The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, October 6, 2026 Leviathan Office Hour, the “off-week” sessions of the 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.
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 updates, only restarts.
General Updates
Game_Control
- Game_control has now been been remerged with the 26.5 Chat Modernisation viewer code.
- This means game_control should start appearing as part of future updates to the current RC version of 26.5 and will be a part of the viewer when it is promoted to release status.
- Current points of note:
- Game_control is be positioned behind a feature flag so it won’t send the GameControlData UDP message to simulators without the required back-end support in order to prevent crashes.
- “Send GameControl Data to server” option is also disabled by default in Preferences UI.
- The reason for the above is if the GameControlData UDP message is sent to a simulator without the required game_control support, the simulator will take the message as an “attack” or a hacked viewer, eventually dropping the UDP circuit to the viewer AND the region would put that UserID + computer_fingerprint on a short-term blacklist – logins to that region would fail for several minutes unless the user migrates to a different computer.
- Whilst the current simulator release (code-named Nectarine) is grid-wide, it doesn’t have the necessary code to correctly set the feature flag to the viewer (and so issues can occur). The next simulator version – Olive (in development at the time of writing) – will have the required code.
- During discussions a bug with game_control in which buttons don’t appear to fire when used in Mouselook. Leviathan is going to look into this.
- Leviathan further noted:
- Items “not set in stone” for game_control: default mappings and the full list of client-side actions available to be mapped.
- Items “pretty much” set in stone: the UDP message format and the LSL constants (new constants can be added, but existing ones cannot be changed).
- Items seen as “missing right now”: the ability to navigate the viewer UI with a game controller.
New Group Ability to Define Who Can Post Links to Group Chats
- Leviathan Linden has developed a new Group Role ability to define who can post random web links in group chat.
- This capability will:
- Allow the posting of URLs to be set to the default Everyone, Owner and Officer roles, with Group Owners and moderators will be able to set it as required to other roles.
- Include a defined “whitelist” of LL domain URL links which can be posted regardless of who is positing them and whether or not the ability has been set. This list may include certain recognised third-party website URLs as well, and may be subject to expansion.
- Not (initially?) include support for user-defined whitelists of URLs.
- This new ability will be deployed as a part of the upcoming Olive simulator update. However, as it requires corresponding viewer updates and back-end database changes, it will initially be set behind a feature flag. The viewer-side updates should be made available in viewer 26.5.
- Per my notes from the previous SUG meeting:
- Messages posted with URL links by those not authorised to do so will see the message go through, but the URL will be redacted.
- This is part of the on-going work to limit the ability of some to post scam and phishing links to Group chats.
- In this meeting, Leviathan indicated the new ability will be “on” by default for the default roles mentioned above; this brought forward understandable requests that the Everyone role does not have the ability to post links be default.
- This would more effectively deal with issues of phishing in existing Groups, notably those Groups which no longer have an active Owner or assigned Officers who can adjust Role abilities.
- Currently, the plan appears to be to only have the ability to post links toggled of the the Everybody role when creating new Groups.
- Leviathan noted the final decision on how the ability should be set is down to the Product Team, but he would relay the feedback to them.
- Broadly speaking, the time frame for this ability is possibly going to be: simulator updates (Olive simulator release): late October / early November; viewer-side support (26.5 release): and the database updates: by late December.
General Discussion
Please refer to the video, below.
- The Group Role ability news led to a discussion on Group abilities and capabilities (e.g. renaming a Group, providing additional information within Groups – date Group created, date someone joined, managing groups where the Owner is no longer active and there are no active Officers, etc.).This ran through the second quarter of the meeting.
- Kyle Linden noted he has “a long list of group improvements in my back pocket,” and is writing Product Requirement documents for them one at a time.
- Leviathan Linden is trying to track down some physics crashes on the simulator – although it is providing difficult to identify the cause.
- The Puppetry project remains shelved. However, there have been some internal discussions / questions asked around it in terms of possible future capabilities for the viewer – but this does not mean the project is about to (or will) resume, just that aspects of the work – such as Inverse Kinematics (IK) might be looked at again in the future with the hope of enabling “simple” actions: holding hands, touching a light switch, etc.
- This led to a discussion on IK, animation, etc. during the last quarter of the meeting.
Date of Next Meetings
- Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, October 27, 2026.
- Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, November 3, 2026.
