The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, September 4th, 2025, and the official video is embedded at the end of this article. Please note that this is not a full transcript, but a summary of key topics.
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.
Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they are conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.
Inventory Favourites System, plus assorted new features.
Improvements to avatar system; camera and movement; chat; voice; content creation tools.
Mesh uploader updates.
Text & UI polish.
Fixes for Environment and Rendering; stability and crashes; UI.
System improvements.
Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13.
Viewer 2025.07
This is now in development.
Will likely include (although the list is subject to possible change as the viewer develops):
“Proper Discord support” for those with a Discord account – further clarification to follow as the viewer is developed.
Native Apple Silicon support, which should see a performance boost for those running Apple Silicon.
A Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF) update (used to power the in-viewer browser, media on a prim (MOAP), etc.), which should bring some performance and security improvements – although the former will not necessarily be observed in regions / parcels making heavy use of MOAP (e.g. in arcades, and similar).
This also might include a code contribution which enables PRIM_MEDIA_FIRST_CLICK_INTERACT within the viewer, allowing the user to interact with a media without an initial “focus” click, as well as passes hover to the media.
As a side note: a code contribution included in 2025.05 7.2.0.16729091892 (current release at the time of writing) allows media Autoplay turned off, whilst still allowing it to work on HUDs using MOAP.
New performance metrics which should allow the Lab to gather data on the likely performance impact new features might have on the viewer. This should benefit updates such as the improvements to screen space reflections (SSR), which have been parked in a viewer branch pending the ability to better assess how these updates might impact the average user’s experience in terms of frame rate (speed, smoothness, etc.).
It was indicated that 2025.07 could act as a baseline for updates to SLua support in the viewer.
General Discussion – In Brief
Alpha / Gamma issues (linear alpha blending):
In order for PBR lighting to render anywhere close to correctly, alpha blending had to be switched from SRGB to linear colour space. This can cause some older content using Blinn-Phong, to look either more opaque or more transparent than in did pre-PBR.
A suggested fix for this would be to give people the ability to adjust the alpha/gamma on per texture entry for the object (including no mod items), and this had been scheduled in 2024 for release “after the ExtraFPS viewer”.
However, as this was essentially a “permission hack”, the update got held-up. It has now been decided to default all old content to gamma space blending, to bring back some of the “old” alpha blending functionality
Issues with updating alphas on PBR materials was raised (currently, it is not possible to change the alpha without also changing the colour/tint. llSetLinkGLTFOverrides can be of some help with certain issues, and Brad Linden indicated that a Canny on the matter is working through the system, which should also help.
Custom Skeleton support: Geenz noted that the move to glTF mesh import was primarily to address the fact that COLLADA .DAE is increasingly unsupported by content creation apps, and thus SL needed to update to a “newer” format.
However, the manner in which the work has been done could support the use of custom skeletons in the future.
But, in order for this to be possible, several other hurdles would have to be cleared first (such as updating the internal SL mesh file format to support custom skeletons and without breaking existing content).
As such, any such support would need further consideration and prioritisation against other updates / projects before getting on the roadmap.
Vulkan support: this was referred to as still being “some way off” and requiring some extensive work, including cleaning-up how the view handles OpenGL.
General Questions
Questions were asked about both segmenting regions / parcels into vertical zones; the status of further work on Combat 2. and on Land impact calculations. These were questions more specific to Rider Linden (who was unfortunately unable to attend the meeting) / the Simulator User Group, and as such were redirected to the latter.
The question was raised if the developing Lobby capability for SL Mobile (which will eventually allow people to use some aspects of the Mobile app such as chat without them appearing as on-line to others) could be implemented within the viewer. It was indicated that this might be possible in the future, although there is no current work in this direction at present.
This above encompassed a conversation on where conversation logs are currently stored (on the local device, be it computer or Mobile) vs. being stored in a manner that makes it accessible to all devices a user might employ to access Second Life. This is something the Lab is looking at, allowing for the privacy / data protection concerns of storing logs on third-party services, and would likely be an opt-in service
Additional questions on cashing-out, lifetime memberships, etc., were similarly pointed towards the relevant user group meetings, as no-one from the Lab at the CCUG in involved in these areas.
The Annex at Nitroglobus: Miles Cantelou – Shamanism
Miles Cantelou is an artist whom I have covered on numerous occasions in these pages, most recently in terms of Miles’ return to Second Life after time away, when I wrote about his Homestead gallery space Scirocco Art Galleries (see: The art of Miles Cantelou in Second Life).
