SL Tech – Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld

Linden Lab announces Project Zero to end

Posted on April 22, 2026 by Inara Pey

On Tuesday April 21st, 2026, Linden Lab announced it is ending support for Project Zero, the viewer-in-a-browser application launched just 14 months ago, and which I was able to co-announce through this blog following a Zoom meeting between myself and Brad Oberwager and Philip Rosedale.

The project, which saw the viewer streamed to a person’s web browser from Amazon AWS servers remained in something of a beta state throughout its lifespan, initially overseen by Philip Rosedale and then (the now Lab-departed) Sntax Linden, with a dedicated User Group meeting being formed around it (although meetings ceased in the latter half of 2025). It also gained much interest among existing users, despite it being largely aimed at incoming new users, leaving access to it limited for established SL users.

The revised Avatar Picker for Project Zero saw the function moved out of the viewer window and displayed within the browser tab, leaving the viewer window unencumbered. This approach was ported to the SL Mobile App.

The project did see some interesting development – such as the updated Avatar Picker mechanism, which was also ported to the SL Mobile App, and at the time of its launch at the start of 2025 and through the initial six or so months of its development, there were plans to undertake a gradual rebuilding of the viewer UI as presented through a browser, using modern tools such as HTML5 and React. To further interest in streaming the viewer through a web browser, Linden Lab also worked with the Firestorm team to take a version of the latter’s viewer and present that as a streaming service as well – although this experiment was ultimately short-lived.

By September 2025, the Lab was indicating that between them, Project Zero (using the official viewer) and the SL Mobile App had lead to a “10x” increase in the numbers of people trying out Second Life when compared to the more traditional requirement to sign-up and then download the viewer (the latter having long been a break-point for sign-ups, with many would-be users turning away from the platform rather than downloading and installing the viewer on their computers). However, not long after this update, things began to go quiet on the Project Zero front.

As a part of the new user sign-up, those directed towards using Project Zero, rather than to having to download and install the viewer, were directed to a revised splash screen comprising a static backdrop and a “Polaroid snapshots” slide show whilst they were connected to a Project Zero streaming server

With the curtailment of the Project Zero User Group meetings and, later, the departure of Sntax Linden from Linden Lab, the Project as a whole seemed to go dark, with little in the way of direct news being given through any User Group meetings. As such, the announcement that the project is now being ended comes as both a surprise (given the enthusiasm for it evidenced by Linden Lab in 2025) and a non-surprise (lack of news / updates on the project through late 2025 and the start of 2026 suggesting it was perhaps withering on the vine).

The announcement blog post offers little in the way as to why Project Zero is being halted, other than the decision being based on both “feedback” and what the Lab has “learned” in running the project, and “insights gained from Project Zero will directly inform improvements” to both the Desktop viewer and the SL Mobile App. However, the beneficial nature of the project in circumventing the need to download and install the viewer is acknowledged.

As it stands, support for Project Zero will end on Friday, April 24th at 17:00 SLT.

Further:

If you have remaining paid time associated with Project Zero, you are encouraged to use it before the [project is shuttered – access allowing, given the potentially limited number of slots at any given time.
If you have any unused time on Project Zero after April 24th, please file a support ticket for a refund (which will be processed up to 30 days after the ticket is received).
Exactly “what’s next” isn’t actually indicated in the official blog post (despite the post’s title), other than

Note that the ending of Project Zero does not affect either the desktop viewer or the ongoing development on the SL Mobile App, which will “continue to operate as usual”.

2026 SL viewer release summaries week #16

Posted on April 20, 2026 by Inara Pey

*Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation*

Updates from the week through to Sunday, April 19th, 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 – 26.2.0.24254827122, April 15 -“flat” UI and font update – NEW.
Second Life Project Viewers:
- Lua Editor Alpha viewer 26.1.0.21525310258, February 12 – No change.

LL Viewer Resources

SL release viewer download page – LL
SL viewer release notes – LL
SL Alternate Viewers page – LL
SL available viewer index – LL
SL Viewer updates and reviews – this blog

Third-party Viewers

V7-style

Kirstens Viewer S24(6) LYSI Beta 1 (Build 3192) – April 19 – release notes.

