Day: July 10, 2026

2026 week #28: SL Open Source meeting: OpenGL

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, July 10th, 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.
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: Flat UI – 26.2.0.25386466510,  -“flat” UI and font update, dated May.
  • Second Life Project Viewers – Lua Editor Alpha viewer 6.1.0.23768336784, April 29.

Viewer Notes

  • 26.3 is back in development with some additional texture streaming work added. It’s currently awaiting QA testing.
  • The Lua viewer (with Linux support) still looks set to be the viewer to proceed to release status after 26.3.
  • The Graphics Care Package (GCP) viewer should be getting some attention “soon”.
    • Geenz Linden indicated that he’d to try and get more PBR fixes into GCP, and encouraged anyone with a broken environment to send details his way (+ landmarks to places that are broken vs. non-PBR).
    • The fixes for water (reflections, etc.), are “mostly there” in GCP, but there are still several edge cases that need tracking down.
    • The alpha-gamma work still doesn’t yet have a home in a viewer .

More on Updating from OpenGL

So, as everyone knows we’ve been on OpenGL for a very long time. And we’ve kicked the can on this for a while – mostly because although things aren’t moving most of the time in OpenGL land, it’s not really – moving. However, deprecation is still landing in various ways across various drivers and the like whether we like it or not, and we’re forever stuck on GL 4.1 because thanks Apple. That limits our options as far as further optimisations. But we can’t just up and move everything over night. There’s a good bit of tech debt that needs clean-up, API calls that are using a lot of older ways to do things, etc., and things that just don’t really make sense even in a “modern” OpenGL context.

– Geenz Linden, discussing plans for “after OpenGL”

  • Geenz went on to note:
    • The “first big chunk” of work – already underway and will hopefully ship with the Graphic Care Package (GCP) viewer – is cleaning up a lot of how OpenGL is used. There are still a lot of “exposed” OpenGL calls. A separate fork of the viewer cleans this up, and should be landing in GCP in the near future.
    • There needs to be work to update and modernise a lot of elements of the viewer that assume a surprising amount of old fixed function pipeline-style GL usage. This is also being worked on, and the hope is it will land in the GCP viewer.
    • There then needs to be some significant work on LLPipeline separation.
      • At its core, this means getting the rendering engine into its own library and making it so the viewer can more directly function in a headless state.
      • Whilst the viewer has had a headless mode for a while, it’ is currently under utilised, and more-or-less banks on LLRender being compiled with some flags that disable OpenGL.
      • The new library-based approach would make it so the rendering pipe is entirely its own library and optional; it just won’t have any render output on its own (it will require a render interface).
  • The current thinking at the Lab is to build a new renderer interface to replace LLRender, which can then be used to:
    • Either port the current rendering engine to Vulkan through, maybe something like an LLPipelineVulkan/ LLPipelineMetal/LLPipelineD3D12(?) + something called LLGPUDriver (which is pretty much where OpenGL/Vulkan/Metal lives).
    • Or TPVs can port in some other third party rendering engine without any coupling with LLRender.
    • Thus, the point of the renderer interface is to further decouple the viewer from the concept of rendering in the first place. Basically, there’ll like be LLRenderEngine which is probably going to be a (mostly) pure interface that LLPipeline gets to be the first consumer of.
    • He noted that this second option is still going through internal decision-making processes, and that both it and the first option are very much “a bit of a large lift”.
  • The reasons for this approach is about having an offramp from the OpenGL pipe without being super disruptive (as might be the case if the new pipeline ships prematurely, forcing people onto it similarly prematurely in a similar manner to PBR). So what is likely is that:
    • There will be an OpenGL pipeline that lingers for a while (aka “years”) as the legacy renderer.
    • Whatever lands as the “new” renderer (whether that’s a direct port to Vulkan or something else)
    • A debug setting to select which one is to be used.
  • A lot of what happens vis OpenGL overall is going depend on overall confidence in a new pipeline reaching a maturity across across a broad enough range of machines used to access SL so as to consider retiring OpenGL.
    • As such, the main thing LL will be tracking once  a project is initiated, is how well adoption is holding up on the low-end for this thing by the way. Some of those machines might be stuck on OpenGL forever, and might not get all of the shiny Vulkan stuff eventually.
  • Geenz further indicated at:
    • He’s been working on a rendering engine of his own for some time, and that is a potential option.
    • Using slang-rhi is very much an option asl well, so multiple APIs can be targeted APIs at once, and then just tweak depending on what is required to support a specific platform.
  • In terms of the up-front clean-up, etc., mentioned in Geenz’s opening statement on the subject, this was noted as being not that far away.
  • A request was made for the new renderer to support more than one pipe at a time with different camera angles, so that a single account could make use of them for shooting machinima, etc.
    • Geenz noted that this is unlikely to be officially supported.

