Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week through to Sunday, October 6th, 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.
Cool VL viewer Stable: 1.32.4.6, October 4 – release notes.
Mobile / Other Clients
SL Mobile (Beta) version 2025.10.563 (A) / 0.1.560 (iOS) – October 3.
Unity Engine upgraded to Unity 6.
Networking upgrade – replacement and upgrading of internal networking libraries; more robust handling of transitions between cell and wifi connections.
Scenes should load significantly faster and more reliably, with better handling of large crowds of avatars.
Improved handling for Bakes on Mesh materials.
Better support for EEP/Windlight shaders, including a direct port of the windlight sky shaders; improves general object lighting.
The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, October 2nd, 2025. 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.
This viewer now ships as a “Universal Binary” that contains both the Intel and Apple Silicon versions of the viewer. It should give performance gains on the Apple Silicon version in particular.
Also includes various WebRTC improvements and bug and crash fixes.
Known issues:
This version does not support convex decomposition for physics meshes with Apple Silicon. This will be hopefully be corrected in a future update or release, possibly with the help of a code contribution.
Navigation buttons in the in-viewer browser are no longer present for marketplace and search – these will be restored in a future update.
Apple Silicon does not support pathfinding tools.
Subtle rendering differences might be noticed on certain configurations and EEP environments.
Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 – No Change.
Viewer 2025.07
LL are working on implementing some bug fixes prior to offering a further beta version of this viewer.
One change with the next version will be the return of Havok convex decomposition for Mac Intel systems to enable mesh uploads under emulation Requires the enabling of Rosetta in the universal build for Mac) until such time as a an alternative can be implemented.
Work on an alternative solution is in progress via code contributions. This is likely to be included in viewer 2025.08.
In short: LL unlikely to implement any form of new / updated system avatar, preferring to focus on implementing more modern technology and capabilities that allow creators to develop more capable (and less complicated to users?) avatars.
This included a brief discussion on “open souring” the avatar system body so creators could take it and modify / improve it for themselves, with the note that technically it is, but as it misses some critical elements which tend to render doing this moot.
A potential bug with touching scripted objects was demonstrated with attachments designed to be touched (in short: a object could miss initial touches and thus fail to trigger touch_start() ). This was demonstrated at the meeting, and a Canny report was requested on the problem, together with the demo item.
This discussion also encompassed issues with fast clicking on object in-world and cursor positioning, and unexpected results (e.g. rapidly clicking on a touchable object with the mouse moving, so that a subsequent click “misses” the item, causing the server to register that in favour of the the expected return – like a dialogue box or something – from the initial click).
A discussion on setting materials / overrides on PBR vs. Blinn-Phong. In short, with Blinn-Phong, a change in texture / material can be carried out with a reset of overrides; within PBR, changing the material resets overrides. In the case of scripted items, unless the material change and new overrides are sent as a single packet, changing the material can result in the object appearing to “flash” as the material is displayed prior to the new overrides being applied.
The prompt for the question arose out of how a scripted bottle held by an avatar could change to a selected texture (to presumably represent the drink in the bottle), and how this might be better coded rather than relaying purely on texture caching, which appeared to be the root of this particular problem.
Possible solutions for this became somewhat convoluted (outside of finding a mean by which required textures could be pre-loaded), and frankly zapped right over my head. However, the conversation took up the the last part of the meeting.
A question was asked as to why sometimes trying to rez mesh items (or items onto mesh objects) results in a “Failed to place object at specified location” error message.
This can often come down to the physics shape of the surface on which an item is being rezzed, as Beq Janus explained in one of her videos.
Another cause can be a mismatch between where the viewer thinks an object is trying to be placed and where the simulator views it as being placed – which has been a long-standing problem.
A misunderstanding has apparently led to some concerns that support for sculpties is being deprecated / sculpties are being “eliminated”. Neither of these are correct; there are no plans to either deprecate or eliminate sculpties.
