Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week through to Sunday, August 4th, 2025
This summary is generally published every Monday, and is a list of SL viewer / client releases (official and TPV) made during the previous week. When reading it, please note:
It is based on my Current Viewer Releases Page, a list of all Second Life viewers and clients that are in popular use (and of which I am aware), and which are recognised as adhering to the TPV Policy.
This page includes comprehensive links to download pages, blog notes, release notes, etc., as well as links to any / all reviews of specific viewers / clients made within this blog.
By its nature, this summary presented here will always be in arrears, please refer to the Current Viewer Release Page for more up-to-date information.
Outside of the Official viewer, and as a rule, alpha / beta / nightly or release candidate viewer builds are not included; although on occasions, exceptions might be made.
Elven Falls Art Collective: Julana Allen and Eta: Where the Flowers Are
Currently open at the Elven Falls Art Collective is an exhibition by Julana Allen (Julana Teichmann) and eta (etamae) entitled Where the Flowers Are.
The name is apparently a reflection of Julana’s love of Joan Baez, and the art is a mix of AI images created by Julana, mounted on frames created by eta (I believe I’m correct in saying), together with additional 3D elements by eta. The exhibition is spread across two floors of the gallery space, with an elevator teleport linking the two levels.
Elven Falls Art Collective: Julana Allen and Eta: Where the Flowers Are
Offered primarily in monochrome (there is a well-considered use of colour in places), the images are – as might be gathered from the exhibition’s title – focused on flowers and plants; although not exclusively so. All of the work is finished using PBR materials, so using a PBR-capable viewer is recommended for viewing the exhibit as intended by the artists.
What is most striking about the images, for me at least, is the manner in which they are been processed. This gives them an extremely tactile look, as if they have been etched. This is further enhanced by the manner in which they have been mounted, eta’s backings helping to give depth and substance to each piece.
Elven Falls Art Collective: Julana Allen and Eta: Where the Flowers Are
A further attractive element within the exhibition space lay with the 3D elements provided by eta. Comprising circles, curving lines, teardrop forms, spheres, and flowing glass-like forms, the perfectly counter the harder lines of the picture frames and mounts, enhancing the presence of nature within the exhibition, as found within Julana’s images.
There is so much to find with the individual pieces, from single-frame narratives (e.g. Scent of a Woman) to reflections on Nature’s order of things (e.g. Busy) to reflections on Nature’s ability to please and inspire (e.g. Smile). This further adds depth found with Where the Flowers Are.
Elven Falls Art Collective: Julana Allen and Eta: Where the Flowers Are
Dutch Coast, August 2025 – click any image for full size
Back in July I received an invitation from Dama (Damatjo Magic) to visit her Homestead region of Dutch Coast, and I’m embarrassed to say it’s taken a better part of a month for me to take her up on the offer.
The majority of the region is offered as a largely public, low-lying sandy island, dotted with birch, eucalyptus, oak and aspen, the upper reaches of the island (such as they are), carpeted with grass and flowers, providing spaces for the local sheep to graze.
Dutch Coast, August 2025
I say the “majority” of the island is open to the public, because there is a private house on the south side, sitting on a large deck and exhibiting something of a Tuscan style to it.
This is one of two private residences in the region, the other sitting on a little island tucked into the south-west corner of the region and which is, I believe, Dama’s private home.
Dutch Coast, August 2025
Outside of these, two other buildings are to be found on the main island, both of which appear to be open to the public. I’m not 100% sure on this, but I didn’t see any privacy notices associated with either.
The Landing Point sits towards the east side of the island, just above the eastern beach as it runs north-to-south, dotted with places to sit – including a beach shack and a small pier. Arcing around to the southern side of the island, the sands become separated from the sea by rocks in the run towards the private house mentioned above.
Dutch Coast, August 2025
To the north, the beach passes around the larger of the two houses which appear open to the public. From here the sands carry on to the second beach house, where rocks once again separate the sand from the sea as the coast runs along the west side of the region and back towards the private house.
The rocks may look desolate, but they are home for a pod of seals that have chosen them as a place to bask in the sun.
