Category: Second Life

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 2th, 2026 Simulator User Group (SUG) off-week meeting (the “SUG Leviathan Hour”). 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 Pantera’s video is embedded at the end of this article – my thanks to her, as always, for recording and 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 were no planned deployments for the SLS Main Channel.
• Wednesday, January 28th might see the next simulator update 2026.01 (Kiwi) to one or more simulator RC channels. However, this is an assumption given the status of the release last week, and no confirmation was given at this meeting.

Game Control Update

• Leviathan Linden has cut a pre-release of the new game-control viewer, thanks to work by Rye of the Alchemy Viewer.
• If anyone tests on Linux or MacOS, Leviathan would love to have direct feedback on success/failure, either via the SUG meetings or via IM in-world.
  • In this he noted that “MacOS does some silly proprietary checks and only supports a small set of officially sanctioned controllers” and LL are limited to whatever Apple support, as otherwise the viewer doesn’t even see see hardware detection events ton Mac OS.
• He also noted that one feature of game-control is you can allow normal avatar control inputs (either from keyboard or the UI widgets) to be interpreted as game-control events that get sent to the server. But – that mode doesn’t provide access to all the possible buttons that a game controller has: just a few of the buttons, because the game-control feature is a work in progress (WIP) and he hasn’t as yet worked out how best to map everything.

Game_Control Resources

• Game control – Second Life Wiki.

SLua Mini-Update

• General appreciation for the work Harold Linden has put into the project, and requests at LL keep him on for the future – although he has indicated he is happy working as a contractor.
• No news on when the latest simulator-side updates to SLua will see the light of day, but they are not in the upcoming 2026.01 (“Kiwi”) release. They Might make the cut for the follow-on 202602 (“Loganberry”) update.
• The SLua beta viewer is progressing, and will progress to release status in due course.

SLua Resources

• The nine beta test regions are centred on SLua Beta Void (mind the water!).
• Official blog post on Slua.
• Official scripting portal (this is a work in progress and open to contributions – Github for the latter here).
• The Second Life official Discord server / channels.
•  Suzanna’s SLua Guide (Suzanna  Linn).
• Official VScode plugin notes:
  • It is not yet available on the VScode marketplace.
  • Issues and PRs for code submissions can be made here, and the plugin downloaded.
• VSCode plugin + documentation (Wolfgang Senizen – likely be discontinued and contributions shifted to support the official documentation).

In Brief

• Leviathan gave insight into some of his work remit, and those of other members of the simulator engineering team:
  •  Some of his work is visible to residents, but he also work on internal problems: things that are causing headaches for other developers, the support team, etc.
  • Currently, he working on an issue whereby simulator states (simstates) sometimes fail to save. These appear to be related to LL’s use of a new compression scheme for simstates: zstd. This should offer faster compression/decompression and smaller packages. However, it is reporting failures every once in a while. These, Leviathan believes, appear to occur during simulator rolls. He’s still investigating this.
  • Like other members of the simulator engineering team, he is on pager duty for the week. This occurs once every four weeks, and when on pager duty, the team member is typically working on maintenance issues: bugs and such.
• In addition, Leviathan is continuing to investigate / fact-find about the issue whereby when sometimes rezzing an object on a mesh surface will fail and supply an incorrect or misleading message (e.g. not having parcel rez rights or something).
  • Firestorm has a bug post on this – FIRE-15429.
  • Beq Janus also provided a blog post offering a workaround for the issue  see  Why can’t I rez on my mesh table/floor/bed in Coming to Firestorm soon… A couple of new features for builders and non-builders alike.
  • Leviathan suspects the problem has something to do with a failure of the viewer to supply info the server needs, so Leviathan is attempting to try to learn more and find out where it needs to be fixed.
• No work has been started on addressing the wrong-number-of-faces-on-old-mesh-uploads problem yet. However, Leviathan hopes that if he can find time to start looking at this again.
• The search for a new Senior Vice President of Engineering is on-going, and the Lab is “see great candidates”.
• There is a reported workaround for avatars becoming stuck on a region crossings when riding a vehicle:
  • It appears possible to escape from the broken state after a failed region crossing by deleting the sit target, forcing the simulator to recompute what’s sitting on what, and seems to unjam left-behind avatars. If this works, they should be able to walk to the vehicle and re-sit (or RLV potentially used for a re-sit, if available.
  • The workaround is described as “a horrible hack”, but appears to be the best temporary “solution”.
  • Leviathan indicated he will look at it as well.
• A general discussion on the missing SIT_FLAG_INVISIBLE, which also included llSetLinkSitFlags, a working SETMASS() flag – and its workaround and avatar bounding boxes. Please refer to the video for details.
  • The request for a working llSetMass() script method was being requested by some race bicycle creators who wanted to eliminate some variance in vehicle performance.
  • The above rolled into more general discussions and WIBNIs (“wouldn’t it be nice ifs”).
• General discussions on the discrepancy between avatar height and prim height as reported on most viewers and avatar movement (e.g. introducing mousewalking to the official viewer) – again, please refer to the video.
• From comments passed at the end of the meeting, it would appear that the work on implementing RLVa into the official viewer, initiated by Kitty Barnett and Vir Linden (prior to his departure from the Lab) may have been stalled.
• It was suggested that LL carry out a limited survey of TPV users and request then list their top X TPV features that prevent them from using the official viewer. These could then be collated in terms of common requests and used as an initial starting point for possible prioritisation  / integration.
  • Exactly how a good cross-section of TPV users could be found was an open debate.
  • Managing such a task might be problem for LL, as it would require input from all of the core engineering teams to offer their input – deflecting many of them (approx 45 LL employees) for core activities.
  • Contextual note: “approx 45” does not mean that this is the total number of developers work on SL – the Lab utilises contractors on and individual and company (ProductEngine) contractors, plus a lot of general operation on the server-side are now handled through AWS.