Calas Galadhon Shadowfell IV, October 2025 – click any image for full sizeShadowfell, the special three-region setting presented annually by Tymus Tenk, Truck Meredith and the Calas Galadhon team for the Halloween season, has opened its doors for 2025, and I received an personal invitation from Ty to hop over and take a look – which given the annual treat always presented by the setting, I was only too happy to do.
Now it is fourth year – and thus appropriately titled Shadowfell IV – the setting has also been expanded with a fourth region, with all four being Full regions utilising the Land Capacity bonus available to such.
Calas Galadhon Shadowfell IV, October 2025
As with all of the Calas themed builds, this is one in which it is very important visitors note at least some of the guidelines regarding a visit, all of which can be found at the landing point – with the most important perhaps being:
Make sure you Used Shared Environment (via World → Environment).
Enable local sounds and make sure you have particles visible.
If you are on a PBR viewer,
If you are running a non-PBR viewer, make sure Advanced Lighting Model is active, and if your system can manage it, do make sure Shadows → Sun/Moon + Projectors is enabled.
Calas Galadhon Shadowfell IV, October 2025
For those familiar with past iterations of Shadowfell, much of the first three regions (Mist, Mist II and Mist III) present a familiar setting and walks. These include the boat tour close to the main Landing Point, the caverns with their experience-based teleport up to the Darkfell setting in the sky, the gardens of Shadowfell, the swamp and ruins, the floating platforms, the creatures and touches of Tolkien I’ve covered in both my 2023 reporting on Shadowfell and my 2024 short video, which I’m taking the liberty of embedding again below.
However, none of the above means these regions should be skipped be returning visitors, there are plenty of new touches and twists worth discovering as one follows the trail(s) northwards through the regions. As such, making your way through all of the regions remains the recommendation.
But it is the newest region in the setting, Mist IV, which is the focus for me in the rest of this piece. It is here that the City Ruins of Shadowfell can be found, together with the Elven Flyer and the magnificent Temple of the Moons.
The Elven Flyer offers another touch of Tolkien, the flyer in question being called Star of Eärendil II – a reference to Eärendil half-elven, forbear of Aragon, who carried the Silmaril Morning Star on his brow as he sailed across the sky (The Silmarillion). Like Eärendil’s voyages across the skies of Middle Earth, Elven Flyer also takes to the air, providing an airborne tour of the newest region within Shadowfell, with occasional dips into the Mist III region. Flights take roughly 17 minutes, and have the novelty of having people ride the winged boats whilst floating (both singles and couples).
Calas Galadhon Shadowfell IV, October 2025
The Temple of the Moons and city ruins also offer an interpretation of Tolkien’s legendarium. In Middle Earth, the elves departed “into the west” from Mithlond, the Grey Havens. Here, the Temple of the Moons is described as serving a similar purpose: From which the elves sailed to distant lands, although the reasons for the sailings are different: in Tolkien’s tales, the elves departed because their time in Middle Earth had drawn to a close; within Shadowfell we are informed they departed “before the darkness came”, thus giving Shadowfell a touch of its own mythology.
The temple itself rises from close to the centre of Mist IV, sitting on an island which appears to be of artificial construction more than a natural formation. A single channel of water points north and west to the open sea, presumably the route by which departing elves started their journey to those distant lands. Multiple bridges connect the temple’s island with the surrounding land and gardens.
Calas Galadhon Shadowfell IV, October 2025
The towers of the temple rise almost to match the surrounding trees, steps rising to meet the ground level of the structure, the stapes guarding two tall amphora which suggest they might once have been for illumination rather than being filled with liquid, although if so then their fires have long since been extinguished.
Behind the amphora, two tall statues of (presumably elven) warriors stand with their backs to the walls of the temple. They appear to be guarding a floating egg sitting within the first level of the temple. Stairways up to this egg lie on the far side of the central tower relative to the guarding statues. Touching the egg either by approaching via the stairs or from below, will teleport visitor to the upper level of the temple, revealing the reason for its name in the sky to the west – a sky where a dragon also flies.
