A Thousand Words Coffeehouse and Gallery, March 2026: Janine Portal
In February, I received an invite from Astella Warrigal to visit her gallery, A Thousand Words Coffeehouse and Gallery. It was actually to attend the venue’s grand reopening, which was held on February 22nd, 2026. However, things being what they were for me at the time, I was unfortunately unable to attend that event; but I certainly wanted to make sure I got to see the exhibition of art by Janine Portal which formed a part of the re-opening.
I first encountered Janine’s work back in 2018, an immediately found it captivating. As I noted at that time:
Utilising animations and prims to present remarkable collage pieces with a surrealist edge that are quite captivating to see … some of the most unusual art and effects I’ve seen in Second Life for a while, each piece offering an unexpected view of what might otherwise appear to be and ordinary scene or photo or presenting a melding of ideas and / or narrative that is quite engaging.
– The artful collages of Janine Portal in Second Life
A Thousand Words Coffeehouse and Gallery, March 2026: Janine Portal
This is very much the case with the exhibition of Janine’s work at A Thousand Words Coffeehouse and Gallery, where it can be seen on the upper levels of the building. On display are some 13 collage images, all of them comprising found and manipulated (by Janine) art and photographs, including reproductions of artwork by the likes of William Blake, Hilma af Klint, Richard Diebenkorn, and Second Life photographer Ajax Ogleby.
Janine says of her work:
I’ve been making art in Second Life using a technique that involves layering transparent prims to create works with shifting collage images. In RL, long before I made an account in SL, layered transparent paint to express similar ideas, using many of the symbols you see here.
– Janine Portal
A Thousand Words Coffeehouse and Gallery, March 2026: Janine Portal
Janine goes on to note that her art reflects ideas which have woven their way into her thinking and approach to art ever since her time at art school: ideas of the metaphysical and personal symbols of transformation. This gives her work a layered set of interpretations; whether one views them purely as visually engaging works of art or seeks to find those metaphysical ideas. In this, Janine adds her own view on the art:
On a conceptual level they represent, to me, the endlessly shifting nature of reality, the ways in which we move through time and space and the nature of growth, change, and transformation.
– Janine Portal
A Thousand Words Coffeehouse and Gallery, March 2026: Janine Portal
A genuinely captivating exhibition, one definitely worth the time in visiting.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, March 3ed, 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
No deployments are planned for the week, channels will be restarted.
It had been planned to slot the initial deployment of WebRTC between the 2026.02 Kiwi update (currently grid-wide), and the next formal RC release 2026.03 Loganberry. However a last-minute issue was discovered, delaying WebRTC whilst it is fixed.
The release to follow Loganberry will be 2026.04 Key Lime).
WebRTC Deployment
As noted above, the WebRTC deployment has been delayed, primarily for a couple of reasons:
LL is addressing some server issues that resulted in very occasional ‘drop from voice’ problems.
The WebRTC team is also digesting feedback from the recent Firestorm Town Hall in which firestorm users who have not moved away from a version 6.x (pre-PBR) version of Firestorm to a PBR-enabled version.
It is hoped the delay will not be longer than a week or so, so as to allow it to commence in March, but an update on this will be made soon.
In Brief
Rider Linden has just finished a tricky bit of infrastructure work and is now focusing on some the simulator aspects of the SLua project, including changes for being able to select a default script. A side effect of that is the ability for a viewer to specify a template script on create without the tricky copy stuff that the viewer was doing for that.
Leviathan Linden:
Has just finished fixing the “can’t save avatar action remap” problem with game_control but has not pushed the changes to a viewer repo as he working to clean the code up and produce documentation.
He regards this particular work as useful as it has reminded him of what remains to be done for game-control. In particular, remapping of controller buttons is not yet enabled in the preferences UI, although there should be work to support that already done under the hood.
He has not made any progress on Henri Beauchamp’s idea for solving the “perpetually cloudy avatar problem” see previously SUG summaries). It is coded on the server, but he hadn’t been able to test it.
His next project is to audit how some “reliable” UDP messages are sent between viewer and server. There is a possibility he can fix some of the login/teleport/region-crossing connection failures with some work there. One of the message pairs to be looked at are CompleteAgentMovement/AgentMovementComplete. Dropping these is the source of quite a few B&W screens every day.
