2026 week #12: SUG meeting summary

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, March 3ed, 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

• No deployments are planned for the week, channels will be restarted.
• WebRTC deployment is now planned to commence on Wednesday, March 18th with a deployment to the BlueSteel RC channel. Progression from there will likely be subject to how it settles, issues arising, etc.

In Brief

• Rider Linden:
  • Has some Lua work waiting on him to add support for script information to inventory and the viewer. Basically, scripts will have an inventory subtype that can be either LSL or Lua and it will also have some meta data which is the VM that the script was compiled for (LSO, Mono, Luau).
  • This week he is taking care of a long standing issue with mesh uploading costs, and the fix should hopefully surface in the 2026.02 viewer release.
• Leviathan Linden:
  • Has been working on is to try to improve login/teleport/region-cross success rate. The idea is to improve the reliability of the UDP packets that are used for viewer<–>simulator connections.
  • He has a Pull Request for this up against the viewer, although he’s not sure the core of the issue lies within the viewer. Rather he believes similar changes server-side will probably make a bigger difference.
  • Currently this work is largely complete and going through validation.
  • Once released, it will not “fix all region crossings” – as there are multiple issues with them that need to be tackled – it his work should hopefully be a further step towards improving things.
  • In addition, Leviathan has been attempting to better understand a fix proposed by Cool VL Viewer’s Henri Beauchamp to reduce the time avatars with attachments spend being a cloud. He believes the fix is the right way to go – asking the server to re-send attachment details (which currently doesn’t happen) along with texture data (which is resent when an avatar has issues “de-clouding”). He hopes to have the simulator updates for this ready for deployment after WebRTC has gone out.
• Harold Linden (SLua):
  • Has been working to refactor some of the common Lua standard library functions that currently lead to “failed to perform mandatory yield” errors in user scripts. As a result, he hopes such errors will be fixed with the next SLua deployment.
  • He is also working on a refactor of lljson to make it easier to convert things back to proper Lua types when serialize / deserialize your data with the JSON serializer
    Working on meta problems, such as identifying Voice issues.
  • The next viewer-side update could be in “the next two weeks”.
  • Further work on SLua is dependent on the continued feedback of those using it.
  • It was noted generally that the is further work to be forthcoming (e.g. sim caps for slua_default.d.luau).
  • Harold also confirmed the Lua scripting system runs on a single thread.

General Discussion

Please refer to the video below as well.

• SLua warning: as per my previous CCUG summary, the next Lua deployment will have breaking changes. At a minimum scripts will need to recompiling, as they otherwise will not run.
• A general discussion on Voice roll-off for WebRTC and general voice tethering to prevent eavesdropping. When moving your avatar / camera away from others who are speak, Voice so decrease down to nothing at 60 metres. However, it has been reported that simply zooming the camera out from the current position does not result in Voice roll-off.
  • This discussion also wrapped around the limitations of Bluetooth headsets / microphones which can affect Voice quality.
• User Tapple Gao has put forward a feature request for improved animations without resorting to a “heavy” project like puppetry. This is currently being tracked by the Lab.
• The are issues around logging in and capability granting which can result in non-graceful disconnects and log-in failures due to capabilities failing to create.
  • Some of these issues had been fixed, but the lab acknowledged there are potential more issues that can cause the same outcome.
  • Monty noted that L and firestorm have recently been jointly poking at the problems.
  • A suggested recommendation for those experiencing disconnects / log-outs of this nature is to either wait 2 minutes before a re-try, or to try logging-in to a non-neighbouring region to the one being used at the time of the crash.
• A general discussion on scripts and scripting and future Lua development work took-up most of the second half of the meeting.

Date of Next Meetings

• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, March 24th, 2026.
• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, March 31st, 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.