Category: SL Tech

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, October 6, 2026 Leviathan Office Hour, the “off-week” sessions of the Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the meeting by Pantera is embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks to her for providing it, and to Erik Mondrian for the chat transcript after my ISP suffered issues and disconnected me from the world.

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 “Leviathan Office 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

• The Nectarine update is across all RC channel regions.
  • This will be updated on October 7 with “final” fix for the issue affecting some UDP format ObjectUpdate messages.
  • This bug can occasionally impact the 26.4 viewer (currently available as a Release Candidate viewer), he expects this to be included in the in-development 26.5 viewer – and a Pull Request (PR) will be made available for TPVs wishing to pull the fix into their code.
• The SLS Main channel (the majority of simulators on the grid) was restarted on Tuesday, October 6, without any update to the simulator version. This shows up in the viewer logs and effectively is a form of packet-loss if the viewer tosses the data, or ignores the final block of data there.

Region Crossings and Game_Control

Region Crossings – Pepper Linden

• As per the previous full SUG meeting, the plan remains to get Pepper’s updated region crossing code to a collection of simulators running on a small RC channel of simhosts put together for testing.
• This channel will likely be given the code name “Breeze”, but is currently being referenced as a Snack channel (“Snack” being the catch-all name for small testing channels of simulators).
• Breeze will likely include some / all of the Blake Sea regions to allow for testing.
• The updates have been rebased on the Nectarine update to be deployed on October 7, but at the time of this meeting it was not clear if the deployment would occur with the general RC roll or at a later date.

Game_Control – Leviathan Linden

• Game_control has been re-based on the in-development 26.5 viewer code base. a new pre-release viewer version, but further work on the viewer code is required.
• This means game_control could be included in the 26.5 viewer when it services – however, the code has not yet been merged into the development branch of 26.5.
• Note: while there are pre=Alpha versions of the game_control viewer available, if used on the Main grid (Agni) they can lead to immediate issues of crashes and temporary SL connection blocking due to unsupported UDP messages if the viewer connects to a “non game_control” region – which is the majority at this time). Therefore, I’m not including links to said viewers in this summary, although they are mentioned in the meeting.
• In the meantime, Leviathan is working to track down a persistent bad avatar texture bake problem on two accounts which the usual tools are fixing to fix, and so need a deeper investigation on the Bake Service code.

General Discussion

• SuzannaLinn announced she and SungAli will be running a series of classes on Media On  a Prim (MOAP) for those who would like to learn this sometimes arcane capability. Details are here.
• There were user-centric discussions on UDP messaging (and hand-offs between regions), script-hand-offs between regions, etc., and better management of Auto-Return.
  • The latter is something LL has earmarked for possible future improvement, but no details offered at the meeting.
  • I’m not qualified to comment on any of these subjects, so please refer to the video.
• “Non-Cartesian” region crossings (e.g. entering, say, a tunnel in region Y and emerging half way across the grid / in another continent or distant region without the appearance of teleporting. This has been discussed a lot at LL over the years, but only as a novelty idea, not as a potential project.

Date of Next Meetings

• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, October 13, 2026.
• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, October 20, 2026.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 29, 2026 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the meeting by Pantera is embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks to her 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 “Leviathan Office 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

• The Nectarine update has a “pretty persnickety issue” at the network layer.
• This is the ObjectUpdate UDP messages issue record in my previous leviathan Hour summary. Overall, there has been some problems with reliability reproducing the problem. given this, at the time of the making, a decision had yet to be made on the best route for a fix.
  • As noted in the Leviathan OH meeting, this issue can affect the 26.4 viewer, and a fix for that is also to be worked on.
• It’s likely that any fix will go to the RCs, on September 30.