V1-style

Cool VL viewer Stable: 1.32.4.26, April 18 – release notes.

Mobile / Other Clients

No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Third-party Viewer Directory – LL
Third-party Viewer Policy – LL

2026 week #16: SL Open Source (TPVD) meeting summary

Posted on April 17, 2026April 17, 2026 by Inara Pey

*Hippotropolis Theatre: home of the OSD/TPVD meeting*

The following notes were taken from:

My chat log of the Open-Source Developer (OSD) meeting held on Friday, April 17th, 2026, together with my chat log of that meeting.
Pantera’s video of the meeting (embedded at the end of this article) – my thanks to her for providing it.
Please note that this is not a full No video this week, as Pantera was absent the meeting.

Meeting Purpose

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.
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 – NEW.
Second Life Release Candidate (RC) viewer: Flat UI – 26.2.0.24254827122, April 15 -“flat” UI and font update – NEW.
Second Life Project Viewers:
- Lua Editor Alpha viewer 26.1.0.21525310258, February 12.

26.2.0 – “Flat UI”

Now at RC status, per the Above list.
More updates to be made to this prior to promotion.
- LL is working through some font kerning problems that were seemingly made much more obvious with the new font choice.
- It was also noticed that the official viewer has been rendering fonts ever so slightly different from FS – which kicked off the above investigation.

26.3.0 – Graphics Care Package

The is the viewer previously known as the SL Visual Polish (SLVP) viewer.
The performance tweak has been ported over, and the team is now looking at additional performance work.
- Async inventory is being parted out into easier to review chunks.
- LL is also looking at some CPU and GPU wins overall – Geenz Linden is working on getting texture batching working for the PBR and Blinn-Phong paths. There is potentially more work on these lines, and these will likely be incorporated prior to passing the viewer to QA.

Lua Viewer

The Lua Alpha update that it had been hoped would surface around the start of April is now being aimed for some time in week #17.
The current lean at the Lab is to move this viewer through to RC status and then release before the 26.3.0 GCP viewer, but no firm decision has been made.
Again, this viewer will also be the first new Linux release from LL.
As a reminder: LL have officially dropped “SLua” (“SL Lua”) and just going with “Lua”.

WebRTC Deployment

The WebRTC deployment is still underway. No firm end-date as yet, although it should now be across all simulator RC channels.
Anyone experiencing Voice issues with WebRTC is asked to file a bug report.

General Discussion

The vcpkg updates for the viewer build process will not be surfacing until “after Lua at the very least”.
- Geenz estimates it will likely not emerge until late summer, due to dependencies on work being completed vis. KDU and the removal of the Havok sub-libraries from the viewer.
- In terms of the latter: VHACD will replace the convex decomposition for mesh upload, and server-generated path-finding mesh will replace the Havok path-finding mesh loaded by the viewer for visualisation.
- A major reason for removing the Havok sub-licences is the impact they have on TPVs, who have to go through the process of obtaining and signing sub-licence agreements via LL, which complicates the open-source environment.
- In this respect, if LL had a truly open-source replacement for KDU on the graphics side, they would look to make similar moves there as well.
Physics shapes and why and what the viewer can do with them became a topic for conversation at around the half-way point in the meeting, and this continued for around 10 minutes.
During the above there was a general discussion on the mesh uploader and clarifying LOD numbers for those coming into mesh creation.
A question was asked on interpreting section 8 part of the Unauthorized Uses of Linden Lab’s Trademarks policy – a question perhaps best dealt with via a support Support Ticket.
A request was made for TPVs to receive stats reports once more (use, crash rates, etc). Geenz noted in reply:

Some of that is a bit of a black box to us as far as your specific crash rates, as for viewer usage we’re bottlenecked by a single person is responsible for that so it doesn’t always get done. I’ve been hoping to get a more automatic solution for this for a while, but our metrics folks have been booked up with other things for a good bit now.

