Category: SL Tech

2025 SL viewer release summaries week #32

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, August 10th, 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.

Official LL Viewers

  • Default viewer 2025.05 7.2.0.16729091892, issued August 5, promoted August 8 – New.
    • glTF mesh import ( should have similar constraints to COLLADA upload, but does not support a unified material upload solution).
    • Media changes including support for PRIM_MEDIA_FIRST_CLICK_INTERACT and HUD autoplay (see https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlGetPrimMediaParams).
    • Fixes related to memory allocation, inventory floater, world map and Picks performance.
    • Fixes for OpenJPG, PBR Texture Panel Repeats per meter improvements and sky ambient colour not blending during day cycle among others.
    • Fixes for image rendering.
  • Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V7-style

  • Megaphit glTF Mesh Import – 7.2.0.54176 – August 2 – changelog.

V1-style

Mobile / Other Clients

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

2025 week #32: SL CCUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Hippotropolis Campsite: venue for CCUG meetings
The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, August 7th, 2025. Please note that this is not a full transcript, 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.
  • Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they are conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.

Official Viewer Status

  • Default viewer 7.2.0.16729091892, issued August 5, promoted August 8 – New.
    • glTF mesh import (should have similar constraints to COLLADA upload, but does not support a unified material upload solution).
    • Media changes including support for PRIM_MEDIA_FIRST_CLICK_INTERACT and HUD autoplay (see https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlGetPrimMediaParams).
    • Fixes related to memory allocation, inventory floater, world map and Picks performance.
    • Fixes for OpenJPG, PBR Texture Panel Repeats per meter improvements and sky ambient colour not blending during day cycle among others.
    • Fixes for image rendering.
  • Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

2025  glTF Mesh Uploader

  • There were multiple requests for the behaviours within the glTF mesh uploader that do not much the COLLADA .DAE uploader to be revised so that they do conform with the latter.
  • These had to be shut down, largely due to technically limitations within SL’s internal mesh formats.
  • The hope is that over time, these limitations can be “peeled” back, and mesh import as a whole improved, most likely by using a new internal mesh format.
  • No details on what the new internal format will be, as this is still subject to internal discussions at the Lab, but the aim is to make things easier for both content creators and content consumers.

2025.06 Viewer

  • The next viewer in development is 2025.06, which is described as “not very ground breaking”.
  • It contains a lot of work and bug fixes original intended for the Maintenance C viewer from 2024, and prior to the viewer release process being revised.
  • The key feature in this viewer will be Inventory Favourites.
  • Currently, the viewer is going through a stabilisation process with the aim of releasing an RC Beta as soon as possible.
  • The aim of the 2025.06 release is to raise the cadence of official viewer releases. This is seen as beneficial on a number of counts:
    • It allows individual releases to become more iterative in nature, building capabilities and allowing better response to feedback from users.
    • It breaks the cycle of long delays between viewer releases while the Lab tries to deliver an entire project in a single viewer drop.
    • It will hopefully allow the Lab to be more nimble with releases, allowing them to come back to major updates and adjust them / add to them based on longer-term feedback, rather than appearing to simply drop a project into a viewer release and then never come back to it with significant updates / improvements.