But I’m not the only one appreciative of Miles’ work. Dido Haas, the operator / curator of Nitroglobus Roof Gallery also visited Scirocco and, like me, was struck by the intensity of Miles’ studies – particularly (I hope I’m correct in assuming) those found within the Galleria Polynesia. As a result, Dido invited Miles to exhibit at Nitroglobus, and on September 1st, 2025 they opened Shamanism.
The Annex at Nitroglobus: Miles Cantelou – Shamanism
Located with The Annex at Nitroglobus, this is a further richly engaging exhibition of paint-renderings by Miles, this one on the subject of Shamanism, with a focus on the (mainly female in this case) Shaman. Produced through a process of ink line sketches scanned into a PC and subjected to photographic and post camera blending, prior to being printed and painted, before an image of the finished piece is uploaded to Second Life.
Shamanism is a spiritual phenomenon centred on the shaman, a person believed to achieve various powers through trance or ecstatic religious experience – the Shaman, a person regarded in many cultures as intermediary between humans and the spirit realm, performing roles such as healing, divination, guiding souls, and maintaining spiritual balance within their communities. The term comes from the Manchu-Tungus word šaman, a noun formed from the verb ša- “to know”; so a shaman is literally “one who knows.”
Given this etymology, the terms apply in the strictest sense to the spiritual systems of the people of northern Asia. However, shamanism has played an important role among Australian Aborigines, some African groups, Arctic peoples and Native American Indians.
The Annex at Nitroglobus: Miles Cantelou – Shamanism
Shamanism presents fourteen richly emotive portrait studies startling in their intensity and depth. Given the headdresses apparent in all of the images, they might be taken to lean towards Native American shaman. That the majority of the images appear to be female in nature reflects the fact that shamanism has no gender exclusion.
For me, however, what is particularly striking about these portraits is the intensity of intelligence and vitality they carry. It is hard not to be drawn to the eyes of those pieces which appear to be looking directly at you and not sense the depth of knowledge and wisdom lying behind them. The result is a series of images that suggest they have not originated from within Miles’ head and sketches, but with the subjects physically allowing their likeness to be captured.
The Annex at Nitroglobus: Miles Cantelou – Shamanism
In order words, a marvellous selection of evocative art.
The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday September 3rd, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. The official video is embedded at the end of this summary.
Meeting Overview
The Web User Group exists to provide an opportunity for discussion on Second Life web properties and their related functionalities / features. This includes, but is not limited to: the Marketplace, pages surfaced through the secondlife.com dashboard; the available portals (land, support, etc), and the forums.
As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.
All of the original Linden Homes micro-continents have been decommissioned.
Remaining holders of these homes have been transitioned over to the current Linden Homes selections.
All of the V1 Linden Home regions have been removed from the grid and the associated Linden Home V1 web-based home control pages have been archived.
Updates
As the August Web User Group was ending, the Marketplace the third-party Elastic Search instance experienced a significant failure, causing a very significant Marketplace outage. This caused some merchants were mistakenly charged multiple times for Product Listing Enhancements, which were all refunded.
If any merchant believes they are still out of balance, please open a support ticket.
The Marketplace team is working to stabilise the Marketplace and add more resiliency to MP systems to handle external outages.
Various bug fixes with Marketplace Responsive Search have been released, together with various clean-up tickets around support, land, and region store
A further tease – without specifics – of an upcoming announcement “in the next few weeks” related to balancing-out the economy and providing more Linden Dollar sinks (see: An Update from Linden Lab – Linden Dollar Exchange Rate and the Economy – July 2025).
General Discussion
Open question from Juniper Linden: If you could remove one feature/aspect of Marketplace, what would it be? Responses went beyond the scope of the question and included:
Revert the change that makes “classified” ads at the top of search returns less obvious than they used to be (e.g. re-add the border around them or highlight them).
Refining the best-selling items section of the Marketplace (e.g. break it into price ranges / prevent it showing items which were on a short-term offer – e.g. L$75 for a day or so, but have since reverted to their full price, etc., or resetting an item so it doesn’t appear in the Best Selling list for the week in which its listing has been altered).
Improved filtering for searches (e.g. by body type).
Filtering-out AI generated content (assuming it is properly self-reported as such within the listings, which currently isn’t possible, nor is how AI been used in a product – for example, is the item itself created using AI tools, or only the scripts within it?).
The default for the number of items shown on a Marketplace Page (e.g. following a search) has been altered from 96 to 48 (with the drop-down offering 24, 48 and 96 items per page options).
The above led to a discussion on further redefining the Marketplace product categories – notably around the avatar (e.g. having an Avatar category, with sub-categories such as Body Parts, Shapes, Hair, etc.).
Web map (maps.secondlife.com) and following-on from the August meeting:
This is a reported issue where, if you have been given the ability to see a friend on the in-world Map and can teleport to them, the teleport may fail if they are on a region with a space in its name, as the space breaks the SLurl.
