2026 week #38: SUG Leviathan Hour: game_control / region crossings

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 8, 2026 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the meeting by Pantera is embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks to her for providing it, and to Erik Mondrian for the chat transcript after my ISP suffered issues and disconnected me from the world.

Meeting Overview

• The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas is held every other Tuesday at 12:00 noon, SLT (holidays, etc., allowing), per the Second Life Public Calendar.
• The “Leviathan Office Hour” meetings are held on the Tuesdays which do not have a formal SUG meeting, and are chaired by Leviathan Linden. They are more brainstorming / general discussion sessions.
• Meetings are held in text in-world, at this location.

Simulator Deployments

• No deployments this week, but all simhosts will be restarted.
• The Nectarine update now looks like its deployment to an RC channel will not be for another week as it continues through QA.
• Simulator support for Lua looks like it will be part of a simulator update after Nectarine
• The next two simulator releases after Nectarine are currently referenced as Olive and Plum – with Olive possibly being the vehicle for Lua release, but this is still TBC.

Game Control

• Game_control has a new pre-release viewer version, but further work on the viewer code is required.
  • One element of this is that there are now two code elements for flycamming – the SpaceNavigator support and now game_control support. Leviathan would like to reconcile these into a single code set for both options.
• There was a reminder that game_control is not grid-wide on the Main grid (Agni).
  • So anyone using the pre-release viewer must disable the “Send GameControl Data to server” option in the game_control preferences – or face being booted from any region sans game_control support.
  • The above will still allow use of a controller for general movement (avatar and camera (including flycam) and the mouse.
  • The full UDP message set required for game_control should be part of the Nectarine simulator update (so no need to disable anything once this has been fully deployed to the Main grid).
• Leviathan also noted:
  • That game_control should support any controller that is supported by SDL3 (simple direct layer).
  • Full documentation on game_control has yet to go to the SL wiki.
  • It’s not clear how game_control will interact with SL Experiences – although views were expressed that in terms of movement, etc, it should work.
• Leviathan would like more feedback on the game_control work, but understands this is difficult given the viewer is only available as a pre-release, and simulator support is limited to the Beta grid (Aditi).
• The latter two points led to some description of the control options and modes, control semantics, etc., and a more general discussion on game_control through most of the rest of the meeting – please refer to the video.

Region Crossings

• Pepper Linden’s region crossing improvements will not be formally included in the next simulator update (Nectarine).
  • They will therefore be ported to a subset of simulators running on the Snack RC channel as previously reported.
• These updates do not, contrary to rumours, make region crossings “faster”;  they do, however, make them more stable and predictable.
  • The above means that if you are using an avatar with many scripted attachments and on a complex vehicle – you will likely complete region crossings in good order rather than crashing (or something), but it may take as long as prior to Pepper’s stability fixes.
• Making region crossings “faster” remains a separate area of work the Lab will at some point start poking at.
  • One hope here is that the  implementation of Lua scripting will help over time (once live) could help speed things up due to its (rumoured) faster serialization/deserialization of scripts.

General Updates

• This was a light meeting, as the past weekend was a long weekend in the US (Labor Day), so many LL staff were out of the office on either side of it.
• Leviathan Linden indicated that the fixes for avatars moving more than usual when standing on moving surfaces and for “crouch-slide” will be in the Nectarine simulator update.
• There was a further discussion on variable walking speeds, with the following being noted:
  • It would require an an overhaul of the avatar locomotion graph and likely updates to game_control.
  • development of suitable animations and scrioted control capabilities to properly sync animations with walking speeds.
• A further request was made for a way to make general data on active / on-line regions available (e.g. via .CSV file) – the information being requested being region names, associated estate names, global grid coordinates, height map and aerial view (without sky-based ads). Leviathan indicated he’ll take the request back to the

Date of Next Meetings

• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, September 15, 2026.
• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, September 22, 2026.