Date of Next Meetings

• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026.
• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, February 10th, 2026.

† 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.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 20th, 2026 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 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

• All simhosts are undergoing restarts this week, with no deployments.
• The next simulator release  – 2026.01 (Kiwi) is currently with QA.
• The simulator release to follow that – 2026.02 – has been given the code-name of Loganberry, but it’s too early in development for details to be provided.

Game Control

• Leviathan Linden had planned to try to get a project viewer branch put together for his game_control work, but has been sidetracked in dealing with issues with the Kiwi simulator code.
• He still hopes to be able to cut that branch “on the side” and see if he can create an installable that can be used to check to see if the game_control code actually works with the port to the current viewer code branch.

Grid-Wide WebRTC Deployment Announcement

• As per the most recent OSD meeting, LL is hoping to deploy WebRTC grid-wide in March 2026.
  • This is not a set-in-stone target, and further updates will be made.
  • This means that Vivox, whilst still being held in reserve, will no longer be available as a Voice service – so those using Voice and using a non-PBR  / WebRTC viewer will need to update.
  • The Lab is currently looking at a March deployment of WebRTC voice across the grid.
• The public beta for WebRTC has expanded – see this official blog post for details –  and Roxie Linden and her team hope the beta expansion will provide more feedback from users on voice quality, voice stability, etc.
• Transcription using WebRTC is being poked at by the Lab, but will not be a part of the initial deployment.

SLua Work

• Harold Linden has a rough draft on how `require()` has to behave to make sense both in VSCode and in-viewer. This is very much a work-in-progress.
  • In short: if you’ve ever had to edit someone’s preprocessed LSL script without all the #includes they had on their disk, and had to wade into the generated code + //#line comment soup, this should be a more readable way to bundle together all the code so editing is nicer.
  • This prompted a series of question on the documentation – please refer to the video.
  • Having the include/require path include object inventory for scripts in objects was noted as future work.
• A new SLua editor will be available with upcoming viewers which should have much faster script editing.
• Rider Linden indicated he would like to add something to the VSCode plugin that would provide access to scripts in inventory – and noting a concern in giving anything automated access of any kind to agent inventory.

SLua Resources

• The nine beta test regions are centred on SLua Beta Void (mind the water!).
• Official scripting portal (this is a work in progress and open to contributions – Github for the latter here).
• The Second Life official Discord server / channels.
•  Suzanna’s SLua Guide (Suzanna  Linn).
• Official VScode plugin notes:
  • It is not yet available on the VScode marketplace.
  • Issues and PRs for code submissions can be made here, and the plugin downloaded.
• VSCode plugin + documentation (Wolfgang Senizen – likely be discontinued and contributions shifted to support the official documentation).

In Brief

Please also refer to the video, below.

• Monty Linden indicated the annual simhost certification work is now in progress. Overall, very little is changing, so no problems are anticipated.
  • The new certifications are being used by the 2026.01 code running on the release test regions on Aditi (the beta grid).
  • Monty plans to automate the recertification later in 2026, and the certification will change slightly at that time.
• A request was made to allow scripts to exchange messages (or streams of messages) with the viewer using by using llOwnerSay (sending towards viewer), and listen on certain channel (receiving from viewer) but directly without a listen.
  • Apparently a feature request for this is in development for submission to Firestorm.
  • Rider Liden expressed an interest in seeing that request once written.
  • This also sparked a discussion on how llOwnerSay works across region boundaries (e.g. with the help of child agents).
• A general discussion on Drawer Distance and how to extend it beyond 1024 metres (e.g. via anchoring the camera in a region and flycamming to another and anchoring there – or by using a 3D Mouse such as SpaceNavigator  – my preferred choice).
• Further requests for the Mainland default EEP setting to be adjusted and  on the status of llSetLinkGLTFOverrides fails to clear alpha override. The former will be referred back to the LDPW and Patch Linden (again), no answer was provided on the latter (it may have been missed in the chat).

Date of Next Meetings

• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, January 27th, 2026.
• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026.

† 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.