Monty Linden has been:
Working on meta problems, such as identifying Voice issues.
Talking to Brad Linden about making it easier to include logs in reports generated in the viewer.
General Discussion
Please refer to the video below as well.
An extensive discussion on llSetAgentRot and how it works and how it and avatar rotation / camera rotation/movement might be improved.
A short discussion on text-to-speech and how favourable (or not) it might be, based off of this feature request.
It was noted that transcription – speech to text – is already being experimented with using WebRTC.
Region Crossings:
It is being reported that for the last week or so, region crossings – physical vehicle or teleport – have been getting worse.
In addition, it is being claimed that, after an extended period of time in a region, people are finding their avatars being “soft disconnected” from the simulators: they can still move around and communicate within the region, by any attempt to move out of it results in a complete disconnection – and allegedly a full disconnect can occur just by rezzing / deleting an object or changing outfits.
There have been no apparent changes to the simulator code that would account for a worsening of region crossings, and it’s not entirely clear how widespread the issues are.
However, Monty linden has requested logs from anyone encountering these issues.
This discussion took up the latter half of the meeting (and beyond the end of the meeting), mixed in part with the rotation discussion noted above,
A discussion on releasing SLua grid-wide without complete documentation, or waiting until a full set of documentation is ready for what is being released, and then updated as code updates are made.
Date of Next Meetings
Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, March 10th, 2026.
Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, March 17th, 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.
China Buddha Caves, March 2026 – click any image for full size
Located within Gansu province in western China is the county city of Dunhaung. It sits on the old Silk Road, and forms a cultural and religious crossroads. Founded as a garrison town in 11 BCE, Dunhaung is perhaps now more famously known for its proximity to the Mogao Caves, a system of 500 temples, caves and grottoes some 25 kilometres south-east of the city.
Also known as the Thousand Buddha Grottoes or Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, the network represents, along with other cave systems in the area, some of the finest examples of Buddhist art spanning a period some 1,000 years, the earliest caves having been dug in around 366 CE, initially as places of rest, worship and meditation. However, as time passed, they became a place of pilgrimage, and further caves and grottoes were dug, with the system expanding through until the 13th century, before they were “lost” until the late 19th century.
China Buddha Caves, March 2026
I mention all of this because in his latest artistic installation, London Junker offers us a vision of the Mogao Caves and the beauty of their art, sculptures and design with his China Buddha Caves build- project was sponsored by SL Public Land Preserve and Ravenglass Rentals (La Montana Rosa) – to which he extended a personal invitation for me to visit.
Situated in the snowy uplands of south-western Sansara, the build is initially deceptive to the eye. The Landing Point sits at the head of a descending gorge through which water tumbles and falls towards the sea. A large Buddha sits behind the Landing Point, undoubtedly offering blessing to arrivals, whilst a single grotto with wall murals and three more figures of Buddha sits to one side.
China Buddha Caves, March 2026
A further Buddha can be seen lower down in the valley, together with a shrine and structures built with their backs towards the rising cliffs. A single path runs down the side of the gorge, passing over a long bridge and down stairs to reach a second bridge crossing the waters and provide access to the tall statue of Buddha and the shrine, whilst a second path rises to the lowermost of the structures build against the cliff, and which forms the entrance to the caves proper.
The art and carvings within the Mogao Caves is truly magnificent, and the site fortunately escaped the Buddhist persecutions ordered by Emperor Wuzong of Tang in the ninth century, continuing to be used through until the Yuan dynasty in the 13th century. However, it was during that era that new trade routes started to open, and the use of the Silk Road fell into decline – and with it, the use of the Mogao Caves as a place of pilgrimage. By the mid- 14th century, no new caves were being built, and the site was largely forgotten other than by locals.
China Buddha Caves, March 2026
It was not until the 19th century that the caves were re-discovered. Interest in exploring the ancient Silk Road and uncovering its secrets was initially a goal of western explorers and historians, and this eventually led them to Dunhuang and the caves. However, it was at the start of the 20th century that the greatest work of rediscovery commenced, with the good intentions of one man in particular.
His name was Wang Yuanlu. A Chinese Taoist, he had appointed himself guardian of the caves, and in the early 1900s set about clearing the entrances to many which had become blocked over the centuries, as well to trying to renovate many of the damaged statutes.
