Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week through to Sunday, January 19th, 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.
Note that for purposes of length, TPV test viewers, preview / beta viewers / nightly builds are generally not recorded in these summaries.
Official LL Viewers
Release viewer: version 7.1.11.12363455226. formerly the ExtraFPS RC, dated December 17, promoted December 19 – No change.
Release Candidate: Forever FPS, version 7.1.12.12793544240, January 17, 2025.
Coda Haze, January 2025 – click any image for full size
Aisling Shade invited me to visit the new home of Coda Haze and the Coda music venues ahead of its official opening on Monday, January 20th, 2025.
Occupying half a Full private region leveraging the Land Capacity Bonus, the new iteration of Coda Haze, offers an expansion on its former quarter-region, with some redesign work put in around the town space and which includes the Myrdin Motel, which Aisling describes as “a nod to Lynchland”, the former artistic setting depicting the works of David Lynch; a particularly poignant inclusion, given the sad news of his recent passing.
Coda Haze, January 2025
Four of the major music venues within the setting comprise the Park, which at the time of my visit was set as the Landing Point (not enforced) and the eastern beach alongside the park and reached by a bridge spanning the local stream. There’s also Code Red and Coda Black, occupying the large building in the centre of the local town.
Coda Haze is an alternative to the busy, competitive and sometimes confusing club culture in SL. We provide the venue, good music and happy vibes, but really this is about you… on your terms. We respect all of your free time and there’s never any obligation to support us. We won’t use gimmicks or high pressure tactics to increase traffic. Come because you want to be here.
– Aisling Slade on the music and culture at Coda Haze
Coda Haze, January 2025
However, before going any further, I should note that Coda Haze has been rebuilt using PBR materials, and while Aisling has tried to provide fallback Blinn-Phong (“legacy”) materials, this has not been possible throughout the setting; therefore it is best experienced using a PBR-enabled viewer. I would also recommend using the Shared Environment whist exploring, although admittedly I did play with the position of the Sun is a couple of images here.
To ease getting around, a teleport network is provided, with stations available at all major points of interest; however, it is easy enough (and more pleasant) to wander on foot from place to face and full appreciate all Coda Haze has to offer (that said, you will need the teleporter system to reach the skyborne Cosmic Factory tavern). There’s also a hover bike rezzer located on the edge of town alongside the steps up from the park and outside the Tea Room. This will carry you around all of the ground-level areas on the setting on a guided tour.
Coda Haze, January 2025
As well as the club venues and motel mentioned above, the setting offers two large swimming pool / spa locations, one overlooking the the beach to the east side beach and its music venue, the other (indoor) pool to the west, standing with its back to one of the two private areas within the setting: the western beach. The other private area is the large town house alongside the swimming pool’s greenhouse-like structure.
Alongside the private beach on the west side of the region is a rocky lagoon that is open to the public and linked to the rest of the public areas in the setting by a couple of rocky tunnels. It forms a neat little hang-out with a neat sense of isolation from the rest of the setting whilst still being a part of it, and offers the setting’s final music venue.
Coda Haze, January 2025
The first sets – and opening – of Coda Haze will commence at 18:00 SLT on Monday, January 20th, 2025, and will feature DJs Kaylee Wickentower (through to 19:00 SLT), followed by DJ Aisling Shade, both of whom will provide a mix of music genres, including psychedelic and dance. After the opening, weekly events will be held as follows:
18:00-20:00 SLT, Mondays, and Wednesday through Friday.
10:00-12:00 noon, Sundays.
Coda Haze, January 2025
Mixing music with places to see and venues for general socialising, the new Coda Haze makes for an engaging visit – and I’ll leave it to you to find the hidden bunker 😉 .
It’s been a while since I have had the pleasure to review an art exhibition by Melusina Parkin. There are several reasons for this, both as a result of the physical world keeping Melu occupied and constraints on my own time. Hence why, when she passed me a personal invitation to see her latest collection, I was keen to find time and hop over.
Dreamscapes is a collection of 64 landscape images captured by Melu from around Second Life and displayed within her Minimal Gallery. Presented in Melu’s sharply-focused, minimalist style, all offer in a mix of soft tones and monochrome. Spread across the gallery’s two levels, it is a captivating display of images.
Melusina Parkin, Dreamscapes – January 2025
Mixing both old and new pieces, all with minimal (or no) post-processing, instead reliant on the image capabilities within the viewer itself, Dreamscapes takes the visitor on a tour of Second Life by revealing not the whole, but merely a part; a tree, a ruined lighthouse, a cabin on the sand, a broken fence, the corner of a motel or industrial building and its parking lot, and so on. In doing so, each opens the first page of a story – or perhaps the foreword to a dream.