Other Items

  • Some discussion circled the topic of “SLMesh2” (see my week #27 CCUG Summary), with Geenz noting:
    • His work on the project is liable to be more high-level, with Product Engine developers doing the coding work.
    • It will be an iterative project, with the first major element being more getting off of the current SLMesh format.
  • An update on the status of work in porting RLVa to the official viewer was requested. This was a project started a few years ago and then appeared to be moved to the sidings. No response was given, possibly because the question was missed in the OpenGL / renderer discussions.
  • A discussion on water and reflections towards the end of the meeting.

Next Meeting

Four for summer at Michiel Bechir Gallery in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey

Michiel Bechir Gallery, July 2026: Lo Coeur
I recently received a series of invites to visit the Michiel Bechir Gallery in Second Life and witness the July 2026 / summer exhibition there, which features four artist-photographers, three of whom present images from Second life, and the fourth photographs taken in the physical worlds and scaled for presentation in-world. Of the four, two follow clearly-stated themes, whilst the remaining two appear more free-form, albeit with undertows of emotions themes.

Through My Eyes by Lo Coeur, is a personal catalogue of her journeys through Second Life – journeys she undertakes with a positive outlook which is reflected in the bright, and in some cases suitably saturated, colours found within many of the pieces presented. Lo additionally uses a mix of styles and tone with which to present moods within several of the pieces (take, Light, Lonely, and Sky on the Water for example), whilst the use of saturation can both enhance the mood of a piece (Misty Mountain)  and encourage focus (Passion, for example).

Rich and inviting, these are pieces that help reveal the magic of exploring SL.

Michiel Bechir Gallery, July 2026: Rebeka Demjórus Tƶimişce (RebekaNLady)
Each photograph in this gallery tells a story. Not just of places and things, but of feelings, of life. Of the quiet beauty that surrounds us every day, if we stop to look. … We chose these photos not because they are perfect, but because they are honest. They capture the world as it is: messy, beautiful, fragile, and resilient. They invite you to pause. To reflect. To feel.

Rebeka Demjórus Tƶimişce (RebekaNLady) introducing her exhibition

Thus Rebeka introduces a collection of 17 photographs captured in the real world which are as rich in colour as they are in subject matter. Their sweeping range encompasses riverside views, woodlands and parks, macro studies of flowering plants, reflections on water rich in reeds or the natural detritus of nature accumulating in shallows – and more. How we respond to them – the feelings or emotions they might cause is, obviously, entirely personal and not something to be ascribed here. All I will say is that all of them do hold the eye and present outlooks on life that might easily be missed if they are looked at too quickly, with the two offered purely in monochrome perhaps conveying a deeper sense of personal message than the others.

Michiel Bechir Gallery, July 2026: Karma Nirvana

There is no introduction for the collection of 14 pieces presented by Karma Nirvana – and one simply is not required. These are pieces which speak quietly but firmly, each with a distinctive voice, of the beauty and wonder of Second Life.

I confess that I’m not sure if I’ve witnessed Karma’s work in the past, but if that is the case then it is to my loss. These are pieces captured in some of Second Life’s most familiar public regions – Loch Tredach, The Far Away, Grand Harbor Isle and so on – which may to some be instantly recognisable, but here are given new depth and meaning thanks to Karma’s use of subject, focus, angle, cropping and post-processing. Whilst no over-arching theme may have been intended here, each piece is in and of itself deeply emotive.

Michiel Bechir Gallery, July 2026: Michiel Bechir
In Reflections, photographer Michiel Bechir invites visitors into a world where surfaces, shadows and mirrored light reveal more than they conceal. Each image captures a moment in which reality folds back onto itself – water becomes memory, glass becomes emotion and architecture becomes a quiet echo of the avatar observing it.

– The introduction to Michiel Bechir’s collection Reflections

And so through a series of 12 images, Michiel takes us on a journey across Second Life, each piece offering a singular view that is subtly split through the use (most often) by reflection, encouraging us to look as much below – so to speak (or in the foreground in most cases)  as what might be taken as the primary subject within it. These are pieces where the play of light on water, of the rippling reflections and refractions of the world above are, together with lighting and tone, the drivers of our emotional responses to each image. Relying most particularly on the use of EEP settings more than post-processing, these are works all waiting to tell a story to the ears that are ready to hear.

Four excellent and engaging exhibitions sitting under a single roof.

SLurl Details