Category: SL Tech

2026 week #20: SUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Planet M – Tula, March 2026 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, May 12th, 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

  • Wednesday, 13th May should see the deployment of the Kumquat simulator update.
    • This contains some further back-end WebRTC fixes and other internal work. E-mail is also being updated, notably off-line IM forwarding and object llEmail()-type activity.
    • This update is being deployed ahead of the originally planned Loganberry update.
  • Loganberry is moving forward, and is currently being reviewed by the Lab’s QA team. This should have:
    • The updates to deal with missing attachments on avatars.
    • Harold Linden’s serialisation fixes to ease some region cross issues.
    • llListen triggering multiple times.
    • A fix for script parcel permissions being calculated incorrectly and an old issue about rezzing on meshes.

WebRTC Update

  • The May 5th grid-wide deployment of WebRTC went ahead as planned, so Vivox is no longer the Voice service across SL; WebRTC is.
  • The deployment apparently went well and there have been few reports of issues.
  • Wednesday, May 13th should see a WebRTC update, which will hopefully see the return of Voice Echo Canyon in-world.
  • WebRTC deployments are now run separately to simulator deployments rather than a part of them. Viewers running the latest client-end of WebRTC should not be affected by this, as they they will disconnect from one voice server in the cluster ahead of it going down for update, and automatically reconnect to an operating server in the cluster.
  • Moving forward, the focus will now be on fixes and updates (e.g. open chat voice attenuation) and general clean-up and the removal of unwanted code.
    • Once this work has been completed, attention will be turned more towards adding new features the WebRTC, including voice-to-text transcription (and has been experimented with inside the Lab, including with multiple languages). However, no decision has yet been made as to WebRTC new features or their scheduling.
  • Concerns over privacy with transcription were raised, and Roxie Linden noted privacy is being looked at, together with security, together with the ability for users to turn off transcription. This sparked a conversation on chat encryption, as per the video.

In Brief

  • Rider Linden has been on-call this week, and so has fixed some issues in the server build system on the server. He is also plans to look at an issue around failed notifications for large groups.
  • Leviathan Linden attempted to provide a game_control update (v 0.7.2), unfortunately, one of the bug fixes within it turned out to be buggy.
  • Harold Linden (Lua):
    • Has the The llprim.ParamsSetter interface merged with the viewer code.
    • Has also been working on the bundler implementation so that `require()` can work correctly in the viewer. However, this might not go out until after the Lua viewer is officially released, so he can focus on “more release-pertinent issues” such as performance and garbage collection.
    • He is going to be working on these latter improvements alongside of making the Lua implementation more memory-efficient in practice: “Lots of non-user-facing things that are important if we want to be in a world where thousands and thousands of Lua scripts don’t make a region fall over”.

General Discussion

Please refer to the video below for  more on the following.

  • SL Combat 2.0 is set so bullets / projectiles are  automatically set to DIE_ON_COLLIDE when they are rezzed, which is a different behaviour to the older SL Combat System and has been found to cause some problems. Rider linden asked if changing Combat 2.0 so projectiles do not die on collide automatically would ab issue.
    • The general (but small) consensus at the meeting was that it should not be an issue; creators can always update their products, if required
    • The question sparked a discussion on Combat running through the mid-point of the meeting.
  • The “soft disconnect” (being unable to physical move from or TP out of a region after being in it for a period of time) issue was raised, with some reporting the issue appears least frequent in the Flat UI RC viewer. No feedback from LL on this
  • There was a discussion on Second Life performance, simulator / viewer / simulator communications latency impacting avatar updates, KFM animations, etc. This ran through most of the second half of the meeting.
  • The above was mixed with a debate over Linux (and its upcoming return to viewer land with the Lua viewer), distros, wishes, etc.

Date of Next Meetings

  • Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, May 19th 2026.
  • Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, May 26th, 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.

2026 SL viewer release summaries week #19

Posted on by Inara Pey
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation

Updates from the week through to Sunday, May 10th, 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  – One-Click Installer = 26.1.1.23806384790 – April 10 – No change.
  • Second Life Release Candidate (RC) viewer: Flat UI – 26.2.0.25021396775, April 29 -“flat” UI and font update – No change.
  • Second Life Project Viewers:

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V7-style

  • Kirstens Viewer S24(6) Build 3322 Patch 2- May 9 – release notes.