In Brief

  • Removing Scale From LI Calculations (Recap/Update):
    • Signal Linden highlighted a Feedback Ticket he has raised, proposing the removal of scale from Land Impact calculations, which has been touched upon at the last couple of SUG meetings.
    • However, numerous caveats / issues with the proposal arose as it was further investigated, including potential impacts on physics, issues for streaming calculations, etc., all of which caused a slow-down in the idea.
    • Rider Linden provided an update, noting that scale land impact is so closely tied into an object’s triangle count that there is no easy way to extricate the two, leading to the risk of small items with a high tri count suddenly exploring in their LI is scale was removed from the equation.
  • Support for Vertex Animation Textures (VAT) – a means to create complex and non-traditional animations in real time using textures and shaders to achieve the visuals on the GPU, thus having a much lighter performance impact on the CPU when compared to traditional skeletal mesh animations.
    • Allowing for the complexities of SL, concern was raised over use of VAT “overloading other systems”, with the view that providing support for blend shapes could actually be preferable.
    • However, given the age and complexity of the SL internal mesh format, adding things like blend shape support (and / or) vertex support, is seen as a “pretty involved effort” with a number of potential complications.
  • The above led to a more general discussions on animations for things like plants, the LI cost of Animesh and how it precludes it from widespread use; the balance between having lots of animated elements in-world versus potential performance cost; options for baking animations into meshes, etc.
  • Make Scale/Offset/Rotation PERSIST when switching PBR Materials (e.g. not having any scale, offset and / or rotation set for a surface cleared why swapping one material on that surface for another, as is currently the case):
    • The reason this happens is that (unlike Blinn-Phong, where the offset, scale and rotation are set against the object surface) with glTF materials, that are set against the material itself (as per the relevant glTF specification extension); ergo, changing the material reset them.
    • This behaviour could potentially be changed through the addition of an override to give more consistency in behaviour between PBR materials and Blinn-Phong; however, any such update comes down to a matter of prioritisation. This prompted an invitation to any interested open source developer to submit a suitable update.
    • One concern over a possible solution is the need for additional UI elements in what is already regarded as a complicated Build / Edit floater.
  • Support 16-bit grayscale terrain import: this has been acknowledged by the Lab as a problem that needs to be addressed, but as yet, there has not been the opportunity to take a deep look into possible causes of issues with the RAW terrain file import, and what the correct solution(s) might be.
  • Nothing on the cards for further .glTF extensions at this time, however, with the glTF importer now in the release viewer “the door is open to a lot more possibilities for what we could do” (e.g. removing the “old” .glTF importer used purely for materials and allowing the “new” importer to handle them, making it much easier to add further .glTF extensions in the future).
  • A general discussion on scripted animation, inverse kinematics (IK), puppetry, and similar. In short:
    • Puppetry remains frozen.
    • It is recognised the proper IK would allow for a range of capabilities (e.g. animation retargeting)
  • A general discussion on controls and the game_control work. As the latter is Leviathan Linden’s project, and he was not at this meeting, I’ll leave updates on this to the Server User Group summaries.

Next Meeting

August 2025 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 August 6th, 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.
    • 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.

Updates

  • The Marketplace team hope to release the mobile responsive marketplace search updates in the next week or so.
    • Note this updates is only for MP search, but there will be future Mobile updates for Marketplace in due course.
  • Time is being given to some general web property quality of life updates.
  • Work is continuing on some technical upgrades to critical internal services, defined as “not very glamorous but help keep things running smoothly”.
  • New bank pay-out options are due to be deployed “in the next week or so” for Brazil, Canada , France, Germany, Lithuania, Malaysia, the UK, the USA and Turkey.
  • A reiteration on the upcoming ending of the Character Designer programme (see: LL announce a pause in the current SL AI character designer project)
  • Kermit Linden will be leading Web User Group meetings for a while, and may be willing to host twice monthly meetings.
  • There is a “new offering” due to be announced in the next couple of months.