A request was made to have a web page in the nature of the Land Auctions page, but specifically for rentals, rather than relying on search / the in-world world map. This was seen as a good idea for the Lab to consider, but would need further consideration in order to fit-in to the development roadmap.
Note: during the above question, a group of unicellular organisms attempted to disrupt the final ten minutes of the meeting. However, as the majority of the topics had been discussed, Pantera has wisely cut the attempt from the meeting video, which jumps to the closing remarks.
To the English-speaking world, Bruchtal might not be immediately recognisable when it comes to references to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien – perhaps most notably in The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. However, German aficionados of Tolkien’s mythology will likely immediately recognise it as a reference to Imladris – or Karningul in Westron, the common tongue of Middle Earth. Also known as Rivendell, it is the location of the House of Elrond Half-elven.
Within Second Life, it is the name Sharon Neiro has selected for his utterly stunning personal adaptation of the mythical lands of Eriador (and beyond) within Middle Earth, and which encompasses the Shire and Rivendell.
Bruchtal – land of the Elves in Second Life
And when I say stunning, I really do mean exactly that; Tolkien world has oft be reproduced or used as inspiration within Second Life, and as someone with a deep love of all of Tolkien’s work and world-building, I’ve enjoyed many of them down the years.
However, Bruchtal is perhaps the most captivating for its sheer beauty and for the skill and love evident in the way this single Full region has been beautifully sculpted to present two vastly different aspects of Middle Earth separated by many leagues, within a single location whilst allowing both to maintain its own unique identity and offering a sense of genuine journey from one to the other.
Bruchtal – land of the Elves in Second Life
Immerse yourself in the magic of Bruchtal, hidden among high mountains, surrounded by deep forests and the gentle sound of mighty waterfalls. Stroll across romantic meadows in the valley, past colourful flower fields and along clear streams. Let your soul unwind to the music of the Elves and find peace beneath ancient trees – or at the riverbanks, embraced by the one you love. Discover the Shire, celebrate with the Hobbits, and enjoy its joyful, romantic charm. Follow the old paths to the Wood Elves, explore their mysterious tree houses, or wander through the deep, enchanted forests.
– Bruchtal Destination Guide entry
Bruchtal – land of the Elves in Second Life
The Landing Point sits on a sky platform high above the region. It offers a choice of destinations – the setting itself, a trip to the J&S and Ink’n’Shape stores and teleports to Pususaari (which I last visited in April 2025) and TheNest: Sunbird (which I also last visited in April 2025). These are all reached by touching the requisite mirror teleport – which will also require the acceptance of the Sauvagess Experience by Walton Wainwright (the creator of the teleport mirrors), if you have not previously done so.
Touching the mirror for Bruchtal will deliver you to one of the elven halls of Rivendell. This offers information relating to Tolkien’s mythology. For those not familiar with the likes of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, the board can make for a useful read.
Bruchtal – land of the Elves in Second Life
Beyond this hall lies an interpretation of Rivendell which appears to draw particular inspiration from Peter Jackson’s vision for the House of Elrond. It hugs the step sides of the dell within which it lays, trees climbing the steep slopes to either side and waterfalls dropping from on high. With the region surround of high peaks suggesting the lofty heights of the Misty Mountains and the region EEP setting adding a particular beauty to the setting, it is hard not to believe you haven’t been transported to Middle Earth.
Across the dell, and reached via a winding path, a choice of trails wind downwards. One offers the way to the floor of the valley. This is a place of serenity and natural beauty and offering multiple places to sit and pass the time.
Bruchtal – land of the Elves in Second Life
The second path continues on down the side of the valley before crossing one of the outward flowing streams and entering The Shire. Here the path winds through a Hobbit village. Whether you opt to see this as Hobbiton itself or not, is up to you; certainly, there is a large Hobbit house on a hill and, below it a field set out for what might be A Long-Expected Party – and towards which a cart and horse is making its way, carrying a certain grey-cloaked wizard…
Beyond the village and the party meadow, the track continues, passing through a pastoral setting and under a stone arch hung with lanterns. As it does so, it takes us further into Middle Earth and to the realm of the Sindarin, the wood elves. Here, among the woods, the great Mallorn trees rise, stairs rising around them to open-sided talans, open for people to visits (as are the Hobbit holes from the village). More places to sit and pass the time can also be found down on the ground and under the shade of the trees.
