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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.
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 – 26.1.0.22641522367 , March 5.
- 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
- Was lined up for promotion to release status, but LL has ben seeing some suspiciously low fault rates – less than 1%, rather than the more usual average fault rate accounting for freezes and crashes being closer to something like 5-7%.
- As a result, the view is going to be left at RC status through until early in week #11.
Viewer 2026.1.1 – One Click Install
- 2026.1.1 is the new designation for the one-click install and velopack viewer (currently 26.1.0.21295806042).
- This is unlikely to move to release status for at least a couple of weeks as it works through QA testing, particularly given this viewer represents a pretty big migration from the old updater to the new one.
Viewer 2026.02
- This viewer is about to undergo an “Alpha” update, designed to gather feedback from users.
- This is the viewer with the new “Flat” UI updates, font changes and WebRTC voice moderation capabilities, and might additionally receive some backported updates to texture streaming.
Viewer 2026.03 -“SL Visual Polish” (SLVP)
- 2026.03 is set 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.
- This work is currently being wrapped-up.
- 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.
- Further performance optimisations.
- The current repository for this viewer (valid March 6th, but may change) is available here.
- This viewer may be in a head-to-head with the SLua viewer as to which gets promoted first when the time comes.
WebRTC
- A small deployment to the Preflight simulator Release Candidate channel was made on Thursday, March 5th, intended to address some server stability issues.
- It is hoped that the deployment will quickly move to the BlueSteel RC.
- There is still no Voice echo canyon for WebRTC for self-testing your own Voice system. However, one is still under consideration.
General Discussion
please refer to the video as well.
- Geenz Linden has not had time to address the much-requested alpha-gamma fixes due to a focus on the SLVP viewer. It is also anticipated this work will require a decent bit of scoping, including understanding what needs to remove server-side to avoid a potential permissions hole.
- Geenz has also has made further commits for the reimplementation of SSR after he found a good way to get hierarchical Z tracing working in the viewer.
- He has also finally got the separable SSR pass working from another branch, which leads to a ton of optimisation potential for SLVP. For example, this now allows rendering of SSR at half or even quarter resolution, while the output for glossy SSR can be filtered, leading to less graininess on PBR surfaces and water.
- There is also now a mirror for water reflections – which as was noted above, requires the Ultra quality setting and will impact viewer performance. but which is independent to SSR for water reflections.
- The long-awaited Appearance fixes, as supplied by Kitty Barnett, are being targeted for the 2026.03 viewer.
- There has been some musing on re-working the viewer graphic settings to make them easier to parse (such as making options drop-downs grouped by the Low to Ultra quality settings, with only the relevant options appearing for each. However, this work is only at the musing stage, not something being pursued.
- A general discussion of texture handling – including the option to add blank texture detection and reduced these to 1×1 to help reduce the RAM load with textures.
- A general discussion on a number of issues bugs (e.g. the AMD bug which sees the avatar textures broken on newer AMD GPU drivers – which is hopefully being addressed by AMD; MOAP input handling bugs on Linux & Apple, said to make playing some games in SL impossible, etc- see the last 15 minutes of the video for more).
Next Meeting
- 13:00 SLT, Friday, March 20th, 2026, at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 