Category: SL Tech

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, July 29th, 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

• There are no planned deployments to any channels this week, only restarts.

In Brief

Also refer to the video for the full meeting.

• Leviathan has turned his attention back to the issue of some people experiencing failures on logging-in, which he describes thus:

So… the problem is the login.cgi computes a big “viewer return value” (aka the VRV) which it sends back [to the viewer]. It has “Content-type: llsd+xml” header on it, and can be several MB in size. It contains, among other things, the list of your friends, groups, and a skeleton summary of all of your inventory folders. When the data package is very big and your download rate is low… it can take a while for it to arrive. If it takes too long the viewer can timeout on the request… even though login.cgi thought it “succeeded” and sent an alert to the Region where you were supposed to arrive.

– Leviathan Linden

Leviathan believe one aspect that makes the VRV so big is the number of folders within inventory (not the contents of folders, just the count of folders). However, Leviathan believes he has a solution (which is pending deployment):

So anyway: a relatively simple change on the login server allows the data to be gzipped, which can speed up the transmission … The Second Life Viewer (SLV) uses libcurl for its http requests, and it can handle gzipped data implicitly. Any viewer that picked up that capability from SLV should see benefits when login gets the update.

– Leviathan Linden

• Another issue Leviathan is looking into a bug where Premium+ users can’t upload mesh for L$0 after crossing a region boundary, although he hasn’t found a root cause as yet.
• There is apparently some exploratory work going on with in the engineering team(s) on the potential to use AI tools for code generation.
• An update to SLua is in development, and might be deployed to Aditi (the beta grid) in the next week or so.
• A general discussion on the (currently stalled) game_control project. As noted in my previous Leviathan Hour summary, the game_control work (and the work for a Linux version of the SL Viewer) is currently archived during the most recent switch to the viewer development and release workflow.
• A Function to Detect Right click (which has it own debate) was raised. Leviathan Linden noted there subject is stalled. This led to an extended discussion on the ticket, and the issue(s) it encompasses. This discussion extended to one on Touch Pointer Capture, together with ideas for extended mouse hover operations, and expanded use of the mouse scroll wheel.

Date of Next Meetings

• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, August 5th, 2025.
• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, August 26th, 2025, due to Leviathan being on vacation (unless he can find a volunteer to fill-in for him).

† 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.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, July 15th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting (“off week”). They 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  – no video this week.

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.
• These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Every other Tuesday from July 8th, 2025, at 12:00 noon SLT.
  • In text (no Voice).
  • 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.
• The term “off week” is used to describe meetings held by Leviathan Linden on those weeks when a “full” Simulator User Group meeting is not scheduled to be held.

Simulator Deployments

• There are no planned deployments to any channels this week, only restarts. Although the Main channel apparently had some issues on Tuesday July 22nd, leading to multi restarts for some regions.

In Brief.

• Rider Linden is working on a few new script features that the moles need for an upcoming project. These mostly deal with land and being able to transfer or sell land using a script.
• Pepper Linden has been working on a re-write of LL’s Conductor service, and is currently wrapping this up as it goes through QA. The Conductor service is responsible for placing regions onto servers, and the re-write is designed to allow the team responsible to more optimally place regions and prevent things like ‘hot-spots’ (e.g. one region on a host using more resources than it should and starving other regions of CPU time).
•  Signal Linden is working on number of projects:
  • Making “shovel-ready” tasks for open source contributors. This includes: bringing back legacy search; implementing drag-and-drop uploads; resizing large textures before uploading; etc.
  • Looking at bounty/reward platforms for compensating people for working on initiatives LL hasn’t got much traction on.
  • Getting budget approval for taking SLua to production and merging some “nice small fix-up PRs” on the LSL-definitions repo.
• The idea in having a series of defined tasks for contributors is to have more people contributing upstream to the viewer and providing “ready to go” code and thus free the Lab’s core viewer team to focus on larger viewer projects.
• Having the ability to replace mesh / prim HUDs with something more suitable was discussed. One suggestion has been the development of an HTML5/CSS/JS solution of some sort. However, this would require quite a bit of both viewer and server work; as such, a proof of concept from the community would go a long way towards getting some server attention on it.
  • Some concerns were raised about this leading to people having to connect to unknown external websites.
  • Another suggestion was for a  small mobile subset of SVG within SL, although this is a potential awkward solution as it doesn’t allow thing like buttons lighting up on HUDS when moused-over.
  • This led to a discussion on options (HYML5, SVG, some form of modal system built-into the viewer, using MOAP / CSS, with various opinions being expressed.
• glTF mech import:
  • As reported in my CCUG meeting notes, this is to go to “beta” with the next viewer update.
  • Full glTF scene import is regarded as “seriously deprioritised”, with Signal Linden expressing a preference for keeping it so until it can be implemented server-side.
  • There s a report that a change in the glTF uploader broke the glTF scene rendering. no further details available.
• The plan to replace the SL Wiki (powered by Media Wiki) with a new documentation platform was discussed (see:  Modern Documentation Platform: docs.secondlife.com).
• As of the next official meeting, the Simulator User Group will be at a new location (still TBC at the time of writing). What this should look like was a source of extended discussion, as was whether or not Simon Linden’s home (the meeting place until now) should be left intact or destroyed (“destroyed” won that part of the discussion).

Date of Next Meeting

• Tuesday, August 5th, 2025 – venue TBA (check the SL Public Calendar and/or User Group wiki page for updated SLurl).
• Unofficial meeting (TBC): Tuesday, July 29th, Venue: TBC.

† 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.