Bruchtal – land of the Elves in Second Life
All of this just scratches the surface of the region – there is much to discover and appreciate. Gandalf, for example, is not the only notable Tolkien character waiting to be found; Galadriel waits (for Frodo?) before her mirror; Elrond stands high up on one of the Talans, whilst his daughter Arwen stands somewhat pensively within Rivendell. Further rounding-out the region is an audio stream featuring arrangements of Howard Shore’s music from the movies, together with pieces by Enya (who, of course, wrote May It Be).
In all, a genuinely engaging, rich setting, beautifully put together and executed – and more than worth spending time exploring.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 2nd, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. They were taken from my chat log of the meeting and the video recording by Pantera, embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks to Pantera 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 “SUG Leviathan 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
There are no planned deployment for the week, only restarts.
The restarts include upgrading some of the hardware to better classes of machines in the background, which is being carried out in stages on each restart.
Monty Linden noted the Main SLS Main channel restart saw an increase in the mix of more modern AWS hosts, but there were some glitches which led to some regions being off-line for a bit longer than expected.
It is hoped a new simulator update – Grapejuice – will be ready for deployment to one or more RC channels in week #37.
In Brief
Rider Linden is working on an official native VSCode plugin for LSL and SLua. This is proceeding smoothly so far, and the hope is to open the repo opened to public viewing as soon as possible.
Right now, this is just for communicating compile errors from the viewer to the plugin.
However, he is planning on pushing a lot more through it in the future (e.g. DAP when LUA debugging becomes available).
He will most likely put in a LSP interface so that it can communicate with Selene for syntax colouring, etc.
Leviathan Linden is working on getting the webRTC voice router to automatically submit crash reports in a similar manner to the viewer.
Pepper Linden noted that:
Working is continuing on turning on the new dynamic packing, noting there has been a “small road bump” due some issues seen with reported region stats. However, it should be turned on for some RC channel regions this week. Things to look for: better performance/less lag, and less restarts.
Pepper is currently working on the outfit project for SL Mobile.
Monty Linden is “thinking about the eventqueueget and other problems” as he re-visits protocol failures again with a view to updating an improving on his previous work in this area.
User Suzanna (SuzannaLinn) is producing a website with a SLua guide, including examples and a LSL to SLua transpiler.
A general discussion on SLua event handling, and on state switching (LSL -> SLua) which led to a wider discussion on coding practices and options which ran through the second half of the meeting.
Date of Next Meetings
Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, September 9th, 2025.
Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, September 16th, 2025.
† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.
I first became familiar with the work of FionaFei in 2019, and instantly fell in love with her unique and immersive art within Second Life, and have covered her in-world exhibitions on numerous occasions in these pages.
A Chinese-American who immigrated to the United States with her family at a young age, Fiona gained traditional training in fine art, gaining a BFA from Cornell University and a MS in visualisation from Texas A&M University. All of this has combined with her involvement in Second Life to celebrate artistic expression – particularly that of shuǐmò, which has been at the heart of a number of her exhibitions and installations in SL over the years.
FionaFei: ShuiMo Ink Brush Installation
For those unfamiliar with the term, shuǐmò (also called shuǐmòhuà or suiboku-ga in Japanese), is a technique of ink brush painting generally using different dilutions and thicknesses of black ink to produce monochrome pieces (although very subtle colour washes might be used as well). It first emerged in Tang dynasty China (618–907), spreading to Japan (14th century) and also reaching Korea and India. Beside the use of black ink dilutions (ranging from deep black to light gray, shuǐmò is also marked by the emphasis of the brushwork being on the perceived spirit or essence of the subject rather than directly imitating its appearance.
Within Second Life, Fiona has offered a new perspective on this traditional art by producing exhibitions offering art in the style and tradition of shuǐmò, but which have the added dimension of physical depth through the use of 3D modelling. This has resulted in finished pieces which can gently shift as our viewpoint changes, and allows the art to become an immersive 3D space we can not only view, but experience by passing through it – including witnessing Fiona’s 2D artwork.
FionaFei: ShuiMo Ink Brush Installation – Fiona’s China Adventures
In her latest exhibition, ShuiMo Ink Brush Installation, Fiona again offers a 3D environment presented in the traditional shuǐmò style within which can be found further 3D shuǐmò paintings framed as scrolls, together with two gallery spaces devoted to 2D art neatly contained within it.
The first – and larger – of these gallery spaces offers a portfolio of Fiona’s photography from the physical world entitled Fiona’s China Adventures. This is a visually engaging collection of 11 images capturing aspects of China which are quite possibly far removed from the common perceptions of that country, helping to further bring it to life. The second presents eight ink paintings again produced as traditional Chinese landscape scroll art. I’ll leave you to discover these gallery spaces – but that shouldn’t be too hard 🙂 .
FionaFei: ShuiMo Ink Brush Installation
As always from Fiona, and expressive and engaging art space.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 