General Discussion

  • Several issues with maps.secondlife.com were raised, with the feedback that “some” are being worked on. Those raised were:
  • CasperVend integration: reported as “no official updates but we do want to take it on soon”.
    • Kali Linden noted that she has been working with Casper to develop product specifications for integrating some CasperTech features in to the Marketplace.
  • Marketplace variants / styles (i.e. multiple option for a product (such as different colours) in a single listing: the Marketplace team has yet to “get back” to this, and the request was for people to keep asking about it.
  • A request was made for a formal means for AI-generated content to be properly disclosed on MP listings. The broad response to this was content disclosure has generally been treated as being differed to the creator.
  • The group was asked that if they could create one web feature in SL, what would it be? Responses included:
    • A 3D SL Map.
    • Marketplace:
      • An ability to users to see a 3D preview of assets on the Marketplace.
      • Formal inclusion of item creation date (not listing creation date) and and the date on which the item was last updated for Marketplace listings. This has actually been looked into, and a plan to offer something “more stable” for creation date is in development, but last update date requires more work.
      • Filter options for removing specific creators / stores from Marketplace searches.  This is acknowledged as being a popular request, and something the Lab wants to look into.
      • Ability to search the MP by body type. This is something that has been specified internally, and so seen as as something that could be delivered in the future.
      • Multiple Marketplace wish lists / favourite lists. Again, this has received a lot of requests and is being thought about.
      • A request for multiple stores under one account. This was seen as a nice idea, but currently hard to implement.
    • Making the Land Use Fees page more intuitive, and perhaps include a way to calculate group bonus, etc.
  • The use of AI agents to assist in Marketplace searches was raised, in order to increase accuracy of results, etc.
    • There is nothing specific in the works for this.
    • Training AI tools for Marketplace search was seen as a major undertaking, simply because of the size of the MP, and that search could generally be improved a lot more directly without necessarily requiring the use of AI tools.
  • A discussion on people’s favourite / least favourite things in Second Life during the past week which flowed into a general conversation – refer to the video for details.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, September 3rd, 2025.

2025 week #32: SL SUG meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey
Caerleone Manor, May 2025 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, August 5th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) off-week meeting (which I’ll be referring to as the “SUG Leviathan Hour” going forward). These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. The notes were taken from my chat log of the meeting and Patera’s video, which is embedded at the end of this article – 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 “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

  • On Tuesday, August 5th, the majority of the grid – SLS Main channel and RC channels – was updated with simulator update 2025-07-25.16512260888.
  • The purpose behind this en masse restart (the first in a long time) was to account for network changes intended to allow the Lab to spread simhost servers across across multiple AWS availability zones (not necessarily AWS global regions).
  • As a result, there will be no RC channel restarts on Wednesday, August 6th.

AI Summit and Tools

  • Week #31 saw a Linden Lab summit on brainstorming how to use AI moving forward and experimenting with possible uses.
  • It is possible this summit may have caused the announcement on the forthcoming suspension / closure of the Character Generation project also made public during that week (see: LI announce a pause in the current SL AI character designer project).
  • As a result, Leviathan Linden has been exploring how hard it would be to use AI assistants to replace the llmath code in the viewer with GLM (graphics library math), a more standard and faster library; however, this is turning out to be more of a challenge than anticipated, with “lots of changes”, requiring care with the work.

SLua Update

  • Signal Linden defined the next goal for SLua is to roll it out to some Agni (Main grid) regions in a limited fashion. However there is work to be completed ahead of this happening – such as the project being made production ready, and “real” documentation assembled, and the inclusion of a new API for event handling.
  • Such a partial deployment would obviously be for testing purposes, and would mean that SLua scripts would only run on regions with the server-side support.
  • It was suggested that those regions offering building / scripting courses are considered for inclusion in Main grid SLua testing.
  • There is a concern that due to the amount of CPU time consumed even when idling, there is a concern that all script time in a region with a large number of SLua scripts could be consumed by idling scripts. This lead to a discussion on scripts, loads, scheduling and script times.