China Buddha Caves, March 2026
Most particularly, Wang’s work led to the discovery of a vast trove of manuscripts in what had simply been called Cave 17, but which afterwards was referred to as the Library Cave. Some 1100 scrolls and 15,000 books were found in the cave, together with an estimated 50,000 texts on a range of subjects including philosophy, art, literature and medicine. This discovery brought the Mogao Caves to wider global attention, with a number of foreign expeditions to explore them being mounted – several of which simply carted off whatever they could.
Fortunately, London’s China Buddha Caves suffers none of this looting. Rising up through multiple levels, as is the case at Mogao, they instead offer a captivating interpretation of their physical world inspiration, presenting a rich mix of Buddhist art and history, the walls bearing beautiful murals and paintings, the statuary magnificent in detail and finish. As you rises up through the caves (take your time in exploring, some of the rising tunnels are easy to miss!), you will come across an opening to a veranda located against the cliff and above the main entrance, reflecting a similar, almost pagoda-like structure found at Mogao.
China Buddha Caves, March 2026
Each level becomes more expressive and rich as one ascends, with the upper most and the landing and grotto leading up to it being particularly attention-holding. However, all of the levels capture the beauty and history to be found in the caves at Mogao, and perfectly reflect the beauty of the murals to be found in many of the caves there. In this, I would advise using a PBR viewer in order to fully appreciate this installation, or if you are still pre-PBR, that you enable ALM.
Presenting a glimpse of what is now a UNESCO World Heritage Centre (since 1988), London’s China Buddha Caves offer a superb means by which to catch a glimpse of what is a magnificent centre of Buddhist history and art in the physical world.
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week through to Sunday, March 1st, 2026
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.
Official LL Viewers
Default viewer 2025.08 – 7.2.3.19375695301 – maintenance update with bug fixes and quality of life improvements – December 2.
Notable addition: new VHACD-based convex decomposition library for mesh uploads.
Hippotropolis Theatre: home of the OSD/TPVD meeting
The following notes were taken from:
Pantera’s video (embedded at the end of this article) and my chat log of the Open-Source Developer (OSD) meeting held on Friday, February 27th, 2026, together with my chat log of that meeting.
Please note that this is not a full transcript of the meeting but a summary of key topics.
The OSD meeting is a combining of the former Third Party Viewer Developer meeting and the Open Source Development meeting. It is open discussion of Second Life development, including but not limited to open source contributions, third-party viewer development and policy, and current open source programs.
This meeting is generally held twice a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre and is generally text chat only.
Note: The OSD/TPV meeting has tended to occur in the same week as the content Creation User Group meeting over the last several months, resulting in a lot of repetition of information between the two meetings (and combined summaries on this blog). An attempt is being made to break this cycle by having the next OSD/TPV meeting on Friday, March 6th, 2026 before reverting to the usual every other week format (so the meeting after that will be March 20th, 2026) – thus putting the OSD/TPV meeting and the CCUG on alternate weeks.
Official Viewer Status
Default viewer 2025.08 – 7.2.3.19375695301 – maintenance update with bug fixes and quality of life improvements – December 2.
Notable addition: new VHACD-based convex decomposition library for mesh uploads.
Introduces the ability to moderate spatial voice chat in regions configured to use webRTC voice.
Second Life One Click Install viewer 26.1.0.21295806042, January 26, 2026 – one-click viewer installation.
Upcoming Viewers
Viewer 2026.01
Remains the current viewer development focus with the release of the beta (RC) version, although this will be shifting more to 2026.02.
The velopack one click installer / updater is not in the initial beta, and may now in fact slip to 2026.02.
2026.01 includes a high priority fix for specific Bluetooth headset configurations which will benefit WebRTC.
Now available as an alpha viewer (above).
As the name suggests, triggers a one-click install / viewer update process.
Also includes improved monitoring / logging of viewer freezes and crashes, etc.
Viewer 2026.02
2026.02 remains on track for the “Flat” UI and font updates.
It now also includes the WebRTC voice moderation capabilities (as seen in the project viewer) to help align viewer-side WebRTC updates more with the hoped-for server-side deployment (see below for more).
This viewer might additionally receive some backported updates to texture streaming.
No Alpha / Beta viewer is available as yet for this release..
