Animats is developing the Sharpview viewer. This includes an “infinite draw distance” – see this video as an example.
- The Lab has been looking over this work internally, and there has been some discussion on supporting the work and giving it more of an official path.
- Geenz noted having the map system provide terrain heightmaps could be a start.
- Geenz also suggested having prim stand-ins for distant objects, but noted that this is a “down the road thing”.
- Geenz Linden has requested developers put their eyes on PR #5429.
- The release ordering for this would b after the SLua works reaches release status, due to both that viewer and this work having ties to the the official Linux viewer build.
- It is unlikely the SLua work will be merged into a main viewer code until around the 2026.04 viewer, which means the work in PR#5429 is unlikely to reach a viewer release until summer.
- Given the changes it may bring to some TPVs, this is seen as no bad thing, as it gives the opportunity for feedback and planning, etc.
- A general discussion on re-enabling water reflections as a part of the upcoming SSR / HDR improvements. Options were mentioned, and Geenz seemed to lean towards “a slight optimization to mirrors on thin probes is not out of the question to help ‘backfill’ probe data”, before noting this would have to be very narrowly scoped for inclusion in the 2026.03 viewer.
- The transmission index of refraction (IoR – good for water reflections) project is seen as requiring more time and input than the PBR specular work, despite a good amount of work being done on the transmission / IoR work. As such, it is awaiting a re-prioritisation to continue – and this might be a while before it is forthcoming, because there is still a fair amount of complexity involved in any implementation.
- A general discussion towards the end of the OSG meeting on HDR, HDR skies, improving the brightness of the SL Sun, etc.
Grid-Wide WebRTC Deployment
- The Lab is currently looking at a March deployment of WebRTC voice across the grid, but this is subject to possible change.
- The viewer server is currently in a beta soak test (see: WebRTC Voice Open Beta is Expanding).
- Deployment will follow the usual simulator update route:
- First week: limited deployment to selected RC channels (e.g. Bluesteel / Preflight).
- Second week (providing no significant issues occurring): wider deployment to all RC channels.
- Third week: deployment to the Main SLS channel, marking WebRTC as grid-wide.
- As noted in the viewer notes above, there are fixes going into the upcoming 2026.01 viewer related to WebRTC:
- These are each described as affecting a “small number” of users.
- The first fixes an issue where some people may lose voice without reconnecting once in a while.
- The second relates to problems with certain Bluetooth headsets losing audio after toggling PTT.
- LL would ideally link to see TPVs cheery-pick these fixes for inclusion in their viewers so as to be available to users as WebRTC commences deployment.
- A server-side fix to address a spatialization bug was released on Monday February 9th, and appears to have dealt with the last known significant server bug.
CCUG Meeting General Discussions
- A request was made for a check box to be added to the PDR editing tools to ignore the alpha channel in order to allow Blinn-Phong specular textures could be re-used.
- This was seen as a “little tricky” given the way BP specular has been implemented in SL, which have resulted in some compatibility between BP and PBR (e.g. the colour RGB parts), whilst others are not.
- Whilst some comprises could potentially be mead, they would deviate away from the glTF specification, which is not what LL wants to do.
- Geenz indicated he is mulling the idea of possible adjustments to texture streaming to help improve it – such as streaming specular, metallic and even base colour at lower resolutions, whist keeping the normal map at the required resolution. This, he feels would compensate for any loss of detail on specular, metallic or base colour, whilst decreasing the overall streaming load.
- Scriptable IK was raised as an idea. This was something the currently suspended Puppetry Project was looking at, as well as things like use of webcams for animations, etc. It is not clear if / when this work might be re-animated (no pun intended).
- Blend shapes / custom rigs were again raised for discussion, with Geenz again noting that the issue is in part a problem with the internal SLMesh format used by SL not being particularly flexible.
- Before anything could be done to support things like custom rigs and similar, there would need to be a new implementation of the SLMesh pipeline.
- This would allow LL to develop a new, more flexible SLMesh format, which is more resilient to things like unexpected data and would also allow support for new fields (e.g. bland shapes – which could even be hooked up to the current slider system and / or be scriptable, etc).
- However, such a project would be relatively long-term and require consideration of other issues (e.g. support for over 20 years of animations which will continue to require support and thus would need things like retargeting).
- Therefore how to fit it into the roadmap and ensure the required resources are available is not currently clear given the number of other priorities already in play / awaiting attention.
- The above encompassed a discussion on external tools which might help in look creation, clothes fitting, etc., such as Character Creator and Marvelous Designer, which can be used with SL as an external tool, whilst having a good level of integration into Sansar .
Next Meetings
- CCUG: 13:00 SLT, Thursday, February 26th, 2026, at the Hippotropolis Campsite.
- OSUG: 13:00 SLT, Friday, February 27th, 2026, at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 