Dutch Coast, August 2025
Such is the design of the island that exploration is a simple matter of wandering on foot and appreciating the landscape and wildlife. There are plenty of places for sitting and passing the time for those who so wish, and there are a lot of little details to be appreciated throughout.
Easy on the eyes, with a sunset style of EEP settings and rounded-out by a subtle soundscape, Dutch Coast is an easy, gentle and calming visit. My thanks to Dama for the invitation!
The following notes were taken from my chat transcript + the video recording by Pantera (embedded at the end of this summary) of the Third-Party Developer meeting (TPVD) held on Friday, August 1st, 2025. My thanks to Pantera as always for providing it.
Meeting Purpose
The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors to discuss general viewer development. This meeting is held once a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
Dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they are generally conducted in text chat.
The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.
A RFP for replacing Autobuild in the viewer build process.
A RFP for replacing the Havok convex hull decomposition mechanism with an open-source equivalent.
The former RFP is as removing Autobuild as a significant barrier / burden to those trying to learn how to the build the viewer. Suggestions for preplacement include pure Cmake, or using Vcpkg or Conan for dependency management, or vendor dependencies in the repo, etc.
Related to this, Brad Linden has started an experimental branch simplifying LL development environment. In is not ready for general use, but the idea is that the Build Instructions in the README should “just work” and not require having Autobuild installed or set up properly ahead of time. The is part of on-going work to overhaul the viewer build process.
The latter RFP above is part of the Lab’s aim to remove the Havok sub-library from the viewer, which also includes a means to still visualise the navmesh.
The above sparked a short conversation on the viewer build process.
Experimental Rewards / Bounty System
LL has launched an experiment rewards programme offering monetary rewards against certain Github issues.
These rewards are not meant to replace regular open source development, but rather to drive contributions on items LL have been unable to get much traction on.
In Brief
LL has also open sourced the LSL definitions project, the authoritative definition of LSL library functions, types, etc. It is used to perform codegen in the server, building out the bindings for LSL and SLua, and also drives the LSL editor tooltips.
PR Appearance fixes#3492 is still requiring attention from linden Lab, and is currently stalling the work on getting RLV into the official viewer.
† 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 gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.
Cherishville – Summer, August 2025 – click any image for full size
As I noted back in 2018, America’s historic Route 66 has been a popular theme for Second Life region designs over the years. In fact I made the observation about Motorheadz Café / Route66, designed by ROCKET (Rocket Biedermann) – see Another trip on Route 66 in Second Life.
Another popular Route 66 destination from around that time was Mother Road by Paul Cutter (Xtreme Paule) – see Get Your Pics on Route 66 In Second Life – and which today has grown to three regions in size (marking itself for a potential re-visit on my part).
Cherishville – Summer, August 2025 – click any image for full size
I mention both of these settings, as I was immediately reminded of them on arriving at Cherishville – Summer, the 2025 summer iteration of Lam Erin’s Cherishville setting, which offers another take on the Route – and with its own twist.
The road runs east-to-west across a desert-like setting, complete with sandy hills forming a surround on three sides, and mesas breaking up the landscape. Some of the latter are places to give the impression the road winds through them as it leaves the region at either end.
Cherishville – Summer, August 2025 – click any image for full size
Bordering the ribbon of tarmac is an assortment of locations that tend to typically inhabit these roadside scenes: petrol (gas) stations, diners, a motel, and so on. A second road exits the main thoroughfare at 90-degrres, providing access to a run-down drive-in theatre, passing a rag-tag circus-come-carnival along the way. How safe the latter is to visit is hard to say: two large African elephants and a tiger seem to have the run of the place.
A smaller sign at the junction of the two road hints at the setting’s little secret. Whilst the main road and its surroundings suggest somewhere deep in the desert, tucked behind the mesa running along the south-west edge of the landscape sits a coastal scene which – for me – totally transforms the design.
Cherishville – Summer, August 2025 – click any image for full size
In contrast to the drabness of the main road and its tired, grimly gas stations and diners, this coastal scene is gaily vibrant in its colours. An open market is filled with fresh fruits; a street café and coffee house offers refreshments, cakes and pastries; pizzas can be enjoyed at the local pizzeria; brightly painted mobile vendors…
The beach might be slightly grassy in places, but there is enough clear sand to be enjoyed underfoot, the waters appear inviting enough for swimmers and surfers, while the entire scene has a sense of bean popular place to visit for those in the know.