Calas Galadhon Shadowfell IV, October 2025
The moons also cast their light down onto an open space with a pond, a number of naturally raised seating circles (and a woodland throne!), standing stones and a stage area with is back to the sea. This appears to be a second event space, complete with an Intan dance system, so I presume some of the events planned for Shadowfell will be taking place here, although the schedule of events, available at the Shadowfell Pavilion only mentions the latter as an events venue.
As always, the regions of Shadowfell are packed with details and characters – not all of the latter necessarily monstrous or wicked or born of darkness. The Darkfell does continue its Alien-esque leaning whilst offering a couple of new additions (or maybe I’m simply misremembering from visits in past years).
Calas Galadhon Shadowfell IV, October 2025
Travel through the setting can be aided through the use of landmarks available through the Shadowfell information notecard, or by keeping an eye out for the Journey Cloths scattered throughout the setting. However, I strongly exploring on foot and working your way around the various paths in order to experience Shadowfell to the fullest, with the boat tour and Elven Flyer helping to ensure you don’t miss anything. Those who enjoy musical accompaniment with their explorations should enable the local music stream, which features a selection of music curated by Ty.
Shadowfell remains one of the highlights of the Second Life Halloween season, and should not be missed by anyone who enjoys Halloween or has a love of fantasy. I gather than further elements might be added whilst the regions remain open, so return visits through October for both the events and additional exploration might be in order!
Calas Galadhon Shadowfell IV, October 2025
As always, my thanks to Ty, Truck and the Calas team for the invitation to explore and for all that they do for Second Life through Calas Galadhon, Shadowfell and their Christmas settings.
The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday October 1st, 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.
Why do you make all your items no transfer? Are most items no transfer?
Most items are created No Transfer (75%-90% in estimates), although the return of Gacha might be increasing the number of transferable items.
No transfer is preferred for multiple reasons. Those cited included: complexities of customer support with transfer items then have been passed from one user to another; the risk of object loss if an item is set to No Copy as a result of being set to Transfer (e.g. through accidental deletion & trash purge). Most users prefer to have Copy / Modify items over Transfer (/ No Copy) / Modify items.
What would encourage creators to make items transferrable?
Largely a matter of personal choice, but Transfer was not seen as a popular need.
The exceptions to this were seen as items specifically designed to be gifted / intended for the Gacha units & the resale market.
How do you attract new users to your stores? Gifts? Credits? Responses included: Group gifts; store credits / discounts; sales / special offers.
Has anyone used the new Avatar Welcome Pack? Have you made items for it?
Unsurprisingly, mixed opinions on the avatars in the Welcome Pack, although it was noted that as the bodies are Legacy, many creators have clothing available for them, even if the clothing is not specifically created with the starter avatars in mind.
Complaints were raised over the fact feet are not posable (so high heel shoes won’t work with them), and the “dead face” expressions – with reminders that the Welcome Pack avatars are just that: for getting started, before moving on to more capable store-bought avatars.
This lead to a discussion on what could / might be included in the Welcome Pack – such as a limited AO system from one of the dedicated AO creators, just to again help people get started and not necessarily try to work out where they need to shop or immediately diving into the MP.
For those who have helped new users create an avatar via the Welcome Pack, what have been the common problems?
Feedback ran from lack of variety in the avatars (e.g. all of them are human); lack of contextual / explanatory information.
General feedback on bodies / heads in general was the over complexity of things and the steps a new user must go through (even after exposure to the Welcome Packs), together with easily identifying what will / won’t work with a given body type / head type if the new user is not familiar with brands, BoM, using HUDs, etc.
How long would you say an experienced user would take to create a really good avatar?
Estimates varied from “5 minutes” to “an hour”, depending on approach (e.g. having the necessary avatar parts – head, body, etc.), already in inventory and working from there, vs going out and shopping for a suitable body / head, etc., vs. using the Avatar Welcome Pack.