Example of the upcoming flat UI. Via: Geenz Linden / Github #4681/2
Viewer 2026.03 -“SL Visual Polish” (SLVP)
2026.03 had been looking to an April release, however, it might slip back to 2026.04. Part of the decision-making on this is related to upcoming server-side updates to EEP and glTF which are seen as being required prior to SLVP shipping.
It will likely to include:
The “long baking” SSR improvements that were started last year. This version of the viewer will likely have a long beta soak time to allow feedback on these changes to be gathered.
PBR specular for residents who are more familiar with the old Blinn-Phong workflow. This will:
Include another texture slot (tint of the specular reflection).
Work with metallics.
Follow the glTF specification, but will likely initially be without glTF overrides, as this requires server-side work.
HDR controls in EEP so residents can decide how bright or dark things should be. This work does require simulator-side updates. This will likely initially have server-side support on Aditi (the Beta grid).
It may additionally include:
Further mirrors optimisations and a new “Ultra” quality setting that will enable a system mirror for water. A caveat on this work is that while this “water mirror” might up the quality of water reflections, it will do so at a performance hit; SSR for water will always be faster and less intensive.
Inclusion of an emissive strength setting for PBR.
Firestorm hosted a Townhall recently, with Lab presence, to try to determine why a percentage of Firestorm users remain reluctant to move away from a 6.x version of that viewer to a PBR-supporting version. The predominant issues appear to be concerns over performance and the degraded water visuals seen with PBR viewers.
One aspect of people refusing to move is hearsay: “X said PBR sucketh and has poor performance, therefore I will not even try it”, regardless as to whether this might be true for them or not; another is, potentially, people’s general unwillingness to change from what they like.
Exactly how to address such issues / beliefs/perceptions is no easy task.
A suggestion was made to have “toggle” in the viewer so users can determine which rendering system they wish to use (e.g. “legacy” or “PBR”). This is far more complicated than it sounds, requiring continued support of two rendering pipes in the viewer, potentially leading to multiple complications and the potential content breakage. As such, it is not going to happen.
Geenz Linden is continuing to work with texture streaming and resolutions, with some of the work possibly surfacing in 2026.02 as noted above. He further noted that:
Work is not stopping at texture streaming improvements; the Lab is laying plans to deal with some of the “bigger performance bullet points”.
It is known that PBR has introduced performance bottlenecks, many of which have been dealt with, others of which still need work. To this end, the Lab may start running Tracy “very, very regularly” to identify bottlenecks so they can be addressed.
The hope is that when adding a new PBR feature / capability, at least one existing bottleneck will be corrected.
As noted in the 2026 week #5 OSD meeting, there are potential changes coming to the viewer build chain. These involve updates to CMake and a Pull Request relating to vcpkg. The latter is still under review, and is likely to be implemented “bite by bite”, rather than all at once. It will also be likely to go into its own branch and not emerge until after the SLua /Linux viewer work reaches release status, so as to not over-complicate things for TPVs.
TPV Developer Henri Beauchamp (Cool VL Viewer) suggested splitting the viewer’s main thread so that the rendering code can be separated from messaging and objects updates, thus smoothing frame rates in the viewer.
Geenz Linden indicated that this had been looked at by a Product Engine engineer, and that it was felt that doing so would help out massively with porting the viewer to other graphics APIs.
However, actual work on this has not as yet started, as there is a need to “chip away” at getting approval together with a need to avoid disrupting existing releases.
Such is the scale of the work, it could involve “a few quarters” of effort to implement.
It was noted that while some multi-threading has been introduced to the viewer, this is mostly “lighter work” more easily removed from the main thread, which still does most of the heavy lifting via a single CPU core.
The last point rotated into a more general discussion on the viewer, threads, the future potential for removing coroutines and fibers in favour of “actual” threads, etc. Please refer to the last 10-15 minutes of the video.
Grid-Wide WebRTC Deployment
This was targeting a March 2026 deployment, following the usual simulator-side deployment process (a selected RC channel or channels for the first deployment, followed by deployment to all remaining RC channels usually a week later, then a final deployment to the SLS Main channel, usually a week after that).
However, it now appears hat the deployment is likely to be delayed, although no specifics have been given on why or when. .
