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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 26.3 – 26.3.0.31203661088, August 10, promoted August 17 – quality of life improvements; performance improvements; bug fixes – No Change.
- Second Life Lua Editor RC / beta viewer 26.4.0.34502396632, September 11 – NEW.
- Lua scripting support (on regions with Lua scripting enabled).
- Improved communication between the Viewer and the newly published Second Life VS Code extension.
- Offers an experimental Linux viewer build.
- Includes the latest WebRTC Voice and viewer-maintenance updates.
- Second Life Chat Modernization viewer 26.3.0.33643480083, September 4 – NEW.
General Viewer Notes
- 26.4 was initially released on September 9, but suffered a high crash rate, with one crasher in particular needing a hotfix, resulting in the release of the September 11 update as listed above.
- Graphics Care Package (GCP) viewer:
- Work continues with bug fixing within the viewer.
- Additionally, server-side work is underway to provide support for the new glTF parameters (e.g. IoR, Specular, and possibly, depending on further internal testing against viewer performance, some of the glTF Transmission capabilities).
- If included, the latter will enable pseudo water prims – that is prims that have the appearance of Linden Water, but not the native attributes such as buoyancy, underwater haze, etc.
- Once this server-side work is completed, the plan is to put up a region on Aditi (the Beta grid) so that the GCP (when available) and the new glTF parameters can be tested.
- GCP includes the ability to have more than two shadow-casting light projectors in a scene (although the default remains at 2).
- Initially (at least) this will be a Debug setting, not a Preferences option, as setting the value too high can result in murdering the viewer’s frame rate.
- This update includes a fix to the long-standing bug that the number of projectors casting shadows is not correctly calculated.
- Confirmation that game_control is now entering the queue for inclusion into a viewer update, but no confirmations as to when this is likely to occur or which viewer update will see it surface.
General Discussions
- Raise the maximum lighting radius beyond 20 meters was raised, together with the positives and negatives to it (the latter being one parcel with extended lighting overpowering neighbouring parcels + the idea of making lighting (like sounds and avatar visibility) so it can be limited to the parcel boundaries.
- It was also suggested that better static shadow mapping could eliminate many of the problems such an extension might cause.
- This led to a brief description of the issues of adding capabilities such as point lighting shadows and static shadow mapping to SL (in short: adding the required parameters to the existing protocol “is a little bit painful right now”, and requires the cleaning-up of some technical debt).
- As such, improvements to lighting without it being a nuisance to other users is not impossible, it’s just not a current focus.
- Introducing Opacity Control for BoM Layers was raised, and Geenz indicated that there are numerous improvements which could be made to Bakes on Mesh (BoM), such that it is fast becoming a project or group of projects in its own right.
- One of the first could be a clean-up of the UI/UX around BoM in order to make it less cryptic and easier for lay users to understand / use.
- This led to a more general discussion on how capabilities and features in Second Life have often evolved and options for improving aspects of BoM and avatar attachments (e.g. making creators define the default attach point at upload, rather than simply leaving it undefined and the right hand being selected as the default). This took up much of the latter half of the meeting.
- A request was made for the ability to bulk upload glTF materials. This is not something currently under consideration, but could be explored in the future.
- Work is continuing on improving texture streaming – although LL are anticipating “some noise” to be made about some of the behavioural changes involved with this work once it surfaces (which is one of the reasons a quality drop-down selector for textures is being included in the viewer).
- This led to comments that textures should perhaps show an “average” colour when loading, rather than just being grey.
- Geenz also suggested it would be nice to have some form of mechanism which could better sample / size textures on upload as well.
- A request was made to make the options to rescale the viewer UI more obvious – particularly for incoming new users with vision impairments – was made. This will be looked into (no pun intended), and might possibly be done through something like a further “Accessibility drop-down” in the two right of the viewer (where the Graphics and Camera presets, etc, are already located), or even via auto-detection (as is already done for MacOS under high definition mode).
- Whilst not content creation related, it was indicated that the simulator Snack RC to contain Pepper Linden’s region crossing improvements (see my recent Leviathan Office Hours update for further information) will be deployed in the next week or two, and will likely include regions on Blake Sea.
Next Meeting
- 13:00 SLT, Thursday, September 24, 2026, at the Hippotropolis Campsite.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 