V1-style

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

2026 week #19: SL CCUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Hippotropolis Campsite: venue for CCUG meetings
The following notes were taken from:

  • My chat log and audio recording  of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, May 7th, 2026.
  • Please note that this is not a full transcript of either meeting but a summary of key topics.
Table of Contents

 

Meeting Purpose

  • 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 and is held in a mix of Voice and text chat.
  • Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.

Official Viewer Status

  • Default viewer  – One-Click Installer = 26.1.1.23806384790 – April 10 – No change.
  • Second Life Release Candidate (RC) viewer: Flat UI – 26.2.0.25021396775, April 29 -“flat” UI and font update.
  • Second Life Lua Editor Alpha viewer 6.1.0.23768336784, April 29.

Viewer Notes

Viewer 2026.02

  • 26.02 is enjoying low crash rates, confirming its status as the next viewer in line for promotion to release status.
  • There will likely be another RC update to this viewer prior to its promotion, which will include some “small, small” changes and fixes (e.g. making bold text easier to see, correcting some text overruns in some floaters, and correcting an extended CEF load time on the viewer splash screen).

Viewer 2026.03

  • This viewer is now described as “following hot on the heels of 26.02”, although it has yet to appear as either an alpha/project viewer or a beta/RC viewer.

Graphics Care Package vs. Lua Support Viewer

  • No firm decision as to which of these viewers is liable to progress to release status first.
    • The Lua viewer would appear to have the advantage given it is currently going through alpha/project viewer evolutions to move towards a beta/RC version, whereas the GCP viewer has yet for officially see the light of day.
    • However, the Lua viewer is dependent on the development of Lua back-end support and simulator updates, plus it is also the viewer being used to re-introduce Linux into the mix of official viewers (with limited support), and both of these might slow the viewer’s promotion to RC and then release status.

WebRTC Update

  • The May 5th grid-wide deployment of WebRTC went ahead as planned, so Vivox is no longer the Voice service across SL. WebRTC is.
  • The deployment apparently went well and there have been few reports of issues.
  • Moving forward, the focus will now be on fixes and updates (e.g. open chat voice attenuation) and general clean-up and the removal of unwanted code.
  • Once this work has been completed, attention will be turned more towards adding new features the WebRTC.
    • Voice-to-text transcription has been requested as one of these new features (and has been experimented with inside the La, including with multiple languages), however, no decision has yet been made as to WebRTC new features or their scheduling.
    • It was also requested to have the moderation tools for Voice made accessible to scripts per this feature request.

General Discussions

  • There are reports of what might be a bug which is causing some avatars to appear to have a 1,000,000 complexity number, when they are far below this. At the time of writing these nots it is unclear if a Canny bug report has been filed on this or not, or how widespread the issue might be.
  • A request was made for expanding SL material assets so they can be used to *completely* set an object’s material? So a BP tab in the material as well (e.g. the ability to drag and drop Blinn-Phong materials into a PBR asset alongside of the PBR materials, so have a complete package with the BP materials available for fallback purposes).
    • There are no specific plans for this. However, as Geenz linden has previously mentioned in recent meetings, there are plans in hand to add specular materials to PBR.
  • Will the terrain painting project be revived? Unlikely at this point is time; performance issues are the current priority and after that, there is more general PBR work to be completed. As such, the terrain painting work remains frozen.

Next Meeting

May 2026 SL Web User Group

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday May 6th 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 at 14:00 SLT.
    • In both Voice and text.
    • At this location.
  • 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.

Project Zero Update

  • Project Zero (the viewer streamed to a browser) is now closed – see: Linden Lab announces Project Zero to end).
  • Interestingly, this work is now being described as an “experiment” rather than any form of product development effort; a description which is somewhat removed from how the project was initially put forward (although it is fair to say that the Firestorm iteration of the work was more experimental by the Lab).
  • “A lot” has been learned from that experiment, some of which will be used to improve both the desktop viewer and Mobile App experiences.
  • Support has already refunded all or nearly all L$ pack purchases and are working through the list to make sure everyone gets refunded. More info is in the blog post here if you need help.