Campwich Forest grounds: location for the Monthly Mobile User Group (MMUG)
The following notes were taken from the Thursday, February 26th 2026 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.
Please note: the meeting experienced assorted voice issues and drop-outs, making transcribing difficult, with some of the issues also resulting a poor sound quality in the video recording.
Meeting Purpose
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.
SL Mobile (Beta) version 2026.2.1079 (A) / 0.1.1079 (iOS) – February 24 – Object chat support and Bubble Chat updates; single tap interactions (see below for more).
Allows chat and incoming IM’s to be viewed over the in-world scene (for approx. 8 seconds), and enables tap-to-reply.
In the initial iteration, tapping a message to reply will take the user back to the menu to show the keyboard.
Release 2026.2.1079 (February 23rd) added:
Bubble chat enhancement to display object names & support messages from objects.
Object chat support (but not, as yet, llDialog support (see below for more on this).
Single tap interactions – no need to use a long press to interact with avatars and objects. Tapping on an avatar or object should generate a blue outline around them indicating they have been selected, together with a basic menu of options which can be expanded via the More option for a full context menu.
It is hoped that these features will help users understand more of what is going on around them whilst also allowing for better interactions and social engagement through chat, etc.
All three features will be enhanced in future releases (such as by making it possible to respond to Bubble chat without have to go via the Chat menu, resolving issues of objects occluding one another and preventing one-tap / “chick through” interactions, for example).
This work should allow for fixing other issues as well, such as adjusting the camera position so that it doesn’t end up on the wrong side of a wall, for example.
All of these features have received generally positive feedback from users attending the meetings.
Upcoming Updates
AI integration:
Currently, when creating a new account, a user will receive a canned welcoming message on logging-in to SL.
However, new users are responding to the message – which the service is not capable of ‘seeing” or making a response -something that might upset new users because it appears like they are being ignored.
To this end, Brad Linden is working on hooking this process up to a chatbot so that users at lease get the sense of a meaningful exchange (and might thus be encouraged to contact others around them).
LL utilises crash reports supplied by Google and Apple to identify specific crash bugs / issues for rectification. This work has seen a noticeable improvement in SL Mobile’s stability on Android, although so new crash issues have crept in as well. As such:
Further Android crash fixes can be expected in the next release(s).
Work is ongoing to deliver the same of iOS.
Work is finally starting on adding support to SL Mobile for llDialog, to ensure support for interactive dialogue menus associated with scripted items. This is fairly involved work, so no target date for possible release is being given at this time.
Synchronising chat history across Mobile and the viewer: again, this is a complex task, but “good progress” is being made.
Localisation in the app (local country languages) is underway, but also no tentative release date for the the initial work as yet.
Supported languages will likely be the same as those supported in the viewer.
Feedback and assistance with localisation (e.g. ensuring idioms translate, etc.), will be sought from users wishing to help with the work, once the first iteration of the work surfaces in the app. Such feedback should be made via the SL Feedback Portal.
This work will also allow manual setting of a preferred language, rather than simply having the app simply utilise the language set in the device operating system.
Voice improvements – particularly WRT making the initialisation of Voice in the app less disruptive for users trying to enable it. This work is currently with QA.
General Q&A
At least one user has reported incidents of Mobile suffering from freezing at times – although this is not tied to time of day or specific activities, but the reporter does have a high ping rate as they are across the Atlantic from SL.
This particular issue has been hard to repro at the Lab (due to a lower ping rate & less in the way of message dropping. etc?).
There are also a number of fixes in the works for crashes, lock-ups etc., one (or more) of which might incidentally resolve the issue. Beanie Linden (Mobile QA lead) is going to have further goes at trying to repro the issue and, if possible, test it against these fixes.
A question was asked about what kinds of data is collected by the app, and for a clarification as to what the “track your activity across other apps” pop-up means.
Rather than gathering user data, this capability is more aligned with the ongoing drive to try and push new users to try the SL Mobile app via advertising – e.g. to gather data and information related to the ads and to those signing-up in response to the ads. The idea here being to help determine the efficacy of such advertising / drives.
A general discussion on feedback relating to to positive benefits of Bubble Chat and object chat, and ideas for future enhancement (e.g. toggle options to turn it on and ) – some, if not all of which are likely to be looked at in the future as the capability further matures.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 