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Table of Contents |
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.
- 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.
Viewer Notes
Viewer 2026.01.o1
- The next viewer targeting promotion to default status, currently awaiting update to beta / RC status.
- Comprises the one-click installer / updater to improve the viewer install / update processes.
- Has already seen a “not insignificant” increase in the retention of users logging-in for the first time during closed testing.
Viewer 2026.02
- 2026.02 remains on track for the “Flat” UI and font updates + plus a possible refresh of the log-in splash screen.
- Currently awaiting an update to include the updated viewer log-in splash screen.
Viewer 2026.03
- It has now been decided that 2026.03 will be the maintenance and performance improvements viewer.
- This means the SLua and Visual Polish viewers will continue along their own tracks for release.
- The SLua viewer is due a further update.
- The Visual Polish viewer will be taking a longer road to release, as the Lab want to give it a “good long” soak time in alpha and beat (RC) to gather as much feedback as possible once it surfaces for general use.
- 2026.03 will be pulling some elements of the Visual Polish viewer related to performance, such as the texture streaming work to reduce the load where creators insist on using very high resolution textures, normal maps and (particularly) specular maps, etc., on every face, regardless of size (specular resolution in particular can be reduced without loss of detail.
- Most of the performance work will be focused on trying to provide a smooth experience for those running SL on lower specification machines and with graphics set to Low to Mid quality / speed.
- So a focus more on improving frame rates in the viewer, rather than trying to address features known to have a high impact on performance such as Shadows (which require higher quality / speed settings than most lower-spec systems can handle).
- In this regards, the Lab has a lot of metrics (including things like hardware specifications as more specialised metrics) upon which they can draw in order to be able to drill down into general performance bottlenecks.
- A further aspect of this work is to reduce VRAM usage, as mentioned in recent previous CCUG summaries.
- Also being considered for lower spec systems is the ability to “turn off” or automatically disable normal and specular maps on low specification systems.
- This viewer will also includes as many maintenance fixes as can be included as well.
General Viewer Notes
- It is currently a toss-up between which gains priority between the SLua viewer and the Visual Polish viewer.
- The official Linux flavour of the viewer will still be included in the SLua release.,
General Discussions
- A feature request to Zoom in notecards, script and image views has been raised and is currently tracked, but as per usual, no estimation as to when it might actually be worked on / implemented.
- Given the internal discussions that are on-going related to the viewer UI framework (XUI), Geenz Linden indicated he doesn’t anticipate the request being worked on “any time soon”.
- Exactly what these discussions might be was not open for comments at the meeting.
- New convex hull tool for mesh uploads:
- The VHACD convex hull tool has been available on Apple OS (notably Apple Silicon) fora good while, and Geenz is keen to see this added to the Windows and Linux flavours of the viewer.
- Again, the primary aim of this move is to allow LL to remove the Havok physics sub-licence requirement from the viewer.
- A discussion on Linden Water and its appearance – with some wanting water to have more than one layer, to have physical waves, etc.; others wanting a “water asset” that could be applied to mesh / prim surfaces in a similar manner to textures / materials – although this latter is actually much harder to achieve and couple be considered a “multiple feature request” (e.g. fogging, a glTF-like transmission layer, etc.).
- A further discussion on performance – texture LODs and the associated drop-down in the uploader (which has nothing to do with mesh LODs), etc., – but for the general user, the most salient points are hopefully included under the 2026.03 viewer notes, above.
- The end of the meeting comprised a theoretical discussion on the requirements to develop a new avatar system for use with SL.
Next Meeting
- 13:00 SLT, Thursday, April 9th, 2026, at the Hippotropolis Campsite.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 