The question was asked about the possibility of viewer-side Lua for building custom UIs to replace some of the HUD systems people use, and whether work on this is still moving forward. Geenz repliedwith:

That’s been on the shelf for a while. Dunno if or when we’re gonna bring that one back – I think what we’d need to really look at bringing that back with a significant amount of interest is gonna be how people would want to use [it]. There’s a lot of criteria that goes into making product level decisions like that, and with the viewer side Lua stuff it was increasingly being looked at something for internal use than something like a content feature.

The question was asked if the puppetry project was once and for all “dead”, to which Genenz again replied:

Lots of things were learned from that project, but I wouldn’t say it’s dead necessarily. Just not a priority. There’s a lot of things that would need to happen for puppetry, and I think it’s really increasingly more of a “when we need <x> we’ll work on that part of it” sort of thing. Because like joint streaming is just generally kind of useful, but we don’t have an immediate need for it. But who knows – maybe some day. Hell, if there’s any interest in having a proper poser viewer-side that ticks all of the privacy and consent boxes that might be a potential path. But we’re nowhere near there yet.

Next Meeting

13:00 SLT, Friday, May 1st, 2026, at the Hippotropolis Theatre.

2026 week #16: SUG meeting summary

Posted on April 14, 2026 by Inara Pey

*Pususaari – Where spring feels gentle, February 2026 – blog post*

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 14th, 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

No SLS Main channel deployments for the week, but the channel was restarted.
The WebRTC deployment will be expanded to Magnum, finally completing its deployment across all RC channels.
The next simulator update – Loganberry – will include (among other thinks) the performance improvement work Leviathan has been working on and the fix for avatars remaining a cloud Leviathan has also developed (which addresses causes of clouding on the simulator – viewer-side clouding is not touched).

In Brief

Leviathan Linden:
- Has been ” removing use of Tilia (payments system) from our code.” Exactly what this means is unclear, given the use of the Tilia wallet and close ties between LL and Thunes, Tilla’s owners.
- He has also spent a little bit of time trying to incorporate some suggested code changes for the game_controller code, as suggested by a user, but upon testing he found something isn’t working right, so some investigation is required.
Rider Linden has been working on viewer code to support the new language definition cap.
Monty Linden has been working with the Firestorm team on some of the TeleportFinish failure modes. One set of fixes, involving viewers simply walking away from the HTTP connection, is getting improvements so one subset of viewer-side TP/RC issues will be improved.
- Kyle Linden noted that the SL 26.2 Flat UI Beta (releasing soon) also has a viewer-side TP disconnect fix.
Harold Linden (SLua):
- There are a number of crash fixes and minor correctness fixes out on the Aditi (the beta grid), which should be coming to the Lua region on the main grid “soonish”.
- As Rider mentioned, the scripting language definitions are going to be accessible to the viewer now, so you can always pull down the correct type definitions for whatever region you’re currently on.
- Harold is additionally generalising his work for making llSetPrimitiveParams less annoying to use. Essentially it’ll be a fluent API where you can batch up prim params commands as you would do currently, but you do it through function calls rather than manually adding a bunch of stuff to a list.
Kyle Linden indicated there will be a “big push” on Lua documentation in the upcoming week(s).

General Discussion

Please refer to the video below as well.

It has been again reported that large linksets of prims or meshes that have alpha scripting (LSL and / or Lua) against Blinn Phong materials (apparently PBR is reported as working as expected) for certain parts of that linkset are failing to change alpha state or are slow to change. Copies of suitable linksets / a formal bug report on this were requested.
- This sparked something of a discussion on probable causes, length of time the bug has been around, means to repo, etc., running through the mid-point of the meeting through to pretty much the end.
- As a part of the discussion llSetLinkGLTFOverrides fails to clear alpha override was raised. No updates were given.
A WebRTC question was asked: the current settings seem to be 60m range, no distance attenuation. Is that the only option available?
- Response: there should be distance attenuation. The curve is different than Vivox, though. If you’re not experiencing any distance attenuation, bug fixes are required with more details so LL can try to replicate what you’re doing.

Date of Next Meetings

Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, April 21st 2026.
Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, April 28th, 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 #15

Posted on April 13, 2026 by Inara Pey

Updates from the week through to Sunday, April 5th, 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.