General Updates

Also refer to the video

• Rider Linden is back on-call and investigating a couple of simulator crashers.
• Leviathan Linden indicated that approval has been given for game_control to be included in the 26.5 viewer (set to be the last viewer release of 2026, once it surfaces).
  • At the time of the meeting, the game_control code still had to be merged into the 26.5 branch.
  • It has been suggested that the mouse cursor is hidden and hovertips are disabled when flycam is being used with a controller, and this is on Leviathan’s list of work to be done. He is also considering a sub-tab for future game_control options / toggles.
  • This led to another discussion on what game_control does (in short: allow game controller to be used with Second Life, including for moving vehicles, the avatar and camera and other typical game controller capabilities, etc.; however this does not support more advanced options such as virtual keyboards + provide some LSL support).
• Harold Linden (Lua) continues to work on backwards compatibility with script serialisation which will hopefully be the end of any “breaking rolls” when deploying future Lua updates.
• The engineering team is still trying to get a selection of regions put together specifically for region crossing testing.
  • When sorted, this will likely be available through a Snack RC channel, (that is, a mini-channel of regions intended for specific testing).
  • This work has been delayed by the focus on the ObjectUpdate UDP messages issue on Nectarine.
  • Leviathan Linden further noted that Pepper Linden has a proposal for patching their region crossing work to avoid the worry of any performance exploit at the server for misbehaving clients, as noted (again) in the previous Leviathan Office hours summary, linked-to above.
  • This led to the inevitable discussion on region crossing improvements & their availability.

General Discussion

Please refer to the video for details on the following:

• A general discussion on avatars being able to pick-up object / grab object in-world (a goal the long-suspended Puppetry Project had hoped to achieve). The ran through the middle third of the meeting.

Date of Next Meetings

• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, October 6, 2026.
• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, October 13, 2026.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 23, 2026 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the meeting by Pantera is embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks to her for providing it, and to Erik Mondrian for the chat transcript after my ISP suffered issues and disconnected me from the world.

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 “Leviathan Office 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

• The Nectarine update was deployed to the BlueSteel RC in week #38. However:
  • It has a bug  that causes it to leave a bad zero-coded block on some ObjectUpdate messages. This shows up in the viewer logs and effectively is a form of packet-loss if the viewer tosses the data, or ignores the final block of data there.
  • Leviathan has been working on a fix for the issue, and if it passes QA, it will deployed to BlueSteel as an Nectarine update, with the updated code also being deployed to the remain RC channels.
  • This bug can occasionally impact the 26.4 viewer (currently available as a Release Candidate viewer), he expects this to be included in the in-development 26.5 viewer – and a Pull Request (PR) will be made available for TPVs wishing to pull the fix into their code.

Game Control

• Game_control has been re-based on the in-development 26.5 viewer code base. a new pre-release viewer version, but further work on the viewer code is required.
• This means game_control could be included in the 26.5 viewer when it services – however, the code has not yet been merged into the development branch of 26.5.
• Leviathan is looking for feedback on the current pre-release builds of game_control, particularly:
  • Whether the default mappings of actions to buttons correct; are there any actions that should be made mappable that are not yet available; and what features are missing that MUST be in the initial release.
  • However, time is limited for getting suggestions in.
• There is still work to be carried out to ensure that game_control doesn’t impact the current SpaceNavigator 3D mouse support.
• A discussion on keyboard mapping to game_control (currently, it is not possible to map keyboard keys to arbitrary gamepad buttons).

General Discussion

• When it surfaces, 26.5 will likely be the last major viewer release for 2026; Olive (which will follow Nectarine) will likely be the last simulator update for the year.
• Region crossings:
  • Pepper Linden’s region crossing updates also introduced a subtle protocol change which had been previously tried – and had to be rolled back.
  • This does not mean Pepper’s fixes do not work; rather that there isn’t a lot of confidence that they are ready for full deployment. Right now, it isn’t clear  whether the existing system can be fixed or if LL need to move to a new QueueEventGet protocol.
  • More internal discussions are required on this, but Pepper’s work has renewed a desire to get more region crossing fixes into the works.
  • This sparked conversation on region crossings and vehicle use.
• The latter half of the meeting was devoted to region / simulator capabilities – number of avatars support, number of objects, resource overheads, region pricing, and – yes – “megaregions” (those larger than the current 256×256 sq m size) + more.
  • This was a fairly wide-ranging discussion, and so please refer to the video below.
• The above was intertwined on some history of SL provided by Leviathan Linden touching on the early attempts at social engineering (e.g. originally limiting the build height to 768 metres and limiting flying height to encourage people to remain near the ground and socialise more).
  • Again, please refer to the video for more.

Date of Next Meetings

• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, September 29, 2026.
• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, October 6, 2026.