Web Services Updates

  • The refresh of the the official viewer log-in splash screen is now available in the current RC (and soon to be release) version of the viewer.
    • It has already been suggested this screen could benefit by the inclusion of the Lab’s own SLBN RSS feeds for blogs, etc, even if only in link format (as with the Firestorm log-in Splash screen).
    • Official blog posts are linked-to under the Events (or some reason – space?) tab, but the broader SLBN links are absent.
    • Surfacing the official blog and the SLBN links more clearly would benefit both official communications – given many users do not directly address secondlife.com, and help the “community” nature of SL.
The refreshed official viewer log-in splash screen, available with viewer 26.2 onwards – click for full size, if required
  • The refresh of the web-base land / region purchasing pages is in its first passes of “button up work”. and is currently on track to surface in the next few months. This is seen as the second part of the Land Portal overhaul which started with the refresh of the Linden Homes pages.
  • The Responsive Marketplace Homepage making progress, and will be passing through the design/QA gauntlet soon.
    • It is hoped that some of the tools used in this work can be put to use in enhancing / re-working elements of the Marketplace in general (e.g. making it more modular than monolithic) in order to add features more easily and leverage opportunities to help promote creators and stores.
    • This work would be subject to senior management agreement.

Internal and Quality of Life Updates

  • Web Search has received a range of under-the-hood updates (OpenSearch migration, Debian updates, Python upgrades), with an eye to tackle some first pass search results updates as a result of these updates in the near future.
  • A range of under-the-hood but necessary security update.
    • Mention of which again brought forth requests for more options to be added to the current MFA process, particularly e-mail support.
  • Wrapping up assisting teams without authentication/email upgrades.

New Joiners

  • Eliza Linden is a new hire, filling the role of Economy Product Manager, with responsibilities related to the Linden Dollar, the LindeX, and also producing support to the Marketplace transactions, etc. She may also become one of the Lindens attending the Web User Group meetings in the future.
  • Crowley Linden has joined LL as a Software Engineer with the Tools & Payments team.

Other Items

  • A bug report has been filed about items shown on the front page of a Marketplace Store not showing the correct price after a listing update – although the actual listing does show the correct price.
  • Marketplace requests:
    • A suggestion was made for merchants to be able to group like items together within their Marketplace stores or to have tabs within their stores so they can display items which might be brought together, etc.
    • It was asked if it would be possible in future to have better integration between the MP and in-world stores – such as having both Marketplace listings and store vendors pull products for delivery to customers from the same repository.
    • The response to these ideas was somewhat favourable, with it being mentioned that Casper (of CasperTech fame) is now looking at the MP and familiarising himself with it, and these might be things that could be incorporated into the MP alongside of features from the CasperVend system.
    • It was requested that the ability to review Demo items (particularly those with limited functionality) due to the negative feedback Demo items can garner for this reason.
      • This led to a more extensive discussion on reviews and hope to improve them.
  • The second half of the meeting [31:59-1:10:20] involved a user-generated presentation on Marketplace usage, featuring a series of slides. Allowing for the data being a snapshot in time (with changes occurring all the time), some of the highlights include:
    • The overall volume of listings has increased throughout the MP’s lifetime, despite periodic delisting exercises for items that have not sold or listings from creators who have not logged in for specified periods (e.g., 2 years or more) and things like the de-listing of Gacha items.
    • 2016-2017 saw a large-scale jump in MP listings / activities – largely as a result of the introduction of multiple mesh bodies and the need to cater for them all with clothing and accessories, etc.
    • In the last decade, 16,000 MP stores have put out at least one product a year (with some releasing as many as 33 per month), and the longevity of individual products has increased (e.g. whereas merchants may have previously removed slow-/non-selling products in the past, now they are being left as listed on the MP.
    • The “average price” for purchased items on the MP is L$350 (obviously with a high degree of variance between low and high cost items such as fatpacks, etc.), with the suggestion that this is a good price for new creators to consider when selling their first individual products.
    • Gacha items appear represent a relatively low number of listings within the MP (and have been declining), but they do have a higher volume of sales.
    • AI use may have moved from AI generated content (peaking at around 1%of overall MP content being self-reported as AI generated) to the use of AI tools for imaging / branding. This led to a side discussion on AI and AI tools.
    • Please refer to the video for specifics for all of the above.
  • A request was made for a) the OAuth client for SL web being made available to users on external services, and b) if the SL Discord bot could do the same thing?
    • These questions were directed to Kermit Linden, but no specific response was offered during the meeting.
  • A complaint that a recent fix to logging-in to the Forums means that those with capitalisation in the middle of their users names now have the letters displaying in lower-case in their names (e.g. “Snuffyab123” instead of “SnuffyAB123”.
    • This issue might be related to a similar issue with SL Wiki for users with Edit rights, but this has yet to be confirmed.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026.

