2026 week #14: SL Open Source (TPVD) meeting summary

The following notes were taken from: My chat log of the Open-Source Developer (OSD) meeting held on Friday, April 3rd, 2026, together with my chat log of that meeting. Pantera’s video of the meeting (embedded at the end of this article) – my thanks to her for providing it. Please note that this is not a full No video this week, as Pantera was absent the meeting.

Table of Contents Meeting Purpose Official Viewer Status Viewer 2026.01 – On-Click Installer / Velopack Other Viewers WebRTC Deployment General Discussion Next Meeting

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.
• Release Candidate viewer – one-click installer = 26.1.1.23806384790 – March 31 – NEW.
• 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.

Viewer 2026.01.01 – One-Click Installer / Velopack

• Now available as a RC viewer – see above.
• This could be promoted as early as week #15, depending on how it performs (crash rates, etc.), over the next few days..

Other Viewers

• 2026.02 – “Flat” UI and Splash Screen Refresh – this is due to have an Alpha update issued on April 3rd.
• The Lua Alpha viewer is also due to have an update issued on April 3rd.
  • Note, LL are now officially dropping “SLua” (“SL Lua”) and just going with “Lua”.

• The viewer formerly known as the Second Life Visual Polish viewer (SLVP) is now known as the Second Life  Second Life Graphics Care Package.
  • The hope is to get that into alpha soon – but only after we get the necessary server work done and get some regions up on ADITI.

WebRTC Deployment

• The WebRTC deployment has hit a “hiccup”.
• As a result the deployment has slowed, with WebRTC liable to remain only on the RC server channels (Le Tigre, BlueSteel, Magnum, etc.) and covering about14% of the Main grid until the problem is resolved.
• Anyone experiencing Voice issues with WebRTC is asked to file a bug report.

General Discussion

• There is an increasing issue of AI driven pull requests.
  • This appears to be a case of people trying to make claims via the bounty programme for code submissions without actually putting any effort into the work.
  • Commenting on the matter, Geenz Linden noted:

If you’re using LLMs to submit pull requests, that’s not an automatic no. However, blatantly vibe coded submissions, submissions that are effectively taking stuff from other viewers without any kind of attribution or permission and so on, and anything that just generally reads as super low effort just to claim a bounty is likely to be closed without comment in a worst case, or otherwise scrutinized in order to ascertain the individual’s understanding of what that code actually does vs. how much is just prompting to see if they can land something. We don’t want to shut down utilizing AI in people’s processes, but certain things are gonna get PRs shut down or scrutinized more heavily. So please keep this in mind.

• • This called into question the value of the bounty programme, with the fair point being made that TPV developers have spent years developing code for their viewers and submitting much of it to LL without any thought of reward other than improving people’s SL experience.
  • Geenz further noted the the bounty programme is due to get reviewed “sooner [rather]than later”, although it is likely “some form” of it will be kept, as it has also led to useful code contributions – such as those for getting the Linux viewer back into the frame (due to surface with the Lua viewer) and the viewer vcpkg work.
  • The suggestion was made that a contract programme – whereby an external coder is contracted to produce work – might be more beneficial than the current bounty programme. Again, this was pretty much the case for Linux and vcpkg.
  • A further suggestion was made to offer general bug / feature request bounties in L$ only – potentially making them less attractive to those trying to bend the system and earn US $ using AI LLMs.
• The question was asked if Leviathan Linden’s work on server-viewer messaging would be surfacing in one (or an) Alpha viewer soon – the reply was that discussions on where and when to place this work are still ongoing, in order to ensure the viewer work and server work appear pretty much together.
• Suzanna’s excellent write-up on the latest Lua release gained a further shout-out. On this (again):
  • This release will be deployed to Aditi (the Beta grid) first for testing.
  • It requires all Lua scripts to be recompiled in order to keep working.
• Tis last 10 minutes of the meeting was spent discussion whether “SLua” should be retained as the name for the Lua project, or if “Lua” was better (certainly more widely recognised) given it is an implementation of Luau.

Next Meeting

• OSUG: 13:00 SLT, Friday, April 17th, 2026, at the Hippotropolis Theatre.