Cherishville – Summer, August 2025
I admit that I found the default EEP settings for the region to be a little murky – although they are well in keeping with the general sense of tiredness the main road and its surroundings exude. So for the pictures included here, I opted to make a few adjustment with cloud cover, brightness and ambient lighting.
There are a few oddities within the setting which, while small, are the kind that once seen, cannot be unseen – such as the stack of wooden chairs embedded in the chest of one of the elephants. However, whilst these do draw the eyes when seen up close, they do not interfere with the overall theme and look of the region as a whole.
Cherishville – Summer, August 2025
I noted last time around that recent iterations of Cherishville have followed more-or-less the same broad design of a small town environment, viewing them through seasonal changes. This iteration therefore offers a significant change from the last few iterations, one that largely works and offers plenty to see and explore.
Campwich Forest grounds: location for the Monthly Mobile User Group (MMUG)
The following notes were taken from the Thursday, July 31st 2025 Monthly Mobile User Group (MMUG) meeting.
These notes should not be taken as a full transcript of the meeting, which was largely held in Voice, but rather a summary of the key topics discussed. The meeting was recorded by Pantera, and her video is embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks, as always to her in providing it.
The Mobile User Group provides a platform to share insights on recent mobile updates and upcoming features, and to receive feedback directly from users.
These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
The last Thursday of every month at 12:00 noon 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.
Version: 2025.7.560 (Android) – July 23 / 0.1.557 (iOS) – July 22.
Updates
Work has been devoted to overcoming some significant infrastructure issues:
A bug within one of the core networking libraries resulted in app update cause significant problems for users in the Alpha programme, who received the update first.
As a result, the library in question was been updated, but was then found to be incompatible with the version of Unity SL Mobile uses, necessitating a Unity update.
Most of this work has gone ahead and is working, although the network-related upgrades still need further testing (e.g. maintaining a connection to the servers when switching from a wifi connection to cellular, or vice-versa).
The network upgrade should result in generally better performance.
The Unity upgrade brings with it a new renderer, which should offer improved performance across the majority of devices, and the ability for LL to maintain compatibility with newer mobile ‘phones and OS versions.
[Video: 25:19-25:52] this upgrade will not directly address issues of rotations being off, textures changing after loading, etc. However, the Lab would like more bug reports sent directly from the app on these types of issue to help identify potential causes.
As soon as there is confidence in these updates, a new release of the app will be made.
LL recently started “playing around with some app notifications” (e.g. tips and tricks, links to events, etc.).
A request was made to have the ability to opt-in to specific types of event notifications (e.g. only those related to SL sports events or those related to role-play events, etc).
Concerned was voiced (by the LL folk at the meeting about the risk of spamming people by sending out too many notifications, but this did not appear to be an issue for those attending the meeting.
In Brief
Please refer to the video for details on the following and other questions which may have had a simple “yes” or “in progress” reply.
[Video: 22:01-23:31] Continuity of messages and notification between Mobile and Desktop (e.g. so users get a full history of messages, etc., when moving between Mobile and Desktop):
This is a significant project, and requires a fair amount of back-end work involving the server teams as well as the Mobile team.
However, it also encompasses the ability for users not to be logged-out of their Desktop session should they log-in on SL Mobile as well.
It is hoped that this work, which had been awaiting resources, will be picked-up in early August, with the potential for a more definitive timeline for the release of these capabilities being available at the next Mobile User Group meeting.
[Video: 24:21-24:52] Displaying text messages from in-world objects (e.g. via llSay; llInstantMessage, etc.): this is apparently awaiting some UI/UX work, but Pluto Linden was not available at the meeting to address the state of the work.
First step is to add support for the Avatar Welcome Pack available to the Desktop and Project Zero (viewer in a browser).
This is seen as a placeholder to help incoming new users to be able to dress their avatars.
Work on inventory access in general on Mobile is described as being a long road. Planning for the next tranche of work on Mobile will be a mix of things for new users to get their bearings and “fall in love with Second Life”, and features to help existing users further augment their Second Life using Mobile.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 