Day: April 17, 2026

2026 week #16: SL Open Source (TPVD) meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Hippotropolis Theatre: home of the OSD/TPVD meeting
The following notes were taken from:

  • My chat log of the Open-Source Developer (OSD) meeting held on Friday, April 17th, 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

  • 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  – One-Click Installer = 26.1.1.23806384790 – April 10 – NEW.
  • Second Life Release Candidate (RC) viewer: Flat UI – 26.2.0.24254827122, April 15 -“flat” UI and font update – NEW.
  • Second Life Project Viewers:

26.2.0 – “Flat UI”

  • Now at RC status, per the Above list.
  • More updates to be made to this prior to promotion.
    • LL is working through some font kerning problems that were seemingly made much more obvious with the new font choice.
    • It was also noticed that the official viewer has been rendering fonts ever so slightly different from FS – which kicked off the above investigation.

26.3.0 – Graphics Care Package

  • The is the viewer previously known as the SL Visual Polish (SLVP) viewer.
  • The performance tweak has been ported over, and the team is now looking at additional performance work.
    • Async inventory is being parted out into easier to review chunks.
    • LL is also looking at some CPU and GPU wins overall – Geenz Linden is working on getting texture batching working for the PBR and Blinn-Phong paths. There is potentially more work on these lines, and these will likely be incorporated prior to passing the viewer to QA.

Lua Viewer

  • The Lua Alpha update that it had been hoped would surface around the start of April is now being aimed for some time in week #17.
  • The current lean at the Lab is to move this viewer through to RC status and then release before the 26.3.0 GCP viewer, but no firm decision has been made.
  • Again, this viewer will also be the first new Linux release from LL.
  • As a reminder: LL have officially dropped “SLua” (“SL Lua”) and just going with “Lua”.

WebRTC Deployment

  • The WebRTC deployment is still underway. No firm end-date as yet, although it should now be across all simulator RC channels.
  • Anyone experiencing Voice issues with WebRTC is asked to file a bug report.

General Discussion

  • The vcpkg updates for the viewer build process will not be surfacing until “after Lua at the very least”.
    • Geenz estimates it will likely not emerge until late summer, due to dependencies on work being completed vis. KDU and the removal of the Havok sub-libraries from the viewer.
    • In terms of the latter: VHACD will replace the convex decomposition for mesh upload, and server-generated path-finding mesh will replace the Havok path-finding mesh loaded by the viewer for visualisation.
    • A major reason for removing the Havok sub-licences is the impact they have on TPVs, who have to go through the process of obtaining and signing sub-licence agreements via LL, which complicates the open-source environment.
    • In this respect, if LL had a truly open-source replacement for KDU on the graphics side, they would look to make similar moves there as well.
  • Physics shapes and why and what the viewer can do with them became a topic for conversation at around the half-way point in the meeting, and this continued for around 10 minutes.
  • During the above there was a general discussion on the mesh uploader and clarifying LOD numbers for those coming into mesh creation.
  • A question was asked on interpreting section 8 part of the Unauthorized Uses of Linden Lab’s Trademarks policy – a question perhaps best dealt with via a support Support Ticket.
  • A request was made for TPVs to receive stats reports once more (use, crash rates, etc). Geenz noted in reply:
Some of that is a bit of a black box to us as far as your specific crash rates, as for viewer usage we’re bottlenecked by a single person is responsible for that so it doesn’t always get done. I’ve been hoping to get a more automatic solution for this for a while, but our metrics folks have been booked up with other things for a good bit now.
  • The question was asked about the possibility of viewer-side Lua for building custom UIs to replace some of the HUD systems people use, and whether work on this is still moving forward. Geenz repliedwith:
That’s been on the shelf for a while. Dunno if or when we’re gonna bring that one back – I think what we’d need to really look at bringing that back with a significant amount of interest is gonna be how people would want to use [it]. There’s a lot of criteria that goes into making product level decisions like that, and with the viewer side Lua stuff it was increasingly being looked at something for internal use than something like a content feature.
  • The question was asked if the puppetry project was once and for all “dead”, to which Genenz again replied:
Lots of things were learned from that project, but I wouldn’t say it’s dead necessarily. Just not a priority. There’s a lot of things that would need to happen for puppetry, and I think it’s really increasingly more of a “when we need <x> we’ll work on that part of it” sort of thing. Because like joint streaming is just generally kind of useful, but we don’t have an immediate need for it. But who knows – maybe some day. Hell, if there’s any interest in having a proper poser viewer-side that ticks all of the privacy and consent boxes that might be a potential path. But we’re nowhere near there yet.

Next Meeting