What that story might be is personal to each of us; each picture given us just enough to set the imagination rolling. It’s a technique used by Melusina to great effect in her work, and here it serves a double purpose: it both prompts us to create narratives around what we see, and it demonstrates that Second Life itself is a place of the imagination; of dreams made real, the places we as creators would like to live within or visit. That it is, if I might borrow from Edgar Allan Poe as Melu borrows from Shakespeare, “a dream within a dream”.
Melusina Parkin, Dreamscapes – January 2025
In keeping with Melu’s more recent activities in respect to her exhibitions, Dreamscapes is also offered as a catalogue of prints presented under her Melubooks brand and costing L$100. I personally love this approach to additional presenting art in Second Life; we all only have so much space in-world in which to place images and presenting collections in this way offers a unique way be ways we can share them over and again at leisure.
As always, I thoroughly recommend Dreamscapes and Melusina’s art for your enjoyment.
Simurg + Winter Valley, November 2024 – blog post †
The following notes were taken from my audio recording + the video recording by Pantera (embedded at the end of this summary) of the Third-Party Developer meeting (TPVD) held on Friday, January 17th, 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 re conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.
The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.
Release viewer: version 7.1.11.12363455226, formerly the ExtraFPS RC (multiple performance fixes, aesthetic improvements and UI optimisations), dated December 17, promoted December 20 – No Change.
Release Candidate: Forever FPS, version 7.1.12.12793544240, January 17, 2025.
Numerous crash and performance fixes.
Upcoming Viewers
ForeverFPS surfaced somewhat faster as an RC viewer than had been anticipated at the CCUG meeting.
Other plans for viewer updates are under review; there a numerous code commits in the Develop branch awaiting a viewer, but collectively, they are regarded as to many to all go into a single viewer update, so the order of release over several viewer updates needs to be determined.
WebRTC / Updating to Viewers with WebRTC Support / Rendering Holdbacks
Further re-iteration of the desire to see as many users as possible to move from viewers which lack WebRTC support (e.g. Firestorm 6.6.17) to those (predominantly PBR-based) viewers with the WebRTC support, so that the Vivox service can be turned off across the grid.
A further request was made as to why people are resistant.
Once again, the response was largely around the quality of the reflections / general look of the Linden Water plane on PBR viewers, lack of exclusion volumes for water; darker ambient tones to natural lighting.
Ambient issues, particularly with legacy EEP skies should have been largely corrected in ExtraFPS.
It was also pointed out that there are cohorts of users who are happy with what works for them, even if half their in-world view seems to be “broken” in some manner, and simply will not update as long as the viewer they use can still access SL.
A particular issue here with regards to WebRTC, is that while a high percentage of users are not updating to viewers with PBR + WebRTC support, it is not clear how many would be adversely affected by the loss of Vivox voice, given that many in SL rarely, if ever use Voice. If the number is small, turning off Vivox might not be an issue; if the number is large, it could cause people to abandon SL.
It was also suggested that wider communications from LL (and TPVs) on the nature of upcoming changes like WebRTC might help to make users more aware of what is going on.
In response to exclusion volumes and water quality / reflections, Geenz Linden noted:
There might be a way to provide exclusion volumes for water (e.g. to prevent water rendering inside boat hulls, etc.), but the issue is complicated.
There has been a regression in the way water appears and generates reflections; part of this was the result of the “pre-PBR” means of rendering water required multiple passes, which became a performance issue. However, improving water is on his list of things to do, and he hopes that some of the ideas he has will also help improve screen space reflections (SSR) .
However, he also indicated that bring back “full real-time reflections” on water is a not insignificant ask, and will likely only be possible after the moiré system has been further optimised, as reflection generation will likely piggyback off of that. As such, the work to recover water reflections will take time and will be iterative in nature, and there may be impacts on the general appearance of water.
Commenting on SSR, Geenz also noted that while improvements can be made, it will be “really hard” to return SSR quality to pre-PBR – but then, pre-PBR SSR had its own performance issues. As such, work in this area requires careful consideration on how to make improvements without impacting performance.
[Video: 24:14-29:30] General discussion / opinions on how and where to present assorted graphical settings and options within the Preferences / debugs, and how users understand / learn about the viewer’s internals.
[Video 30:16-32:25] Discussion on graphics and lighting – improving HDRi rendering, ambient like, introducing punctual lighting, using physical units for lighting.
[Video: 37:14-43:40] EventQueueGet is a simulator Capability that delivers messages from a simulator to viewers over HTTP using a long-poll scheme. It is core functionality without which viewer/simulator coordination is impossible. However, a number of defects in the design and maintenance of this capability have been found (see here for both defects and proposals to resolve).
