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Table of Contents |
Meeting Purpose
- The OSD meeting is a combining of the former Third Party Viewer Developer meeting and the Open Source Development meeting. 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.
Note: The OSD/TPV meeting has tended to occur in the same week as the content Creation User Group meeting over the last several months, resulting in a lot of repetition of information between the two meetings (and combined summaries on this blog). An attempt is being made to break this cycle by having the next OSD/TPV meeting on Friday, March 6th, 2026 before reverting to the usual every other week format (so the meeting after that will be March 20th, 2026) – thus putting the OSD/TPV meeting and the CCUG on alternate weeks.
Official Viewer Status
- Default viewer 2025.08 – 7.2.3.19375695301 – maintenance update with bug fixes and quality of life improvements – December 2.
- Notable addition: new VHACD-based convex decomposition library for mesh uploads.
- Second Life Release Candidate viewer 2026.01 – 26.1.0.22359044520 , February 25 – NEW
- Legacy search; WebRTC improvements; QoL improvements.
- Second Life Project Viewers:
- Second Life Lua Editor Alpha viewer 26.1.0.21525310258, February 12.
- Second Life Voice Moderation viewer 26.1.0.20139269477, December 12.
- Introduces the ability to moderate spatial voice chat in regions configured to use webRTC voice.
- 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, and may now in fact slip to 2026.02.
- 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 (see below for more).
- This viewer might additionally receive some backported updates to texture streaming.
- No Alpha / Beta viewer is available as yet for this release..
Viewer 2026.03 -“SL Visual Polish” (SLVP)
- 2026.03 had been looking to an April release, however, it might slip back to 2026.04. Part of the decision-making on this is related to upcoming server-side updates to EEP and glTF which are seen as being required prior to SLVP shipping.
- It will 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 workflow. 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).
- It may additionally include:
- Further mirrors optimisations and a new “Ultra” quality setting that will enable a system mirror for water. A caveat on this work is that while this “water mirror” might up the quality of water reflections, it will do so at a performance hit; SSR for water will always be faster and less intensive.
- Inclusion of an emissive strength setting for PBR.
- The Pull Request for this work can be found here – #5385.
General Viewer Notes
- Firestorm hosted a Townhall recently, with Lab presence, to try to determine why a percentage of Firestorm users remain reluctant to move away from a 6.x version of that viewer to a PBR-supporting version. The predominant issues appear to be concerns over performance and the degraded water visuals seen with PBR viewers.
- One aspect of people refusing to move is hearsay: “X said PBR sucketh and has poor performance, therefore I will not even try it”, regardless as to whether this might be true for them or not; another is, potentially, people’s general unwillingness to change from what they like.
- Exactly how to address such issues / beliefs/perceptions is no easy task.
- A suggestion was made to have “toggle” in the viewer so users can determine which rendering system they wish to use (e.g. “legacy” or “PBR”). This is far more complicated than it sounds, requiring continued support of two rendering pipes in the viewer, potentially leading to multiple complications and the potential content breakage. As such, it is not going to happen.
- Geenz Linden is continuing to work with texture streaming and resolutions, with some of the work possibly surfacing in 2026.02 as noted above. He further noted that:
- Work is not stopping at texture streaming improvements; the Lab is laying plans to deal with some of the “bigger performance bullet points”.
- It is known that PBR has introduced performance bottlenecks, many of which have been dealt with, others of which still need work. To this end, the Lab may start running Tracy “very, very regularly” to identify bottlenecks so they can be addressed.
- The hope is that when adding a new PBR feature / capability, at least one existing bottleneck will be corrected.
- As noted in the 2026 week #5 OSD meeting, there are potential changes coming to the viewer build chain. These involve updates to CMake and a Pull Request relating to vcpkg. The latter is still under review, and is likely to be implemented “bite by bite”, rather than all at once. It will also be likely to go into its own branch and not emerge until after the SLua /Linux viewer work reaches release status, so as to not over-complicate things for TPVs.
- TPV Developer Henri Beauchamp (Cool VL Viewer) suggested splitting the viewer’s main thread so that the rendering code can be separated from messaging and objects updates, thus smoothing frame rates in the viewer.
- Geenz Linden indicated that this had been looked at by a Product Engine engineer, and that it was felt that doing so would help out massively with porting the viewer to other graphics APIs.
- However, actual work on this has not as yet started, as there is a need to “chip away” at getting approval together with a need to avoid disrupting existing releases.
- Such is the scale of the work, it could involve “a few quarters” of effort to implement.
- It was noted that while some multi-threading has been introduced to the viewer, this is mostly “lighter work” more easily removed from the main thread, which still does most of the heavy lifting via a single CPU core.
- The last point rotated into a more general discussion on the viewer, threads, the future potential for removing coroutines and fibers in favour of “actual” threads, etc. Please refer to the last 10-15 minutes of the video.
Grid-Wide WebRTC Deployment
- This was targeting a March 2026 deployment, following the usual simulator-side deployment process (a selected RC channel or channels for the first deployment, followed by deployment to all remaining RC channels usually a week later, then a final deployment to the SLS Main channel, usually a week after that).
- However, it now appears hat the deployment is likely to be delayed, although no specifics have been given on why or when. .
Next Meeting
- OSUG: 13:00 SLT, Friday, March 6th, 2026, at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 