The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 23, 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
- The Nectarine update was deployed to the BlueSteel RC in week #38. However:
- It has a bug that causes it to leave a bad zero-coded block on some ObjectUpdate messages. This shows up in the viewer logs and effectively is a form of packet-loss if the viewer tosses the data, or ignores the final block of data there.
- Leviathan has been working on a fix for the issue, and if it passes QA, it will deployed to BlueSteel as an Nectarine update, with the updated code also being deployed to the remain RC channels.
- This bug can occasionally impact the 26.4 viewer (currently available as a Release Candidate viewer), he expects this to be included in the in-development 26.5 viewer – and a Pull Request (PR) will be made available for TPVs wishing to pull the fix into their code.
Game Control
- Game_control has been re-based on the in-development 26.5 viewer code base. a new pre-release viewer version, but further work on the viewer code is required.
- This means game_control could be included in the 26.5 viewer when it services – however, the code has not yet been merged into the development branch of 26.5.
- Leviathan is looking for feedback on the current pre-release builds of game_control, particularly:
- Whether the default mappings of actions to buttons correct; are there any actions that should be made mappable that are not yet available; and what features are missing that MUST be in the initial release.
- However, time is limited for getting suggestions in.
- There is still work to be carried out to ensure that game_control doesn’t impact the current SpaceNavigator 3D mouse support.
- A discussion on keyboard mapping to game_control (currently, it is not possible to map keyboard keys to arbitrary gamepad buttons).
General Discussion
- When it surfaces, 26.5 will likely be the last major viewer release for 2026; Olive (which will follow Nectarine) will likely be the last simulator update for the year.
- Region crossings:
- Pepper Linden’s region crossing updates also introduced a subtle protocol change which had been previously tried – and had to be rolled back.
- This does not mean Pepper’s fixes do not work; rather that there isn’t a lot of confidence that they are ready for full deployment. Right now, it isn’t clear whether the existing system can be fixed or if LL need to move to a new QueueEventGet protocol.
- More internal discussions are required on this, but Pepper’s work has renewed a desire to get more region crossing fixes into the works.
- This sparked conversation on region crossings and vehicle use.
- The latter half of the meeting was devoted to region / simulator capabilities – number of avatars support, number of objects, resource overheads, region pricing, and – yes – “megaregions” (those larger than the current 256×256 sq m size) + more.
- This was a fairly wide-ranging discussion, and so please refer to the video below.
- The above was intertwined on some history of SL provided by Leviathan Linden touching on the early attempts at social engineering (e.g. originally limiting the build height to 768 metres and limiting flying height to encourage people to remain near the ground and socialise more).
- Again, please refer to the video for more.
Date of Next Meetings
- Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, September 29, 2026.
- Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, October 6, 2026.