Monty Linden has implemented a “phase 1” project to address some of these issues, and has set-up a channel of several regions on Aditi (the Beta grid) for public testing of the changes to validate that they do not in fact break anything. He has also published information on how users can help with the test and what is involved in the “phase 1” work.
During the meeting, he requested that people take the time to visit the test regions, carry out TPs and physical crossing between regions, leaving suitably scripted objects running on the regions, etc., per the testing information forum topic and report back via the topic or via the Feedback Portal.
This work may become part of the Banana Bread simulator release (still in the process of being defined), and further references to the work will most likely be via the Simulator User Group meetings.
User groups for discussing Project Zero / SL Mobile:
The Project Zero viewer-in-a-browser project is open for discussion at the Web User Group (as Sntax Linden leads both the WUG group and Project Zero); and it has been indicated it might spin-up its own user group in time.
There are internal discussions going on in the Lab about starting a SL Mobile User Group. More to follow on this.
† 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.
Borkum, January 2025 – click any image for full size
I was surprised to see that it’s been over a year since I last visited Yoyo Collas’ Homestead region of Borkum (see: Borkum’s Winter in Second Life); so long, in fact that I gather the region may have vanished for a time from the grid. However, it is now back within a new location, and I’ve been keen to make a revisit.
As I noted back in November 2023:
Drawing its name from the Lower Saxony island which forms the largest and westernmost of the East Frisian Islands as it sits alongside the border with the Netherlands, and caught between the North Sea and the Wadden Sea, Yoyo’s Borkum has always been a place that is both photogenic and a reminder of how good it is to spend time away from the bustle of life and simply be.
Borkum, January 2025
This remains the case now as much as it did then; the major difference being that with this iteration of Borkum, spring has once again returned, allowing it to offer a welcome promise of what is to come for those of us in the northern hemisphere as winter moves increasingly behind us and spring draws ever closer.
One of the delights of Borkum is that whilst the island many change in its overall look and feel with each iteration, it retains many elements from past designs – such ats the Apple Fall Old Manufactory -, so as to always hold the feeling that one is returning to familiar and comfortable place.
Borkum, January 2025
With its central upland grasslands and surrounding beaches, this iteration of Borkum is very much a haven for both wildfowl and domesticate animals – horses, sheep, cattle, chickens. The latter are all clearly ruled over by the island’s felines (just as cats hold sway over our physical lives, whatever we might think; as the saying goes – dogs have owners, cats have staff!).
The wildfowl and birds range from geese through seagulls, cormorants, egrets, cranes and even swans. Together with the animal life they offer many opportunities for photography; but so to does the natural beauty of the region. The grasslands of the hills are awash with colour thanks to the meadow flowers, poppies and other blooms which almost completely hide the grass, whilst the scrub trees, buildings and other structures all add to the picturesque nature of the setting.
Borkum, January 2025
I’m not going to describe how to explore the island – it is easy enough to work out for yourself; the paths offer hints, pointing places of interest, but really, Borkum is a place to simply wander and to sit and allow the time to pass, either on your own or in company. For those so minded, there is a sailing boat slowly circling the island visitors can sit upon, but there are more than enough places on land for people to enjoy if the boat is already occupied when you visit.
The sense of solitude present on the island is enhanced somewhat by the hints that it might be the retreat for an artist, and which also happens to offer opportunities for visits dropping by, thanks to the beaches and the little café.
Borkum, January 2025
Rather than say anything else, I’ll close with the words Yoyo has written for the region, as they are the most fitting:
Far out in the endless northern dance, where waves weave patterns in a timeless trance, lies an island, where winds still play, Borkum, a gem in the ocean’s sway. The gulls sing clear, a hymn to the skies, of horizons that promise where the future lies. The briny air speaks bold and free, of ventures shaped by the restless sea.
Borkum, January 2025
Upon the shore where stories remain, where amber gleams in a golden chain, an eternal symphony calling us all. When the night lays out its starry veil, and the breeze unfolds its ocean tale, you’ll dream of Borkum, the boundless strand, the island of wonder, the promised land.
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 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.
Official Viewer Status
Release viewer: version 7.1.11.12363455226, formerly the ExtraFPS RC (multiple performance fixes, aesthetic improvements and UI optimisations), dated December 17, promoted December 20, 2024.
Numerous bugs and issues have been reported following the ExtraFPS viewer promotion, and as a result, these seem likely to be developed into a bug-fix viewer (“ForeverFPS”), with an initial cut at an RC version potentially coming in the next week or so.
There are “numerous discussions” occurring at the Lab regarding possible future projects, but nothing at present to announce.