It was noted that helping new users build / customise avatars takes much longer, both due to the general learning curve and the need to overcome the technical / language barriers (e.g. explaining what “BoM” is, why only certain clothing will fit certain bodies, how to recognise what is needed from multi-body pack of clothing in order to wear the outfit on the avatar, etc.).
What would you say is the average cost of a good avatar?
Just for a head, body, skin, hair and initial outfit: US $50, although cost is relative depending on what is being sought.
This also folded itself into people’s expectations / desires for their avatar and its looks.
General Points
Sntax Linden noted that the Avatar Picker / Customiser found in Project Zero is now offered in the official viewer, but without the dedicated Avatar toolbar button, the Picker opening within the viewer rather than as a separate browser panel.
It was pointed out (as I’ve done previously), that the official welcome hub is out-of-step with the Avatar Welcome Pack as it only references the Senra avatars.
The Q&A session included a wide-ranging discussion on approaches to getting new users acclimatised to SL using a mix of web options / capabilities and in-world experiences.
It’s October, which means Halloween sits a-waiting at the end of the month. I’ve noted on numerous occasions that I’m not a fan on the modern take on the celebration, but within Second Life I do like to take a look at region settings and installations that offer a take on things that is a little different to the usual. Such is the case with Cica Ghost’s October installation: Happy Halloween, which she invited me to visit as it opened on October 1st, 2025.
Offered largely in monochrome (the pumpkins and stars being the exception here!), Happy Halloween offers much that might be associated with the modern take on Halloween – but also perhaps applies more broadly to generally spookiness and fun. It even carries with it what might be seen as a little nod towards Tim Burton.
Cica Ghost, October 2025: Happy Halloween
The main Landing Point sits in the sky over Cica’s regions of Mysterious Isle, where can be found the usual request about using the local environment settings, a link to Cica’s on-line store and a tombstone teleport down to the installation proper. The latter delivers visitors to a setting caught under the same star-dusted sky as seen from the Landing Point, complete with a crescent Moon low in the sky.
The quote accompanying the build is a popular take on a line made famous by Franklin D. Roosevelt during his first inaugural address. At the time, America we deep into the Depression, and his words in that address were both solemn and intended to give hope and reassurance. He certainly did not originate the phrase in question – various forms of it have been recorded since the 16th century. The version Cica uses gives it a decidedly humorous little twist:
The only thing we have to fear is FEAR itself – and spiders.
Cica Ghost, October 2025: Happy Halloween
And there are certainly spiders to be found here. They grin and bounce among flowers with equally toothy grins, or sit on stalks as if they are themselves flowers. They share the landscape with bat plants and star plants, all growing out of a dusty ground with tall hills all around, their surfaces pockmarked like the surface of a moon. In places the dust gives way to a checkerboard effect, whilst scattered across the entire setting are bare trees, odd little houses and all the local denizens.
The latter come in many forms: monsters who appear to be out for a lark more than to frighten, ghosts who fade in-and-out of view, black cats, giant pumpkins, crows… the list goes on, and I really don’t want to spoil things by saying too much here – other than the little touch of Tim Burton might be seen in the people also scattered across (over over in one case) the setting as they go about their evening’s business.
Cica Ghost, October 2025: Happy Halloween
As always with most of Cica’s builds, there are various opportunities to be found for interaction within Happy Halloween, and plenty of opportunities for photography and smiles.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 30th, 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.
On Wednesday, October 1st, this simulator update should be deployed to the remaining RC channels. This update includes:
A new function that allows you to set a parcel for sale – this is pending a viewer-side update.
Various WebRTC updates.
More accurate CPU usage measurement; more correct live configuration file load on start; more meta data about asset upload so LL knows when people are uploading glFT assets.
SLua Updates
The LLEvents C++ implementation is basically done, and Harold Linden is testing it and integrating it with the simulator.
LLTimers is “going to be funky” because he believes that timers aren’t currently based on real time but rather frame time which is affected by time dilation in the simulator.
