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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 – Legacy search; WebRTC improvements; QoL improvements – 26.1.0.22641522367 – March 12.
- Second Life Project Viewers:
- Second Life Project Flat UI – 26.2.0.22829286351, March 20 -“flat” UI and font updates.
- Second Life Lua Editor Alpha viewer 26.1.0.21525310258, February 12.
- Second Life One Click Install viewer 26.1.0.21295806042, January 26 – one-click viewer installation.
- Second Life Voice Moderation viewer 26.1.0.20139269477, December 12, 2025 – Introduces the ability to moderate spatial voice chat in regions configured to use webRTC voice.
Upcoming Viewers
Viewer 2026.01.01 – One-Click Installer / Velopack
- Remains the current viewer development focus, with a beta (RC) update targeting a potential availability in week #13 (week commencing Monday, March 23rd). Actual promotion to release status depends on how long the viewer may ned to remain at RC status.
- There is one major blocker to promotion, which is being worked on, but otherwise, it is “very close” to being a candidate for release, user feedback allowing.
- Geenz Linden noted that the repo for the viewer is getting updates to more easily ship updates for those TPVs opting to adopt Velopack as their updater.
- Velopack benefits:
- The move to Velopack allows LL and TPVs to move off from VVM with the exception of cohort management, and allows LL to discontinue the old SLVersionChecker all of which should streamline the viewer install and update processes as experienced by users.
- Velopack also opens the door to partial viewer updates – although LL are still in internal discussions on when to actually start doing this.
- A side effect of this viewer, when generally available, is that it will not automatically uninstall versions of the viewer using the old install / update processes, and there will be no requirement to manually uninstall such versions (although users can if they wish). The reason for this latter point is a concern that inexperienced users will simply click YES when asked if they wish to remove all their settings, etc., and thus lose them.
- Testing of this viewer against incoming new users to SL saw a “not insignificant” increase in day 1 user retention..
Viewer 2026.02 – “Flat” UI and Splash Screen Refresh
- An alpha version (see viewer status, above) was released on Friday, March 20th, but without the log-in splash screen updates. These will be in an upcoming update.
- This viewer includes the “flat” UI design, font updates and WebRTC voice moderation capabilities to help align viewer-side WebRTC updates more with the server-side.
Viewer 2026.03 – Maintenance Release
- 2026.03 will now see the return of official viewer maintenance releases, with the initial focus on viewer performance improvements, together with a focus on top crashers and regressions, up to a certain limit, so they can be kept as relatively small releases rolled out on a reasonably fast basis.
- 2026.03 should see (partial list):
- A backporting of the texture streaming changes at the very least, with Geenz particularly focused on getting lower RAM usage in general.
- Kitty Barnett’s long-waiting avatar appearance fixes.
- Geenz also hopes to get some work done on lightening the main thread burden in the viewer – which is potentially more difficult, and may take longer.
- A hope with this cycle of maintenance releases is to put a reasonable dent in some of the debt we’ve accumulated with PBR’s release.
Viewer 2024.04 – SLVP or LUA (TBD)
- The 2026.04 viewer release is liable to be either the Second Life Visual Polish (SLVP) release (containing all of the SSR, PBR Specular, and HDR EEP parameters work), or a SLua release.
- Work on improving mirrors for SLVP is currently on hold whilst 2026.01.01 and 2026.02 is on the table.
- SLVP is liable to spend a long time at alpha status (which may be why SLua moves ahead of it in the order of things).
WebRTC Deployment
- This commenced on Wednesday, March 18th, with a deployment to the BlueSteel RC channel covering approximately 3.4% of the grid.
- This early release allows us to verify performance, stability, and compatibility in real-world conditions before expanding further.
- Users in the release candidate channel may experience:
- Failure of peer-to-peer (P2) Voice calls between regions on WebRTC and the rest of the grid. These will not be fully resolved until WebRTC is grid-wide.
- Differences in audio quality depending on being in or out of the release candidate channel.
- Ongoing tuning and iteration as we gather feedback.
- For more details, see: WebRTC Voice in Second Life — Limited Release Begins March 18, 2026.
- The next, larger deployment is currently scheduled for week #14 (commencing Monday, March 30th). However, a smaller deployment might be made in week #13.
- There are thoughts being given to next steps for WebRTC: transcription, the ability in-preferences to hear how you sound, etc. (a replacement for echo canyon), but these are subject to other priorities.
- The existing Vivox Voice service is liable to be shut down “a few months” after the WebRTC deployment has been completed. However, no target date has as yet been decided.
General Discussion
- Mesh Convex Hulls:
- The new physics choice for mesh uploads is currently available on ARM Macs, and on the “to do” list for other viewers.
- Geenz’s first choice for the role choked on a lot of content for SL, so VHACD is the choice of libraries.
- As has been previously mentioned, the aim is to remove the Havok sub-libraries from the viewer entirely – but this a process several steps down the line.
- There was a general discussion on performance, lightening the load on the viewer’s main processing thread (some noted above).
Next Meeting
- OSUG: 13:00 SLT, Friday, April 3rd, 2026, at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 