It was announced that Runitai Linden (often referred to as DaveP) is departing Linden Lab to enter public service.
Runitai commented directly on his reasons for departing the Lab and his feelings about doing so, however, rather than drop them here for those who prefer to read rather than listen, I’ve provided a transcript with some additional notes: Runitai Linden hears the call of Public Service.
It is believed the 2K bake updates for the Bake Service are “ready to go”, having cleared QA per my notes from the SUG meeting.
The viewer updates required to allow 2K textures to be used with wearable layers are apparently merged into the Develop branch, but yet to surface within an RC viewer built from that branch.
In theory, the back-end support could be enabled pending the viewer update, because it will not interfere with current rendering, as the viewer should continue to limit wearable textures to the current maximum of 1024×1024 until it is updated to apply 2K bakes. However, discussions on how to proceed pending the viewer update will be taken-up internally by LL.
[Video: 14:48-15:00] here have been multiple requests / discussions over the years about the potential of an Inventory archive to allow people to reduce (some of) their Inventory bulk / bloat by archiving items through a supported system rather than just boxing them. Currently, such a service is not on the roadmap.
[Video: 17:32-22:55] A request to add the type of client (viewer, browser, SL Mobile) some is using to their avatar tag “to help people help others”. Surely the easiest way to find this out, as a mentor / someone giving assistance, etc., is to ask (“Are you using SL on a Mobile or through a browser, or have you installed the client on your computer?”).
Comments from Philip Rosedale
The core CCUG meeting was shortened to 30 minutes due to LL meeting conflicts. However, Philip Rosedale dropped in to provide assorted comments and feedback.
[Video: 24:40-25:35] On AI and Scripted Agents, etc.: thinks the Lab’s policy on AI and bots is going to be “a complex and evolving matter”, and that as AI becomes more powerful, people will need to come together to decide how best to handle it in SL, given the variety of views.
[Video: 27:39-40:14] The above indirectly led to a discussion on being able to identify bots in Group chat sessions and IMs similar, where it may not be obvious that messages are being bot / AI-generated. There are flags which should be used with scripted agents and which should force a message to indicate a messenger is a scripted agent in IMs; however, the issue appears to be that chat and IM can get flooded so quickly with text, the notification can be missed. Suggestions were made to make this text a different colour and possibly pin it to the top of the chat / IM window.
This resulted in a list of categories of bot bad behaviour being drawn up, including begging, phishing, undesired group chat, traffic gaming, data collection (e.g. Bonnie Bots) even overwhelming users with NPC text & failing to account for other interactions.
Overall, this became an extended conversation, and following the video is recommended for full context.
[Video 25:45-26:48] On promoting Second Life as a place to hold work meetings: does not believe the platform has reached that point, because of the lack of nuance within avatar communications – humans really heavily on non-verbal communication cues for further subtext, etc., in exchanges, and SL currently cannot provide these.
[Also, as a sidenote, LL put considerable effort into trying to develop SL as a behind-the-firewall “business application” between 2008-2011 with the Second Life Enterprise (SLE) package (licenses at around US $55,000, but I cannot remember how many avatars came with that license), and that didn’t go so well at the time – potentially because of the shortfalls Philip mentions being among the reasons it didn’t really gain a lot of traction at the time.]
[Video: 40:14-50:10] A discussion on resource allocation through Project Zero to allow fair and balanced access to SL at minimum / no cost through the browser for people without it being abused (e.g. by people creating and running dozens / hundreds of bots through the browser access, thus running up costs to a point where others have to start paying at a higher rate.
As this was a brainstorming session producing multiple ideas (e.g. limiting browser access to subscription accounts – potentially missing the people the service is really geared towards helping, as they may not have subscription accounts; controlling via some form of 2FA; utilising Payment Information on File both as a means to limit access to those who are PIOF and a means to prevent them logging-on more than one account through the streaming service at one time, etc.), please refer to the video.
[Video: 50:11-54:08] When will voice services switch solely to WebRTC? – still waiting for more users to move from Firestorm 6.6.17 to a PBR-enabled version of Firestorm (which will hopefully happen once Firestorm release a version based on the ExtraFPS viewer code, allowing for the issues for poor Linden Water quality – reflections, etc.).
[Video 55:50-1:01:05] Discussion on exclusion volumes for boats under PBR (as re-enabling the forward renderer to allow invisiprims to hide water volumes is not going to happen). Runitai indicated there are potentially alternatives to allow such exclusion volumes to work.
[Video: 1:01:11-1:02:55] Comments on alternative rendering engines and content support segueing into thoughts on why other VW platforms have never achieved the level of adoption by users as witnessed with Second Life (including Sansar, OpenSim and Meta).
† 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.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 