Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week through to Sunday, March 8th, 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.
Second Life Release Candidate viewer 2026.01 – 26.1.0.22641522367, March 5 – NEW
Legacy search; WebRTC improvements; QoL improvements.
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, March 6th, 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.
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
Was lined up for promotion to release status, but LL has ben seeing some suspiciously low fault rates – less than 1%, rather than the more usual average fault rate accounting for freezes and crashes being closer to something like 5-7%.
As a result, the view is going to be left at RC status through until early in week #11.
Viewer 2026.1.1 – One Click Install
2026.1.1 is the new designation for the one-click install and velopack viewer (currently 26.1.0.21295806042).
This is unlikely to move to release status for at least a couple of weeks as it works through QA testing, particularly given this viewer represents a pretty big migration from the old updater to the new one.
Viewer 2026.02
This viewer is about to undergo an “Alpha” update, designed to gather feedback from users.
This is the viewer with the new “Flat” UI updates, font changes and WebRTC voice moderation capabilities, and might additionally receive some backported updates to texture streaming.
Example of the upcoming flat UI. Via: Geenz Linden / Github #4681/2
Viewer 2026.03 -“SL Visual Polish” (SLVP)
2026.03 is set 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.
This work is currently being wrapped-up.
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.
Further performance optimisations.
The current repository for this viewer (valid March 6th, but may change) is available here.
This viewer may be in a head-to-head with the SLua viewer as to which gets promoted first when the time comes.
Grid-Wide WebRTC
A small deployment to the Preflight simulator Release Candidate channel was made on Thursday, March 5th, intended to address some server stability issues.
It is hoped that the deployment will quickly move to the BlueSteel RC.
There is still no Voice echo canyon for WebRTC for self-testing your own Voice system. However, one is still under consideration.
General Discussion
please refer to the video as well.
Geenz Linden has not had time to address the much-requested alpha-gamma fixes due to a focus on the SLVP viewer. It is also anticipated this work will require a decent bit of scoping, including understanding what needs to remove server-side to avoid a potential permissions hole.
Geenz has also has made further commits for the reimplementation of SSR after he found a good way to get hierarchical Z tracing working in the viewer.
He has also finally got the separable SSR pass working from another branch, which leads to a ton of optimisation potential for SLVP. For example, this now allows rendering of SSR at half or even quarter resolution, while the output for glossy SSR can be filtered, leading to less graininess on PBR surfaces and water.
There is also now a mirror for water reflections – which as was noted above, requires the Ultra quality setting and will impact viewer performance. but which is independent to SSR for water reflections.
The long-awaited Appearance fixes, as supplied by Kitty Barnett, are being targeted for the 2026.03 viewer.
There has been some musing on re-working the viewer graphic settings to make them easier to parse (such as making options drop-downs grouped by the Low to Ultra quality settings, with only the relevant options appearing for each. However, this work is only at the musing stage, not something being pursued.
A general discussion of texture handling – including the option to add blank texture detection and reduced these to 1×1 to help reduce the RAM load with textures.
A general discussion on a number of issues bugs (e.g. the AMD bug which sees the avatar textures broken on newer AMD GPU drivers – which is hopefully being addressed by AMD; MOAP input handling bugs on Linux & Apple, said to make playing some games in SL impossible, etc- see the last 15 minutes of the video for more).
The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday March 4th 2026. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. Pantera’s video is embedded at the end of this article, my thanks to her for providing it.
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.
Friday February 27th Marketplace Outage
On Friday, February 27th, 2026, the Marketplace suffered an outage resulting in delays to item deliveries, background check-outs and viewer notifications for approximately 5 hours. This was apparently caused by a degradation in the MP asynchronous workers during a deployment, resulting in a backlog in the MP queuing system. The backlog should be clear now, and there have been no recent reports of missing / delayed items or notifications.
Updates
Changes are being made to the email verification prompt that comes up on the Second Life dashboard – those who have verified their email won’t see anything (“for a while”). Those who haven’t verified their email address for contact are advised to do so.
Updates to the web maps to allow searching by region name is still “slotted” for implementation.
Updates are in progress for the buying land experience – the look and presentation of the pages, UI changes, etc. – not changes to current land pricing.
The viewer splash screen will be changing soon as a part of the viewer UI / font changes contained in the upcoming 2026.02 viewer.
Work on making the Marketplace home page more responsive on Mobile devices is continuing, with small changes already made to the sidebar.
Quality of Life / Internal updates:
Further guardrails have been placed around Marketplace Product Listing Enhancements (PLEs) to prevent users being double-charged.
Multiple bug fixes related to wishlist displays, language selections and display name synchronisation, and similar.