Basically, if a simulator is running at 70% speed and a timer is scheduled for 10 seconds later, it might actually happen in 13 seconds.
Harold notes that it’s not clear if this is the desired behaviour going forward, and so is looking for some opinions on what people actually want there.
The preference at the meeting was for real time (or both, as a primary / secondary set of options, if this could be handled tidily), although there was some discussion on event timers and frame / real time, etc.
He noted that any adjustments made would only affect users of LLTimers, not existing uses of llSetTimerEvent().
Harold has also been profiling of the script scheduling code after reports that there can be some slowdown on simulators just by virtue of having scripts that don’t really do anything. The adjustments made should mean things run 5-10% faster now on regions with lots of scripts that don’t do much, which is most of them.
The LSL compiler and runtime will be open-source (MIT licensed).
Harold Linden has tried to put most of the code in the SLua repo that is going to be open-source, so scripters can have a mostly-complete SLua implementation for local testing.
SLua Questions
Please also refer to the video.
Will the LL functions that return -1 meaning “not found” (e.g. like ll.ListFindList() ), still return -1, or will they return nil? Answer: they will continue to return -1.
Similarly, negative indices like -1 in library functions will continue to work as before.
Will the LL functions that return boolean values in a list (e.g. ll.GetPrimitiveParams{PRIM_PHYSICS}), still return number? Or will they return boolean? Answer: they will continue to return a number, unfortunately.
Will there be a llcompat library with the functions in LSL style (0-based, etc.)? Answer: yes.
Will ll functions support constant folding (such as ll.Ord(“a”) being turned into 97 at compile time without having to run the function call at runtime)? Answer: not currently, but there’s no reason that they couldn’t.
Will it be possible to use very large scripts without having to break them up? Answer: the memory limit should be at least 128kb and scripts will generally be much smaller, so technically yes.
Rider Linden additionally noted the memory requirements for the Luau VM are considerably less than the old Mono VM. So there should be some headroom on larger scripts, and LL hasn’t made a final call as yet about the memory allotment.
Additionally, script monitors should show roughly the memory you were _using_ at a recent point in time rather than when hitting the memory limit.
Is there a way to avoid stack-heap collisions (e.g. is the Lua VM armed against them)? Answer: SLua does allow you to catch failures to allocate with pcall().
Will a “shared data” system be implemented, where multiple copies of the same script reference the same instance of bytecode data? Answer: yes, that basically comes with the VM system.
What is happening with viewer-side scripting capabilities? Answer: it has been put on ice for the present.
This sparked a mini-discussion of local scripting use cases, format, security, etc.
In Brief
Rider Linden has the official native VSCode plugin for LSL and SLua “ready for feedback”. He still has some further work to do on this, but hopes to have the repo open and available “as soon as possible”.
Leviathan Linden is now working on a server-side implementation for voice moderation on WebRTC (e.g. the ability for estate owners / managers (and possibly parcel holders) to mute people’s voice).
Pepper Linden is still working on outfit support for SL Mobile, and is also working on a new viewer feature, “async inventory”:
This allows the loading of inventory asynchronously, leveraging the inventory cache after logging-in.
It should see those with very large inventories to log-in much faster than is currently the case (initial testing had 200K inventories loading in 5-10 seconds).
The work is described as currently “very rough” and not ready for inclusion in any active viewer branch.
Signal Linden has been variously involved in:
Apple Silicon support.
Working with our operational team to finish some simhost hardware configuration changes which have been in progress for a while.
Trying to help unblock Lua documentation efforts, get folks the resources they need to build a new documentation site.
Mesh faces mismatch issue: this appears to be a server-side problem rather than anything integral to the viewer. Leviathan Linden is now looking at options for correcting it – his current idea is to use the viewer request to modify a non-existent face to be a hint to the server that it maybe needs to update an asset and put it on a background queue somehow, that would essentially re-submit the asset for update in the background.
Date of Next Meetings
Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, October 7th, 2025.
Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, October 14th, 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.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 