In Brief

  • As well as experimenting with GLM, Leviathan Linden has also trying to get some old server projects merged and shipped:
    • A slight speedup of scene load at login (and maybe less frequent missing content on arrival).
    • Compressed data from login.cgi for faster download of initial login data (and maybe fewer failed logins for people with lots of inventory folders).
  • Leviathan also hopes soon start working on the WebRTC voice streaming system.
  • Rider Linden is hoping to complete the LSL land functionality work he’s been developing for the Moles. This will include a llSetParcelForSale function (name still to be finalised at the time of writing).
  • Rider is also looking to expand llRequestInventoryData. There have already be requests for it to encompass to get information like tint and alpha from PBR textures, and sound and animation length.
    • Additional suggestions include PBR properties like metallic/roughness; animation priority; last attach point/position/rotation for a worn item, and last rezzed/in-world position/rotation.
  • Pepper Linden:
On the Conductor front, it’s been moving through QA, and we anticipate an Aditi and Agni rollout within the next week. During the initial roll out, we’ll be keeping the packing mode the same, and later on, turning on our new ‘packing’ logic (how we place regions on servers).
Some minor notes on our Discord integration for community servers, I had promised that we’d get that out relatively soon but unfortunately Discord has rolled out a UI change to profiles that’s now hiding the connection details, so that’s something we’ll need to figure out and handle before releasing it.
  • Monty Linden is finishing-up work to move the experience KVP store.
  • Signal Linden has been working on multiple projects:
    • Putting together release plans for the next viewer release.
    • Coordinating with contributors on viewer Discord integration, apple silicon support and other projects.
    • Following up on the August 5th deployment, and preparing to put some simhosts into another AWS availability zone.
  • As noted in my week #31 TPVD meeting notes, Camera Constraints Bug (below -0 metre altitude) has been filed. This affects all v7 viewers – but Kirsten Lee (Kirsten’s Viewer) has filed a possible fix.
  • The mention of the llSetParcelForSale function resulted in a discussion on land rentals in the second half of the meeting – specifically around the use of texture  / signs at altitude advertising regions / parcel available for rent, when looking at the world map.

Date of Next Meetings

  • Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, August 19th, 2025.
  • Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, August 26th, 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.

2025 SL viewer release summaries week #31

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, August 4th, 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.

Official LL Viewers

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V7-style

  • Kirstens Viewer S24(3) Revision 1 – July 30 – release notes.
  • Megaphit glTF Mesh Import – 7.2.0.54160 – August 2 – changelog.

V1-style

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

2025 week #31: SL TPVD meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Calland, May 2025 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from my chat transcript + the video recording by Pantera (embedded at the end of this summary) of the Third-Party Developer meeting (TPVD) held on Friday, August 1st, 2025. My thanks to Pantera as always for providing it.

Meeting Purpose

  • The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors to discuss general viewer development. This meeting is held once a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
  • Dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they are generally conducted in text chat.
  • The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.

Official Viewers

Code Contributions “Shovel List”

  • Signal Linden has produced a “shovel list” of code contributions the Lab are seeking from open-source developers.
  • Two high-value items identified in the list are:
    • A RFP for replacing Autobuild in the viewer build process.
    • A RFP for replacing the Havok convex hull decomposition mechanism with an open-source equivalent.
  • The former RFP is as removing Autobuild as a significant barrier / burden to those trying to learn how to the build the viewer. Suggestions for preplacement include pure Cmake, or using Vcpkg or Conan for dependency management, or vendor dependencies in the repo, etc.
    • Related to this, Brad Linden has started an experimental branch simplifying LL development environment. In is not ready for general use, but the idea is that the Build Instructions in the README should “just work” and not require having Autobuild installed or set up properly ahead of time. The is part of on-going work to overhaul the viewer build process.
  • The latter RFP above is part of the Lab’s aim to remove the Havok sub-library from the viewer, which also includes a means to still visualise the navmesh.
  • The above sparked a short conversation on the viewer build process.

Experimental Rewards / Bounty System

  • LL has launched an experiment rewards programme offering monetary rewards against certain Github issues.
  • Powered by Opire, the programme is explained here.
  • These rewards are not meant to replace regular open source development, but rather to drive contributions on items LL have been unable to get much traction on.

In Brief

  •  LL has also open sourced the LSL definitions project, the authoritative definition of LSL library functions, types, etc. It is used to perform codegen in the server, building out the bindings for LSL and SLua, and also drives the LSL editor tooltips.
  • PR Appearance fixes #3492 is still requiring attention from linden Lab, and is currently stalling the work on getting RLV into the official viewer. 
  • Camera Constraints Bug (below -0 metre altitude) has been filed. This affects all v7 viewers, and is under investigation.

Next Meeting

† 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 gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.