Upgrades are being made to some web-related AWS services.
Marketplace
Th question was asked if people felt it would be worth a break of 12-18 months on work on all Marketplace development (bug fixing, etc., still continuing), in order to get variants / styles (e.g. multiple colour options, etc.,) in a single listing produced and released.
Whilst stated that a “year / year-and-a-half” was “very conservative”, it was still something of a surprised given that in late 2022, Reed Linden stated variants would be the “first deployment” in 2023.
Spidey Linden noted that the biggest hurdle with the project is actually migrating users as smoothly as possible from having multiple listings for the same item (but in different colours) to having all options in the one listing.
There was support for the idea and variants / styles is something that has long been promised and has been a popular request.
The above spun-out into a discussion on “Marketplace 2.0”.
Currently there are no plans for a “Marketplace 2.0”, so this was more a “throw out ideas” session.
This discussion also spun out into requests for “social” elements to be included on MP listing, such as a indicator as to when a store owner last logged-in to SL, the date any item was posts to the MP (already available via some 3rd party browser plug-ins, support Firefox, Edge and Chrome and its variants – I use it with both Brave and Gener8).
An alterative question regarded on “Marketplace 2.0”, were it to be developed, is whether merchants would access not having any migration mechanism and having to go through and manually re-list all their items on the new version.
This caused something of a divided response, with some seeing it as not being a problem for MP stores with large inventories, as it was argued (not unreasonably in the case of clothing), that the reason for many stores having large numbers of listings is because they have multiple colour version of each item, each with it own listing – which any new Marketplace would solve by allowing multiple variants in a single listing.
Others felt any requirement to manually upload to a new MP would slow adoption.
Still others felt that having a new MP with “more features” would still be worth the effort to give them a new, cleaner & more functional store.
It was suggested that some of the pain in moving to a “new” MP could be eased by offering an extended transition period to allow creators to gradually make the move.
However, it was pointed out that running two systems side-by-side will incur additional cost and so a) would have to be factored-in to the transition period; b) would likely preclude both the current MP and “MP 2.0” running side-by-side indefinitely; sooner or later merchants would have to move.
There is also the risk of consumer confusion over where to find items if the transition period is drawn out to the point where creators migrate their listings in small quantities (“one or two a week” was mentioned), which could then impact sales.
Calls were made to simply delete stores from the Marketplace on the basis of the creator not logging-in to SL for a given continuous period (currently, listings are made “inactive” if the owner has not logged-in during a certain period). This is a potentially damaging approach, as it could unfairly penalise users who are forced into a more restricted ability to log-in to SL due to social circumstance, illness, etc.
The discussion on “MP 2.0” spun out to include integration of CasperVend and the ability to see through the MP and via in-world vendor kiosks.
A request was make to solve the “translation issue” whereby automatic translation of products leads to things like the wrong colour being delivered (e.g. a translation referencing the “pink” item for delivery, whereas the listing shows the “red” version.
Other Items
Community Pages / Forums Changes:
Concerns were raised over recent changes to the Community pages (e.g. the official blogs) / Forums — notably around logging-in.
These concerns took two parts:
The fact that the logging-in process has been changed by the third party providing the community pages / Forum platform (Invision) to use OAuth as their authentication method, rather than the Lab’s own MFA;
There was no announcement of the change by Linden Lab via blog or Forum post, in advance of it being made by Invision across their services.
The concern over the use of cookies seems to be (in part) born of misunderstanding: cookies are a “standard” means of maintaining login session IDs. However OAuth appears to be retaining the cookie after a user has physically logged-out from the Community pages via the sign-out option (which does not mean logging-out of SL), which appears to be the problem.
Kermit Linden offered to look into the authorisation flow.
Invision has implemented a new verification process outside of the lab’s MFA (which not everyone uses) for accessing the Community pages (official blogs, the forums, etc.), they host on LL’s behalf. The process was introduced without any communication from LL, and utilises cookies, which has raised concerns.
The issue of SL wiki thumbnail images not displaying has been partially resolved, but more work is required to completely resolve it.
A request was made to add a further SL Discord generic category for those whose blogs fall outside the current three categories of fashion, home & garden and bloggers-streamers.
Complaints that 2 clicks to reach a person’s transaction history on the SL dashboard, and Marketplace is too hard and the labelling is not precise (which is fair).
A general discussion on web search and its perceived drawbacks (such as being unable to exclude display Names from People searches, thus leading to “false positives” when seeking user names etc.)..
A discussion on being able to “register” brand names with LL to prevent things like copycat stores using the same name, or having stores using the sane name / word in their keywords coming ahead of registered stores in MP searches.
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
Not 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.
Regio 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.
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. .
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 