2026 SL viewer release summaries week #18

Posted on by Inara Pey
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation

Updates from the week through to Sunday, May 3rd, 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  – One-Click Installer = 26.1.1.23806384790 – April 10 – No change.
  • Second Life Release Candidate (RC) viewer: Flat UI – 26.2.0.25021396775, April 29 -“flat” UI and font update – New.
  • Second Life Project Viewers:

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V7-style

V1-style

Mobile / Other Clients

  • SL Mobile iOS version  0.1.163391, April 28 (Android update pending at the time of writing).

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

April 2026 SL Mobile User Group meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Campwich Forest grounds: location for the Monthly Mobile User Group (MMUG)
The following notes were taken from the Thursday, April 30th 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.
Table of Contents

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.
    • In Voice and text.
    • At Campwich Forest.
  • 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.

Core Mobile Team

The following are core (but not necessarily the only) members of the Mobile App team:

  • Bridie Linden; project manager.
  • Radix Linden: Mobile engineering manager. A new Linden, he has a strong Unity development background and his initial focus at LL is ensuring that Mobile is a smooth, seamless experience.
  • Adam Sinewave: lead developer.
  • Beanie Linden: QA.
  • Brad Linden: developer.
  • Stray Linden: back-end infrastructure engineer.

Resources

Current Releases

See notes below.

Recent Updates

  • A release was made on Tuesday, April 28th – Apple version number given as 0.1.163391.
    • At the time of writing, the update did not appear to be available for / had not fully propagated through the Google Play Store; my Android version had no update option from 0.3.1089, and any removal + reinstall still left me on 0.3.1089.
  • This release adds:
    • Display of, and interaction with, LLDialog support, allowing in-world object interaction dialogues to be displayed and used (e.g. pose menus for chairs / seats, etc.).
    • French UI support.
    • Improved Voice services – clearer microphone status; better spatial audio positioning; more consistent mute controls; user blocking / unblocking; removal of unnecessary prompts; clearer messaging when Voice or the device microphone is not available; users should be able to hear other users whether their avatar is sitting or flying, etc. (both of which could cause Voice to cut out for the seated / flying avatar); and to ensure privacy, the device microphone is off by default in the App when logging-in or re-logging.
  • Bug fixes:
    • Favourites (locations) no more duplication; no more to tap favourites to get them to respond; users new to Mobile can now Favourite a location.
    • Streaming audio: shows the correct status (e.g. only showing the streaming audio as muted when it is actually muted, rather than showing it as such when the audio is still playing), however, there still may be intermittent cases of this bug appearing, so if you encounter it, please file a report. Steaming audio should also be consistent across sessions (e.g. if it is turned off in one session, it should remain off in all subsequent sessions until turned on again, and vice-versa).
    • Multi-factor Authentication: no more need to input and authentication token every time the Mobile App is used.
  • Crash rates: crash rates have been greatly decreased. On Android they were above the thresholds set by Google, and have now been brought down to be well within them. There is more work to be done on iOS, but this is on the radar.

General Q&A

  • Chat, chat storage and chat history.
    • Work on “modernising” the chat UI is in progress, but is a long-term project.
    • Mobile has the capability to archive chat sessions – but only Mobile-to-Mobile (as indicated in past Mobile User Group summaries) and there have been requests to make this more cross-platform (e.g. combining Mobile archives with Desktop chat histories). Mobile retains chat histories on the server for up to 90 days – and a little longer locally.
    • The plan is to have more integration between the two, including similar storage times between the two, with full integration of chat histories between both Mobile and Desktop.
  • Camera movement: there are some conflicts between camera movement and Vstick tap / movement. This is something still to be addressed, although a degree of user interaction (such as how taps / touches are performed when attempting to move the camera) which can also cause the conflicts.
  • It was asked if there is / could be a setting to adjust the Vstick sensitivity (some someone isn’t always running everywhere). The reply was “kind-of but not quite”.
    • There are a couple of settings which can affect the Vstick.
    • However, the overall problem is that SL doesn’t have linear motion – you are walking or you are running; this results in a little too much use of the Vstick on Mobile triggers the avatar to switch from walking to running.
    • As such, there is no means to really make adjustments within the Vstick code; instead, the Mobile team is looking to make running a separate toggle button.
  • Streaks / Achievements: will be continuing for the foreseeable future.
    • LL would eventually like to get to incorporating Special Achievements into the App – a rotating series of “novel” things to do / discover in Second Life.
    • Some of these may include Linden Dollar rewards when built. If this is the case, Streaks could be phased out of the App.
  • The question on why more existing users haven’t come over to Mobile (asked during the March meeting) was asked again. Responses were pretty much the same as in the March meeting.

Date of Next Meeting